The Canada Pension Plan Fund had a bad year last year. You’d never know it to read the latest annual report from the fund’s managers, the CPP Investment Board, which spends much of its nearly 80,000 words boasting how, thanks to the herculean efforts of its employees and the sophisticated investment stratagems of its managers, it eked out an 8-per-cent return on investment for the CPP’s beneficiaries.
But of course it did: asset markets generally were up wildly last year. As an investment manager, you’d have to have gone pretty far out of your way not to have earned a sizable return. Indeed, the fund’s benchmark “reference portfolio,” a composite of global equity and bond indexes, gained 19.9 per cent on the year.
h/t Mauser
