Ontario Teachers’ COO Leaves to Spearhead United Nations Pension Fund

Rosemarie McClean

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Chief Operating Officer Rosemarie McClean announced this week that she will be leaving the pension after a 33-year tenure to serve as the chief executive officer of the United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund. McLean will succeed Janice Dunn Lee, the acting CEO for the UN pension.

In her position at OTPP, McClean leads all operational activities, including management of financial operations for the pension’s investments and portfolio management activities, information technology, process improvement, and project management.

She joined the pension in 1986, and has since simultaneously served as a board member for Alberta Pensions Services Corp., the Toronto Financial Services Alliance, and Heartland Dental, an Illinois-based dental service organization supporting over 800 dentists.

“I have been very fortunate to spend the majority of my career at such a great organization as Ontario Teachers’. The people here are truly exceptional. It has been an honour working with such dedicated teams, who come to work each day with the clear mission of providing excellent service and retirement security to teachers in the province of Ontario,” said McClean.

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Her departure comes as the pension’s CEO, Ron Mock, is set to retire at the end of the year. In July, the plan named Jo Taylor as its new CEO and president effective Jan. 1, 2020.

At the same time, the OTPP recognized a new asset increase by $10.3 billion from December 31, 2018, to a total asset valuation of $201.4 billion. The total-fund net return was 6.3% for the first six months of the year.

“Our focus is on achieving stable results that help deliver financial security to our members through a variety of market conditions,” said Mock. “Our balanced portfolio approach is delivering strong returns that are in line with our long-term objectives.”

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Tags: Janice Dunn Lee, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Rosemarie McClean, United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund

Back during the housing boom, contrarian hedge fund manager Michael Burry detected trouble in subprime mortgages. So he shorted these low-end home loans via credit default swaps and reaped a bonanza when the housing bubble popped in 2008.

These days, his Scion Asset Management ($343 million in assets) has found a new set of popular assets to disdain: index funds. He thinks they have grown too large and are obscuring great bargains in small and value stocks. Moody’s projects that passive investments will overtake active ones in two years.

“The bubble in passive investing through ETFs and index funds as well as the trend to very large size among asset managers has orphaned smaller value-type securities globally,” he told Bloomberg in an email. Small-caps and value-oriented shares have suffered in the current bull market, as major tech names like Facebook and Apple pulled indexes ever higher.

Note that Burry is not predicting the demise of passive investing, which is growing more popular all the time with investors, who were burnt during the financial crisis because they picked stocks or depended on active managers to do it for them.

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Burry came to prominence in Michael Lewis’ 2010 book, “The Big Short,” which recounted how he and the other negative prognosticators bet against the inflated housing industry and made a pile. In the movie version, Christian Bale played Burry, a role that earned Bale a best-supporting actor Oscar nomination.

Burry has sold Facebook shares, according to the Whalewisdom asset tracing site. At the same time, he is taking positions in smallish South Korean stocks.

Tags: housing bubble, index funds, Michael Burry, Michael Lewis, Small Cap Stocks, sub-prime mortgage, value stocks