Pension Pulse

Seher Dareen of Reuters reports CPPIB co-leads partnership acquiring US utility ALLETE in $6.2-billion deal: U.S. utility Allete said on Monday that it had agreed a deal with investment firms Global Infrastructure Partners and CPP Investments to be taken private at a US$6.2-billion valuation, inclusive of debt. The transaction is a rare example of a U.S. utility being taken private by investment firms, and comes at a time when such companies are receiving increased investor interest as technological innovations, such as artificial intelligence and data centres, boost power demand. For utilities such as Allete, this hunger for power comes as they are implementing a shift to greener forms of generation, creating the need for significant investment in their networks. Allete chief executive officer Bethany Owen told Reuters that the Minnesota-based company’s strategy involved spending US$4.3-billion on renewables over the next five years, and further billions on investments

Back in January, Lydia DePellis of the New York Times wrote an article on how private equity is starting to share profits with workers, without taking a financial hit: In 2018, Anna-Lisa Miller was working with agricultural cooperatives in Hawaii, helping them reinvest in their communities through shared ownership. Ms. Miller, who had gone to law school and had planned to do civil rights litigation, loved the principle of workers partaking in the financial success of their employers, and the next year joined Project Equity, a nonprofit that helps small businesses transition to worker ownership. But it was slow going, with each transaction requiring customized assistance. Then she came across an investor presentation from a different universe: KKR, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. In it, a KKR executive, Pete Stavros, discussed a model he had been developing to provide employees with an equity stake in companies it purchased, so the workers would reap some

It's Orthodox Easter this weekend so I will keep this comment short. Earlier this week, NBIM CEO Nicolai Tangen posted an interview with Citadel founder Ken Griffin, part of his podcast series In Good Company. This was a truly incredible interview because it's rare Ken Griffin shares so much and Nicolai asks pertinent questions as he's a former heavyweight hedge fund manager himself. Now, I'm not going to go over the entire interview but after the market closed today, I spent the time to really listen to it very carefully and think there is a lot of great stuff here not just for students thinking about their career but also for CEOs, middle managers all the way to entry level positions. Right before markets opened today, I had a quick chat with a finance student who is the son of someone I knew back in CEGEP. He reached out and asked me to speak to his son to impart knowledge and wisdom and I did my best to steer him in the right direction. I told him to get his CFA as

Alicia McElhaney of Institutional Investor reports Alaska Permanent is reconsidering private equity and here's what that means for the rest of its portfolio: After decreasing its allocation to private equity in 2023, the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation is once again rethinking how much of its sizable investment pool it will commit to the asset class. “In 2012 when I came to the fund, we had invested four percent of our portfolio in private equity,” CIO Marcus Frampton said. “We grew pretty fast up to 19 percent, but last year we reduced our pacing. Our board members wanted to revisit that.” Last year, APFC’s staff decreased its private asset allocation from 19 percent to 15 percent, hypothesizing that there were better risk-adjusted returns to be had in asset classes like fixed income and hedge funds. Meanwhile, fellow major pension funds, including CalPERS, continued to bolster the assets they were putting to work in the private markets. As it reconsiders this decis