A former pension investment officer heads the team that will manage a wide-ranging portfolio of alternative investments. These include allocations to outside managers of hedge funds, private equity, real estate, infrastructure and natural resources, but also direct trading in securities.
Funds based on the strategy may get the return on certain investments via swaps or other derivatives rather than investing with a manager.
The director of the program is Nancy Everett, who used to be chief investment officer at the Virginia Retirement System, where she helped build a sophisticated hedge fund portfolio. Subsequently she moved to another large pension manager, General Motors Asset Management, in 2005. She joined BlackRock in 2011.
The strategy is meant to be turnkey solution for investors that want a variety of alternatives and a way of taking advantage of opportunities as these arise. Early in 2011 BlackRock chief executive Laurence Fink said that investors favor go-anywhere approaches where managers can move swiftly from one market to another.
Tags: BlackRock, Laurence Fink, Nancy Everett
HedgeFundSmarts 
Leave a Reply