Nest, the largest workplace pension in the UK, says that private credit managers who prioritise institutional clients will be more favourably viewed. The £61 billion fund has awarded a £450 million US direct lending mandate to Crescent Capital this month, citing the manager's institutional-client-first approach as a key attraction.
Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund will soon look to expand its alternatives database project, which evaluates the performance of private markets GPs, to cover more funds. Director of research and analytics speaks with Top1000funds.com on how the $2 trillion pension giant will position the system as its first point of reference for private market manager due diligence.
While the dominant economic narrative has been that supply chains are shifting out of China amidst rising geopolitical competition and that the ASEAN countries are obvious beneficiaries, the truth is more nuanced.
While war weighs heavily on the world’s mind and its portfolio impacts are acutely felt by investors, celebrated geopolitical expert Stephen Kotkin said there is another thing that troubles him even more in today’s society: the "decay" of government performance.
Tokenisation of traditional assets will lead to a boom in on-chain trading, and that in turn opens the door to AI-agentic trading. But there are risks that AI agents may behave in unpredictable ways and, despite the hype surrounding the technology, still produce unexpected investment losses. In these cases, it will typically still be the CIO who bears responsibility – so they’d better understand what their AI agents are up to.
Some investors are “missing the point” of geopolitical risks by equating them to the disruptions from conflicts and wars, according to GIC chief economist Prakash Kannan, but in reality, geopolitical risk is no longer episodic or peripheral. This means investors need to think harder about inflation and country composition in their portfolio.
Long-time practitioners of the total portfolio approach said one of its greatest advantages is that the investment team can make significant asset allocation at its discretion, as interest towards adopting the framework picks up among asset owners to handle more complex decision-making. At FIS Singapore, GIC and OPTrust unpack the governance and risk culture to enable it.
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