Germany’s €70 billion pension provider VBL is increasing its diversification, notably investing in overseas real estate outside Germany for the first time. It's also increasing its tilt to international equities over European stocks, enabled by an organisational and investment process overhaul.
The NT$700 billion ($21 billion) Taiwanese Labor Pension Fund is tendering for Asia ex-Japan and global equities mandates, with a combined asset value of $1.2 billion, for its new and old pension funds in what is the first overseas discretionary search for this year.
In line with its recently-approved leverage policy, the $181 billion fund for Californian public employees, CalPERS, has reviewed its derivatives policy for global equities, with notional leverage constrained to a new limit of 10 per cent of the value of the global equities portfolio.
Like most defined benefit pension funds, the £2 billion (US$3.27 billion) John Lewis Partnership Pensions Trust is struggling to cope with the funding pressures resulting from the financial crisis. But as pension investment manager Andrew Chapman tells Kristen Paech, bonds are not the solution.
Temasek Holdings has made changes to the long-term outlook of its S$185 billion ($134 billion) portfolio reducing the asset allocation to OECD countries and adding an allocation of 10 per cent to “other geographies” including Latin America, Russia and Africa.
For their biggest public market investments in the last two years, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) zeroed-in on the most dogged companies in the worst-performing sector: Western financials. These decisions incurred paper losses of $US56.3 billion, accounting for most of their public market losses for the period.
PME, the €18.8 billion (US$25.6 billion) industry-wide pension fund for the mechanical and electrical engineering sector in the Netherlands, has seen its funding ratio fall 45 per cent over the last year. Kristen Paech talks to the fund about its recovery plan, including the decision not to rebalance equities, and the benefits of using a
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