“We’re really just warehousing it so we know where we want to redeploy it,” president and CEO says of capital freed up from private asset sales
Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has trimmed its US dollar and US Treasuries exposure while keeping the United States as a core market.
President and CEO Jo Taylor said in a Bloomberg Television interview at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos that the fund is doubling down on private markets and selective AI-related investments.
Taylor said Ontario Teachers’ “thought we were a little over exposed to the dollar and actually, probably a little over exposed to US treasuries,” so the fund cut both in Q1 last year after it “saw personally that there was probably more risk of a deflationary data.”
He noted that the US still makes up roughly 30 percent of the portfolio and “is always going to be an important territory for us for further Capital.”
The shift came as Ontario Teachers’ monetized a series of private holdings.
Taylor told Bloomberg the fund’s business is “a mix of investing in private, great private companies, as well as investing in listed markets,” and that it “started to realize some of our private portfolio, which we did very successful last year.”
He highlighted as the largest realization the sale of “our airport portfolio of five airports in and around Europe,” alongside the disposal of several private equity assets.
Taylor said Ontario Teachers’ has temporarily parked much of that capital in liquid securities, mainly in public markets.
As per his comments to Bloomberg, the fund has “tended to put in is more of a sort of a benign, but liquid public format, and then you get the accurate weighting, which is actually quite strong towards the US,” adding that “to some extent, you always tend to get a little bit pulled back to that territory.”
He stressed this is a holding pattern: “our plan is to reinvest that Capital” and they are “really just warehousing it, so we know where we want to redeploy it.”
Despite the recent realizations, Taylor said private assets remain central to the strategy.
He described private markets as “a hugely successful part of our business” and “still a very much a core activity.”
He emphasized that Ontario Teachers’ is “not asset collectors,” but instead tries “to acquire companies, build them, make them successful,” and will “tend to monetize them” when offered an attractive price.
On portfolio resilience, Taylor characterised Ontario Teachers’ as an “all, whether portfolio” that “can be a very resilient entity in difficult times,” saying they have “been seeing some of that recently, and it stood up really well to those challenges.”
AI is another focus, but with a cautious tilt.
Taylor noted to Bloomberg that “the AI question always tends to arise” and said Ontario Teachers’ is “not sure every AI business is going to be successful” nor that “the larger businesses are automatically the ones that will win over time.”
As a result, the plan is “trying, therefore, to be careful, selective,” even if that creates the risk of choosing the wrong partner.
He also stressed AI’s impact on existing holdings and internal decision-making.
Taylor said a key priority is “how it’s impacting our existing portfolio of companies we already own,” asking “how do we enable them so that they actually use AI themselves to be Advantaged rather than sort of a just a disadvantage by hitting them.”
He added that Ontario Teachers’ is working out “how do we use AI to actually make better choices using the data we have.”
On specific positions, Taylor confirmed Ontario Teachers’ owns stakes in SpaceX and Anthropic.
He called Anthropic “an interesting AI investment” and said “SpaceX has been a fabulous investment for us.”
He played down market-cap hype, saying “everybody gets a little bit fixated on the market capitalization that’s being discussed,” and instead described SpaceX as “the dominant business in space at the moment,” with “excellent execution around engineering” and “a very cost aware analysis of what they do.”
Taylor also said, according to Bloomberg, that Ontario Teachers’ has had “lots of really interesting conversations with companies that [see it as] an alternative to an IPO.”
He cast the fund as a source of long-term patient capital that can help companies grow without immediately taking on “all the issues around disclosure” that come with being listed.
