Читать книгу The Hunt for Unicorns - Winston Ma - Страница 12

‘Well, now that we have seen each other,’ said the unicorn, ‘if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.'”

– Lewis Carroll; Through the Looking Glass

This timely and important book by Winston Ma and Paul Downs turns a long-standing prevailing orthodoxy entirely on its head, and for good reasons! Not so long ago, particularly prior to the onset of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009, the most sophisticated and successful pools of institutional capital were managed by pension funds, insurance companies, and university endowments largely in OECD countries which allocated their capital to investment fund managers in stocks, bonds, and to some degree also in the private markets for real estate and private equity.

Large scale was viewed largely as an impediment for achieving investment success because smaller funds were viewed as more nimble and less likely to move a market while it was securing disproportionate benefits (e.g., by investing in small cap stocks). Sovereign investment funds were few in number, lightly staffed, and seemingly one step behind their more adventurous institutional fund peers.

Today, the impact of these same sovereign funds cannot be understated both in terms of their impact on the global investment markets and economic development but also on modern life generally. Indeed, the significant changes we are seeing worldwide in ride-sharing versus taxis, away from motor-fueled cars and towards electric ones, and towards sharing office and home spaces can all be attributed in large measure to the actions of these sovereign investors. Rather than being rogue actors, which was greatly feared prior to 2008-2009, these sovereign investors have become a stabilizing force in the global capital markets for stocks and bonds because of their long investment time horizons and acceptance of long-term risk.

Moreover, rather than large scale being a disadvantage, these sovereign funds have also demonstrated that large size can become an advantage in terms of their ability to access new opportunities and their heightened credibility among project managers around the world who increasingly view them as the Investment Partners of Choice for international investing.

It is this now firmly established role as the Investment Partners of Choice for international investing that will enable the sovereign funds to have a disproportionately strong impact on modern life for many decades to come. Ma and Downs’ clear and expansive insights into these disproportionately important and yet little-known institutions will prove critical both to practitioners in the field of investing as well as to the general public seeking answers to the big picture questions of why the new unicorns transforming their lives arose from the modern financial system.

Russell Read, CFA, Ph.D., London

Russell Read, CFA, Ph.D. is the former Chief Investment Officer for the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), the Gulf Investment Corporation (GIC-Kuwait), and the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (APFC)