Canada Pension Plan Investment Board
also referred to as: canada pension plan · cppib
51 statements across 6 episodes · 12 bullish · 7 bearish · 6 people on the record · first statement Jun 19, 2017 by Mario Therrien · said 31 times in 10 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
Mentions by year
brought up most by Tim Lyne (7), Ted Seides (6), Geoffrey Rubin (5), John Graham (4), Sarah Williamson (2), Mario Therrien (2), Ashby Monk (2), Yann Robard (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 4 mentions in 1 episode
2024 2 mentions in 1 episode
2023 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
2022 9 mentions in 1 episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
2018 2 mentions in 1 episode
2017 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
Everything said about Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, oldest first
Jun 19, 2017 positive
Aug 7, 2017 positive
Jul 22, 2019
Deal teams are transaction experts; IC chairs provide pattern recognition
“When somebody has spent three, four, 500 hours on a transaction, they're the expert. You're not. But you hope that your training, that your experience, that the fact that you've seen so many transactions is really going to help you focus on the right question …”
Nov 14, 2022
Nov 14, 2022 positive
Rubin: Mega-funds like CPPIB must manage investment teams as business portfolios
“Managing portfolios of franchises and businesses is something that a large institutional investor like CPPIB needs to grapple with our collection of investment businesses and the infrastructure and real estate and private equity and private credit and hedge fu…”
Nov 14, 2022
A $3B check creates local friction despite negligible total fund impact
“What makes for an outsized concentration risk at the total fund level is going to look very different than outsized concentration risk
At the level of a portfolio owned by one particular portfolio manager within our organization.
And oftentimes we have these c…”
Nov 14, 2022 negative
CPPIB found that splitting positions into centralized books eroded accountability
“We previously had a centralized book and
And the local team would hold a pro rata piece, but a small piece and the centralized book would hold another piece.
To be honest, I don't know if there's any perfect solution to this, but we found some of those fairly …”
Nov 14, 2022 neutral
Single-domain investment careers are giving way to broader talent circulation
“I think the era of the eye-shaped individual who's just really deep in one particular area and has been mentored and has been apprenticed in one particular area and staying in that area their entire careers, I think that's going to give way to more circulation…”
Nov 14, 2022
Nov 14, 2022 positive
Nov 14, 2022
Rubin: Managing internal investment teams requires preserving capabilities through cycles, unlike position trading
“If you think about the portfolio as one of A page or two on a Bloomberg terminal, you can think about in a very agile and flexible way, scaling up and scaling down exposures to respond to both longer term and tactical or conditional risk adjusted pricing. When…”
Nov 14, 2022
Nov 14, 2022 neutral
Nov 14, 2022
CPPIB splits incentive comp equally across fund, team, and individual performance
“In terms of the variability of that level of compensation, we have a really a three part incentive compensation system. One third is tied to the performance of the overall fund. One third is tied to the performance of the local team portfolio and the final is …”
Nov 14, 2022 positive
Nov 14, 2022
Nov 14, 2022 neutral
CPPIB dropped its agriculture strategy because it couldn't move the needle
“I mentioned we built an agricultural investment strategy a number of years ago, and I'll give us credit for having the wherewithal to understand that that was an investment strategy. It was never going to have the kind of needle moving impact to our portfolio …”
Nov 14, 2022 bullish
CPPIB expects its assets to double to $1 trillion by 2029
“I think it's hard to conceive of a fund like ours of five hundred billion dollars going to a trillion over the next six or seven years or so. It is hard to conceive of us maximizing returns at a particular target level of risk without truly global exposure to …”
Nov 14, 2022
Nov 14, 2022 bearish
Rubin: Active Investment Spaces Risk Commoditization Without Cross-Fund Connectivity
“Without this prioritization and coordination and integration, the connectivity among them, I worry that the spaces in which we invest will become ever more standardized and commoditized and over time will have diminished risk adjusted returns as a reward for t…”
Nov 14, 2022
A true investment horizon is how long you endure underperformance
“I think an investment horizon is fundamentally about the length of time one can remain committed To an investment strategy that is broadly performing as expected without getting stopped out. For me, the big value of possessing a long horizon is the ability to …”
Nov 14, 2022 negative
CPPIB's 2019 top-down strategy to center investing on tech fell short
“This was more kind of a top-down expectation that we were going to put data and technology at the center of everything we do in terms of the decisions we make and how we invest. And I don't think we've, as an organization have developed capabilities that match…”
Jun 17, 2024 positive
Successful financial market innovation requires evolutions rather than revolutions
“The interesting thing about these markets is that you need to be half a step ahead of the market, but you can't be a full step ahead of the market. It's really interesting. Markets need evolutions, not revolutions. So one of the things that I learned while I w…”
Jun 17, 2024 neutral
Oct 13, 2025 neutral
Oct 13, 2025
CPPIB Sets Quantitative Review Triggers Across Almost All Investment Programs
“So we have these quantitative range of reasonableness that this is the range of outcomes that we would actually expect. If it's outside of that, then it should really generate question. We actually have it for almost all our programs.”
Oct 13, 2025 negative
CPPIB Closed Internal Macro Team and Shifted Capital to Passive Strategies
“We had an internal macro team. It's challenging. We're not set up. We don't have the technology stack to do it. We really didn't have a right to win. So we do invest in a few external macro managers, but largely the capital that would have been allocated to th…”
Oct 13, 2025 neutral
Fixed Costs of Internal Teams Constrain Dynamic Capital Allocation Across Classes
“The challenge of that is you build out internal teams and they need to be fed.
Can't have a team sit on their hands.
So you have to find that balance of you have a fixed cost.
They need capital.
They need to be relevant in the market.
It's really hard to come …”
Oct 13, 2025 positive
CPPIB Engineers the Exact Opposite of Founder Culture for 75-Year Longevity
“Because we have to be here 75 years from now, we're not a founder culture. We're almost the exact opposite of a founder culture. Our job is to put in place an organization that in many ways will be able to operate independently of the people who are there in t…”
Oct 13, 2025
Oct 13, 2025 neutral
CPPIB Avoids Decision Committees Outside Core Investment Committee to Enforce Accountability
“And we delegate also a belief that people make decisions because we need accountability for decision making. So we don't have committees that are making decisions other than, let's say, the investment committee.”
Oct 13, 2025 neutral
CPPIB Expects External Managers to Deliver Macro and Geopolitical Insights
“Obviously, partnering with external managers, we focus on the net returns, but we do pay fees and carry, and we have an expectation of partnership that we will learn things just about macro, that we will learn things about geopolitics. That's part of the reaso…”
Oct 13, 2025 positive
CPPIB Uses AI to Generate Baseline Investment Committee Questions in One Minute
“Part of the value, I think it makes the investment committee pick up their game a little bit, because we can put the memo into the model and get 10 questions in about one minute, and so you can ask the investment committee members, and whatever we paid for tha…”
Oct 13, 2025
CPPIB Uses Leverage Only to Tailor Risk, Not Beat Benchmarks
“We are risk targeters, so we can't build a portfolio and then just lever it up to beat a benchmark. That comes down to really discipline, build the best portfolio we can, the most diversified portfolio we can, and then we do use some leverage to tailor the ris…”
Oct 13, 2025 bearish
CPPIB Deliberately Holds Less AI Exposure Than Broad Public Market Benchmarks
“On the investing side, we obviously have exposure in the portfolio. We have invested in a lot of the big AI companies and we have exposure to them. Net though, we don't have as much AI exposure as the broader public markets. And that's a challenge from a relat…”
Oct 13, 2025 neutral
Oct 13, 2025
CPPIB Ignores Asset Class Boundaries When Staffing Data Center Investments
“Live examples are data centers. Is data center real estate? Is it infrastructure? The constraint is energy. So rather than having discussions about where it fits, the real assets team just does data centers and they staff it with people from each group.”
Oct 13, 2025 positive
CPPIB Delegates Investment Decisions to Frontline Teams
“On the investment side, we delegate decisions into the people who are at the coalface with the sense they have the best intuition and the best sense of where markets are pricing, and we should do everything we can to delegate down to the people who are actuall…”
Oct 13, 2025 neutral
CPPIB Structurally Separates External Allocators From Direct Investment Teams
“In the hedge fund world, it's our external portfolio management group, and that's a focus group. They really allocate to external managers, and on the private equity side, we have a funds group that allocates to external. It's rarely commingled within the grou…”
Oct 13, 2025 bearish
CPPIB Slashes Emerging Markets Allocation to 15 Percent on Reduced China Appetite
“And recently we have scaled back over the past few years, we actually scaled back our allocation to emerging markets. It's still reasonably large compared to many funds. I think we're about 15%, but it's not as large as it once was. And a lot of our appetite f…”
Oct 13, 2025
Oct 13, 2025 neutral
Dynamic Capital Allocation Without Hard Limits Imposes Massive Internal Coordination Tax
“So to actually execute on almost a relative value framework where capital could move between asset classes
Between public and private, where we don't have hard allocations into each one, it requires a huge amount of coordination across the organization.
There'…”
Oct 13, 2025 neutral
Oct 13, 2025 neutral
Oct 13, 2025
CPPIB Retains Majority Ownership of Antares Capital Acquired From GE
“We have the Antares platform within our credit investments, and this was acquisition from GE about 10 years ago, and that fit right in where we are the majority owner of it, where we had a real understanding of the market, and it's very synergistic with our in…”
Oct 13, 2025 positive
CPPIB Credit Teams Shift Capital Dynamically Due to Portfolio-Level Compensation
“Where I see it working really well would be within the department. So credit. Credit is, they're really good at moving capital around. We're saying, we think structured credit is more attractive than corporate credit. We think European credit or Asian credit i…”
Oct 13, 2025 negative
Oct 13, 2025 neutral
CPPIB Maximizes Long-Term Total Return Rather Than Managing Benchmarked Active Risk
“We're not just giving out an asset allocation and a bunch of benchmarks and managing active risk against it and trying to maximize the information. We are actually trying to maximize a total return at a given level of risk. Over the long run.”