Credit Crunch: NISA’s Eichhorn on Alpha and Liability Management

“All alpha is excess return, not all excess return is alpha,” says NISA CEO and Head of Investment Strategies David Eichhorn when discussing the use of appropriate benchmarks to measure performance and beta masking as alpha. Eichhorn joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Noel Hebert on the latest episode of Credit Crunch to talk about hedging liabilities and utilizing derivative overlays, targeting high information ratios and being a liquidity provider, and the evolution in liability management. The current rate backdrop and funded status for defined benefit plans, as well as leverage costs for BDCs are also discussed. Pensions & Investments (P&I) rankings were based on U.S. institutional,tax-exempt assets managed internally (covered for overlay) as of December 31, 2024; published on June 16, 2025. NISA paid a standard fee to access the full set of data published by P&I. Other survey participants may have reported overlay strategies on a basis other than notional values and, as such, direct comparison and rankings may not be appropriate. Visit www.pionline.com for more details, including past rankings and methodology.