We're not just giving out an asset allocation and a bunch of benchmarks and managing active risk

against it and trying to maximize the information. We are actually trying to maximize a total

return at a given level of risk over the long run. One of the challenges is we execute through

a series of strategies, private and public, decisions get made bottom up, and we can get collection of idiosyncratic portfolios.

And then we blend them all together and see what we got, knowing that it's looking past

the very simple asset class labels, looking what we have from a geography perspective, looking

what we have from an asset class perspective.

And I know where the team thinks a lot about is how do we actually then have an optimal total portfolio and that we

have the right exposures in the total portfolio? We right have the right allocations in the total

portfolio. We still have a mechanism to get the alpha through security selection, but then

we have an ability to manage the total portfolio so we have the right exposures we want.

I'm Ted Sides, and this is Capital Allocators.

My guest on today's show is John Graham, the president and CEO of the Canadian Pension

Plan Investment Board, or CPPIB, which oversees $730 billion Canadian dollars, making

it the seventh largest pension fund in the world.

Jeffrey Rubin, CPPIB's chief investment strategist, was a past guest on the show describing

the Canadian model, and that conversation replayed a few weeks ago as part of our CIO Greatest Hits Summer Series.

My conversation with John picks up from my conversation with Jeffrey discussing the evolution

of the Canadian model, buzz about total portfolio approach,

onset of global competition, and its impact.

We discussed John's leadership approach

to leverage the benefits of CPPIB's size

...