Erin Bigley, CFA

Pension funds in Canada have long relied on a simple fixed-income strategy: buy Canadian. And for a long time, this worked wonders. But times are changing, and our research suggests that swapping a Canada-only approach for a more globalized portfolio will provide better risk-adjusted returns in the future.

For liability-driven investors, exposure to global bonds offers important benefits: a strong correlation to domestic debt, with greatly reduced volatility. However, these are not the only positives. Today, we’ll look at some other important benefits—such as greatly expanding the investable universe and offering a natural hedge against the tail risk of a domestic credit crisis—and then examine some of the practicalities of introducing global bond allocations within an LDI framework.

Liability-driven investors can reap significant benefits from globalizing their long-duration bond portfolios, but how much should they sow? How large an allocation to nondomestic bonds is appropriate? Our research suggests that even a modest allocation can meaningfully improve an LDI portfolio’s risk-adjusted return potential.

Despite compelling evidence in favor of global diversification, investors in many markets around the world continue to have a strong “home bias”—a preference for domestic over foreign assets. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in the ranks of liability-driven investors. But our research shows that LDI investors, too, can reap significant benefits from going global.