CalPERS may have doubled the fees it pays for active management in public equities, but the alpha it generates has quadrupled, says global equity head Simiso Nzima, who has spent three years pruning a roster of nearly 100 managers down to a tightly scored handful. La Caisse's Mario Therrien describes a parallel discipline, using external managers not just for returns but as a "window to the world" on emerging strategies, from quant investing to AI.
Blue Owl co-chief executive Marc Lipschultz has defended the manager’s push into the retail space, telling the Top1000funds.com Fiduciary Investors Symposium that “it’s kind of a crazy thing” to deny mum and dad investors access to illiquid assets like private credit when they are in a prime position to benefit from it through channels like 401(k).
Canada will pitch the partnership with its mammoth pension pool as a key drawcard for global capital to invest in the nation, with Prime Minister Mark Carney set to host top brass from asset management giants at the inaugural Canada Investment Summit this week in the hopes of turning the country’s institutional maturity into an investment advantage.
CalPERS’ three-and-a-half-year overhaul of its $242 billion global equities portfolio has delivered the program’s highest alpha in almost three decades, after the pension giant deployed $65 billion back into active strategies and dramatically tightened manager selection.
The rise in government bond yields is being driven by higher policy-rate expectations and commodity supply concerns linked to the Strait of Hormuz, not fears of an imminent sovereign debt reckoning. Investors share how they are preparing for higher returns.
Australian Retirement Trust real estate head Mark Lee says the COVID downturn exposed that treating real estate as an easy asset class was a crucial mistake from investors, and property is not just a “bond replacement with a slightly higher yield”. As the A$20 billion portfolio prepares to double in five years, Lee says future returns will depend increasingly on investors’ ability to “sweat the assets”.
Early venture bets on SpaceX have ballooned into major portfolio positions at some US university endowments, with new analysis estimating the aerospace firm contributed as much as 10.6 percentage points to annual returns. Michael Markov, founder of US quantitative researcher Markov Processes International, says the windfall is now creating a concentration risk that investors cannot ignore.
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FIS 2026 at Stanford University