Here’s some reading for your weekend:
- Buffering: Russia’s main sovereign fund was $8 billion larger last month than it is now.
- You Gotta Commit to Outperformance: New research shows that living your life — such as getting married, divorced, having kids, and so on — destroys alpha. Note: All managers engaging in this kind of reckless behavior will be fired ...
- In-Sourcing I: The China Investment Corporation has launched a new direct investment company to help domestic Chinese firms make overseas investments.
- In-Sourcing II: THIS is how you get political buy-in for bringing assets in-house. You name and shame presidential candidates for padding the pockets of Wall Street.
- Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn: Angola’s current oil diversification strategy reminds me a lot of Libya’s strategy from 10 years ago: high-end African hotels.
- The Power of the Dark Side of the Force: Korea’s $430 billion National Pension will begin allocating to hedge funds ... together, they can rule the galaxy.
- The Fee Machine: According to the Financial Times, “Fees matter more than asset allocation ... In the long term nothing is more important than keeping fees under control.” Remarkable. Though it helps to explain how endowments, such as Stanford and Harvard, can have such high active risk budgets and still underperform sovereign funds and pension funds.
- Rebalancing: The Kuwait Investment Office is reallocating capital from the USA to Europe.
- Keep It Real I: Qatar’s SWF is buying a lovely piece of real estate in Milan.
- Keep it Real II: Hong Kong’s new €25 billion SWF may invest 50% of its assets in alternatives.
- Governance: Wait ... Angola’s SWF has a single, Swiss, external asset manager running the entirety of its assets? Is this right? It is? Wow ... No comment.
- Shut’er Down: Malaysia is considering plans to shut down the crisis-prone 1MDB. Given that the sovereign development fund paid Goldman Sachs $500 million in a non-competitive process to underwrite three mid-size bond sales ... I can understand why politicians would want to wipe it from the earth.
- Collaboration: The Investment Corporation of Dubai has signed an MoU with Korea Investment Corp. to jointly explore investment opportunities.
Have a great weekend!
