Briefings, research, charts and analysis on the institutions, capital flows and systemic risks shaping long-horizon portfolios.
CalPERS retires strategic asset allocation on July 1 — the first US pension to adopt the total portfolio approach. We cover the switch, the staff-pay vote that decides whether it works, the private-credit split it's meant to settle, and the contested outperformance number behind it all. (1) CalPERS
May US payrolls beat forecasts two-to-one, but two sectors did 73% of the work and long-term unemployment hit a cycle high — into a split central-bank week and oil back above $96. Three things for long-horizon allocators. (1) US jobs: strong on top, frozen underneath. (2) The Atlantic splits: ECB to
A Blackstone- and pension-backed operator pledged $30bn to build 5GW of AI data centres in India; Gulf sovereign funds kept spending through the war; and the IEA's numbers say power, not capital, is the real ceiling on the compute boom. Three things for long-horizon allocators. Full brief: https://w
The FSB's June plenary reframes systemic risk around correlated, simultaneous shocks — and names two fresh ones. Plus record private-credit defaults and Norway's paused stewardship engine. Three things for long-horizon allocators. Full brief: https://www.universalassetowners.com
Gulf sovereign funds kept deploying through the Iran war, mostly into developed markets — even as official reserve managers eased off the dollar. Today's Capital Flow Watch: where Gulf capital went, the split inside the Gulf, and what a fragmenting "safe haven" means for allocators. (1) The Gulf did
On July 1, the largest U.S. public funds move in opposite directions on private markets. Alaska Permanent trims as its CIO calls the illiquidity premium "gone"; Washington, Connecticut and Virginia build private-credit targets; the FSB warns on a market it can half-see. Three things for long-horizon
The five biggest Gulf sovereign funds deployed nearly $26bn in three months — faster than their five-year pace — even as the Iran war shut the Strait of Hormuz. In this brief: the headline number; the emerging-markets tilt at PIF and ADIA; and PIF's spend-and-prune quarter. Full brief: universalasse
China's two May factory surveys point in opposite directions as Wall Street closes its best month of 2026 at a record and oil sits 20% off its peak. Three things for long-horizon allocators. Official China PMI stalls at 50.0 while the private survey jumps to 51.8 · S&P 500 closes May at 7,580 · Oil
Meta's May 27 AGM defeated every shareholder proposal — the AI-data-governance measure topped out at ~27%, and even the world's largest fund couldn't move it. Three signals for universal owners: the stewardship ceiling, the proxy-season AI pattern, and AI debt concentrating in investment-grade credi