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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“Private, where we don't have hard allocations into each one, it requires a huge amount of coordination across the organization. There's almost a tax that has to be paid in the coordination tax in the organization. It means people have to be pricing risk, maybe not exactly the same, but at least in some comparable way. Our CIO, Ed Caz, has to be able to look across the asset classes and see that asset class A is offering better relative value than asset class B. Then the department heads and the portfolio managers need to understand that this is how we're going to operate, that capital can be a little bit fluid. The challenge of that is you build out internal teams and they need to be fed. Can't have a team sit on their hands. So you have to find that balance of you have a fixed cost. They need capital. They need to be relevant in the market. It's really hard to come in and out of markets. But at the margin, how do you get?”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not easy, and it is also not how most of the industry works. This starts to challenge people's personal identity also, because it's not how the industry works. The alternative asset space often just works on an absolute return model. But we're solving something different in CPP investments. We're solving for the highest total return at the total portfolio level. And I've learned this in this job. When I speak to the key stakeholders around the country, they want to know what the total return is. They aren't as interested in what the sub-asset class returns are. They want to know is the total portfolio okay and what's the return of the total portfolio level. So that's what we have to optimize. But the cell side is set up often by products. It's not really, they're not optimizing a total portfolio. So they're selling products and we're buying products. So to actually execute on almost a relative value framework where capital could move between asset classes, between public and private.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have built up over 15 20 years capabilities across, I think, the majority of the asset classes and the majority of the geographies. Private equity, infrastructure, real estate, credit, public equities, hedge funds across North America, Europe, and Asia. I always loved it in credit when we had a breadth of mandate and we had the ability to move capital to the areas that we see the best opportunities. So part of the value added is taking advantage of that breadth of not being so dogmatic that you have to always be piling into one asset class, regardless of the relative value, that has the ability to move capital around to the areas of greatest relative value.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of my personal investment beliefs is that you want to have a really wide funnel and see as many opportunities as possible. You want to have as many opportunities to say no as you can. The team will have a partnership model where they are asked to see a lot of opportunities from the co-investment and co-underwriting. Then they have a very broad mandate of what to say yes to. They are looking at lots of different industries, lots of different geographies. And often when we say yes, it's not only that we like the asset itself, but we think the general partner has a real edge in that area. You're partnering with the best software general partner. You're partnering with the best industrial general partner. And they're doing those type of deals, best healthcare, and you're doing those type of deals. Another area that I do believe is a real differentiator for organizations such as CPP Investments is the breadth of the mandate. This to me is something that's really important.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the team you have set up in that partnership model, particularly in private equity, you can imagine lots of deals getting shown to you by your partners. How have you determined what are the right type of opportunities to size up through a co-investment?”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understanding of the market and is very synergistic with our internal credit business. And that's where we felt we had essentially a right to win.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where strategies will sit on the axes of the two. Take private equity as an example, where we invest in who we consider to be the best general partners around the world. And then we will co-invest and co-underwrite alongside of them. And we think we have a right to win there in that. I think we're a great partner. We're a reliable partner. And we are quick, responsive, and can write a check of scale. So the partnership model is one where we think is really valuable for us. There's certain areas where we may be a little bit more direct than others, where we feel the duration of our capital, the time horizon of our capital could be an advantage, where we feel the scale of our capital could be an advantage. The Antares platform within our credit investments. And this was acquisition from GE about 10 years ago. And that fit right in where we are the majority owner of it, where we had a real...”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably important spending a bit of time on the partnership model because a lot of our internal is partnership. And this is where the matrix gets a little blurred.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Passive portfolio has actually grown a little bit over the past few years. We've increased it slightly from probably four or five years ago. If we're just trying to get exposure to something, if we just want equities, exposure, we'll do it passively. If we just want fixed income exposure, we largely do it passively. Now, the teams do have some ability around the edges to manage those portfolios, but the expectation is that it's largely passive. One example where I wouldn't say was necessarily an active to passive other than because there's no real passive alternative is macro. We had an internal macro team. It's challenging. We're not set up. We don't have the technology stack to do it. We really didn't have a right to win. So we do invest in a few external macro managers, but largely the capital that would have been allocated to that wet passive.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underwrite, and that's been a very successful model. But it is important to be deliberate. And on it going forward basis to think about how we're allocating all the resources in the organization, not just the capital, how we're allocating our money, our time and our people. I'd love to.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To really being true and having high fidelity to the purpose of the organization, I have a very simple two by two matrix in my mind. And we try to be very disciplined about this as we think about just the structure of the organization. On one axis is active versus passive. And on the other axis is internal versus external. And for every strategy we run, everything we do, being very deliberate in which quadrant it falls into, don't automatically default to everything being active and internal. Don't default to everything being active and external. There's some strategies where we feel we don't have an ability. We don't have an edge. We have no right to win. And so we should have a completely outsourced model on that. There's some strategies we don't think anybody has a right to win. And there we will invest that money passively. Now, we are a big fan of the partnership model where we invest with the best and then co-invest.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be a multi asset class, active investor, global investor partnering with the best around the world. Our purpose is to contribute to the financial security and retirement of 22 million Canadians. And doing that in a way which is consistent with the CPPIB Act, which is a piece of federal legislation in Canada that defines essentially the mandate of CPP investments, which is to maximize return without undue risk of loss. Everything we do is a choice. We've made a choice to be active. We've made a choice to be global. We've made a choice to have multiple strategies because we believe that is the best way to fulfill the mandate and the purpose. But we have to challenge ourselves to make sure that the identity is always aligned to the ultimate purpose of the organization and we aren't making decisions to preserve our identity as opposed to”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I think about the Canadian model, it's been super successful, and it's why it's been replicated in many different kind of sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors around the world. When the Canadian model was first being developed, I would say, the world was a different place. Think about some of the big asset managers, the blackstones of the world, that are trillion dollar asset managers today. They were different 15 years ago. The rise of these mega asset managers across the alternative asset space, the accessibility of alternative assets, like the maturity of the private equity space compared to 15, 20 years ago, worlds changed. And we do spend a lot of time thinking about how we have to change, how we also have to evolve with the market around us evolving. And almost a philosophical discussion we have at CBP investments is this challenging ourselves on identity versus purpose. Our identity as an organization”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot has been written about the Canadian model. It's been incredibly successful model. I know Jeff shared teachers was really the pioneer of the model, and then it's been replicated by others, such as us at CPP investments. If you ask people to describe the Canadian model, people might have a slightly different description of what it is. So I'll share how I think about it. I think about it as being an active asset manager and making that decision, but how to access different asset classes in different geographies around the world. Building internal teams where it makes sense, partnering with the best people around the world, where it makes sense, some of the fundamental beliefs in the model partner with the best, internalize where one...”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to turn over to the investment framework. And we talked to some, like Jeffrey was on the show, about the Canadian model, about total portfolio approach. As you step into the CEO seat, how do you think about the evolution of the approach as time has passed?”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's about ensuring that the people around the table with you are aligned with where the organization needs to go, are aligned with the objectives of the organization at that point in time. And without alignment, it's very difficult, almost damaging to delegate.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a big believer in delegation on the investment side. We delegate decisions into the people who are at the coalface with a sense they have the best intuition and the best sense of where markets are pricing and we should do everything we can to delegate down to the people who are actually in the trenches. We spend quite a lot of time thinking about decision making and thinking about delegation. If you ask my colleagues, they would say this is very much a work in progress. I think we're making progress. We are thinking about it and it's a priority. And we delegate also a belief that people make decisions because we need accountability for decision making. So we don't have committees that are making decisions other than, let's say, the investment committee. So if we're going to delegate, delegation without alignment is chaos. If one delegates decision making and people aren't aligned to what the organization is trying to achieve, it ends up in a really a quagmire. So when I talk about leading leaders, it's about a leader.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leaders, and you're leading very senior people and people who are leaders themselves. That takes a very different approach than managing new grads. So the softer skills that I've learned is to be situational and your leadership approach has to evolve as you evolve and grow through your career.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one I would like to say is being really effective at giving feedback. I'm still working on that. I can be more timely and I can probably be more direct with my feedback. The one area that I have learned is to be situational and to read the situation and know what type of leadership is required in that situation. There are times when the leadership style needs to be a little bit directive, a little bit pace setting. There's times when the leadership style needs to be pretty empathetic. There's times when people need to have their tires pumped and there's times when people need to be pushed a little bit in the back. And when I've watched great leaders, they have an incredible instinct for that situation. They all have a preferred habitat. They all have a style they would like to use, but they know at times it'll be maybe ineffective or not as effective as it could be. And as one progresses through their career, one also realizes that as you become senior, you're leading.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was able to get that on the ground training and build portfolios and do okay with that. One of the things that I also learned in my corporate life and in my corporate life was a company that was at the time between close to 100,000 people, a true multinational. It was complex at CPP investments we're only 2,000 people. It's actually a pretty small place relative. When I started it was two, 300 people. The learning you have of navigating a very complex organization has served me well. I probably had more training from the corporate world in managing people in leadership in some of these softer skills, which maybe they put more emphasis on in the early training. That also I think served me well as I went through my career at CPP investments.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things I comment on. I did work as a scientist for about nine years, and there are very few things I know with certainty in my life. And one of them is I don't do science anymore. Because in science, there's an answer where we can do an experiment and someone in Japan and the US and Europe can do the same experiment and get the same answer. Investing is about, in some ways, predicting the future because we don't have data on the future. So it's about inference. It's about judgment and it's about making choices. And that was actually a very helpful thing for me to have done science and know that this is different. I don't fall in love with the models. I don't fall in love with the quantitative outputs because they are there to help guide what is ultimately going to be a decision and a choice. So obviously I had to learn more of the investing business and I was very fortunate to have mentors and very fortunate to have people along the way. And investing is an apprenticeship business. You don't learn it in school. So I learned it on the ground. And one of the great things about CPP investments is you see lots of opportunities. So we had lots of reps. And so you learned, made mistakes.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you go through that trajectory of learning the business, investing in credit, finding some esoteric credit, then running the credit group, becoming CEO, how did you distill what you learned either as a scientist or a credit investor along the way that formed your ability to go from an analyst to a portfolio manager to leading teams?”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this was the, I call it more the direct lending group, the non investment credit, the non-investment corporate credit group. Then about eight, nine years ago, they brought all the credit together within CPP investments. We had public credit. We had real estate credit, and they created a credit investments department, which I had the privilege of running. And I did that for a few years and was successful with that. And thanks to the great team I had. And then just over four years ago came into the role of CEO.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went into the group at the time. It was called Portfolio Design and Investment Research. And it was essentially the portfolio construction group. I was helping with the characterization of asset classes. Within a couple years, I moved over to credit and helped the head of credit at the time, Mark Jenkins, build out the credit investments. And I focused quite a bit on royalty and maybe non-traditional type of credit investments, a little bit more esoteric based on my background, the ability to read patents, understand patents, but was given lots of opportunity to try other things, to try other parts of the credit markets, spent quite a bit of time working on the portfolio construction within credit, had opportunities to work in strategy, in business management. So I did lots of lateral moves, always trying to expand my skill set, always trying to develop as a person and a professional, then eventually was asked to take over the credit group.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and blown away by the organization and what it could be the governance model it had, the ambition it had, and this organization had the capability to be great and not just great on a Canadian scale, but great on a global scale. So here was an opportunity to get in very early without a traditional background in finance or investing more at this point a corporate executive executive”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And some of it was idiosyncratic to the company itself. The company sent me to get my MBA. And I started to work in strategy and alliances, which was involved more at how do you prioritize the technology portfolio, how do you allocate capital across the portfolio, how do you look at internal versus external, when do you license, when do you buy, when do you develop? So some really interesting challenges on how to allocate capital. I got a call one day from a headhunter saying, would you be interested in coming and talking about a role at a pension plant? And my first reaction was John Graham's a really common name. Are you sure you have the right John Graham? Yeah, we're pretty sure. We're pretty sure we got the right John Graham. So I went and I met with the team at CPPIB or CPP Investments. It was only a couple hundred people. Still had a reasonably large asset base of probably around $80 billion, but they were one office in Toronto and just starting out. And I remember meeting them and being blown away.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“John, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. Why don't you take me back to your background before getting into the investment business? I have a non-traditional background in having listened to many of your shows. I know that's probably a common theme. I have a PhD in physical chemistry. I actually worked as a research scientist for almost nine years, writing papers, probably have 25, 30 U.S. patents, largely in photovoltaic solar cell area, and worked in the Xerox Innovation Group, which at the time was one of the great industrial research labs in the world. And so I spent the first part of my career as a true scientist. How did that lead you to getting involved in investing? I started pre-.com in science working in the, I guess, the technology world and did love it and still have a real affinity for it. But company obviously went through some tough times.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm Ted Sidees, and this is Capital Allocators. Guess on today's show is John Graham, the president and CEO of the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, or CPPIB, which oversees $730 billion Canadian dollars, making it the seventh largest pension fund in the world. Jeffrey Rubin, CPPIB's chief investment strategist, was a past guest on the show describing the Canadian model, and that conversation replayed a few weeks ago as part of our CIO Greatest Hits Summer series. My conversation with John picks up from my conversation with Jeffrey discussing the evolution of the Canadian model, buzz about total portfolio approach, onset of global competition, and its impact. We discussed John's leadership approach to leverage the benefits of CPPIB's size alongside the challenges of doing so across the internal team, external partnerships, global offices, and governance structure.”
2025-10-13 · Capital Allocators · John Graham – Evolution of the Canadian Model at CPPIB (EP.465) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 a 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 total portfolio and that we have the right exposures 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