As asset owners grapple with the appropriateness of a total portfolio approach for their fund, new ICPM research has outlined building blocks to be considered in the process including some essential “enablers”, like governance structures, and optional “levers”, like incentive architecture. ICPM managing director Adrian Trollor unpacks the framework.
Investment committee meetings, a governance cornerstone at every asset owner organisation, run the risk of amplifying group biases and social dynamics, and can push the IC towards recommending more extreme investment positions collectively than the average of their individual views. Bernhard Scherer, head of portfolio implementation at ADIA, unpacks the thesis in a new paper.
The State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio has warned of a “material” increase in US recession risk compared to last year as the fund braces for a wider, “negatively skewed” distribution of outcomes in the next 12 months. It came as the mature plan, which is 81 per cent funded, is tilting to fixed income and new asset classes like liquid alternatives over equities.
A view that the US stock market is overvalued and equity risk premia will be lower over the long term has driven New Zealand Super to lower the return expectations for its reference portfolio following its recent five-yearly review of the benchmark. Co-chief investment officer Brad Dunstan also flags underweight commodity exposure as an area to address and explains why the fund remains sceptical of illiquidity premia despite seeing a growing case for private markets.
Three decades of investing have given Monte Tarbox sharp eyes for recognising risk and opportunities, and he’s putting it to use as the new permanent chief investment officer of the $306 billion NYC Bureau of Asset Management. In an interview with Top1000funds.com, Tarbox outlines his vision for the fund, why he’s bullish on infrastructure but “nervous” on PE, and why he hasn’t drunk the TPA “Kool-Aid”.
Impact investing has come a long way in the past two decades, going from a niche strategy to a $1.5 trillion industry, but there are still challenges for it to reach institutional scale due to the lack of products and insufficient evidence of outperformance in some parts of the market.
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