Aimco Puns

https://www.teachers.ab.ca/News%20Room/Issues/Pages/AIMCo-Walked-Away-from-Negotiations-with-ATRF-in-November.aspx?fbclid=IwAR371wUhcKt2YYo_rltlmxgX8Ni4qHI9XmTcGP591idecSd9fRifn3AaE98

Did nobody notice AIV? 🚀

Hi all,

A few months back much discussion was had about AIMCo, their performance relative to other funds, and their relative asset mix. The former tended to be focused on whether they were a good manager for the teacher's pension, and a proposed APP, and the latter tended to be focused on an alleged intention by the UCP to use the fund for oil investments.

At the time, all relevant documents showed their performance being roughly in line, and their asset mix being quite diversified away from oil and gas. However, many pointed out that things may have changed since the UCP came to power.

As such, I committed to several people that I would repeat my analysis when their new annual report came out. While the urgency of the issue seems to have cooled somewhat (thanks for delaying your annual report AIMCo.. sheesh), here I am with that update, all in one stop shop now instead of spread across a dozen comments and threads.

This post will be detail heavy, and quite long, and I am not trying to take a political position on whether or not what the UCP or the NDP (they've both got a controversial past with AIMCo) was right or wrong, I'm merely trying to do some comparative analysis.

This thread will be broken into two rough categories. The first is a performance benchmarking exercise. I plan to compare AIMCo's ten year return as at their most recent annual report (so just before COVID - a nice snapshot of their performance in an environment that doesn't include a once in a century black swan market event) against four other major funds as follows:

1. The Canada Pension Plan - For the obvious relevance of a proposed APP, as well as them being a very large institutional investor
2. The Alberta Teachers Retirement Fund - For the obvious political relevance of this issue
3. The British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (Pension assets only) - BC's AIMCo equivalent, to evaluate AIMCo’s competence with pensions against a similar institution
4. The Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan - One of Canada's largest pension investment funds.

Ground rules here are as follows:

1. I will be comparing the ten year annualized return of each fund. This is because these funds all report at different times of the year, and so individual year returns are not really comparable. For example, in 2018 the market dipped 10% in mid-November, and was at bottom in late December. By March it had fully recovered. AIMCo reports as at 31 December, so they were reporti

Long term investment is the best way to go with AIV stocks

I know much was made about the concern of the government potentially 'meddling' with AIMCo's investment portfolio (using pension funds to prop up lagging O&G investment for example). The counterpoint seemed to be that AIMCo was an arm's length crown corp, and a ministerial order along those lines would be unprecedented. However, it appears that there is a clause in bill 22 allowing the government to do exactly that with up to 10% of AIMCo's funds? When it was being reported on, it seemed like directing investment was a "hypothetical" option, and no mention was made of the 10% figure. Just curious if anyone else knew this specific language was in the bill? It's possible I missed it when skimming news articles, but I don't think I saw that ever specifically reported on?

>(4) The Minister may, by order, authorize the Corporation to exclude from an investment management agreement under subsection (2), for a fixed or indefinite period of time, specific investments or classes of investments of the plan fund but such investments must not make up more than 10% of the total value of the Corporation’s investments at the time the order is made, excluding investments made under subsection (3).