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CPP Investments | Frank Ieraci and Jimmy Connor

Jimmy Connor Mar 6, 2026 31:46

Summary

CPP Investments targets a risk level rather than fixed asset allocations, flexing across sectors, geographies, and asset classes to find the best risk-reward.

The fund owns no gold or gold miners today; management sees producers as richly valued after gold's run toward $5,000 an ounce.

Central banks have lifted gold buying to as much as 30% of annual production since 2022, a key driver behind the metal's rally.

On energy, CPP Investments would evaluate Canadian pipelines and infrastructure if shown a real economic case and durable assets.

With a 3-5 year holding horizon and 20-25% annual turnover, the fund argues scale lets active management beat ETFs.

Jimmy Connor's takeaways

  • Top takeaway Jimmy Connor argues that after gold's run to or near $5,000 an ounce, producers trade at very rich valuations that no longer fit a bottom-up value approach.
  • He presses on AI valuations, citing OpenAI's rise from a $20 billion valuation at ChatGPT's November 2022 release to $500 billion at its latest raise, and asks whether this recalls the early-2000s tech bubble.
  • He challenges the idea that a pension fund must be conservative, saying he was surprised CPP Investments held Nvidia and is an early investor in Waymo.
  • He describes riding a Waymo autonomous vehicle in Austin, operated in partnership with Uber, and says he was blown away by its capabilities.
  • He frames a weak Canadian backdrop for the interview: declining GDP per capita, falling labor productivity, rising unemployment, and Canada-US trade-negotiation uncertainty.

Frank Ieraci's takeaways

  • Top takeaway Frank Ieraci says CPP Investments was a big Nvidia investor from 2018 through 2025 on a GPU-in-AI thesis, calls it a tremendous investment, and rejects framing today's AI market as a repeat of the tech bubble, seeing pockets of value instead.
  • He explains CPP Investments targets a risk level rather than static asset allocations, and his active equities group runs a bottom-up, market-neutral portfolio with a 3-5 year horizon and 20-25% annual turnover, benchmarked per strategy rather than to the MSCI World Index.
  • He notes about 12% of the fund's roughly $780 billion is invested in Canada, a significant overweight, while Active Equities as of the interview holds no gold miners because producer valuations look too rich with gold at or near $5,000 an ounce.
  • He says the fund invests across the AI landscape, including data centers globally through its real assets and infrastructure teams, and was a very early investor in Waymo.
  • He argues Norway's sovereign wealth fund should not be compared apples-to-apples with CPP Investments: its roughly 70% public-equity allocation reflects a different objective function, not necessarily more risk.