Khalisa Valani
Principal, Completion Portfolio Strategies
OPTrust
Institutional Connect is pleased to feature a speaker spotlight with Khalisa Valani, Principal, Completion Portfolio Strategies at OPTrust.
Khalisa Valani: As a Principal in the Investment team at OPTrust, I am responsible for various hedge fund strategies including macro, multi-strategy and risk mitigating hedge funds. I also lead our Tech & Innovation Portfolio, which invests in novel and transformative technologies across venture capital funds and liquid tech funds.
A unique aspect of my role is the ability to look across both public and early-stage private markets, which provides a differentiated view on how technological change, macroeconomic conditions and company fundamentals intersect. This perspective allows us to identify themes early, assess how they are priced in public markets, and size exposures thoughtfully within OPTrust’s total portfolio. By integrating insights from macro, fundamentals and innovation, we aim to build resilient portfolios that complement the broader plan and support long-term, risk-adjusted returns.
Institutional CONNECT: When evaluating macro or multi-strategy hedge funds, what are the most important qualitative and quantitative factors you look for before allocating capital?
Khalisa Valani: When evaluating macro or multi-strategy hedge funds, we focus on a combination of qualitative and quantitative factors, with an emphasis on understanding the source, quality, persistence and profile of returns.
On the qualitative side, we spend significant time assessing the people behind the strategy. This includes understanding what gives the team a differentiated perspective, how they generate ideas, how decision-making is structured, and what ultimately drives their investment process. We look for a clear and repeatable edge across informational, analytical, structural or behavioral vectors.
Quantitatively, we dissect historical performance to understand the quality of returns and the true sources of alpha. This involves determining embedded factor exposures, assessing performance across market regimes, and evaluating downside behavior, drawdowns and consistency. We want to understand how the strategy behaves in different environments and whether the return profile aligns with its stated objectives.
Risk management is another key pillar of our evaluation. We place strong importance on a manager’s risk philosophy and framework, including position sizing, portfolio construction, liquidity management and how risks are identified, monitored and adjusted over time. Robust risk management is essential to preserving capital and ensuring the strategy performs as intended, particularly during periods of market stress.
Finally, we evaluate each strategy in the context of OPTrust’s portfolio to ensure it contributes to overall portfolio resilience. Beyond capital allocation, we view our managers as thought partners and value ongoing dialogue and insight sharing, particularly around macro developments, market structure and evolving risks. These relationships help enhance our broader understanding and decision-making across the portfolio.
Khalisa Valani: I was always interested in becoming an investment professional, but chose to study a highly technical discipline because it trained me to think critically, solve complex problems and approach uncertainty in a structured way. Those skills translate directly to investing, particularly in areas like portfolio construction, risk assessment and decision-making under incomplete information.
The transition into investing started early through the co-op program at the University of Waterloo. My first co-op was on the trading floor at CPP Investments, where I was exposed to public market investing and saw firsthand how technical skills including coding, data analysis and quantitative thinking could be applied to real-time markets and trading decisions.
Through subsequent co-op roles, I gained broader exposure to how CPP approached active investing from a total fund perspective, which helped shape how I think about risk, diversification and the interaction between strategies. That experience ultimately led me to OPTrust, where I deepened my understanding of manager selection and portfolio construction, and how individual strategies fit within a long-term institutional portfolio.
Looking back, the engineering background was not a departure from investing but a strong foundation for it, providing the analytical rigor and problem-solving mindset that continue to inform how I evaluate investments today.
Khalisa Valani: The best career advice I’ve received was to learn how to think from first principles: to focus on understanding the fundamental drivers rather than relying on consensus views or established narratives. I believe this approach encourages clarity, intellectual rigor and the ability to separate signal from noise.
In investing, this is especially important because markets are noisy and narratives change quickly. Durable investment decisions are grounded in an understanding of what truly drives returns and risk, whether that’s underlying economic forces, incentives, market structure or behavioral dynamics. First-principles thinking encourages intellectual humility: the willingness to challenge assumptions, adapt views and change course as fundamentals evolve.
