The California Public Employees' Retirement System — CalPERS, which manages roughly $556 billion for 2 million public employees — voted unanimously in November 2025 to scrap its Strategic Asset Allocation model in favor of the Total Portfolio Approach, or TPA. The change goes live July 1, 2026. It gives investment staff broad discretion to allocate across the entire portfolio and measures performance against a single 75/25 equity-bond reference portfolio, rather than benchmarking each asset class against its own target. The board called it historic. I'd call it overdue and underbuilt — the right framework in the wrong institution, at least for now. The fund is carrying $153 billion in unfunded liabilities and has a 71% loss on its last major discretionary bet to answer for.
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