Pension Pulse

Layan Odeh of Bloomberg reports  CAAT Pension Plan earns 8.4% as stock gains outweigh weak PE returns: CAAT Pension Plan earned 8.4% last year as buoyant stock performance outweighed soft returns in the fund’s private market portfolio.  The gains, which pushed assets to C$25.4 billion ($18.6 billion), were below the benchmark of 11.2%. That was driven “almost entirely” by the pension plan’s private equity allocation, which returned 1.5% compared to its benchmark of 19.6%, according to CAAT’s annual report published Thursday.  Public equity holdings gained 21.7% in 2025, while credit and real assets returned 3.7% and 4.1%, respectively .  Private markets suffered from constrained liquidity and subdued deal activity last year as higher interest rates and macroeconomic uncertainty weighed on investor sentiment and valuations, the Toronto-based pension plan said in the report.  The pension plan is “modestly” exposed to software companies affected by adv...

BCI recently released some insights from its 2026 Investor Day: Earlier this year, at BCI’s Investor Day, our asset class heads faced a deceptively simple challenge: tell clients what’s happening now in their programs, and what they think is coming next. No hedging, no caveats. These are the experts who live and breathe these markets every day, building investment strategies to serve BCI’s clients. What followed were candid, informed perspectives from the people who know these markets best. All figures reflect data as at February 2026 unless otherwise noted.   Capital Markets & Credit Investments “ Deliberate credit selection, as opposed to broad market exposure, is where long-term value is created within private credit. You don’t just go out and buy a slice of the market—if you do that, you face very tight credit spreads and poor credit selection . Since the portfolio’s inception in 2018, our focus has been on the quality of the portfolio, across geographies, ...

James Bradshaw of the Globe and Mail reports  OMERS aims to add $10-billion in new investment in Canada over five years: The OMERS pension plan is looking to add at least $10-billion in new investments in Canada to its portfolio over the next five years, as chief executive Blake Hutcheson says a push to attract more capital to Canadian projects is starting to show results. The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System has about 18 per cent of its $145-billion portfolio invested in Canada – about $26-billion. Over the next five years, Mr. Hutcheson aims to increase that share to 25 per cent, he said in an interview. The investing teams at OMERS are kicking the tires and putting in bids on more assets, especially in infrastructure and real estate, he said. And the fund – the seventh-largest of Canada’s eight biggest pension investors – is gaining confidence that there will be deals worth making in defence as well as in growth capital for Canadian startups. “What’s r...