Pension Pulse

Sean Conlon and Lisa Kailai Han of CNBC report the S&P 500, Nasdaq close at records, boosted by Intel, as investors hope for a restart to U.S.-Iran talks: The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite closed at record levels on Friday after investors were given a hopeful sign that peace talks between the U.S. and Iran would soon take place in Pakistan. The broad market index finished up 0.8% at 7,165.08, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq added 1.63% to settle at 24,836.60. Both indexes also scored fresh all-time intraday highs. However, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 79.61 points, or 0.16%, to end the at 49,230.71. MS NOW reported, citing a Pakistani official, that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is expected to arrive in Islamabad on Friday evening to have a discussion with Pakistani mediators about a possible second round of negotiations with the U.S. U.S. oil prices pulled back following the development. U.S.  West Texas Intermediate futures settled above...

Layan Odeh of Bloomberg reports  CAAT Pension Plan earns 8.4% as stock gains outweigh weak PE returns: CAAT Pension Plan earned 8.4% last year as buoyant stock performance outweighed soft returns in the fund’s private market portfolio.  The gains, which pushed assets to C$25.4 billion ($18.6 billion), were below the benchmark of 11.2%. That was driven “almost entirely” by the pension plan’s private equity allocation, which returned 1.5% compared to its benchmark of 19.6%, according to CAAT’s annual report published Thursday.  Public equity holdings gained 21.7% in 2025, while credit and real assets returned 3.7% and 4.1%, respectively .  Private markets suffered from constrained liquidity and subdued deal activity last year as higher interest rates and macroeconomic uncertainty weighed on investor sentiment and valuations, the Toronto-based pension plan said in the report.  The pension plan is “modestly” exposed to software companies affected by adv...

BCI recently released some insights from its 2026 Investor Day: Earlier this year, at BCI’s Investor Day, our asset class heads faced a deceptively simple challenge: tell clients what’s happening now in their programs, and what they think is coming next. No hedging, no caveats. These are the experts who live and breathe these markets every day, building investment strategies to serve BCI’s clients. What followed were candid, informed perspectives from the people who know these markets best. All figures reflect data as at February 2026 unless otherwise noted.   Capital Markets & Credit Investments “ Deliberate credit selection, as opposed to broad market exposure, is where long-term value is created within private credit. You don’t just go out and buy a slice of the market—if you do that, you face very tight credit spreads and poor credit selection . Since the portfolio’s inception in 2018, our focus has been on the quality of the portfolio, across geographies, ...