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The pension fund has allocated $150m each in return for equity stakes and hopes that such investments will help nuture “potential diverse major players in the financial markets,” said Joseph Dear, CIO at CalPERS. The selected firms include France based institutional investment firm TOBAM, that specializes in quantitative core strategies, and California-based Victoria, that focuses its investing on emerging markets. The announcement also included news of an additional $100m to be given to Quotient, which has been in the MDP II program since 2008.

According to the firm’s website, TOBAM was founded in 2006 by Yves Choueifaty and his colleagues within Lehman Brothers Asset Management in Europe. The firm was taken private by employees in 2008. TOBAM’s flagship strategy is termed “Anti-Benchmark” and is a quant process that “provides a broad exposure to the available risk premia and avoids the concentration of risk that is found in Market Cap-Weighted benchmarks.”

Victoria is the firm founded by Josephine Jiménez in 2007. According to the firm's website "Victoria 1522 offers separately-managed accounts that enable institutional and high net worth individual investors to focus on areas of potential opportunity in emerging markets: frontier economies, small-cap companies, core (diversified) emerging markets, and select (concentrated) strategies." Jiminez is well known veteran of the emerging markets area, she has been investing in those markets since the late 1980s, when they were originally thought of as "frontier markets". She was manager of the first no-load mutual fund focused on emerging markets, the Montgomery Emerging Markets Fund.

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