The Total Portfolio Approach for US Institutional Investors

April 2026

The strategic asset allocation (“SAA”) model, with its fixed targets across discrete asset classes, has dominated institutional decision-making for decades. Yet some of the world’s largest long-term investors, including Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, New Zealand Superannuation Fund, Singapore’s GIC, and Australia’s Future Fund, have adopted an alternative framework called the Total Portfolio Approach (“TPA”). In 2025, CalPERS, the largest US public pension fund, began evaluating TPA for investing its investment portfolio. This has led many US-based institutional investors to reckon with a fundamental question: whether the governance, operational, and analytical features of TPA warrant a shift in how they think about governance and portfolio construction.