UPDATE 2-Japan pension fund posts $100 bln record loss
* Return on investments -10.03 pct or 9.667 trln yen loss
* Worst performance since fund began managing own portfolio
* Loss nearly halved in first quarter of this financial year
* Outperformed Calpers (Recasts, adds comments from fund, portfolio breakdown)
TOKYO, July 1 (Reuters) - Japan's public pension fund, the world's largest, said on Wednesday it posted a record loss of almost $100 billion in the last financial year, hit hard by the global financial crisis and a sharp appreciation in the yen.
But the fund cut the loss by roughly half in the April-June quarter, helped by a rapid recovery in equity markets, including a 22 percent gain for Tokyo shares since the end of March.
The comparatively conservative pension fund, which has 74 percent of its investments in Japanese bonds, also said it outperformed other large foreign pension funds such as Calpers, or the California Public Employees' Retirement System.
"I'm not trying to take the large loss for the financial year lightly, but I want to say that investing in the market means facing a large swings," Koichi Nojima, the fund's executive managing director told a news conference.
The Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) said the rate of return on its investments fell to minus 10.03 percent, or a 9.667 trillion yen loss, for the year ended in March.
By contrast, Calpers had a rate of return of minus 29.1 percent. Calpers held 19 percent of its investments in bonds as of end-March, while 56 percent were in stocks and 25 percent were real estate and hedge funds, the GPIF said.
It was the GPIF's second year of losses and nearly double the size of the previous year's loss, when its rate of return was minus 6.41 percent.
GPIF invests the reserves of national and corporate pension plans into foreign and domestic stocks and bonds.
Investments in Japanese bonds outperformed other assets with a slim positive return of 1.35 percent during the period, with a 870 billion yen profit.
But the pension fund lost heavily in other asset classes.
The rate of return on the GPIF's investments in Japanese stocks was minus 35.55 percent, with a loss of 5.06 trillion yen. Continued...
