The Alaska Permanent Fund will appoint four real return managers in March next year to manage a total of $2 billion in mandates that will have very few restrictions, and has shortlisted five managers to fill the brief, as part of its special opportunities bucket that makes up 21 per cent of the total fund.
The increasingly dynamic nature of asset allocation and the combination of internal and external management within pension funds requires a performance evaluation model for deeper insight of the organisation’s results.
Investment appetite among European institutions rebounded in 2009, with Mercer Investment Consulting identifying a surge in clients’ demands for new global fixed income, global equity and specialist credit exposures. Andy Barber, global head of manager research at Mercer, tells Simon Mumme about the investment themes driving these searches, and the evident decline of the ‘home country bias’ among UK institutions.
The $28 billion Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System is a late entrant into private equity with its debut $25 million allocation to the Draper Fisher Jurvetson Fund X, occurring at the same time the fund has cut its allocation to short term assets by 5 per cent.
The $37 billion United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund increased its allocation to equities by 4 per cent in the past quarter, at the expense of real estate and bonds, and is now overweight the asset class, as it continues to support active management.
About half of the $201 billion in assets managed by CalPERS is available to liquidate within 90 days according to a new total fund liquidity assessment to be presented to the investment committee as part of the quarterly risk management update, which also shows the fund to have a total leverage of 19 per cent, or $37 billion.