(March 13 – 15:30 ET) – The Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec is boasting about its 2000 performance. The Caisse says its management teams beat both the 2000 and five-year benchmarks.

At a news conference today Caisse chairman and CEO Jean-Claude Scraire expressed his satisfaction with the Caisse’s performance. “2000 was quite a turbulent year, with tech stocks tumbling and almost all foreign stock markets losing between 10% and 30% of their value. In such a bear market, an overall return of 6.2% is quite impressive growth for a globally diversified portfolio,” explained Scraire.

Scraire noted that the real estate portfolio generated an 18.3% return. The Canadian and Quebec equities portfolio had a return of12.5%, or 5% more than the TSE 300.

The Caisse ended 2000 with $125 billion in total assets under management, up 18% over the previous year. Its overall return for the year was 6.2%, and the five-, six- and 10- year returns were 12.2%, 13.2% and 11.7%, respectively.

In his closing remarks, Scraire noted that the Caisse has generated an average annual return of 13.2% since he began his mandate six years ago. Scraire also drew attention to the Caisse “unique” approach to investing.

“We should add that CDP also relies heavily on a sector-based approach, active management and multi-management, which means several teams working on a same product, with different points of view, expertise, and sometimes even different objectives. This way of doing things, combined with the values we espouse, characterizes us to such an extent that we have come to refer to it as the ‘CDP way,’ in other words, a unique approach that guarantees success,” concluded Scraire.