Tracy Abel

The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan Board's (OTPP) investments are well-diversified across a mix of public and private Canadian and non-Canadian equities, inflation-sensitive investments, fixed-income securities and real assets (real estate and infrastructure). Risk is managed carefully to reflect the plan's maturity and to decrease risk tolerance, with emphasis on outperforming the markets in which they invest. OTPP's public equity investments include stock market indices, actively managed portfolios, relationship investing and long-term equities. They use indexed equity portfolios to maintain their asset-mix policy weighting. They also manage quant portfolios that invest in global stocks based on enhanced models that seek to identify strategies and stocks with the potential to outperform relevant indices. For equity index funds, OTPP invests entirely in equity-based derivatives. OTPP's actively managed equity investments include both internally and externally managed portfolios. The firm's internally managed active equity investments are selected using bottom-up analysis to identify and invest in undervalued stocks. The majority of their investments in public companies are managed internally. OTPP's fixed-income investments include core portfolios of Canadian bonds, Ontario debentures, provincial bonds, real-return bonds and inflation-linked bonds. OTPP gains exposure to energy, metals and agricultural products through a well-known commodities index. They invest in commodities as a hedge against the cost of paying inflation-protected pensions. OTPP invests mainly through swap agreements linked to the S&P GSCI Total Return Index. The index is heavily-weighted towards oil and gas. OTPP also invests in real assets such as real estate, infrastructure and timberland to generate returns that are linked to changes in inflation and act as a hedge against the cost of paying pensions.