We’re back up and running after the holidays. Here’s what we missed:
- Picks & Shovels: If you can’t stomach investing money in Uber or Square at current valuations, perhaps you can help them part with some of the money others have invested? Apropos, the Canada Pension Plan is their new landlord.
- Annals of History: Hedge Funds apparently had a bad year. Cue the music.
- Entreprenerds: Universities are trying to better leverage some of the economic value they inevitably create through the creation of new venture funds. Good luck to them; success will be about governance more than anything else.
- Rainy Days: The line for handouts outside Russia’s National Welfare Fund is now all the way down the street.
- Brain Bomb: The boss of the biggest pension on earth will earn less than a typical investment banking associate. Sigh. People, if you pay peanuts, you get...the point.
- The Fee Machine I: The SEC is now investigating the “expenses” GPs incur while wooing SWF clients. Will they find the bribes they are looking for?
- The Fee Machine II: At TPG, “investment clients are effectively paying twice for a partner’s time.”
- Aging Too Gracefully: You’re going to live longer, which is, apparently, a bad thing...at least for those paying your pension.
- The Law: Towers Watson is being sued by one of the UK’s largest pension funds for more than £47 million.
- Permanent Capital Vehicles: LPs see them as EVERgreen, while GPs see them as everGREEN. They’re both right.
- New SWFs: Mexico’s new SWF, the Oil Fund for Stabilization and Development, is officially up and running.
- New SDFs: Ireland’s NTMA will finalize a strategy for the new Strategic Investment Fund early in 2015.
- Research: What have large pension funds been up to over the past year? A few interesting answers from the OECD.
Have a great weekend!
