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Investor Profile
Church Commissioners: Managing historic real assets for the future
The jewel in the crown of the Church Commissioners’ portfolio, the London-based asset manager for the historic assets of the Church of England, is its allocation to real assets, which contributes to returns used to support the work and specific needs of the church, alongside clergy pensions.
Featured Story
How Brightwell combines external credit managers and in-house LDI
Brightwell, asset manager for the BT Pension Scheme, explains why it manages its liability-driven investment strategy in-house but has turned to external managers in its cash flow-driven strategy.
Investor Profile
Why AP4 has decided to integrate Scope 3 emissions across equities
Swedish buffer fund AP4 has begun integrating Scope 3 into its systematic equity allocation, convinced a company's up and downstream emissions data signposts the green winners of the future.
Featured Story
APG: The AI boom might have peaked
Thijs Knaap, chief economist at APG, shares his observations of the AI boom and one of Wall Street’s most closely watched companies.
Decisions to Enable Net Zero Investing
How Investors Are Assessing the Future Cost of Climate Change Risk
The impact of climate change on investing presents a big challenge. Learn how investors are tackling the risk. When people envisage the impacts of climate change risk, they tend to picture the physical risks: soaring temperatures, rising seas, failing crops, species loss, hunger and strife.
Technology
How technology plays a central role in CPP’s evolving strategy
Top1000funds.com double clicks on CPP Investments' technology strategy exploring a new user-centric focus on modular design so technology can evolve alongside investments; how in the not too distant future teams will include “non human” intelligence; and how to answer the question of value added from technology deployment.
Investor Profile
Japan’s Noritz fund talks asset manager gripes and why comparisons are bad
Japan's Noritz Pension Fund combines active management with a large allocation to cash. CIO Kyoshi Iwashina opines on his frustrations with the asset management community, his concerns about ESG and the dangers inherent in comparisons between corporate pension funds.
InFocus
The long and the short of harnessing demographics for better returns
Demographics is destiny, or so the saying goes. As populations grow, and as they move about, there will be investment opportunities that arise from their needs, their activity and their consumption. The trick for investors, however, is working out how long-term trends figure in generating shorter-term investment performance.
Investor Profile
ATP returns hit again by large allocation to bonds
The $102 billion Danish pension fund, ATP, returned just 3 per cent in its return-seeking allocation in the first half of this year, buoyed by its foreign and Danish equity portfolios but pulled down by rising interest rates negatively impacting the large allocation to bonds.
Investor Profile
KLP continues the fight to get Chinese mining companies to change
As growing geopolitical tension and government control has caused some investors to exit China, Norway's $78 billion pension fund KLP has stepped up engagement with Chinese mining companies at risk of breaching labour rights and responsible extraction.
Featured Story
Catching up with reality: Investment beliefs need a rethink
Co-founder of the Thinking Ahead Institute, Tim Hodgson, thinks your investment beliefs are out of date. He says if they were written five or more years ago they aren’t grounded in a 2024 reality and inadequately consider climate risk and systems thinking, both essential for a modern day asset owner.
Investor Profile
Thailand’s GPF – where sustainability is more important than returns
Thailand’s GPF is a regional leader in ESG integration. Top1000funds.com talks to Man Juttijudata, responsible for GPF’s active investment and outsourced investments about the challenges – like how to treat EV companies – and how uses fund managers for nuanced assessment.
Strategy
UK’s transition-focused SWF gets green light
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves didn’t waste any time approving the UK’s new SWF aimed at funding the energy transition. As it begins to lay down structure and governance frameworks critics point to the challenges of bringing projects to a level where they are investable.
Featured Story
UK’s GMPF: Why institutional investors are pushing into the rental market
A chronic shortage of housing in the UK has resulted in long waiting lists for social housing and young people left priced out of ownership. The experience of the Greater Manchester Pension Fund, investing more in the sector, provides lessons for other investors in jurisdictions with a housing shortage.
Investor Profile
Border to Coast prepares to answer the call for pre-IPO growth capital
Joe McDonnell, CIO of Border to Coast, says the £45 billion fund can help fill the gap in funding UK private companies wanting to IPO. It’s part of an investment strategy that sees a focus on putting capital to work innovatively and intentionally for its underlying funds.
Investor Profile
Private equity: Florida SBA mulls CFOs as alternative to secondaries
Florida State Board of Administration (SBA) is exploring innovative new strategies in its private equity portfolio like Collateralized Fund Obligations and “NAV loans” to tap liquidity and reposition the portfolio as an alternative to selling in the secondaries market.
Featured Story
CalPERS extols the benefits of co-investment in private equity
A recent board meeting marked progress in turning around the fortunes of CalPERS' private equity portfolio. Large co-investments and reducing the bias to buyout are reshaping the profile of investments, said portfolio manager Anton Orlich.
FIS Stanford 2018
FIS Stanford Photo Gallery
View photos from the 2018 Fiduciary Investors Symposium, held at Stanford University, United States.
FIS Stanford 2018
China’s enticing, challenging market
Inefficient markets and an explosion of technological innovation fuelled by Millennial consumers make China a tantalising prospect but accessing strong returns there isn’t as simple as it looks.
FIS Stanford 2018
Protecting human capital helps everyone
Investors have plenty to gain from helping to protect human rights in supply chains and managing the human costs during technological disruption and the transition to a low-carbon economy.
FIS Stanford 2018
How to follow megatrends to success
The big themes that will fuel growth in coming decades are interconnected and subject to change. An expert panel gave advice on riding societal change to outperformance.
FIS Stanford 2018
How the active complements the passive
Investors discuss the various ways that two styles often presented as if they are enemies in fact work hand in hand across portfolios to produce returns.
Featured Story
Better performance and alignment of purpose: The benefits of TPA
A total portfolio approach aligns investment implementation with the purpose of being a fiduciary, rather than short term or relative performance. Not only that, there is huge upside performance from the approach, the source of which is not what you might think according to Sue Brake.
Investor Profile
Frampton shows the way as APFC turns to China, private equity
Opportunity in China, risk aversion in fixed income as spreads remain tight, and turning up the volume in private equity: Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation's Marcus Frampton talks latest strategy at the $82 billion fund.
Featured Story
Shared investment objective critical to portfolio resilience: Bridgewater
Investors who are looking to build portfolio resilience better get their team on the same page first about the underlying investment objectives in play, said Bridgewater co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour at the Fiduciary Investors Symposium.
Investor Profile
CPP evolves total portfolio approach
Understanding the drivers of your portfolio risk and return, and then using that information to more dynamically adjust the portfolio, is one of the benefits of the total portfolio approach according to CPP's Manroop Jhooty, whose total fund management team is exploring whether to include emerging factors in portfolio design.
Investor Profile
Brunel uses AI in stewardship and doubles down on manager misalignment
Brunel Pension Partnership has introduced AI in its stewardship processes, and is working with other asset owners to put more pressure on asset managers to align with its climate demands.
FIS Toronto 2024
The subtle complexity of best-practice pension management
Identifying best practice in pension management is not a straightforward task. As much as asset allocators may want there to be a definitive answer, differences in size, mandate and resources between different pension funds means an investment approach that works for one may not work for others.
Featured Story
Brightwell ponders implications of shake up in UK pension scheme surpluses
New rules may enable employers to tap surplus funds built up in defined benefit plans in the UK. It remains unclear if this would alter investment strategy and see these funds invest more investment in so-called productive assets rather than UK government bonds.
Featured Story
How Ireland’s ISIF is helping crowd-in transition finance
The €15 billion ($16.1 billion) Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF) is finding compelling investment opportunities in the energy transition and is successfully drawing in additional investment to finance Ireland’s net zero commitments.