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Matt Whineray

Matt Whineray

Former CEO of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund

Aug 16, 2026

10:36
Tell me a little bit about the philosophy.
10:38
Sure.
10:39
So the strategic tilting came out of a lot of work done by our asset allocation team under the leadership of Neil Williams.
10:46
So Neil had been in the asset allocation team at UBS, asset management, and worked with a couple of other guys, a guy called Brian Singer and Renato Staub there.
10:57
And he had brought with him this idea thinking around the dynamic asset allocation approach.
11:04
And the idea of it for us was to take advantage of our belief that we can have a more constant relative risk aversion than the market.
11:13
So as the market gets excited or the market gets depressed, uh and we have a if we have a long run view of the equilibrium value of a particular asset class then as it gets depressed we can we can add exposure or as it gets excited we can we can reduce exposure and do that in a systematic way so what we're trying to do is remove our own behavioral biases by creating a systematic uh dynamic asset allocation approach so the team did a lot of work on on setting that up thinking about what the governance of it ought to be uh how do we make it efficient how do we remove our personal biases as markets get really you know volatile uh and overcome that to be to be systematic in that so it's not about waiting for a market to get to an extreme and then putting a position on, it's saying, hey, if the market's gone down and there's a gap between what we think value is and prices, then we will add exposure and we'll be systematic about how we size that.

11 MINS LATER

23:33
Why that switch at that time? What was the thinking behind introducing this reference portfolio?
11:36
Why don't we walk through a little bit more granular detail? Start with these, what you're calling endowments, and how you think about each one.
11:45
So long horizon.
11:46
So what does a long horizon mean? This is, this is quite interesting.
11:50
We've published a bunch of white papers, which are the outputs of, of the debates that we have internally, and we've published one on what it means to be a long-term investor.
11:59
Because when you ask people that, "What does it mean to you to be a long-term investor?" M- and people leap straight to, "Oh, it means that I can invest in private equity." We're like, well, actually, let's sort of unpick this a little bit and say, what does it really mean? Ultimately, it means you're never forced to sell something.
12:14
Your long horizon allows you to hold things through cycles and allows you to withstand volatility as long as it's combined with that illiquidity.
12:24
The liquidity profile allows you to do that.

42 MINS LATER

54:23
What are your priorities for the coming year as you look at the things you're working on and how you're gonna continue to try to evolve this model?

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