YouSaid · the spoken record

John Graham

lines on the record: 83
first: 2025-10-13
most recent: 2025-10-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The CPP investments book needs to be a really big book. It needs to be a really, really long book. Trilogy, it needs to have hundreds of chapters. We're still in the early chapters because we're only 25 years old. So what's the next chapter about? It's actually about setting up the chapter after it. There's no conclusion to that chapter. It is a chapter in a long story. It's not the last chapter. And what we have to do at CPP Investments is ensure that the next chapter starts out from a position of strength.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slight variation on that question is one of the things I wish I knew when I came into this role. Slight variation on the question, if that's okay, is sometimes stop and enjoy the moment. These roles, this career, this industry, it's amazing and it provides incredible opportunity. And you get to do incredible things. You get to meet incredible people, but you're so focused on the next thing that you never stop and just marinate in the situation and just enjoy it. I've been trying to do more of that of sometimes just stop and reflect on how fortunate you are and what an amazing opportunity this is.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my biggest investment pet peeves is a belief, a tendency that you can diligence a bad investment into a good investment. That if you just do enough diligence and keep working at it, that you can figure out a way to make it work. You get too committed early on. Maybe you fall victim to a familiarity bias and you just convince yourself that you can do it as opposed to just saying no early. Just saying no. Life's too short and we got to step away. In credit, I would say. And look, some people have been very successful at it and have done it well. I've also seen many examples where individuals convince themselves they can structure a bad opportunity into a good opportunity. And you end up spending an incredible amount of time. And in the end, you still have a structured turd.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a mentor who said you're a hard charging, paceetting person. And when people ask you to do something, you're going to say yes, because that's going to be your instinct. It's just to say yes. You're going to always have lots of balls in the air and somebody's going to ask you to put another ball in the air and you're going to say yes. And eventually one of those balls is going to fall. And you're going to see it as a failure. And they're going to see it as a failure, but the failure was putting that ball in the air the first time. So you will need to learn to say no in your career.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first paid job was I worked at a gas station. And what did I learn from it? I learned that people will try to rob you. It's important to lock the door at 9 p.m. And it's important to put the extra cash in a safe. But that is what I learned from that job. And I have carried that to this day. There are bad guys out there.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The business of investing and creating an institution that invests that isn't so dependent necessarily on the individuals.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many ways will be able to operate independently of the people who are there in the past. We can't become totally dependent on a few people. So it's not the right word, but we have to institutionalize because we have to be there in 10 years, there in 15 years, there in 20 years. And so I think that also that mentality of singing, we're not a founder culture of a little bit of the discipline of when we make choices, we're not making a choice for us. We're making a choice for the people who are in these seats because the one inevitable future we know is we won't be in these seats forever. And there should be, if we've done our jobs right, dozens of people in these seats in the future. And we need to make choices for them. And we need to be in some ways forgotten to history at some point. And that's how we think about it is it can't be a cult of personality, which is interesting because investing is a people business. It can be very anchored into individuals. So how do you really think about”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always say, I work at the pleasure of the board. And for as long as they allow me to be in this seat. And as I think about the role and I think about CPP investments, we need to be here 75 years from now. We can't fail 22 million people rely on the plan, but we can't be complacent and we can't be a victim of like creative destruction in the market. So we have to create this like risk-taking at the grassroots level and this experimentation and risk taking at the grassroots level with stability at the global level. I think it's one of the great challenges we have. And one of the ways that I think about it, and we talk about it as a senior team, is because we have to be here 75 years from now. We're not a founder culture. We're almost the exact opposite of a founder culture. Our job is to put in place an organization that in”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And maybe it gets back to the super tanker analogy because we don't move quickly. And even on things like this, we don't move quickly. And how many times have we heard in our career that this time it's different? And then it turns out it's not. We spend a lot of time and money on moving portfolios around to just round trip back to where they were at some point. We actually try to be quite disciplined and maybe almost programmatic in how some of these get evaluated and move into the portfolio. We would not look at it and then overnight flip the portfolio dramatically based on currency. We slowly moved it down from 12 to 7.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So while others might be more active in hedging, we haven't been as active. We still believe it's a diversifier. We think there's a tendency to think of things as black and white. Something goes from a reserve currency to not. And there's a lot of gray in between those two, but it's something we're thinking a lot about. These are the things that really move the portfolio, how we think about currencies and how we think about some of these fixed income equity correlations.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are worried about a lot of the same things. That's other people think we have a lot of the same concerns equity fixed income correlations. The institutional model is built on fixed income being a diversifier. The way we run the portfolio and the total portfolio approach is a lot of fixed income in there. So we think a lot about that equity fixed income correlation. That's been one of the take it to the bank correlations over the years for institutional investors. For Canadian investors, the US dollar. And one of the take it to the bank behaviors we've had is the US dollar strengthening against the Canadian dollar in periods of stress. And that's provided a lot of diversification into the portfolio. We've witnessed some times over the past year where it didn't behave exactly that way. And we have largely not hedged our currencies. We view them as diversifying assets.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we got these questions in one minute, and you're bringing 20 years of experience. I think it actually will help with the efficiency and the quality. I think we still got to look to the experience investors for having that intuition.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you do that? We can train the models on all of our historical investment recommendations and such and then can ask the model to ask questions. We can do that. We can get the model to ask questions and just to prep or people will use to summarize it. Personally, today I found it interesting. Not all that, I haven't been super impressed, I guess, by the quality of the questions, but that's okay because part of the value, I think it makes the investment committee pick up their game a little bit because we can put the memo into the model and get 10 questions in about one minute. And so you can ask the investment committee members and whatever we paid for that license is hundreds of dollars. And so we can ask the investment committee members, you better have a question better than these 10.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're a little bit under though, it's going to hurt our relative performance. But this is a case where we're getting back to who we are and what we're solving for. I think it's just important that we're going into this eyes wide open. Why many institutional investors around the world right now on a quote-unquote relative basis can't keep up because they don't want to concentrate at the same level into the market. And I don't know. The market could be right. I ask the teams all the time. I get lots of different answers. A technology can change the world and still be overvalued.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Committed to it internally, really focused on it. On the investing side, we obviously have exposure in the portfolio. We have invested in a lot of the big AI companies and we have exposure to them. Net, though, we don't have as much AI exposure as the broader public markets. And that's a challenge from a relative performance perspective, but that's a deliberate decision we're making. Not that we don't think this is a transformer of technology, not that we don't think that it could change the world, but we are a little bit concerned about the potential concentration risk in the portfolio. And thinking about who we are and what our mandate is, we're not a wealth maximizing vehicle. There's times when a pension plan and a personal account may deviate, and this might be one of those times where we're thinking about over the 75 year time horizon. If we don't get it exactly right, it's okay because we're not going to imperil the fund by not being exposed at the market cap weighted level.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like most companies, we're spending a lot of time on it. I would describe where we are as at that trying to build a literacy and a fluency in the organization. We've given everybody in the organization all the tools. We have given them training and given them the expectation that we want everybody to be literate. We want everybody to be incorporated into their daily work. And I think we're seeing great examples of productivity at the individual level. Challenge now is that top down. What do we think could be a little bit transformative to the business? Are there certain areas where we think it could have a bigger impact than others? We're using it in the investment committee. We're doing all the, I think all the right things and now challenging ourselves a little bit on the top down. It's always that fine balance, right? A thousand flowers blooming, giving people the tools or doing super cool things. At some point, you got to have some way to herd it all together and see what it all adds up to. At some point, we'll probably diminishing returns.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two feet. If it can only exist because of some type of subsidy, then we shouldn't invest in it. But the economics make a lot of sense in places around the world. And so we continue to invest in it. We also continue to invest in oil and gas. And we have a big oil and gas portfolio. The world, from our perspective, is going through an energy addition. Not necessarily an energy transition. And I think AI is really amplifying that in that we need more energy. And we should look to add sources of energy that are reliable, safe, and ideally green. But we also invest in oil and gas. And we recently announced a transaction with LNG. For us, what has been really important is let's just say what we're doing. Let's just focus on returns, focus on value, not values, and we'll be okay”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a great question. And the short answer is nothing's changed. And nothing's changed in our investment process. And even getting back to our governance construct is we have a sole fiduciary mandate. We're about value, not values. We don't do concessionary capital. We don't do impact funds. We're about value. We're about returns. So we continue to think it's important to incorporate climate considerations right now, specifically physical risk, into portfolio construction and security selection. And we ask every team to think through it. Just think about the impact on the insurance markets with physical risk and how that's impacting the value of certain assets and whether we think that's being priced properly in the market. We continue to invest in renewable energy around the world. We continue to see it as an interesting investment opportunity where it needs to stand on.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd love to ask you about two very topical areas that have changed over time. One is climate investing and the other, of course, AI. Climate that used to be a couple years ago, tip of the tongue for everyone, has receded a little bit in interest. How have you gone about thinking about the importance of a climate in your investment process?”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Holders are, and you're going to have to spend time with them, a lot of time with them. I think about stakeholders for us or being, for me in my role, I got the employees, the board, the stewards, and the 22 million Canadians that rely on the plan. And so you have to do stakeholder management. And even though you may be independent, ignore a stakeholder at your own peril.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making that's a fact. And I've been there for 18 years, and that's how it's operated. But we also take the perspective that we need to be accountable. And we have really important stakeholders across the country. CPP investments is a provincial federal construct. One of the best examples of the provinces and the federal government coming together to solve a problem. We have stewards that are the provincial finance ministers and the federal finance minister, and they're really important stakeholders, and they care deeply about the plan and they take the role very seriously. So we spend a lot of time on stakeholder management. That doesn't mean we have influence in our investment decision making, but we understand that these are important stakeholders. And at the end of the day, the organization needs to be accountable for the decisions it makes, for the money it spends, and delivering on what's in the CPP-IB Act. With respect to governance, you got to know who your stake is.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing that I know I firmly believe in in the rest of the CPP investments management and board believes in is we need to execute on the mandate as written in the CPPIB Act. It's not ours to apply a modern interpretation to it's our job to maintain fidelity and discipline to the reforms that happen in 1997 to create CPP investments. And that says to maximize return without undue risk of loss. It creates a governance construct where we are independent with respect to investment decision making. So we don't have government involvement with respect to investment decision making. We also have a professional board of directors, a board of directors that is largely composed of ex very senior business professionals from across Canada. It has been our experience that we operate with independence and we don't have political interference in our decision.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the long held strengths of the Canadian model has been the governance structure that allows the delegated authority for you and the team to go about investing. There have been a couple incidents over the last few years where something in the governance structure in one of the plans looked like from the outside at least it was going awry. I'd love to hear how you've thought about continuing to maintain a strong governance structure once it was set up, those very conducive for successful investing.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are risk targeters, so we can't build a portfolio and then just lever it up to beat a benchmark. That comes down to really discipline, build the best portfolio we can, the most diversified portfolio we can. And then we do use some leverage to tailor the risk in the portfolio. We're big believers in diversification. Diversification is an act of humility. We do want to be diversified across geographies, across asset classes. We continue to be a believer in diversification, despite the fact that being invested in a handful of stock in the U.S. equity markets would have been the best choice over the past 10 years. We continue to believe that going forward, we should be diversified.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have an overriding objective of trying to get the highest net return with a given level of risk, there are all these decisions that you can imagine would lean people to incrementally taking more risk. How do you manage that tension?”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The teams have done great. The beta returns probably haven't been exactly what people wanted over the past few years. They seem to be turning around a little bit now at this point in time. So we right-sized what we wanted for the portfolio.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emerging markets have always been a pretty big part of this CPP investment portfolio. And recently we have scaled back over the past few years. We actually scaled back our allocation to emerging markets. It's still reasonably large compared to many funds. I think we're about 15%, but it's not as large as it once was. And a lot of our appetite for emerging markets historically was a larger appetite for China than we have today. And now you can debate whether the world's second largest economy should be fitting into the emerging market bucket because again, back to looking through just the asset class labels, we had an appetite for a allocation into the world's second largest economy. In general, all the reasons people like emerging markets of growth and convergence, the rationale people get for emerging markets. So we've been investing in it. We have an office in Sao Paulo, an office in Hong Kong and an office in Mumbai. So we've also been reasonably active. From a alpha perspective,”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To pre wire that discussion in three years, if we're going to make a go no go, what's the decision criteria going to be? Put them down on paper now, not in two years and 11 months as to what the decision criteria are going to be.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is something we have been spending quite a bit of time on. And when we do launch a new strategy, when we launch a new initiative is at the beginning, trying to be very deliberate on what is the range of reasonableness? Because we all know that if we say we're going to do a review in two, three years to see how it's working, there's probably going to be some revisionist history on what exactly we were trying to do, probably going to be some new fact pattern on what the metrics of success will be. which is totally expected. It's also very hard in this business that there is a range of outcomes. Something could be working and you still haven't made money on it. So we have these quantitative range of reasonableness that this is the range of outcomes that we would actually expect. If it's outside of that, then it should really generate question. We actually have it for almost all our programs. When something goes out of the range of reasonableness, saying that either we're super good at this or we're not. And we should have a discussion about it.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the more reps you get in any investment opportunity set, the more likely you are that something along the way won't work. As you've expanded geographically into different offices, how have you thought about measuring success and what period of time would cause you to reverse a decision that you fully intended was going to be for long term?”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Local opportunities. It's not just about doing transactions in the country, it's about doing transactions that will ultimately add alpha. I think our footprint is very much a differentiator. I think it's a real asset we have. But one has to go into it eyes wide open. When we move into specifically a geography, our reputation at CVP investments as a long-term partnership driven organization, we're getting married to the geography. We're committing to it. We can't come in and out. So we better have a lot of conviction that we're going to be able to scale that and we'll be able to get differentiated opportunities. And we also will bring in some people from other offices often to set it up. So similar to the asset classes, we put in a fixed cost. Needs to be fed. So you have to be comfortable that you're going to have to feed it pretty much all the time at some level and then have that optionality to accelerate in when things look really attractive.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a handful of offices outside of Toronto. And again, this was a choice. We made a choice to open offices because we believe it'll lead to higher net returns for the portfolio. The reason we believe that is it will give us access to markets, give us access to specifically the best partners and the best opportunities in those markets that from even a risk management perspective, if you're going to build a reasonably sized portfolio in India, you should have feet on the ground in India. Lying in and out is often not a recipe for success. So if we're going to commit, we'll commit and we'll have an office. We have the offices to get differentiated access. It's not to get beta. We can get beta from screens in Toronto. We can get beta through swaps and ETFs.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very reasonable expectation. So moving capital around is a big cultural component to it. Where I see it working really well would be within the department. So credit. Credit is they're really good at moving capital around. We're saying we think structured credit is more attractive than corporate credit. We think European credit or Asian credit is more attractive than North American credit. So we're going to move capital around. They're incented to do that because they're incented at the credit portfolio level. So it's a lever they have to get more carrots. Within our real assets between energy infrastructure and real estate, an ability for them to think about where they're seeing the best value within that. When you start to cross between asset classes, it's a little bit more challenging, but there is an opportunity for larger opportunities where you might be able to move capital in.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I describe it as a super tanker in that it's very hard to be nimble with a $700 plus billion dollar portfolio. What we need to do is build a portfolio that is resilient through a broad range of macroeconomic conditions. When it sees something it doesn't like, it just hits it and runs it over. We can't really move it that quickly. One of the messages I do try to deliver internally, and having experienced this for the past 20 years, every asset class will have its moment in the sun. Every geography will have its moment in the sun. It'll also have its moment in the shade. And you can't kill a program every time it goes into the shade or you won't have anything after so many years. So it is expected that capital may not always be uniform into a given area. There's a big cultural aspect to it on how to think about it. Capital coming in and out. We build internal teams. We have people. It's their livelihoods. And they want to do transactions. And they were hired to do transactions.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Total portfolio in the total portfolio. We have the right allocations in the total portfolio. We still have a mechanism to get the alpha through security selection, but then we have an ability to manage the total portfolio so we have the right exposures we want.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are solving for the highest total return at the total portfolio. And the total portfolio approach is solving for that. It's very consistent with trying to maximize the total return at the total portfolio level. We're not just giving out an asset allocation and a bunch of benchmarks and managing active risk against it and trying to maximize the information. We are actually trying to maximize a total return at a given level of risk over the long run. One of the challenges is we execute through a series of strategies, private and public, decisions get made bottom up and we can get collection of idiosyncratic portfolios. And then we blend them all together and see what we got, knowing that it's looking past the very simple asset class labels, looking what we have from a geography perspective, looking what we have from an asset class perspective. And I know where the team thinks a lot about is how do we actually then have an optimal”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You bring this all together in the portfolio approach for CPB, you have this total funds management approach, slightly different from asset allocation model. What's your way of thinking about that works?”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Active external on the public's side, a lot of the quant strategies, they have some macro strategies. They do have some equity strategies in there. A lot of the strategies there. We may run some very small kind of programs on the side of it, but those are really where we're looking to the external managers. Coming back to the private equity model, I'm a big believer. It's worked really well. Partner with the best private equity managers and then do co-investing and co-underwriting with them. So that's what I meant bike. It starts to blur a little bit in private equity. That funds portfolios like the sun and the rest of the department rotates around it.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are diffusing the knowledge and the information through the rest of the organization. It's hard though. It's really hard.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I would say when I talk about the East West connectivity is exactly that, it's exactly taking the knowledge that is embedded in that funds team and driving it through the organization. Not only providing and access to opportunities, but also an access to knowledge and access to information. Obviously partnering with external managers, we focus on the net returns, but we do pay fees and carry and we have an expectation of partnership that we will learn things just about macro, that we will learn things about geopolitics. That's part of the reason we do it. You work with the best around the world. I will spend a lot of time with the leaders of these firms not going through their portfolio, but trying to understand how they're thinking about geopolitics, how they're thinking about the macro environment, how they're thinking these big mega trends in the industry. So that's a real focus of mine is the expectation that these teams that our external portfolio management team and our funds team, that they”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this interesting dichotomy between talking about how you want that cross-fertilization of your internal teams improving and this separate team going out with external managers. How have you thought about the crossover and potential value creation between what you can learn from the external managers you selected and your internal teams?”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“External managers, and on the private equity side, we have a funds group that allocates to external. It's rarely commingled within the group that they're doing funds and direct. There are some instances, but they're usually separate groups. So the funds team, the external team, if we did want them to expand, we would give them that mandate to expand and then they would go off and find the managers.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Process is generally dictated by returns and realized returns. It's interesting because at the end of the day, you need to allocate to those programs you think you're going to make money in the future, not just in the past. I'm always asking the teams two questions. How did you make money? And how are you going to make money? It might not be the same answer. There's a tendency in attribution and all the great analytics people do for it to always be backward looking. Now the first clue that you're not going to make money going forward is usually that you didn't make money historically. But there are cases where you may want to scale back because you just are watching a decay in performance and you know that freight train is coming at you. And so you have to make the difficult decision. What we often try to do is move people around and put them into other groups. We typically have had focused groups that are external allocators in the hedge fund world, it's our external portfolio management group. And that's a focus group and they really allocate to”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This situations where you've decided that you couldn't compete effectively internally, what does that look like, both the decision process and then the process of finding who you want to partner with externally?”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things I have also a firm believer of at CPP investments is once a CPPIB are always a CPPIB. And so we've really tried to cultivate the alumni network. We're only 2,000 people. Not everyone will spend their whole career here, but I want everybody to always feel like they're part of the CPP-IB family.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a challenge we have, and as markets become super hot and then sometimes not super hot and they ebb and flow. Take credit. Credits become really hot. And our credit group was a little bit more direct than our private equity group. And they still do follow somewhat of a partnership model. And so that puts stress into the system. We always try to be competitive as competitive as we can, knowing that sometimes we're just not. I think people have an incredible career at CPP investments. The senior people have an opportunity to be on a platform that has incredible breadth, scale, reputation, brand for people with creativity, for people who want to innovate. It's incredibly motivating for young people entering the investing space, you'll see tons of reps, tons of opportunities. But there's some people who really do want to have that opportunity to work at a general partner. And I say, God bless them.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, nothing sharpens the mind like compensation This will always be a challenge. We don't pay carry. We don't have the same pay structure as a general partner. We don't pay promote, so we don't have the same pay structure as a hedge fund. But people are compensated fairly and people are compensated well. And everybody's mother is proud of them for working at CPP investments. That gets back to the right to win and where to play in areas where the constraints on the organization do not cause you to lose the game. It's why in the private equity space we play a partnership model where we work with the best. We don't compete with the GPs. The private equity space is such a well-developed, large, mature market, and the partnership model works really well. Our private equity professionals have a great career and a super fascinating role, but they are solving for something slightly different than a GP. So we're eyes wide open that our compensation system, while people are paid in the Canadian model fair, they aren't paid like they would be at a general partner or ed.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get to thinking about how to align the team to work together for that common portfolio goal, you get right to incentives and compensation. It's always been an interesting question of in an internal pension model, how do you hire and retain the people you want? And how has that played out over the last several years?”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Across our real assets team, our infrastructure team, our energy team, and our real estate team working together, live examples of our data centers. Is data center real estate? Is it infrastructure? The constraint is energy. So rather than having discussions about where it fits, the real assets team just does data centers and they staff it with people from each group.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Carrots always work Incentives always work. We really try to celebrate, to highlight, to reward areas where opportunities that don't fit neatly within an individual asset class are really highlighted. And again, rewarding the individuals who are thinking with that one fund or enterprise mindset, but also knowing that we're asking people within their asset class to deliver the best returns they can within their asset class, but not to be so dogmatic and not to be so tunnel visioned into their asset class that if they see something that might be interesting to another group or it might even be a can share, then putting their hand up and say we should look at it. We've seen great success between our private equity and our credit group. And there's a natural synergy there where they're in the same areas. You obviously have to be careful with information at times. The level of connectivity between our credit and our private equity team today versus even five years ago when I ran it is just much better. We're seeing great connections.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source