Q&A with Rossitsa Stoyanova, Chief Investment Officer

2025 confronted investors with intense geopolitical, economic and technological change. Rossitsa reflects on IMCO’s experience.

Tell us about IMCO’s performance in 2025.

In 2025, IMCO's portfolio delivered solid returns amid complex market conditions, reflecting the resilience of an investment strategy built on discipline and diversification. Results were positive for a third consecutive year, with nearly all asset classes delivering strong gains. Real estate was the exception, though we believe it’s turning the corner with its broadly stable results, demonstrating meaningful progress from the year prior.

Our performance also benefited from the discretion IMCO exercised across client portfolios, as we made proactive adjustments to position us well amid changing market dynamics and elevated currency risk.

Over the year, exceptionally strong public markets challenged our ability to beat public market benchmarks, resulting in negative NVA. We continue taking a patient and disciplined approach to value creation, as most of our private assets are in the early stages of the investment life cycle and require time to realize their full value.

Notably, the core of our investment success this year came from our ability to diversify the portfolio and collaborate seamlessly across asset classes. For example, public equities partnered with infrastructure to build a high-performing utility portfolio, while Global Credit supported Public Equities' due diligence in an AI-related investment.

Across the platform, teams prioritized defensiveness and reduced concentration risk, ensuring the fund remained adequately diversified across geographies, sectors and trends.

Currency volatility was elevated this year. How did IMCO adjust accordingly?

U.S. dollar volatility and rising hedging costs weighed on our performance results this year. Although the U.S. dollar strengthened in the second half of the year, earlier swings reinforced the need to manage currency risk carefully. To protect the portfolio, we proactively repositioned our U.S. exposure by setting targets on both U.S. assets and the USD.

Public markets were once again concentrated in 2025. How did that dynamic influence IMCO’s results?

Market concentration remained a defining feature, as a small group of large technology companies often referred to as the “Magnificent Seven” extended their outsized influence on overall performance. That concentration was also reflected in IMCO’s results as public equities led portfolio performance this year.

The asset class delivered returns well above target, which we credit in part to the thoughtful design of our strategy. Our increased passive exposure performed as expected, giving us efficient upside from the tech rally. Meanwhile, we deployed active capital selectively, focusing only in areas where we had differentiated insight to add value. This includes select pre-IPO and IPO-stage companies where our team identified compelling growth opportunities.

A standout example of our active strategy in action was our investment in AI cloud platform CoreWeave, which returned $1 billion to the portfolio. We prudently trimmed the position during the year, realizing significant gains while remaining invested at an appropriate size.

How do private markets fit into IMCO’s overall investment strategy? What do they represent in terms of the portfolio’s long-term resilience?

Private markets are central to IMCO’s strategy, representing roughly half of total assets and a key driver of long-term returns. While these investments take longer to realize gains than public markets, the advantages they offer are significant. Many of today’s most valuable opportunities in infrastructure, real assets and early-stage growth companies are simply not accessible through public markets. They require scale, operational expertise and patient capital, which we bring as an institutional investor. Additionally, at the total portfolio level, privates help cushion our fund from short-term market swings and have historically outperformed public markets over full cycles. The scale, diversification and reliability they provide will remain critical to our investment success.

Our private portfolio is well diversified, filled with high-quality assets. Most of our strategies have reached their allocation and internalization targets, a testament to the team’s strong partnerships and flexible co-investment model. At this stage of the investment cycle, we are focused on optimizing the portfolio and partnering with our strategic partners and management teams and exerting meaningful influence over value creation.

How does IMCO adapt to fast-changing markets while staying true to long-term objectives?

As a long-term investor, we anchor decisions in fundamentals while remaining market aware and diversified — a discipline that proved critical this year.

As enthusiasm around AI lifted public markets, we took a picks and shovel approach that focused on investing in companies enabling the AI boom, such as data centres and energy. This allowed us to capture upside without assuming the risk of selecting individual winners.

At the same time, we stayed responsive to near-term shocks when warranted. Rapid shifts in U.S. policy disrupted global trade, currency and markets, prompting us to make targeted adjustments to client SAA, including selective hedging of U.S. assets and shorter bond durations to manage risk.

Meanwhile, at home in Canada, a renewed momentum to strengthen the economy is creating compelling opportunities. Our local insight, scale and flexible capital position us to pursue investments that align naturally with our expertise and long-term horizon.

In fast changing markets, we have proved that our advantage lies in our judgment and flexibility to adjust the strategy while maintaining focus on our clients’ long-term objectives.