London-based AustralianSuper deputy CIO Damian Moloney oversees the global expansion plans of Australia’s largest superannuation fund. While a global presence has clear benefits for the fund and its members, Moloney’s advice to others contemplating the same is to plan extensively and build early.

When AustralianSuper opened its first offshore office in Beijing in 2012 it had A$46 billion in assets, cashflows of A$8 billion a year and 39 investment staff.

Fast forward to 2024 and around half of the fund’s A$341 billion ($228 billion) is invested offshore, it has offices in London, New York and Beijing, and is growing exponentially.

Part of the genesis of the offshore expansion is the pace of growth of the fund. Fuelled by Australia’s mandated superannuation system (11.5 per cent inflows per year, regardless of investment returns or new membership) the fund is projected to grow to A$700 billion by 2030 and $1 trillion not long after. It is expected that 70 per cent of new flows will be invested offshore.

Deputy chief investment officer Damian Moloney, who joined the fund in 2018, heads the strategic direction, governance, oversight and enablement of the fund’s global investments program from London.

Moloney explains how the offshore strategy has evolved, with the success of the operations refocussing strategy from the initial expectation that the international offices would simply manage in region assets.

“Because we have been successful in recruiting the right people and teams, and the AUM is much bigger, we decided to manage outside the region. So that platform can be leveraged to manage offshore across the board, that’s what we are doing in London,” he tells Top1000funds.com in an interview.

The 150 people in the London office, about half of whom are in investments, is expected to triple by 2030. The fund also recently committed to doubling the assets it invests in the UK in that timeframe, to around A$26 billion.

The London office manages real assets where it has made some significant investments including a 74 per cent interest in the King’s Cross Estate, which it calls home. From London it also manages fixed income, global equities and private credit where it has invested around A$4 billion – including a £375 million ($488 million) subordinated facility to support Heathrow Airport during the pandemic – although the fund’s head of private credit, Nick Ward, recently relocated from Melbourne to New York.

The new-ish head of international equities and private equity, Mark Hargreaves, who was appointed last year, is also based in London overseeing expected growth of global equities from A$69 billion to A$255 billion, and private equity from A$14 billion to A$55 billion in the next four years.

About 30 per cent of the fund’s assets are invested in North America, where a team of 60 is headed by new head of Americas, Mikaël Limpalaër who will oversee the expected doubling of the team within two years. Most of the assets managed from New York are unlisted.

At the same time the fund’s Australian investments have doubled in the past five years and by 2030 the expectation is they will exceed A$260 billion, which is the equivalent of about 9 per cent of the country’s forecasted GDP. Pushing assets offshore is a natural diversification, and opportunity.

It has been, and continues to be, a huge undertaking for Moloney to build the teams and the infrastructure (the London office numbered six when he arrived). The experience has made him acutely aware of what is required for a successful global business build, and his advice to others is to plan extensively and build early.

“One big learning is we didn’t design the build early enough,” he says. “We should have worked harder and better on technology, the architecture and have the systems and structures in place earlier. Invest in that upfront is what I’d say.

“Clarity around plans is important: what do you want to do and where do you want to do it? Building from the top down is easier than the bottom up. And recruit for the future, making sure when those people arrive they are suitably delegated.”

A new 10-year plan is about a year away from being finalised, but already he says having people on the ground in the key financial centres is paying dividends for manager relationships and access.

“We are particularly seeing this in private equity with Terry [Charalambous] going to New York there has been a substantial uptick in the relationships as he is on the ground,” Moloney says, adding there have been notable improvements in access to GPs, co-investment and deal flow.

On the asset management side, the fund is also now more easily able to have representatives on the boards of various investee companies and to work directly with management and non-executives on the ground.

“You have to be present to be part of the conversation,” Moloney says. “When I came here we were about $150 billion. Now we are over $350 billion and are a lot more interesting now.”

Global decision making

Of a senior team of eight people, half are now offshore. And Moloney admits there is an internal discussion about the shifting centre of gravity at the fund.

“We are transitioning from Melbourne-based decision-making to more global, and having delegated decision making within region,” he says.

“It’s iterative. If most of your team and investments is offshore, you should be offshore, but there is no hard and fast rule”.

He adds that the bulk of the investment support remains in Australia.

“The support to run the investment portfolio is in Australia and that will be the case, they are experienced and mature at what they do,” he says.

The fund has global portfolio management systems and other technologies that all teams globally are hooked into.

“It is a bit of an effort with decision-making, coordinating the three offices, but we just work it out as we go,” he says.

Some delegated authority is in Australia, and some offshore, such as private markets; but mostly internal approvals go to chief investment officer Mark Delaney in Melbourne and, if needed, to the investment committee.

“Performance was good and the portfolio looked good and worked well, so we didn’t want to disrupt the delegation too much,” Moloney says. “We just work through the time zones.”

Continued internalisation

Generally speaking, the fund’s investment strategy is focused on long-term investment themes including digitisation and the energy transition.

Just this month it made a A$2.2 billion investment in US data centre, DataBank adding to its A$60 billion real assets portfolio that includes digital infrastructure across Australia, EMEA and South America. Last year it made a A$2.5 billion investment in DigitalBridge Group for a significant minority stake in Vantage, which at the time was the fund’s largest infrastructure investment in Europe.

Philippa Kelly, chair of the investment committee, says growing the investment team outside Australia an anticipated fourfold over the next decade is part of the fund’s internalisation strategy.

“This reflects our long-term approach to internalisation, and that, wherever possible, investments should be managed by those with local insights and proximity to the deals and target assets,” Kelly says in the fund’s latest annual report.

“We expect that more than 75 per cent of the portfolio will be managed internally by 2030.”

The good news for members is an expectation that by building these teams out the fund expects to “save more than $1.3 billion per year by the end of the decade”.

Moloney says he expects about another two to three years of work to build out the capabilities in the London and New York offices to support that internalisation effort.

“We expect to extract some real efficiencies as we internalise, we reduce external costs, and we can maximise what we have and expect to deliver some of that benefit to members,” he says.

In addition, Moloney says the investment committee and board is keenly focused on how to hold the internal team accountable to the same standards as external managers.

A recent $A1.1 billion equity and credit write-off connected to venture capital investment in Pluralsight attracted front page news in Australia.

After the write-down the fund took a very close look at what happened and what could have been done differently, Moloney says.

He also welcomes the growing public scrutiny of funds investing more directly into private markets.

“I think personally, as a member as well, scrutiny on funds in this area… could do with ongoing focus and I don’t think we should shy away from it.”

He says the fund needs to deliver on its promise to deliver an outcome for members that is better than just passively investing the money, and to be accountable for that.

“So I think it is actually a good thing that we get constant scrutiny, it just needs to be balanced across the sector,” he says

“Not every model is the same, and capabilities are being built differently, but the ultimate test of it all is the performance numbers.

“There will always be issues in a portfolio, we are so big now with so many assets and geographies, I don’t mind the scrutiny personally. I think it is a good thing. And our members should expect that. It’s all part of being a good business and doing a good job, being open to scrutiny and being up for the challenge.”

AustralianSuper’s balanced fund 10-year performance was 8.07 per cent and one-year to June 30 was 8.46 per cent.

Disclaimer: Amanda White is a member of AustralianSuper

 

Damian Moloney is a speaker at the Fiduciary Investors Symposium to be held at Oxford University from November 19-21. The event is for asset owners, for the program and registration click here.

 

 

The fundamentals that underpin timberland, and their strategic role on the path to net zero, will reward consistent investment in productive natural capital. Aleksi Ehtee, timberland team lead at the Church Commissioners for England explains why forestry is a real opportunity for patient capital to tap into favourable long-term supply-demand dynamics while generating positive financial, environmental and social value.

This year has seen relatively muted timber prices across major markets, as reduced economic activity has applied drag on the demand for wood-based products, and construction starts have stalled owing largely to affordability.

For several reasons, however, this short-term downturn is expected to see a reversal supported by deep-rooted market fundamentals. Investors that have been involved in timberland for some time are used to waiting for end values to mature. Patience also tends to pay off.

For example, temporary price fluctuations may impact cash yields, typically with limited impact on capital values, while timber can be kept ‘on the stump’ until there are stronger signals to sell. Similar defensive strategies to ride out downward pressure may also see investors benefiting from the optionality to participate in voluntary carbon credit markets where credit pricing and markets are favourable, and diversifying risk exposure through the introduction of complementary land uses.

Like many institutions with decades-long hold periods, however, it is the dynamics and the structural resilience of the sector that make sustainable forestry especially attractive to the Church Commissioners for England. That the idiosyncrasies of the asset class allow for a degree of ‘tactical’ yield protection is valuable. But it is the fundamentals that underpin timberland and the timber commodity, and their strategic role on the path to net zero, that will really reward consistent investment in productive natural capital.

Consider socio-demographic trends. On one level, the UN estimates that the world’s population is expected to increase by nearly 2 billion to 9.7 billion in 2050, which will expand the base demand for raw materials, including timber, over time. Layer on top of that the positive correlation exhibited between net GDP per capita and the consumption of wood-based products; as well as the observation that developed and developing economies are using timber more resourcefully to replace non-renewable materials such as plastics. Factor in that the constrained net supply of timber is decreasing globally, and sustainable forestry begins to look relatively undervalued at a global scale.

The proposition that more people equals greater demand would hold water for most commodities, so what else makes timberland a worthy addition to portfolios with longer time horizons? Demand quality is one differentiator.

International timber markets are deepening with the steady increase of timber used in construction and the adoption of cross-laminated timber as an alternative to steel and concrete in the built environment. Markets are also broadening thanks to the push for increased use of sustainable materials, which is supporting demand for wood fibre (in the form of paper and cardboard) as a viable replacement for plastics in consumer industries. New applications are rapidly emerging for wood-derived products, ranging from bio-based plastics and renewable chemicals to eco-friendly battery energy storage technologies.

For the aforementioned reasons, World Bank forecasts predict a quadrupling of demand for timber by 2050, while other more conservative estimates from public bodies such as the UK Forestry Commission and the Softwood Council still suggest a three-fold increase over a similar period.

Our trees continue to grow, regardless of financial market conditions

Of course, there are further factors at play that will push prices upwards over a longer period. Timber supply, particularly that of lumber-grade timber, is not expected to keep up with demand. Around half of all institutional-quality timberland is concentrated in the US, with Europe, Latin America and Australasia representing the other half.

Increasing supply has its limitations – not least the time it takes for newly planted trees to mature. Another factor is certification. End users, as well as investors themselves, are increasingly wanting to procure sustainably managed and FSC or PEFC accredited stock as part of responsible supply chain practices.

Then there is competitive tension between the price of timber and the carbon stored therein.

Timber – be it standing or locked up in the built environment – uniquely benefits from dual purposes. Forests can be used as either an offset – to essentially act as a ‘sink’ in the carbon cycle – or as a perpetual source of commercial timber supply.

Moreover, capital directed toward conservation may reduce commercial timber production from natural managed forests. If increasing value is placed on carbon and biodiversity, this could further limit timber supply going forward – while potentially providing asset owners alternative income opportunities.

As responsible investors, our 88,000-acre sustainable timberland portfolio is a cornerstone of our contribution to people and the planet.

We’re proud to have planted 11 million trees in the past five years alone, and the fact that our sustainably managed forests combine renewable resource production and carbon sequestration, with caring for our environment and rural communities.

For the Church Commissioners for England, forestry is a real opportunity for patient capital to tap into favourable long-term supply-demand dynamics while generating positive financial, environmental and social value. All the while, our trees continue to grow – regardless of financial market conditions.

Aleksi Ehtee is timberland team lead at the Church Commissioners for England.

PFA, Denmark’s largest pension provider, is switching more of its portfolio into equities. The strategy is a direct reflection of the increasing comfort with risk of the beneficiaries in its defined contribution offering, which accounts for around two thirds of the $100 billion portfolio.

“We can see that more of our clients have moved from the middle of the road to running more risk,” CIO Kasper Lorenzen tells Top1000funds.com, explaining that beneficiaries tap into life cycle products based on two underlying feeder funds titled towards either equity or more stable, income-based returns.

“Danes have got used to having more equities in their pension fund and become more familiar with the volatility and drawdowns that come with equity. Our balance between equity and fixed income is changing because people are ready for it, especially younger people.”

In a reflection of the shifting dynamics amongst beneficiaries, Lorenzen has spent most of this year developing PFA’s market-based pension product, PFA Plus.

He believes the growing appetite for equity investment is a consequence of savers’ better understanding of  DC and the way it works during the last 18 years. He observes that people are more involved in investment, especially since COVID, although he is also mindful that enthusiasm for equities might also have something to do with markets performing well.

“We have to be careful about this,” he says.

Passive with a caveat

PFA hunts for returns through three value drivers. First of which comes traditional asset management centred around choosing the right securities across equity and fixed income risk.

However, recent analysis revealed the team has a strong track record managing fixed income risk and security selection but found that active fundamental stock picking was more difficult.

“We were less successful at this element,” says Lorenzen. “We looked back and realised that active fixed income rather than equity was the real value driver.”

The second value driver is private markets where PFA has gradually substituted traditional asset classes for private market exposure like swapping fixed income for real estate over the last decade.

A third element involves risk management, turning the conversation to Lorenzen’s belief that the word passive no longer reflects the complexity and decision making behind index investment.

Yes, the the DKK 220 billion ($32 billion) equity allocation has a passive backbone and PFA is no longer deciding to own one company over another.

But the team must still decide which index to use, mindful of too much emerging market exposure all the while ensuring a home bias in Danish equities for example; run top/down overlays, lever up or down, add geographical sector tilts (they run underweights when it comes to China mostly due to risk/return rather than ESG or  sustainability) and layer on derivative positions.

Elsewhere the team has to integrate net zero targets, voting and concentration limits on some of the largest exposures in the book which requires a degree of research.

This raft of tweaking and adjustments can mean the investor may not actually invest in 20 per cent of the index, picking up a tracking error the team also has to decide they are comfortable with.

“This kind of risk management has been the key value driver for us for the past five years,” says Lorenzen. “Let’s call it passive but we refuse to say we are passive. We run overlays; we are active in derivatives and active in private. We are passive with a caveat.”

A new liquid markets team

Lorenzen’s investment strategy has been accompanied by an overhaul of the investment office. The old asset management division has gone, replaced instead with a smaller investment division wholly focused on managing the assets of the pension fund rather than selling additional funds to other investors.

“PFA Asset Management used to run 8-10 equity processes overseen by portfolio managers. The team now run 1-2 processes,” he says.

The headcount has been reduced from 150 to around 100 of which 35 sit in the front office overseeing liquid and private markets.

“It makes things easier; we are much more focused. Being competitive in Denmark’s pension market is enough of a challenge. Being consistent and good at this is what matters to us.”

Lorenzen has also created a liquid markets team (something he also did while chief investment officer at ATP) encompassing FX, credit and equity so that instead of specific asset class teams, decision making is now top down. It meant some of PFA’s traditional equity investors were let go so that the team could be strengthened with global macro, top down skills.

“Let’s face it, even for specific equities it’s still about Fed rate cycles, growth and discounting of long dated cash flows,”

Key risks ahead

The larger allocation to equity will open the door to additional risk that is already front of mind. Namely, concentration risk in the equity book where the US accounts for around 70 per cent of the market cap and big tech, particularly companies involved in AI, dominate.

“We have sizeable exposure to specific names and exposures that are much bigger compared to other, very large private market exposures,” he says.

Managing this risk is another example of the active decision making that now accompanies passive investment. It calls into question beliefs in the benchmark; investors must decide if they can justify the valuations and concentration or if they would do better to run overlays or change the benchmark to bring the portfolio around a different anchor.

PFA isn’t approaching the problem with these strategies yet.

“To be honest, right now we are comfortable with it and we buy into this idea of the winner takes all in AI,” Lorenzen says. “Companies have put themselves in a good position and grown and taken advantage of their position in AI.”

Still, he recognises that at some point there will be a reset focused on the main beneficiaries of AI. It will move from companies building the hardware to those building the software and applying software in their processes.

“We saw this at the beginning of the century around the dot.com boom when the profits moved from the likes of Intel and hardware producers to other institutions that captured that productivity boost. That is something we are aware of here too.”

PFA’s larger equity exposure will also open the door to more climate risk where he says investors deploying capital to the transition face increased uncertainties around the technology and governments’ ability to build the infrastructure around which market forces will be able to respond.

Until this happens, he believes private investors are going to be reluctant to deploy more, particularly after repricing in more traditional asset classes.

“We are still involved, some of our investments have done fine, in others we’ve learnt lessons, Northvolt being one of them.”

Positively, he concludes that government financing of the transtion could spark new interest in traditional real assets like inflation linked bonds which could offer a reasonable return.

Climate risk has certain features that stretch the imaginations and toolkits of investors, meaning a new framework that includes systems thinking is necessary to branch out from the narrow measurement and management of risk predicated on modern portfolio theory. Amanda White speaks to author of Net Zero in the Balance, Roger Urwin.

Net Zero in the Balance: A guide to transformational thinking, produced by the CFA’s research and policy centre and authored by WTW’s Roger Urwin, seeks to influence the industry in climate investing, a discipline that is still in its infancy.

“This paper is an attempt to build a guide to the whole framework of net zero which hasn’t really been described before. It’s a long paper and is meant to be the coherent whole,” Urwin tells Top1000funds.com in an interview.

“We are still in the creation of a net zero investment proposition, so there is not anything completely set in stone, and we have to adapt from here.”

The new framework emphasises systems thinking, which really means two things: thinking about the whole and its interconnections with the past; and a pattern that is changing all the time. It has a particular application to finance, which both impacts and is impacted by society, technology, the legal system, ethics, politics and consumers. And now, climate.

“We don’t want to over-complicate something that could be simple, but investment has quite naturally taken up system thinking but in a relatively unstructured way,” Urwin says. “Now net zero is a challenge to be integrated into finance.”

Historically, the investment industry has grown up thinking narrowly about its taxonomies according to Urwin, with Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) in particular making some significantly narrow assumptions.

“This means industry thinking has grown up with a narrowness that is unhelpful now,” he says.

“The environment is part of our ecosystem. The climate system itself has its own ecosystem which is covered by specialist scientists and their disciplines are important for the industry to understand and embrace.”

Thinking deeper about the problems

Thirty years ago, Urwin started the investment business at Watson Wyatt, now WTW, which has grown into a business of more than 1000 employees. More recently he started working directly with clients in a more creative way, with deeper thinking at the core of his challenge to investors, scrutinising how and why processes and behaviours exist.

Similarly, the frame of the CFA paper posits that tackling complexity requires thinking that is inclusive of different perspectives and challenges norms.

“We need to think deeper about the problems,” Urwin says. “The industry has a lot of auto pilot in it. You can lead the horse to water, but it isn’t necessarily going to drink.”

The paper emphasises the need to breakdown the problem into “useable chunks” and suggests a new framework combining an investment model and systems model that will encourage conversations that are more grounded.

“This subject is really stretching,” Urwin says. “We are trying to coach people into…an understanding of the problem deeper than we have.”

Urwin says one of the problems is the industry wants wisdom, packaged up nicely in a bow.

“It’s the question of ‘what I should do on Monday?’,” he says. “Essentially the approach to climate everyone should be taking is to establish its materiality: is it impacting risk and return in my portfolio? Then climate risk management becomes an extension of normal risk.”

But while it is an extension of more commonly recognised investment risks, the features of climate risk present challenges to investors that their imaginations and toolkits have not previously tackled.

Urwin has an acronym to explain the complexity, SUPINE: systemic, uncertain, pervasive, interconnected, non-linear, endogenous.

“The action is the investment industry has to be better at integrating climate risk as a risk to be managed,” he says.

Challenges: Benchmarks, incentives, time frames

In addition to challenging the industry’s historical norms around behaviours and thinking, other industry structures present challenges for climate risk integration.

“There are problems in our frameworks in the system which get in the way of interacting with sustainability and climate in particular,” Urwin says, naming benchmarks, incentives and time horizons.

In essence he says benchmarks are backward facing; incentives are not integrated; and time horizons are relatively short and not balanced.

“The challenge is it is not joined up, and there are multiple goals. Under MPT there was only one goal, it was all about alpha, and that’s how the incentives and benchmarks were set up,” Urwin says.

But climate risk can’t be viewed through the lens of MPT because there are different risks entering the system in different time frames.

“We understand risk at a three-year horizon but when we look out 10 to 20 years we haven’t got the quality of the telescope,” he says.

Risk can be viewed through a stochastic lens which is engrained in finance, and uncertainty risk which, by definition, is the lack of quantification.

“At one end you have radical uncertainty, and unknown unknowns. Climate risk is more in that area,” he says.

The good news is twofold: this problem is ripe for the smart minds in the industry attracted to the intellectual challenge of new finance; and climate science can give meaningful insights for finance to adopt, most notably the integrated assessment model, for which Yale’s William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize [See The spirit of green, an online video interview by Amanda White with Professor Nordhaus].

“I’m very clear it is an opportunity, and this is captured substantially in what people are trying to build into portfolios, like climate solutions as part of a net zero plan and financing them is a very important part of net-zero investing,” Urwin says. “Every time you have to be reminded whether the risk-return proposition is suitable for your portfolio, and a lot of the climate solutions are early innovation finance which has been more difficult for mainstream investors to commit to.”

Strategies for success

In addition to framing the issues of climate more broadly through systems thinking and developing transformational change within organisations, Urwin advocates universal ownership, stewardship and the total portfolio approach as strategies for success.

“TPA is a whole approach, so it fits neatly into the climate challenge,” he says.

Similarly, universal ownership or 3D-investing is a relevant framework for looking at each investment in terms of risk, return and real-world impact.

“The returns we need can only come from a system that works,” Urwin says. “The financial system is supported by the environmental and social system and if that doesn’t work it produces poorer returns as a result.

“This links to stewardship and moving the system to fully recognise externalities and doing what is possible to limit damaging climate change.”

An environment of increased macro volatility and geopolitical risk means investors should question assumptions, move towards more narrative-based scenario thinking and build resilience says Richard Tomlinson, chief investment officer of LPPI.

A healthy level of scepticism goes a long way in investing, and Richard Tomlinson chief investment officer of the £26 billion ($34 billion) LPPI, has it in spades.

In an environment he believes will become more volatile, and the impact of geopolitical uncertainty is untested, he’s “sceptical that everyone will play nice” and rates will come down.

In this context he’s encouraging his team to more explicitly acknowledge that investing is based on assumptions, and to look at uncertainty in views and forecasts, noting there is not one single reductive model.

“Don’t assume central banks can always come to the rescue with monetary stimulus, don’t assume the current (stable) plumbing of the world economy and world order will continue indefinitely, don’t assume rates and inflation will drop back to the levels of 2008 to early 2020’s,” he says in an interview with Top1000funds.com.

“Move away from point forecasts as these can be deeply misleading unless you are very careful with full disclose of all assumptions, methodology and all confidence intervals.”

Instead, he advocates for more narrative-based scenario thinking that is more dynamic and inclusive.

“Assume rates and inflation may be higher going forward and more volatile, don’t assume the rules-based order will continue indefinitely, assume that a big dislocation in markets will happen at some point but the cause could be any number of drivers,” he says.

With more dispersion and potential risk, it is more important than ever to invest carefully and be more dynamic in thinking and behaviours, and building resilience in portfolios is part of that.

“Investors need to try to be as aware as possible of the structural drivers of investment returns, like falling and stable inflation, low interest rates, tight credit spreads,” Tomlinson says. “And if any asset has relied on something being way above trend or structurally different to what is likely going forward, be careful.”

To this end Tomlinson suggests avoiding any asset that is reliant on “free money” or ultra-low rates and abundant financing, making him cautious on venture capital and any asset where the time-cost of money really matters.

“It drives you more towards investments with clear fundamentals,” he says. “That’s not to say more speculative investments can’t perform but time is now being priced more aggressively. Edward Chancellor’s excellent book The Price of Time is really helpful in framing this debate.”

He views the world as a bit more complicated than in the past, where allocators could invest globally and it didn’t really matter what you bought because everything went up.

“That’s not the case anymore. There is more dispersion and potential risk, we are seeing it in equities now,” he says.

“There is another layer of diligence going on for thinking about how the world might play out over the next few years. The risk profile of putting capital to work means the probability of something bad happening is high, it could be the geopolitics piece, but also some of the climate scenarios and physical risk in certain regions of the world is elevated.”

Building resilience

Tomlinson says building resilience in portfolios essentially means not building a portfolio for a single base case and embracing uncertainty.

“You do have to make some trade-offs but do it knowingly,” he says.

“Build a portfolio to perform in several higher-probability central cases and survive plausible negative ones. Narrative-based scenario analysis can help with this. The ‘what if’ questions and then some war-gaming of scenarios and the team making decisions to test thinking and reaction functions. My current view is don’t bet the farm on long rates falling right back down. But also don’t bet the farm against it!”

To this end, portfolio construction is key in terms of strategic asset allocation, but so is looking at underlying asset characteristics such as factor risks and cyclical exposure.

“We are more thoughtful on how we weight individual strategies within the buckets,” Tomlinson says.

LPPI doesn’t follow a full total portfolio approach, because underlying clients set an SAA, but its thinking is along similar lines in terms of a total portfolio view to achieve goals, rather than individual benchmark outperformance.

While the aim is to build a portfolio to survive in a range of scenarios, LPPI does tend to have more growth-orientated portfolios, leaning into inflation-linked assets, and is relatively underweight emerging markets. This is not based on a view of emerging markets per se, but rather, on an anchoring to the mandate of generating returns linked to long-dated UK liabilities.

And in areas like infrastructure and real estate there is a clear home bias because execution is more efficient with a team on the ground.

Tomlinson says this “structural alpha” or added value from execution is a natural advantage for LPPI, with its ability to fully originate and manage direct assets.

“Within our investment team alone, we have over 15 people focused on direct infrastructure and more on infrastructure funds, both investment due diligence and operational due diligence,” he says. “This allows us to manage exposure to infrastructure very effectively – driving alignments up, costs down and being able to be very specific about what we do and don’t want to do.”

The investment team has grown from 15 to over 70 in the time Tomlinson has worked at LPPI and he has focused on moving from generalists to specialist investment staff.

“Our people have deep experience and can push back hard on managers,” he says. “We have given them the environment and framework and they are very technical specialists and fanatics at what they do.”

Importantly there is strong governance around that, so the specialists get to flex their edge but it’s wrapped in solid operational due diligence.

“My job is to give them the environment to do that and step in if needed. We have a super solid underwriting process,” he says. “Any investment you make, there is risk and uncertainty. Do everything you can to make sure the initial decision is good and then make sure you have solid lines of defence.”

What’s next

Time horizons and connectivity underlie the challenges ahead for Tomlinson.

He’s moving the team to cooperate more as one portfolio, rather than silos, and to marry the top-down and bottom-up views and activities.

“We are trying to get people to think broadly, and out of the view of competing for capital. That is the bit that we are looking at to build,” he says.

Generally, the fund looks to invest over 15 to 20 years, but time horizons are on Tomlinson’s mind at the moment.

“We have strong views on what the world look like in five to 10 years, it’s more about geopolitics, demographics, and the supply side of economy and a potential collision between climate and demographics. There will be more change in the next decade than there has been in a long time,” he says.

But the challenging part is how to make those views actionable.

“That’s what I’m wrestling with, trying to make that more practical beyond not investing in a few areas,” he says, adding the ESG time horizon is one example.

“ESG in the now is a lot about compliance and reporting,” he says.

“But over a longer time-horizon it feeds into investment strategy, investing in the transition or ignoring it, physical risks and geographies. The mid horizon stuff is a bit more complicated. How do we think about the framing for the next five years, that’s the bit we are wrestling with.”

Most institutional investors continue to steer well clear of cryptocurrencies. The prospect of fraud and theft, wild volatility and more high-profile failures like crypto exchange FTX raise too many red flags to invest in crypto, blockchain, and the wider digital asset ecosystem.

But Abdiel Santiago, CEO and chief investment officer of the Fondo de Ahorro de Panama, Panama’s $1.5 billion sovereign wealth fund, is one of many CIOs watching the market develop from the sidelines.

Investment strategy at the young sovereign fund is still cautious and conservative. The fund began allocating to cash, fixed income and a little equity when it was set up six years ago and has only recently started to develop an allocation to private equity and infrastructure. Santiago is also exploring opportunities in core and opportunistic private debt with the fund’s investment managers although he says the asset class remains too frothy to invest in right now.

But he believes long-term investors are well positioned to embrace new opportunities in digital assets as the market develops, and signs of its evolution are evident. For example, the market capitalisation of Bitcoin already accounts for about 3 per cent of the S&P500: add in all the other cryptocurrencies and that reaches about 5 per cent.

Maturation is also visible in the emergence of Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded funds which Santiago believes could provide a good entry point for more institutional investment. A range of ETFs has been approved in the last year and a half in the US, Europe and Australia, and he reflects that these products provide a more reliable wrapper, regulatory clarity, and have helped reduce the mystery around digital assets that could signpost wider adoption.

“ETFs are providing a sanitised method of investing in cryptocurrencies,” he says.

Some pension funds have already stepped into the market, such as the State of Wisconsin’s Investment Board which manages $156 billion in assets for the Wisconsin Retirement System. Elsewhere, $143 million State of Michigan Retirement System has invested in Bitcoin ETFs. Last May, Jersey City mayor Steven Fulop wrote on X that he planned to allocate part of the city’s pension to ETFs.

Correlation risks

Exactly how an allocation to digital assets would fit alongside other assets investors hold remains a key unknown. Bitcoin and Ethereum fell more sharply than equities, commodities and fixed income when markets crashed at the beginning of the pandemic; and Bitcoin shattered the idea that it was an inflation hedge when it plummeted as inflation soared around the world in 2022.

However, Santiago suggests that although the diversification benefits aren’t present today, that doesn’t mean digital assets are not an investable asset class and that they will not be a source of diversification in the future. Only time, data, and analysis will tell.

“It is still too early to see how digital assets will offer diversification in a portfolio in the future,” he says.

“Exploration of the basic correlation between bitcoin, the biggest cryptocurrency, and gold, averages around 0.5 to 0.6 in a positive correlation. Gold goes up and Bitcoin also goes up. Similarly, when the S&P500 goes up, Bitcoin also spikes. Although analysis of Bitcoin against a bond index sees less correlation, there is not enough history in the data to say if digital assets do or don’t act as a ballast against risk assets.”

He adds that it is similarly unclear whether digital assets will even grow as an opportunity set.

“It may be that it doesn’t grow, but just remains the same size for a long time.”

Regulatory clarity

What is clear, however, is the need for regulation. Santiago argues that a strategic shift toward clearer and more consistent regulatory frameworks would protect early investors and support sector growth.

“The stability of blockchain investments and, by extension, digital assets, significantly hinges on future regulatory clarity,” he says.

He describes the current landscape as “regulation through enforcement” whereby regulation is unclear but punishments and penalties are meted out for misdemeanours. For example, little viable regulatory progress ensued the collapse of FTX.

“The industry would benefit from and is asking for a regulatory regime in which serious players can operate,” Santiago says. “We are really looking for a catalyst that would allow people to start moving away from this punitive approach.”

Santiago is no more wary of the risk in digital assets than he is of the risk inherent in any other asset class. He traces much of the risk to the sector’s “bad birth” and thinks it is probable digital assets hold more headline than fundamental risk.

However, he says post-trade and custody concerns are particularly pressing for investors because of unknowns around how the assets would be held or protected.

“It would be about getting comfortable around the custody angle for institutions like us,” he says. Positively, he notes emerging solutions like cold storage, taking the investment offline and putting it with a reputable bank.

“It comes down to risk measurement,” Santiago says.

“Just because something is riskier doesn’t make it a bad investment.”

But he observes that many investors struggle to understand digital assets. The idea that their investment sits on a computer server is a difficult concept to grasp.

“For good reasons, investors want to see the asset they invest in,” he says.

“Even if it just a computer, we need to know there is something standing behind it.”

For this reason, he suggests the most compelling opportunities in digital assets will lie in blockchain technology and the real-world applications it offers, such as collecting and securing patient data; supporting money transfers; and logistics and supply chain management, for example.

“When we can see applications utilising this infrastructure for real applications in the real world our level of comfort develops,” he says.

Despite transparency in blockchain infrastructure, from an ESG perspective, cryptocurrencies are also problematic. Cryptocurrencies have uses for nefarious actors in evading sanctions and taxes and Santiago concludes the race to secure power for mining means owning power infrastructure is becoming as valuable as the cryptocurrencies themselves.

“This isn’t just mining,” he says.

“It’s a strategic bet on the future of power.”