Institutional investing in the time of COVID-19

Tested by the pandemic, many of the world’s leading institutional investors are demonstrating resilience and agility.

 
The humanitarian, social, and fiscal challenges wrought by COVID-19—and those still to come—are historically severe. The economic harm to businesses and investors mounts daily. And it is difficult, within the eye of the storm, to ascertain the full extent of the damage.

Yet an early perspective from leading institutional investors (IIs) suggests that as destructive as the pandemic has been to their portfolios, it could have been a lot worse. After a decade-long bull run across asset classes, many investors already considered a “correction of some sort” as inevitable and had positioned their portfolios defensively. The result is that, by and large, many pension funds, sovereign-wealth funds, endowments, and other IIs have found themselves better off than they were in the 2008–09 global financial crisis. Across the industry, there is less of a sense of panic, greater investment discipline, and more continuity than there was in 2008.

We spoke with CEOs, CIOs, and other senior executives at 21 of the world’s leading investment institutions, including some of the most influential pension funds, sovereign-wealth funds, and endowments. These institutions, which manage $3.7 trillion in assets across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America, include some of the world’s more sophisticated public investment funds. We asked them for their reflections on the pandemic, how their crisis playbooks are holding up, and what this discontinuity may mean for long-term strategy.

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Πηγή: mckinsey