Our public equity investments of $55.1 billion are broadly diversified across more than 2,200 international and 700 Canadian public companies.

Our primary approach to equity investing is to create a portfolio that replicates the composition of major stock markets. Replicating broad market indexes is a cost effective approach for a long-term investor with holdings in virtually all publicly traded companies in the major developed markets around the world.

In addition, our active overlay program places a layer of active selection over our public equity portfolio of more than 2,900 public companies. Under this program, external managers sell securities that they expect to under perform and invest in securities that they expect to do well.

Global Capital Markets

Led by Ed Cass, Vice-President and Head of Global Capital Markets, this group is responsible for trading, liquidity and passive portfolio management as well as short-horizon and event-driven, value-added active strategies. The CPP Investment Board's organization-wide trading activities are centralized within the Global Capital Markets group, allowing us to develop a unified, leading-edge liquidity sourcing, trading and transaction cost management platform.

In order to efficiently manage a large fund with large cashflows, the Global Capital Markets group is building research capabilities focused on trading cost measurement, management and minimization. The group is developing sophisticated trading capabilities such as algorithmic trading via a direct market access platform in order to transact electronically with exchanges and use technology to optimize trading. The group is also focused on short-horizon risk measurement and value-added strategies, normally the domain of broker-dealers.

External Portfolio Management

The External Portfolio Management group is responsible for the selection and implementation of strategies managed by external partners, primarily medium-horizon, value-added active strategies. Their mandate includes, for example, hedge funds whose strategies employ publicly-traded or over-the-counter traded securities.

The External Portfolio Management group uses a systematic approach which blends a leading edge quantitative framework with intuition and qualitative judgment to efficiently allocate active risk to externally managed investment strategies.

Global Corporate Securities

The Global Corporate Securities group is responsible for developing and executing long-horizon, bottom-up, value-added active strategies involving global corporate securities (eg. corporate stock/ bond selection).

The group integrates the best of quantitative and fundamental portfolio management approaches into a unified investment process. The quantitative strategies team builds models that forecast risk and excess returns and performs portfolio construction for the Global Corporate Securities group. The fundamental strategies team refines quantitative forecast factors, analyses security-specific issues and builds long-horizon valuation models.

Global Tactical Asset Allocation

The Global Tactical Asset Allocation group is responsible for developing and executing long-horizon, top-down, value-added active strategies in global markets.

The group develops superior, proprietary views on currencies, equities, fixed income, commodities and related derivative markets. They use a systematic framework that combines macro-economic research, identification of market anomalies, sophisticated quantitative models as well as cutting edge portfolio construction techniques.

Relationship Investments

Led by Scott Lawrence, Vice-President, Head of Relationship Investments, the Relationship Investments group aims to provide strategic capital ($100 million to $2 billion) to public companies where CPPIB can make a difference to the future success of the issuer in a number of ways, including the support of acquisitions, the funding of organic growth, or helping to recapitalize the balance sheet.

By acquiring a meaningful minority stake in the equity (or via equity-linked securities) – typically via private placement – and establishing a collaborative relationship with an issuer’s management and board of directors, CPPIB’s Relationship Investments group can be a constructive partner and provider of capital over the long term.  Currently, the Relationship Investments group is focused exclusively on Canadian issuers.