Pension Pulse

Lawrence Delevingne of CNBC reports, Why you should avoid the hottest hedge fund hands : Investors who don't have money with Pershing Square Capital Management are likely salivating at the hedge fund's industry-leading 26 percent return from January through July. But investing with Bill Ackman and other top-performing managers after a great run is probably a bad idea, according to a new study of long-term hedge fund industry performance. A white paper by Commonfund , which manages nearly $25 billion for close to 1,500 endowments, pensions and other institutions, shows that putting money with the hottest hedge fund managers can work in the short term, but that sticking with them for three years or more is worse than picking managers at random. Picking up losing hedge fund strategies can even produce slightly positive performance. "Not only does positive-return persistence tend not to work as a selection strategy, but it is especially ineffective in the medium-to-...

Gene Marcial of Forbes reports, Ride With The Bulls Even As Warnings Of A Big Correction Are On The Rise : With the market’s major indexes continuing to climb to new all-time highs, investors are getting increasingly jittery about the incorrigible bears’ warnings that the huge correction they have been predicting is on its way. The selloff will signal the market has hit its peak, they assert. What to do? Ride with the bulls — and face any pullback with enough cash firepower to buy the battered shares of fallen angels with proven track records. The proven antidote to a massive pullback is to embrace it and prepare to buy shares of companies that are fundamentally sound and equipped to thrive after a market pullback. The key is to be prepared – not by selling but to be an opportunistic buyer as prices plummet. “The bears keep seeing market tops as the bull charges ahead,” notes Ed Yardeni, president and chief investment strategist at Yardeni Research. Even some of the bulls...

Alex Rosenberg of CNBC reports, The strange dynamic that’s guiding stocks higher : The S&P 500's surge past the 2,000 level this week for the first time ever is just the latest milestone for the great rally that stocks have enjoyed over the past 5½ years. But Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, doesn't think the latest splashy market headlines will do anything to bring in the many retail investors who have long been staying on the sidelines. Individual investors are "still nervous, they're concerned," Silverblatt said on CNBC's "Futures Now" on Tuesday. "Even though we're into this rally over five years now, and they're getting very little if they're sitting in a bank or some alternatives, they are not moving back into the market." And he said the S&P's crossing of 2,000 won't lure retail investors. After all, many small investors will not soon forget the market collaps...

Hassan Yussuff, President of the Canadian Labour Congress, wrote a special for the Financial Post, Why there’s no benefit in target benefit pensions : So-called ‘shared risk’ plans have nothing to do with sharing Every child grows up learning the importance of sharing. It’s also fundamental to the labour movement. Unions bargain with employers to ensure that workers share in the fruits of their labour. This makes for a stronger, stable economy and a fairer society. Sharing is also at the heart of workplace pensions. Part of the wages and salaries that unions bargain get deferred until retirement, in the form of pensions. When our negotiated pension plans experience funding shortfalls, as they have in the last six years, unions have stepped up and agreed to pay more into the pension fund, even temporarily cutting back on benefit levels. In return, unions expect that employers will live up to their commitments and pay retirees the pensions they’ve earned over a working lifet...

Don Pittis of CBC reports, Workers not to blame for Quebec pension problem : A deal's a deal, right? Well, not when it comes to the province of Quebec and the pensions of its municipal employees. And if Quebec gets away with cutting municipal worker pensions, which have been eaten away through mismanagement by the very people doing the cutting, then watch this phenomenon spread. Quebec is pulling a Detroit. About a year ago, I pointed out that the shattered dreams of Detroit pensioners should be a warning to the rest of us . But unlike Detroit, Quebec is trying to snatch back promised pension money by fiat through its proposed Bill 3 pension reform legislation, without the inconvenient legal process of bankruptcy. To read many of the stories about these Quebec pension cuts you would think that it was the pensioners' fault. The same kind of thing happened in Detroit. Outraged taxpayers inveigh against government employees for sucking money out of the public purse for...

Dan McSwain of U-T San Diego reports, Leverage spells headline risk for pension fund : By tradition, a public pension fund is safe and boring. If you run one of these multibillion-dollar funds, replacing a lost benefit check should be your biggest problem on any given day. Same goes for taxpayers who support the pension system, and retirees who depend on it. Here’s what you don't want: A front-page article about your fund in The Wall Street Journal. Yet that’s precisely where San Diego County’s fund landed Thursday morning, as it has on many U-T San Diego covers in recent years. Here’s how Journal reporter Dan Fitzpatrick described the situation: “A large California pension manager is using complex derivatives to supercharge its bets as it looks to cover a funding shortfall and diversify its holdings.” That sounds neither safe nor boring. Until the 1980s, when pension managers began adding stocks to portfolios, most funds were restricted to ultrasafe government b...