In 2009, the Air Canada pension plan was in dire straits with a $2.6 billion solvency deficit. A decade later, it has a surplus of more than $2 billion. The complete turnaround is in part due to a new investment team that joined in 2009 and transformed the pension fund’s investments. With the $21 billion […]
Japanification is a term describing the spread of low growth and low inflation around the world. Speaking at the Canadian Investment Review’s 2019 Defined Benefit Investment Forum in Toronto on Dec. 6, Charles Lannon, head of equities at Cidel Asset Management Inc., discussed whether Europe and the United States are destined for a similar fate […]
Investing in residential real estate can offer benefits to pension plan sponsors, but it’s not an asset class that’s easy to access. However, a new strategy exists that harnesses the power of quantitative investing to make this option feasible for pension plans. Residential real estate should be top of mind for any institutional investor, said […]
While it’s easy for a plan sponsor to determine how an equity or fixed income manager is performing, it isn’t as straightforward to assess the performance of an outsourced chief investment officer. “There’s a lot of similarities in OCIO providers out there, but there’s also a lot of differences,” said Eric Menzer, global head of […]
The rise in alternative investing combined with an increased focus on integrating environmental, social and governance considerations into the investment process is leading pension plans to a natural question: how can they integrate ESG in real estate portfolios? The buildings sector has one of the highest carbon footprints, said Derek Warren, vice-president and portfolio manager […]
For many passive investors, the belief in efficient markets is core. But how efficient are markets at different parts of the capitalization spectrum? A new paper by CEM Benchmarking Inc. looks at the historical performance of actively managed portfolios for dedicated U.S. large cap equity portfolios and dedicated U.S. small cap equity portfolios for large […]
Since the Teachers’ Retirement Allowance Fund, which is the defined benefit pension plan for public school teachers and other eligible employees in Manitoba, was introduced in 1925, it has made significant strides around asset mix and governance. In the early days, the fund’s asset mix consisted largely of federal, provincial and municipal bonds, but in […]
Many pension plans use risk systems to test how different scenarios would affect their portfolios. Traditionally, risk models use thousands of scenarios. The likelihood that these scenarios will occur is weighted equally and generally reflects short-term asset characteristics. On the other hand, pension plans also use asset-liability models for long-term portfolio construction. This could result […]
Globally, negative yielding bonds are alarming investors. And while Canadian government bonds haven’t gone negative, movement in other countries is demonstrating to institutional investors that anything is possible. So if bond yields do go negative, what could this mean for Canadian pension plans’ funding statuses? Canadian defined benefit plans can be valued in three different ways, all […]
Since the Teachers’ Retirement Allowance Fund, which is the defined benefit pension plan for public school teachers and other eligible employees in Manitoba, was introduced in 1925, it has made significant strides around asset mix and governance. In the early days, the fund’s asset mix consisted largely of federal, provincial and municipal bonds, but in […]