Singapore’s GIC Pte Ltd has tripled investments into hedge funds over the past decade and will deploy another US$30 billion into them over the next three years, Bryan Yeo, chief investment officer of the sovereign wealth fund said in an interview with Bloomberg.
He said GIC has identified global macro, quantitative and multi-strategy hedge funds as key areas of expansion.
“We are happy to pay for performance fees if the fund manager can deliver us good returns. We are able to work with them and leverage their skillset and expertise to launch new strategies as well as incubate them in order to grow,” he said in the interview published on July 27, two days after the wealth fund announced results for its financial year ended March 31.
He said one important reason for ramping up exposure to hedge funds was because of diversification, with so many areas of investments now closely linked to artificial intelligence.
“That AI risk factor has become a concentrated risk that many global investors face. So hedge funds as an active strategy actually diversifies away from a single concentrated risk.”
GIC spokespersons did not immediately respond to questions from Asia Asset Management.
The wealth fund on July 25, reported an annualised 20-year real return of 3.4% for the last financial year, down from 3.6% in March 2025, partly due to geopolitical risks.
According to Lim Chow Kiat, GIC’s chief executive officer, geopolitical crises are different now compared to the past, when they resulted in sharp, short-term disruptions followed by normalisation of risk premia. “Today, geopolitical risks are no longer episodic disruptions but structural changes, with more persistent and uneven market effects,” he wrote in a letter to stakeholders.
GIC raised exposure to equities from 51% to 56% of total assets in the last financial year. Exposure to fixed income dropped to 22% from 26%, while real assets were down from 23% to 22%.
