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 ($82 billion) fund has awarded a £450 million ($605 million) US direct lending mandate to Crescent Capital this month, citing the manager's institutional-client-first approach as a key attraction.
Mercer has revamped the asset allocation of its largest group of funds and in the process refined the way it classifies types of investments into ‘growth’ and ‘defensive’. The multi-manager has also signaled an evolution towards a ‘risk premia-based’ approach to asset allocation in the future. Greg Bright reports.
The New Jersey Division of Investment, which manages the $67.3 billion in state pension funds and was the best-performing US fund last year, has made some dramatic changes to its asset allocation in line with its objective of relying less on public equities for returns.
A committed ‘return seeker’, Sweden’s Andra AP Fonden (AP2) exploited the repricing of risk during the financial crisis by investing decisively in convertible bonds and credit, says Tomas Franzen, chief investment strategist at the SEK204.3 billion ($28.5 billion) fund. Now it is looking at real assets and emerging Asia to further diversify its sources of
Jim Christensen, the investments boss of one of Australia’s biggest corporate superannuation funds, Telstra Super, is close to fully rebuilding his team after a chain of key departures in the past eight months, and has viewed the task as an opportunity to reshape the fund’s alternatives program and consider the potential for further internal management.
The $48.4 billion OMERS, which plans to have 90 per cent of assets directly managed by 2012, increased its investment management expenses in 2009 by 8 per cent, a figure it claims is offset by lower investment operating and third-party manager expenses.
China is the world’s biggest new frontier since wild-west America in the mid 19th century. For instance, it controls four of the top 10 sovereign wealth funds by size, as just one of many examples of its nascent power. And China is changing, becoming much more of a global corporate citizen and less of the
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