Pension Pulse

Henry Fernandez, Ashley Lester, Raman Aylur Subramanian and Chris Cote of MSCI put out a comment on how Canadian asset owners are seizing investment opportunities as risks evolve: Key findings Asset owners and researchers observed that radical shifts to the investment risk landscape have created new challenges for the portfolio construction process – and created new investment opportunities. Canadian asset owners’ treatment of climate change and the energy transition shows how evolving investment frameworks to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow can help identify opportunities over different time horizons. Asset managers tasked with generating alpha for institutional clients are also adapting their approaches, with fundamental managers integrating quantitative and alternative data signals into their decision-making processes. As the lines between structural, macroeconomic, societa...

Kevin Carmichael of The Logic reports Freeland eyes power of pension funds to lift Canadian economy: We’ve been conditioned to dismiss federal budgets and fiscal updates s as political documents. That, and a shaggy carpet under which to obscure things the government would rather avoid talking about. But the big-picture thinkers usually manage to add some seriousness to the process. There’s direction on how Ottawa intends to confront the forces that are shaping the world. In this way, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s fall economic statement was more interesting than she indicated it would be. She is considering a rethink of Canada’s approach to retirement by working “collaboratively” with Canadian pension funds to encourage them to invest more in Canada. That could be a game-changer at a time when higher interest rates have changed how investors think about risk, making venture capital harder to come by. But it also opens a door to political influence over pension management tha...

IMCO's President and CEO Bert Clark posted a comment on LinkedIn on their focused approach to investing outside Canada: At IMCO, we believe that investing outside Canada can bring very important benefits to client portfolios. However, we also believe that it is important to ensure that geographic diversification is pursued for the right reasons and that all the implications of doing so are considered and planned for in advance. This is particularly the case today, because we expect that the coming years will be shaped by a number of forces, including higher geopolitical risk, deglobalization and the growing importance of ESG, necessitating a focused approach to investing outside of Canada. As a result, we invest a significant percentage of the funds we manage on behalf clients outside Canada (the percentage varies over time – but today it is approximately 65%), and mostly in developed markets (approximately 93% today) ....

Adam Clark of Barron's reports Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia—what tech stocks hedge funds are buying and selling: It’s filing season for a string of major hedge funds, and big tech names like Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia were among the most-traded equities in the third quarter. With the seven big tech firms—Apple (AAPL), Amazon.com (AMZN), Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL), Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), and Tesla (TSLA)—playing an outsize role in this year’s stock market rally, it’s no surprise to see them featured heavily in the quarterly filings of large investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission requires anyone managing at least $100 million in publicly traded assets to disclose their holdings within 45 days of the end of each quarter. One of the most dramatic moves in the third quarter was Chris Hohn’s TCI Fund Management selling its entire stake in Microsoft, which had previously totaled 11.8 million shares—worth around $4.4 bil...