ABP, Europe's largest pension fund, may allow its portfolio managers to act like hedge funds and take short positions in equities. The move would make it the first pension fund in the world to run equity hedge strategies in-house. It underlines how ABP has shifted to specialist management that has included taking tens of billions of assets from investment managers to run itself over the past four years.

Jan Straatman, chief investment officer at ABP, said: "We will be more aggressive in the way we do things internally and managers could be allowed to go short. This is under consideration at the moment."