Seeking a way to improve investment performance, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) has placed its bets on alternative data.
Geoff Zochodne explains how Canada’s biggest pension plan is hoping to boost the quality of and the returns from its investments in this story from the Financial Post:
CPPIB has assembled what it calls a “data-driven edge” team, a small group of investors and data scientists that are experimenting with different kinds of information in making longer-term investment decisions, says Deborah Orida, senior managing director and global head of active equities at CPPIB.
“As we look to enhance that decision-making, one of the things that we’ve been focused on for the last couple of years is being able to use not only the traditional financial data that we get from the traditional sources like Bloomberg in making our investment decisions, but also the increasing volume of alternative data that is available,” Orida told the Financial Post in a phone interview from Hong Kong.
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Reams of data can also be used to feed various artificial intelligence technologies, and Orida said that CPPIB does employ machine-learning in its research. The example she gave for this was their thematic investing group researching automobility, such as trends around consumers moving from buying cars to buying rides off an app instead, or the evolution towards electric and autonomous vehicles.
Orida said the existing research had taken a more regional approach, but CPPIB, a global investor, had wondered if it made more sense to analyze the adoption trends based on certain characteristics, such as density or wealth. The fund used a machine-learning algorithm to group cities around the various attributes, which is insight it could also apply across its portfolio.
“So for example,” Orida said, “when you think about that evolution of moving from buying a car as a capital investment to consuming rides as a service, that’s going to impact how we think about long-term projections for toll roads, for airports that make a lot of their money from parking revenue, in our infrastructure team.”
