I would say the main reason that Teachers' was able to do that
was actually not really to behave like a pension plan. And
a lot of people look at us and say in some ways you behave more
like a hedge fund than a pension plan because we move capital
around between our different asset classes very deliberately
and quite radically.
So to give everybody a bit of a perspective, I took over as CEO
of Teachers' at the beginning of 2020, great time just before a
pandemic landed. But actually, the thing we did try to do was
look at our component parts and when I took over about 50% of
our balance sheet was in fixed income
and by the end of 2020 it was 0.
So we moved best part of 120 billion into other asset
categories. Now there aren't many people who can do that that
quickly or with that level of agility.
Specifically for the last year, the two areas that really came
up trump's for us was really to say what were we not in. So we
were very light in fixed income and public equities and what
were we in as a sort of an overweight position and we went
really long on inflation sensitive, that's really oil and
gas in code and also into commodities both of which
performed very well in a high inflation environment.