Pension Pulse

Freschia Gonzales of Benefits and Pensions Monitor reports  Canada's private sector shed 25,800 pension members in 2024: Canada's private sector lost 25,800 registered pension plan members in 2024 even as national membership climbed to nearly 7.4m, exposing a widening split between public and private workplace retirement coverage.  The overall gain of 132,000 members, or 1.8 percent, from 2023 came almost entirely from public plans.   According to Statistics Canada, public sector plans added nearly 157,900 participants, a 4 percent increase, taking the public total to just over 4m.  ...

Josh Welsh of Benefits and Pensions Monitor reports  IMCO adds $300 million in pension assets with Hamilton mandate: The Investment Management Corporation of Ontario (IMCO) has been selected to manage approximately $300 million in pension assets for the City of Hamilton, consolidating three legacy defined benefit (DB) plans that cover more than 1,000 retirees, deferred members and beneficiaries, according to its press release Thursday. According to the organization, the mandate will require an onboarding process during which IMCO will work with the city on investment decision-making and transition planning for the legacy portfolios ...

Hugh Son of CNBC reports on how Leopold Aschenbrenner built a $45 billion AI hedge fund — and lost most of it in days: Two years ago, Leopold Aschenbrenner argued he was one of few people in the world who saw the future clearly. In a sprawling, 165-page essay that became required reading in Silicon Valley, the former OpenAI researcher positioned himself as a kind of prophet for the coming age of artificial super intelligence. But this week, the limits of Aschenbrenner’s vision were on display when the AI-themed hedge fund he runs — named Situational Awareness, also the title of his viral June 2024 manifesto — ran into the harsh reality of tumbling semiconductor stocks and Wall Street margin calls. At its peak earlier this month, his fund sat atop $45 billion in assets. By Thursday, however, after being forced to offload all of his leveraged stock bets — including hard-hit names like SK Hynix and CoreWeave — to Ken Griffin’s Citadel at a discount, the fund’s holdings p...

Layan Odeh of Bloomberg reports  OMERS hires CAAT’s Buzanis to lead private equity funds business:  Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System hired a longtime executive from CAAT Pension Plan to help build its private equity funds strategy as it makes such investing a more central part of its buyout business. CAAT’s head of private markets, Adam Buzanis, will join Omers as head of funds. In that role, he’ll develop the external private equity funds strategy and advance efforts to ramp up co-investments, according to the pension plan. The move is the latest change in Omers’ investment team over the past several weeks after the departure of chief investment officer Ralph Berg, who left to join Singapore’s Temasek. Earlier this month, the pension plan elevated Michael Hill to global head of infrastructure and private equity and gave Michael Block a wider mandate for private capital investments. Omers has revamped its private equity unit in the past two years, halting ...

Veselina Petrova of Renewables Now reports  Elia, CPP Investments buy 1.8-GW North Sea grid link project from CIP: Belgian transmission system operator Elia Group SA (EBR:ELI) and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) said today they have acquired the 1.8-GW Tarchon, a subsea interconnector project planned to link Germany and the UK to allow the countries to share surplus clean electricity. The project will be bought from Copenhagen Infrastructure V, a fund managed by Denmark’s Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP). Specifically, CPP Investments will buy a majority stake in the project, spending CAD 1 billion (USD 709.7m/EUR 622.5m) on a 75% ownership, while Elia will own the remaining 25% . The Belgian company will acquire minority holding through its WindGrid subsidiary, which invests in electricity transmission and offshore wind grid infrastructure. The new asset will extend CPP Investments’ commitment to invest in developing European energy infra...