Break out your drink koozie and spray fan: it’s the weekend, y’all! As per usual, here’s some news for your reading enjoyment:
- Relative Performance: In the same year that the China Investment Corp earned 5%, Singapore’s Temasek earned 19%. Just presenting the facts. Nothing more.
- New SWFs: The latest country to set up a new sovereign fund is ... Myanmar. Also, Britain’s George Osborne has “underlined the government’s commitment” to establish a new sovereign fund made up of revenues from shale gas. Riiiiight.
- Ex-SWF: A Malaysian sovereign fund you’ve probably never heard of is being shut down for reasons I can’t decipher. You heard it here first!
- Fraud: In other Malaysian SWF news, police raided the strategic development fund, 1MDB, after a claim that $700 million was wired to an account linked to the prime minister. If true, that’s about as bold and blatant as it gets. Wow.
- Do You Like Apples? To the delight of many asset managers’, institutional investors’ assets under management were up 8% in 2014! And that is remarkable! But there’s one catch: All (!) of that new capital is being managed by Giants in-house! So, managers, how you like them apples?
- Insourcing: Speaking of internal management, the in-sourcing Australian giant — AustralianSuper — has posted another solid year of investment returns. Kudos.
- Fee Machine: Dear Giants, Thou shalt never have these words uttered about you again: “The public pension fund up to now hasn’t been able to account for all it pays in carried interest.” It’s sad to say, but there really has been a complete lack of standards around the calculation and presentation of carried interest among GPs. Though that is finally starting to change.
- Too Late: The OECD is warning pension funds not to over-allocate to complex and opaque alternative assets. It also advised that kids should not eat too many cookies. Noted, OECD. Thank you.
- Ivory Tower: A “40-under-40” CIO hangs it up to go back to academia. As a fellow academic, let me be the first to say... Are you crazy, man? Dude!
- Selfie 1: Mankind’s survival requires fee transparency. No, seriously.
- Selfie 2: I posted a new working paper with my colleague Rajiv Sharma: Re-Intermediating Investment Management via Relational Contracting. (Warning: Do not drive or operate heavy machinery after reading due to potential for drowsiness.)
Hey have a great weekend, everybody!
