Alaska focuses on infrastructure
Infrastructure co-investments will be a new area of focus for the $36.6 billion Alaska Permanent Fund, as reflected in changes to its strategic asset allocation last week.
Infrastructure co-investments will be a new area of focus for the $36.6 billion Alaska Permanent Fund, as reflected in changes to its strategic asset allocation last week.
The most recent Barra US Equity Model, USE4, contains some important innovations in factor risk modelling, including the introduction of country risk factors, volatility regime adjustments, and eigenfactor risk adjustments. Amanda White spoke to executive director and head of equity factor model research at MSCI, Jose Menchero, about what that means.
Harvard Management Company (HMC), which manages the $32 billion Harvard endowment, has made significant alterations to its policy portfolio, including increasing allocations to emerging market equities and the externally-managed absolute returns program, while slashing fixed income allocations.
A rigorous debate between staff, consultant and investment committee has resulted in the $224-billion CalPERS deciding to fund an allocation to hedge funds from its global equities allocation, using futures to neutralise the policy allocation, rather than have a separate strategic asset class. But the strategy is on watch, and will be reviewed mid-next year.
The International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) released principles for regulation and supervision of commodity derivatives markets last week. Effective supervision of these markets is necessary to avoid even the prospect that derivatives contribute to speculative price bubbles in commodities, which can increase the number of people driven into hunger.
According to the modelling in this paper, a modest allocation to hedge funds would improve the returns to US public pension funds by about $13 billion annually. It also shows that the track record of hedge funds in recent years illustrates that hedge funds have not been “an important source of systemic risk”.
Uncategorised posts