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.
Over the next few years the €180 billion ABP will invest 2 per cent of capital to innovative assets and strategies under the broad direction of innovation. One such investment has been an allocation to the incubator company, IMQubator, which invests in investment managers with innovative ideas and strategies. Amanda White spoke with chief investment
The $32 billion Maryland State Retirement System is searching for advisers in real estate and private equity, as it moves toward its strategic asset allocation target that sits signficantly distant from its actual investments at the end of September, requiring a quadrupling of its private equity investments and new allocations to real return assets.
Not withstanding the effect, for investors, of globalisation, country and sector bets still drive the performance of global equity portfolios. And research shows that whole countries tend to stray from fair value for a lot longer than individual stocks do. Deutsche Asset Management has produced a paper on ‘Diversification-Based Investing’, which leads one to think
Harvard Management Company, with responsibility for managing the $26 billion Harvard endowment fund, has hired a number of senior investment staff and reorganised its internal structure as it positions itself to bring more asset management in-house.
The experience of the C$26.7 billion ($25 billion) Hospitals of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP) is testament to the success of asset-liability driven investing. Amanda White spoke with chief executive, John Crocker, about how matching assets with liabilities led to an underweighting in equities and a subsequent (relative) survival of the global economic crisis.
The £2.3 billion ($3.7 billion) Lothian Pension Fund, part of the Scottish Local Government Pension Scheme, has overhauled its investment strategy, increasing its alternatives weighting to more than one third of the total fund, after poor performance in financial year 2008-09 wiped 17 per cent off the fund’s value.
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Asset Allocation