As a number of prominent pension funds stop using external managers they say charge too much in exchange for paltry returns, the biggest pension fund in Denmark is bucking the trend and sticking with the hedge funds it uses.
“In our case, funds have played a small but a good part in our portfolio,” Carsten Stendevad, the chief executive officer of ATP, which oversees about $118 billion in assets, said in an interview in Copenhagen.
The comments stand out at a time when a number of other pension funds have questioned the sense of continuing to rely on hedge funds to generate extra returns. There are plenty of examples of prominent skeptics. Rhode Island’s $7.7 billion pension fund terminated investments in seven hedge funds, including Brevan Howard Asset Management and Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC, it said earlier this month.
