Pension Pulse

Jesse Pound and Yun Li of CNBC report stocks close at record highs, market notches best month of the year despite Big Tech earnings misses: The U.S. stock market set another round of record highs on Friday as Wall Street looked past disappointing results from major companies to wrap up its best month of the year. The S&P 500 rose 0.19% to close at 4,605.38 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 89.08 points, or 0.25%, to finish at 35,819.56. The Nasdaq Composite rose 0.33% to close at 15,498.39. All three closed at record highs, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq clinched their best months since November 2020. The positive performance came despite weak third-quarter reports from two of the market’s biggest companies. Amazon shares dropped 2.1% after the e-commerce giant badly missed earnings and revenue expectations for the third quarter . Apple stock fell 1.8% after the tech giant’s quarterly revenue fell short of expectations amid larger-than-expected supply con...

Esteban Duarte of Bloomberg News reports Ontario Pension taps Antares to invest in private equity deals: Investment Management Corp. of Ontario, a money manager for pension funds in the Canadian province, tapped Antares Capital LP to invest US$500 million in loans to be used by private equity firms to finance transactions. The portfolio will target between 75 and 100 transactions U.S. and Canadian issuers operating in the mid-market, according to an emailed statement seen by Bloomberg. IMCO selected Antares as its private debt manager after a competitive process. “We are building out the global credit strategy for the long term,” Jennifer Hartviksen, IMCO’s managing director of global credit, said in an interview. “As we surveyed the landscape, we identified Antares as being the best fit for us because of that superior performance generated by a demonstrated low loss rate over many cycles.”  Pension funds and other large institutions are deploying more capital to p...

Today, OPTrust put out a press release stating it reached an important milestone as OPTrust Select continues to grow and has enrolled 50 employers: Since enrolment began in 2019, 50 organizations from communities across Ontario have joined OPTrust Select – a defined benefit pension offering designed to enhance retirement security for employees who work at charitable, nonprofit and broader public sector organizations in Ontario. “Workers in the nonprofit, charitable and broader public sectors play an important role serving our communities but have traditionally not had access to the security and stability of a defined benefit pension,” said Audrey Forbes, Senior Vice-President of Member Experience at OPTrust. “We now have over 1,700 members in OPTrust Select that have the peace of mind of a more secure retirement.” Organizations that have joined OPTrust Select provide a range of critically important services including healthcare, community supports and senior ser...

Josephine Cumbo of the Financial Times reports that CDPQ plans to pour $12bn into European and UK assets: One of Canada’s largest pension fund managers has unveiled plans for a C$15bn ($12bn) spending spree on private assets in the UK and Europe in a significant expansion of its efforts to drive up returns offshore.   Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec (CDPQ), the C$400bn global investment group, told the Financial Times that it plans to deploy around those funds to the region over the next four years, with the UK standing out because of its “pro business” stance.  The investment manager’s allocation to Europe stands at roughly 14 per cent of its international portfolio and is “concentrated in the UK and France,” Charles Emond, president and chief executive of CDPQ, told the Financial Times in an interview.  “We anticipate growing this figure in the coming years mainly due to opportunities we see across Europe for private investments in our sectors of expertis...

The Globe an Mail published an op-ed from AIMCo's Chair Mark Wiseman on rethinking Rogers’s dual-class share structure: In 1861, in his treatise Considerations on Representative Government , J.S. Mill argued that benevolent dictatorships could never remain benevolent. Similarly, the saga unfolding at Rogers Communications Inc. represents yet another case of abject corporate governance failure in Canada – a power struggle within a family dynasty that is jeopardizing the future of the company and usurping value from common shareholders. This is a door that I, and many other institutional investors and legal experts, have been banging on for decades now. For too long, dual-class share structures have allowed families and insiders to maintain control of companies without adequate accountability to those owning the majority economic interest in those companies. A dual-class structure means simply that specific shareholders possess voting control disproportionate to their eq...