This year in June John Graham, CPP Investments CEO, mentioned that they rejected the idea of investing in crypto just because of fear of missing out and took more time to research the area, saying that FOMO wasn’t a strong enough reason to dive into crypto area right away. Their pension plan manages more than half a billion Canadian dollars for about 20 million Canadians.
“You want to really think about what the underlying intrinsic value is of some of these assets and build your portfolio accordingly… So I’d say crypto is something we continue to look at and try to understand, but we just haven’t really invested in it.” - John Graham, CPPI CEO.
CPPI’s Alpha Generation Lab formed a three-person team back in 2021 to engage in research on crypto currencies markets and blockchain-related realms to determine future plans for dealing in this area. This year, however, CPPI disbanded the team to reassign them to other areas, according to the sources of Reuters.
Canadian pension funds are not prohibited from buying cryptocurrencies. They are rather more conservative though and try to avoid risky strategies. Meanwhile, two other major Canadian pension funds had to fully write off their crypto investments. One of them was CDPQ (Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec) . with an investment worth $150 million to now bankrupt Celsius Network. The other was with OTPP (Ontario Teachers Pension Plan) direct investment in FTX exchange of $95 million dollars.
CPPI was fortunate enough to avoid a poor investment; they made no direct investments in crypto at all, though. At the same time, a Virginian pension fund invested $70 million in cryptocurrencies. Interim results of these investments weren’t published.
Well, nothing ventured – nothing gained. Would you like to have your pension invested in crypto? Would you like your pension to have been invested in crypto in 2010?
