Wenn Sie das Ziel nicht treffen können, verschieben Sie die Torpfosten. Warum der Canada Pension Plan seine Benchmark geändert hat

It can be hard to have discussions around the CPP, it’s a bit of a sacred cow and there is a history of some critical voices being more against the entire notion of a public pension rather than the particulars of how ours is executed, but that’s not this.

If you’ve been paying attention to recent criticisms, probably most extensively by a [Canadian youtuber](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcNIrBlciPc), none of this is really a surprise but maybe it coming from a more „respectable“ source will help move the discussion forward a bit past some of the initial hurdles/objections.

To that end, the history here is relatively straight forward. 20 years ago the CPP underwent a significant change, adopting a new active management strategy with the promise of higher returns. A reference benchmark was established to make it easy to demonstrate those increased returns. The CPP has consistently under-performed relative to this benchmark despite the significantly increased cost to administrate. Recently the CPP has decide to rework their return formula in such a way that now shows them performing better, while also adding in a new subjective rating system which they naturally scored themselves perfectly on. They’ve applied this retroactively to a significant financial reward.

The fundamental question is whether this active management strategy is working. There’s usually pushback to comparing the CPP to our own passive investing because naturally it has different concerns/constraints but that is an obvious point that gets addressed immediately so I hope it isn’t brought up here.