6 July 2026
11 new episodes (7.4 hours listening) published by the 38 podcasts on the list. 4 highlight clips below (7 mins total).
Investment 6 July 2026 · 4 clips
In Good Company (Norges Bank)
John Graham, CEO of CPP Investments
Chief executive of CPP Investments, which manages about $800 billion for the Canada Pension Plan on behalf of 22 million Canadians, of which roughly $550 billion is investment income. He has been in the role for over five years and was an experimental scientist before he was an investor.
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1 of 4 framework
CPP Investments says it is giving up upside to protect the downside right now, because concentration risk in the equity market costs a pension plan more than it costs a wealth maximiser.
Federal legislation gives the fund one instruction, maximise return without undue risk of loss, and the promise underneath it is an inflation-protected benefit for 22 million contributors, so a drawdown does more damage than a missed rally. Diversification follows from the same reasoning, which Graham calls an act of humility: hold across asset classes and geographies because nobody knows.
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2 of 4 framework
John Graham does not treat public and private equity as two asset classes, only as two ownership structures wrapped around the same exposure.
Hard allocations to asset classes and to countries produce strange behaviour when the portfolio has to rebalance, so CPP works in factor space instead: duration, inflation sensitivity, the real economic exposure a holding brings, on the view that the labels mislead. Execution teams still run soft allocations, because somebody has to know real estate.
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3 of 4 framework
CPP Investments says asking whether its internal teams beat its external managers is the wrong question, because the internal book is assembled out of the external managers' own deals.
Co-investment and co-underwriting arrive at advantageous economics, without the full fee and without carry on that slice, and the origination and asset management behind those deals come from the manager. Blending the two is what he argues for, since the in-house programme would not exist in that form without the fund relationships feeding it.
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4 of 4 current issue
CPP Investments has put large language models in front of every employee and still cannot say whether they have made the fund a better investor.
Headcount has been roughly flat for three years while assets grew by about $300 billion, which he credits partly to the tools and partly to ordinary process work. Faster decisions he will claim, better ones he will not, and he rejects the idea of cutting junior hiring on the grounds that those people run the place in ten years.