Pension Pulse

Maggie Fitzgerald and Thomas Franck of CNBC report stocks fall despite blowout earnings from Amazon, Dow drops 200 points: The major averages slipped on Friday as investors pored over a flurry of earnings results and a robust profit beat from e-commerce giant Amazon. The S&P 500 fell 0.7% to 4,181.17, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 185.51 points to close at 33,874.85. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 0.9% to 13,962.68. Despite Friday’s weakness in equities, the S&P 500 notched its third straight month of gains in April, adding more than 5% to the index as investors bet on a big economic and profit recovery from the pandemic. The S&P 500 is now up 11% for the year. The benchmark closed at record levels on Thursday on the heels of blowout earnings results from Apple and Facebook. The Dow rose about 2.7% this month, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 5.4% in April. Amazon, the last of Wall Street’s mega-cap tech companies to publish results, reported a rec...

Bert Clark, President and CEO of the Investment Management Corporation of Ontario (IMCO), spoke at a C.D. Howe Institute event today sponsored by Torys L.L.P. on delivering good returns in a frothy market. Bert was kind enough to forward me a paper on investing in challenging times which formed the basis for his fireside chat earlier today: Investing isn’t easy. There are no immutable laws of investing. There are no hard and fast rules, only probabilities, and much of that is beyond an investor’s control. The big unknowns of any era are ultimately resolved and in retrospect they look logical and even predictable. As a result, every investor probably thinks they are living in challenging times. Like previous environments, today’s investment landscape is characterized by many unknowns that make investing challenging. While there are no silver bullet techniques for navigating market challenges, there are well-known and straightforward strategies that have generated better return...

CDPQ put out a press release today on i nvesting constructive capital to support strong companies in strong communities: In its most recent Stewardship Investing Report released on April   21, 2020, CDPQ provides an overview of the latest developments in its strategy to fight against climate change, as well as on matters related to equity, diversity, inclusion and governance. Charles Emond, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Kim Thomassin, Executive Vice-President and Head of Investments in Québec and Stewardship Investing, take stock of   2020 and provide some important observations on the organization’s ambition to achieve a green, equitable and inclusive economic recovery. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing crisis had unprecedented impacts on communities, exacerbating already existing inequalities. Women, young people and members of ethnocultural minority groups around the glo...

In February, CIBC Mellon released results of a  survey  of 50 of Canada’s leading pension plans, seeking insights into how they have coped with the crisis, the challenges and opportunities that now lie ahead, and how they are positioning themselves accordingly: Canada’s pension plans enjoy a well-deserved global reputation for strong management and resilient performance, but they are not immune to shocks in the markets in which they operate. The COVID-19 pandemic – a true Black Swan 1 event – has been testing pension plans and their asset managers, prompting significant volatility in financial markets and reshaping the global economy. This is the backdrop against which we surveyed 50 of Canada’s leading pension plans, seeking insights into how they have coped with the crisis, the challenges and opportunities that now lie ahead, and how they are positioning themselves accordingly. In this report, we present the findings of this research. The good news is that...

The Canadian Leadership Congress wrote a comment on the the four "I"s of BCI's ESG strategy: In advance of our 2021 Challenge of Change Forum, we spoke to Jennifer Coulson, Vice-president, ESG and Public Markets. Jennifer will be joining a panel addressing the challenges and opportunities that come with implementing ESG strategies for pension funds. We talked about BCI’s ESG strategy and the four “I”s driving their decision making. CLC: Last summer BCI launched its new ESG strategy — how does your new approach differ from what you’ve always done? Jennifer Coulson: There were definitely a lot of pieces that were already underway, but this strategy was the first time we really brought everything under a corporate-wide umbrella . The way BCI’s investment strategy has evolved and developed, the asset classes have been pretty distinct in terms of how they’ve approached ESG. So, we felt the need to kind of come together as an organization and think about ho...