November 2020

24Nov

Canada. TTC pension plan focusing on liquidity amid coronavirus pandemic

The Toronto Transit Commission Pension Fund Society has been reminded of the importance of liquidity during the coronavirus pandemic, according to Sean Hewitt, the fund’s chief executive officer, during a virtual roundtable hosted by the Canadian Pension and Benefits Institute on Thursday. “COVID-19 was a really interesting test study in liquidity,” he said, noting the TTC plan conducts a liquidity budget test annually to ensure it’s able to pay pensioners under dire circumstances. The previous test case was the...

November 24, 2020
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23Nov

What South Africans Need To Know About Offshore Investing

South Africans looking to make proper provision for their retirement should consider utilising their full annual foreign exchange provisions and should choose the right offshore investment options to protect themselves from a volatile economic and political environment. This is according to Sovereign Trust SA. Many South Africans still feel conflicted about investing offshore, partly because they don’t understand the differences between local and international retirement plans, said Richard Neal, MD of Sovereign Trust SA. “While offshore retirement funds, like...

November 23, 2020
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20Nov

UK pension funds urged to step up infrastructure investing to boost long-term economic sustainability

A recent report by PwC found that the UK will need to increase infrastructure spending to GBP40 billion a year, double the current level, in order to reach its target of net zero by 2050. “In the UK, investment in infrastructure by long-term investors is minuscule,” said Nick Silver, co-founder of the Climate Bonds Initiative, at the World Pensions Council event. Pension funds allocate on a risk-return basis, and have historically shown a strong preference for liquidity – leading...

November 20, 2020
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17Nov

Is America’s Largest Pension Fund Gambling With Risky Tech Stocks?

In a desperate bid to boost return in a time of unprecedented economic uncertainty, the nation’s largest public pension fund is piling in on notoriously risky tech stocks. In the third quarter, California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or CalPERS, which manages $389 billion in assets for more than two million public service employees, bought over half a billion dollar worth of shares of Nikola, Nio, Tesla and Zoom, the pension fund revealed in an SEC filing earlier this month....

November 17, 2020
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13Nov

Nigeria. NSE Fixed Income Market capitalization hits N17 trillion

Despite the impact of the pandemic on businesses and incomes, the market capitalization of fixed income securities appreciated to over N17 trillion as at October 2020. This was revealed by the Divisional Head, Listing Business at the Nigerian Stock Exchange Market, Mr. Olumide Bolumole, in a webinar hosted by the Exchange in collaboration with Oduá Chambers of Commerce and Industry on Wednesday 11 November, 2020. Despite the impact of the pandemic on businesses and incomes, the market capitalization...

November 13, 2020
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12Nov

“Pension Funds in Figures 2020”

By OECD Preliminary data for 2019 show that pension funds held USD 32.3 trillion in the OECD area and USD 0.7 trillion in 29 other reporting jurisdictions (Table 1). The United States exhibited the largest amount of assets in pension funds at end-2019 (USD 18.8 trillion), followed by the United Kingdom (USD 3.6 trillion), Australia (USD 1.8 trillion), the Netherlands (USD 1.7 trillion), Canada (USD 1.5 trillion), Japan (USD 1.4 trillion) and Switzerland (USD 1.0 trillion). These seven countries...

November 12, 2020
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12Nov

What Matters in the Annuitization Decision?

By Mohamad Hassan Abou Daya, Carole Bernard We conduct a simultaneous test for several rational and behavioral factors which have been hypothesized to affect the uptake of life annuities on a sample of American individuals. In addition, we investigate whether analysts’ stock market expectations affect the decision to annuitize retirement wealth. We provide evidence that the effect of such expectations depends on the level of trust in them. We attribute our findings to the availability heuristic and default probabilities....

November 12, 2020
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12Nov

Kuwait’s $124bn pension fund plans infrastructure boost

Kuwait’s $124bn pension fund, which posted a record first-half profit, plans to double its infrastructure investment and boost exposure to private equity, its director general said. The new plan, developed with US-based consultancy Mercer, will start next year and will “entail increasing infrastructure from 5 per cent to 10 per cent as well as fine tuning some of the other allocations,” Meshal Al-Othman, who heads the Public Institution for Social Security, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on...

November 12, 2020
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11Nov

Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund Returns 3.05% in Q2

Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) posted an investment return of 3.05% gross of fees during the second quarter of fiscal year 2020 to raise the asset value of the world’s largest pension fund to 167.536 trillion yen, or $1.62 trillion. The fund is now $440 billion larger than the world’s second largest pension fund, Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), which currently has an asset value of roughly $1.18 trillion. To put that in perspective, the gap between...

November 11, 2020
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10Nov

South Africa. Improving pension fund outcomes: a case for hedge funds

“Shouldn’t we have more offshore exposure?” Investors continue to express concern regarding the state of South Africa’s fiscal and monetary issues. Despite the added volatility that can come by an increase in offshore exposure for a rand-denominated investor, investors are asking the question as to how they can increase their offshore exposure. Some investment professionals have been very vocal about the state of affairs in South Africa and have openly promoted taking your money offshore whilst others have cautioned against...

November 10, 2020
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