Pension Pulse

Sean Conlon and Lisa Kailai Han of CNBC report stocks close at record highs with tech leading the way again. Nasdaq gains 8% in May: U.S. equities closed at record highs on Friday, while crude prices slipped, helping the major averages score a winning month, boosted by technology. The Nasdaq Composite settled up 0.2% at 26,972.62, while the S&P 500 climbed 0.22% to 7,580.06. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished up 363.49 points, or 0.72%, at 51,032.46. All three indexes hit fresh all-time intraday highs earlier as well. Dell Technologies was a winner. Shares surged nearly 33%, seeing its best day on record, after the laptop maker reported a first-quarter beat on both the top and bottom lines and raised its full-year guidance. Shares of Micron Technology and Qualcomm rose 5% and 3%, respectively, adding to their recent gains. While the two have suffered notable drops this month, they both posted sizable gains in the period. Micron jumped almost 88% in May, while Qua...

Layan Odeh of Bloomberg reports  BCI expands into financing private equity funds amid deal slump: British Columbia Investment Management Corp. created a team within its private equity unit to provide financing to buyout firms that are increasingly looking for new ways to drum up cash amid a prolonged dealmaking drought. The new Capital Solutions Group will focus on preferred equity, recapitalizations and funding continuation vehicles, according to Jon Salon, the pension fund’s head of private equity. “We can be a capital solutions provider to our general partners in the market at a time where liquidity is scarce,” he said in an interview. Deal activity across the buyout industry has remained subdued for years, limiting firms’ ability to return capital to investors. In response, fund managers have increasingly turned to alternative liquidity tactics, including so-called continuation vehicles that allow them to hold investments for longer while generating distributi...

Layan Odeh of Bloomberg reports BCI shuts two stock funds, cites shrinking public pool: British Columbia Investment Management Corp. is closing two global stock-picking strategies that oversee about C$4.3 billion ($3.1 billion), as it contends with a contracting pool of publicly listed firms. The pension fund manager is retiring two internally managed global strategies focused on thematic and fundamental equities, BCI said an emailed statement to Bloomberg. The strategies, Global Active Thematic Equities and Global Active Fundamental Equities, make up about 7.2% of its public equities portfolio. “The opportunity set for active fundamental stock selection in global developed equities has reduced materially — fewer listed companies, growth companies staying private for much longer, higher index concentration and a narrower path to alpha,” BCI’s global head of capital markets and credit investments, Daniel Garant, said in the statement. The rise of passive investing has fur...

Mathew Kaminski, a former employee of CPP Investments, wrote a lengthy blog comment on how CPP executives are manipulating their benchmarks to pay themselves before your retirement. He calls it an insider's perspective on the illegitimate $100 million dollar wealth transfer from Canadian taxpayers to CPP execs and employees, and exactly how they covered it up: As you may have seen, CPP Investments published its Annual Report for the Year Ending March 2026 yesterday. It would be one thing if CPP was underperforming their benchmark. It would be another if they were manipulating their benchmark to pay themselves unduly. It would be another if they were depressing growth in the Canadian economy writ-large to cover it all up. I’ll prove they are doing all three. In short, CPP Investments leadership manipulated their benchmarks over 2025 and 2026 to pay themselves and their teams at least an extra $100 million while they missed the baseline target of 4% real return needed to s...