Rising consumer awareness of health and environmental concerns has coincided with a boom in innovation and technology in the food sector. Investors have an important role to play in encouraging their investee companies to understand the scale of the shift and to adopt a strategy to leverage innovation and new technologies to drive long-term value creation.
Harshal Chaudhari recently sidestepped from his role as company-wide CIO at IBM, looking after $150 billion in pension assets, to a new role as the tech giant’s chief analytics officer. He spoke to Top1000Funds about the strategy he ran at the pension fund, his wider thoughts on the global economy and the impact of technology on the investment world.
QSuper CIO, Brad Holzberger, has long stood out from his peers by loading up on long-term government bonds and even the recent sudden collapse of yields, as investors started pricing in slower growth, hasn’t deterred him from sticking with this asset class. The retiring CIO of one of Australia’s largest funds about expectations.
The EU expert group for sustainable finance has published a taxonomy, or green encyclopedia, that gives guidance to investors looking to finance the transition to an economy in line with the Paris Climate Agreement. PGGM’s Brenda Kramer, who is a member of the EC’s sustainable finance technical expert group, explains how this could be a game changer in the long term.
A key issue in life-cycle fund design is setting the right ‘glide path’ for switching from growth to defensive assets over time. As it turns out, risk aversion is far more important than pension fund balance. New research raises a note of caution over offering a single, one-size-fits-all life-cycle fund.
The $700 billion Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, ADIA, is boosting its internal fixed income capabilities and scaling up capacity to run active strategies in-house as it simplifies the portfolio to become more fleet-of-foot.
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