April 02, 2012
The NYT had a good piece reporting on the fact that public sector pension funds that have invested heavily in alternative investments (e.g. hedge funds, real estate funds and private equity funds) have done much worse than those that just held traditional investments (e.g. stocks and bonds). While the managers of these alternative investments did quite well collecting fees, the governments did not.
There is a simple way to avoid this problem. If the funds made compensation for the managers of these investments almost entirely contingent on their beating a conventional market basket, then the risk would be shared. If managers are not willing to accept such contracts it implies that they don’t believe they will be able to beat the returns on conventional instruments. If the managers don’t believe that they can beat conventional returns, then governments should not either.
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