Japan's Pension Fund Boosts Hedge Fund Investments

Japan's Pension Fund Association has lifted its hedge fund investments sixfold in less than a year as part of efforts to boost returns from a wider range of holdings on its $122 billion of assets.

The fund has put 300 billion yen ($2.8 billion) into hedge funds and aims to increase that to about 4 percent of total assets, Tomomi Yano, executive managing director of the government-backed agency, said in an interview in Tokyo yesterday, declining to specify a timeframe for the goal.

 ``We've been aggressively increasing investments mainly in about top 50 hedge funds in the U.S.,'' Yano said after attending an annual conference organized by the Economist Intelligence Unit in Tokyo. ``The returns have been decent.''

 Institutional investors like pension funds are putting more money into hedge funds, which aim to make money in rising and falling markets, even as the industry had its worst start to a year in 18 years, to boost returns after the U.S. subprime loan crisis. A quarter of Japan's population will receive pension benefits by 2025, the government estimates... (Read more..)


Source : Bloomberg