Canadian Pension Plan Fund: High-Fee Active Structure Lags Passive Index Benchmark Over Last 5 Years

The Canada Pension Plan Fund (CPP) is one of the two major components of Canada’s public retirement income system, along with Old Age Security (OAS). The CPP mandates that all employed Canadians age 18+ to contribute a certain percentage of their earnings (with an match contributed by their employer) to the CPP, managed by a group called CPPI. (Source: Wikipedia.)

I learned all of this because the CPP has become an interesting example where we can compare an investment manager that has chosen to switch to the high-cost, “we can do better because we are smarter” philosophy: lots of highly-paid employees, lots of highly-compensated hedge fund and private equity managers, lots of fees paid, all in search of higher returns. Luckily, we can see if they succeed because they have to publish their results for all to see.

My sources are two interesting articles and the CPP 2024 Annual Report:

• Opinion: Eighteen years and $46-billion later, the CPP admits it could have earned more just by buying index funds [Globe and Mail]
• Canada Pension Plan Falls Short of Indexed Benchmark [Center for Retirement Research at Boston College]
• CPP Annual Report 2024

In their fiscal 2024, the CPP paid C$3.5 billion in fees to external investment managers. (The fees paid in 2006 were just C$36 million. As in only C$0.036 billion, 100 times less!) The pension fund itself has grown to over 2,000 employees (up from only 100 employees in 2006), and after adding all operating expenses and transaction costs, the fund’s total expenses now exceed C$5.5 billion annually.

The total assets are roughly C$630 billion. C$5.5 billion of costs on C$630 billion of assets means the fund’s annual expenses eat up 0.87% of the total assets every year. That is creeping very close to 1% of assets annually.

What have those costs bought? Not much so far. In fact, the 5-year performance lag in returns as compared to a passive benchmark portfolio is actually higher than that. The CPP chooses its own Reference Portfolio to match up with their mix of hedge funds and private investments, and it has shifted over the years going from 65% Global Equities/35% Bonds in 2015 to 85% Global Equities/15% Bonds in 2024. (Specifically, 85% MCSI World Index and 15% Canadian government bonds.)

After many pages in the CPP Annual Report explaining their very fancy system and why they believe they will outperform… here’s the one chart that shows their actual value-added. This is their own chart and language.

The CPPI says that we should be okay with this lag, partially because they are so “resilient” during market downturns. This is an often-cited reason for underperformance, but I question it on two levels.

First, with many of these illiquid investments, the values are essentially self-reported. Private REITs always have lower volatility than publicly-traded REITs because they get to report their own net asset value. What’s the value of a building or business that hasn’t actually sold on the open market? Who really knows? Sure, the numbers have to be within reason, but otherwise they are easily fudged. Second, you could have gotten lower volatility by simply holding a little less stocks and a little more bonds. That would have also been more resilient.

I’ve also read the follow-up defense pieces, but I wasn’t really swayed. It’s all the same old stuff. The benchmark wasn’t really a good benchmark (in retrospect), even though they picked the benchmark themselves. Our performance beat our arbitrarily-set target (’cause everything went up), even if it lagged the benchmark. You have to pay up for smart helpers! Don’t you understand?! “I have people skills!”

(Counterpoint: It’s not common, but it can be done with less bloat and lower fees. The Public Employees’ Retirement System of Nevada (NVPERS) is an example of a pension fund that uses low-cost index funds for all of their publicly-traded asset classes. They have two employees. Their overall fees are 0.13%, mostly because they do hold about 12% in private assets. Their trailing 1-year performance as of 9/30/24? 20% annualized. Source.)

Right now, the alarms are not ringing for the CPP because the markets are up a lot and they are generating solidly positive returns even if they lag the market by 1% or 2% annually. I will be on the lookout for future updates on the CPP to see if they can justify their high cost structure over the long run. In the meantime, perhaps Canadian taxpayers should re-read Warren Buffett’s parable warning us about expensive Helpers.