HESTA

“There's a few early models on neural networks and equities, which are starting to sort of show Some promising signs.”

“And we're thrilled we've just announced a platform that we've launched to do exactly that here in Australia.”

“We're working with some other global asset owners on an initiative around antimicrobial resistance, which is the resistance we're all building to antibiotics as they're used through the food supply chain and overuse in the medical industry. Again, we see that …”

“Within the investment management team, we're running over 40% female, which is very high. Relative to the financial services industry and benchmark.”

“That is something we're watching closely, and we just don't think equity markets have really priced that risk at the moment.”

“We're seeing a lot of indicators that are traditional recession indicators triggering. Obviously we've got an inverted yield curve. We've got leading indicators starting to slow. We're seeing employment starting to turn. High inflation, rising interest rates. …”

“But assuming that those couldn't be traded, we do different scenarios and try and make sure that we're not breaching 40%.”

“We currently target around 30% in illiquid assets.”

“Following our process, we quickly formed a view on what we thought that collateral that would go out of our fund, so the external liquidity demands would be, and it turned out we were within five percent of our estimate, which was a fantastic outcome.”

“We were fortunate we actually went into that period through our dynamic asset allocation process, underweight risk assets, and overweight cash. So we were running about nine percent cash going into COVID.”

“So you've got to have the preparation to be able to make decisions in the moment. You have to have found that alignment and belief on how you believe markets will work. And then you need a culture that you can come together with agility and make decisions quic…”

“And at the moment we're preferring private markets. We think the dislocation is better and, you know, more targeted in private markets, but that's not always the case.”

“It seems to us like a cheap hedge to be adding to the portfolio, especially even ILBs now. Inflation linked bonds with real yields really rising over the past while, locking in and protecting some of that real yield for our members is attractive.”

“And probably, to be honest, we think we're being overpaid for the risk we're taking in the current environment of scarcity as banks are pulling back.”

“We are a large global investor. We are exposed to the global economy and these risks and externalities that individual companies create have an impact on the system. We pay the cost, whether we pay it directly or we pay it indirectly. We pay that cost in our p…”

“So we think we'll probably have Fewer, deeper partners into the future, and then how do we create capability so that we have more discretion in our building?”

“And I think, again, what's been interesting is that by having that sophistication in house, it actually makes us better partners. It's been fascinating to watch how the relationships with our active managers globally and even domestically have really improved.…”

“So that led us to internalize Australian equities. And we've attracted a great team into our Australian equities who have been on the ground and running portfolios now for over a year. We've also moved into Australian fixed interest and cash.”

“We actually delegate decisions to key decision makers. There are a lot of decision makers in our business. I don't get to make every decision, for example. We're very fortunate that we've got a lot of delegation from our investment committees. They set clear p…”

“So we were buying inflation Back in 2019, when it was pricing at one percent, we were loving inflation. So, well, let's buy some of that.”

“So rather than talking about whether equities are cheap or expensive, we're talking about, well, what are our beliefs around how equities behave? What really is driving our views on earnings growth into the future or multiples into the future? How do we see ri…”

“We know that we don't just want carbon emissions to reduce in our portfolio. That would be easy. I could just sell everything with high carbon and be done tomorrow. But that is absolutely not success for us. Success is reducing carbon emissions in the real eco…”

“We are using those taxonomies and we are reporting publicly on our investment aligned with the SDGs step one. We're also part of a pilot program with the Harvard called the impact weighted accounts, which is really trying to start to translate externalities, b…”

“We don't have a lot of hedge funds in the portfolio.”

“They're not big tilt. So we're not going plus or -30% equities. And that's because we have the product by definition is in a risk cohort. And so we are limited by the ranges that we publish to our members. But within those ranges, and they're broadly plus -10%…”

“It's a balanced growth fund, so it does hold a reasonable amount of growth assets, a significant amount of equities, around 58%, including private equity. We've got around 16% in real assets, so infrastructure and property to give that inflation hedging charac…”

“We offer a number of products, but almost three quarters of our funds are in our MySuper default balanced growth option, and the real return objective for that fund is CPI plus three percent.”

“We set ourselves an interim target in 2020, a third reduction in our carbon emissions by 2030, and pleasingly two years in, we've achieved that objective, so we've increased it to 50% now.”

“We have over a million Australians as members. The membership is 80% female, and they come from the health and community services sectors.”