From Bloomberg:
The world’s biggest pension funds lost confidence in stocks as the best long-term investment, cutting holdings or leaving them unchanged during the steepest rally since the 1930s.Funds overseeing money for California teachers and public workers, Dutch government retirees and South Korean private- sector employees reduced their target weightings for equities this year, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The rest of the 10 largest kept them the same. U.K. pensions have cut stock allocations to the lowest since 1974, according to Citigroup Inc. Managers handling Oxford and Cambridge University professors’ assets have been selling shares as the MSCI World Index posted a five-month, 53 percent rally.
“Given the storm in financial markets that we have seen, the name of the game is risk management,” said Dirk Popielas, head of the Pension Advisory Group at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Frankfurt. “The majority of pension funds have not finished taking risk off their portfolios. Some have not even started.”
Losses suffered in the worst decade for stocks versus bonds since at least 1900 drove pension funds to pour more money into fixed income, commodities and derivatives just as signs the global recession is easing helped equities rebound from the MSCI World’s biggest annual drop on record.
The average return for U.S. stocks has trailed government bonds by about 8.6 percentage points annually since 1999, after outperforming by 8.2 points last century, based on data compiled by the London Business School and Zurich-based Credit Suisse Group AG.
New Century
Equities appreciated an average 12.91 percent a year from 1900 to 1999, while bonds returned 4.69 percent annually, according to the data from the London Business School and Credit Suisse. Since the start of the new century, bonds gained 6.36 percent, compared with a loss of 2.27 percent for shares....MORE
