Charles Skorina & Company
● RETAINED EXECUTIVE SEARCH ●
Our clients: visionary families, transformative nonprofits, Wall Street trailblazers
Our vision: build investment preeminence, create opportunity, enrich lives
Our work: provide talent, access, relationships, and insights
LATEST NEWSLETTER
If I disagree with something, I either bet against it, or I keep silent – Amarillo Slim
It’s been a festive fifty years for the alternative investment industry, with private equity the belle of the ball. And as Chuck Prince, former CEO of Citigroup once remarked, “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.” But no matter how compelling the party, there are usually a few contrarians lingering in the wings.
Ken Frier, CEO of OCIO firm Atlas Capital Advisors, wrote recently that “The signs are clear, the non-profit model, where the energy goes toward selection of alternative investment managers, is bearing less fruit.
That’s the case even for the Yale endowment – their performance beat a simple 90/10 stock/bond index portfolio by 6.2% in 1994 – 2004, by 3.6% in 2004 – 2014 and just 1.2% in 2014 – 2024. And that 1.2% in the past decade is overstated since Yale cannot sell their private holdings at the reported value.”
Maybe so, but with private equity forecast to double from $5.8tn in 2023 to $12.0tn in 2029 and the “barbarians” storming the retail 401(k) ramparts, one can’t help but wonder what the smart money is up to. As Ben Carlson, A wealth of common Sense, quipped, “being a contrarian is easier in hindsight.”
Most big dollar state pensions still follow the herd. CalPERS recently announced they’re going large on private assets with a target 40% allocation, about $225 billion of the $563 billion dollar fund.
As for CalPERS peers, Stephen L. Nesbitt, CEO & CIO of institutional consultant Cliffwater reported last year that allocations to alternatives reached 40% of state pension assets in 2022, with PE at 14.85% as of 6-30-23.
State Pension Allocations
June 30, 2018 to June 30, 2023
Non-profit Investment staffs try their best, but most go to the same conferences, use the same consultants, follow the same trends, and invest with the same managers as their peers. Career risk is too great to “think different” when politicians and media trolls lie in wait for any and every mistake.
Pinching pennies
Despite the grumbling, fees still don’t seem to matter much to the institutional crowd. Richard Ennis, former co-founder of consulting firm EnnisKnupp (now AON), thinks the herd pays too much for too little.
“Alts bring extraordinary costs but ordinary returns – namely, those of the underlying equity and fixed income assets.” Ennis finds big endowments in his study – estimated to hold 65% of assets in alternative investments – fare worse than pensions, which have a 35% exposure.
When compared with a market index that he designed with a specific stock-bond mix to mimic funds’ risk profile, endowments have trailed by 2.4 percentage points annually in the 16 years through June 2024. Over the same period, pensions undershot their benchmark by 1 percentage point a year.”
Callan recently published their 2025 Cost of Doing Business Study – “a comprehensive look at the investment management fees paid by institutional investors.” Here are a few highlights from the press release:
“Total investment management fees averaged 40 basis points (bps) across all asset pools. But this headline figure masked significant variation across investor types:
- Nonprofits continued to pay the most, averaging 57 bps, driven by larger allocations to alternatives.
- Public funds averaged 43 bps, but the largest plans resembled nonprofits in both structure and fees.
- Corporate funds averaged 30 bps, driven by growing use of liability-driven investing (LDI).
- Insurance pools, with their conservative asset allocations, were the lowest at 20 bps.”
To be fair
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ABOUT
Mark L. Baumgartner, new CEO/CIO University of Florida Investment Corp
Katharine “K.C.” Krieger, new CIO at The Getty
x CIO, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation , x Cambridge Associates, BA Colby College
Vincent Tuohey, next president PRINCO
13yrs MITMCo, 2yrs Littlejohn & Co. 4yrs US Army Captain (Iraq), BA & MBA Harvard, MA Cambridge U
Scott Chan, succeeds Chris Ailman as CIO of CalSTRS
SKORINA IN THE NEWS
2-19-25 Institutional Investor: Most endowment returns aren’t high enough to cover universities’ costs
11-15-24 Institutional Investor: Nokia taps mercer to navigate evolving corporate pensions
5-7-21 BloombergNews: Yale Names Alex Banker Interim Endowment Chief, Plans Search
5-6-21 The New York Times: David Swensen, Who Revolutionized Endowment Investing, Dies at 67
5-6-21 Forbes: Yale Endowment Chief David Swensen Leaves Legacy of Top College Investment Leaders
CHARLES A. SKORINA & COMPANY works with leaders of Endowments, Foundations, and Institutional Asset Managers to recruit Board Members, Executives Officers, Chief Investment Officers and Fund Managers.
Mr. Skorina also publishes THE SKORINA LETTER, a widely-read professional publication providing news, research and analysis on institutional asset managers and tax-exempt funds.
Our Practice:
• We recruit Board Members and Executive Officers, Chief Investment Officers and Senior Asset Managers.
• Our research and analytics are backed by over thirty years of hands-on recruiting experience and an unrivaled personal network.
• We collect performance, compensation, and background data on most senior institutional investment professionals in the U.S. and the funds they manage. We analyze that data to construct profiles of those managers and their funds, identify best-in-class people, and map their career trajectories.
• We share our research and insights in a widely-read professional newsletter – THE SKORINA LETTER – and website – www.charlesskorina.com.
• The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Thompson Reuters, Financial Times (Fundfire), Institutional Investor, Pensions & Investments, Private Equity International, and the institutional investment community use our research and analysis. Skorina has been interviewed on chief investment officer compensation issues on Bloomberg TV.
• Our work is regularly re-printed in Allaboutalpha.com and other industry magazines, blogs, and third- party web postings.
• We focus specifically and effectively on the world we know: Board members and Executive Officers, Chief Investment Officers, and Senior Asset Managers at institutional investment firms and funds – including sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations, pension funds, banks, investment banks, outsourced chief investment officer firms (OCIO), and sell-side money managers.
Prior to founding CASCo, Mr. Skorina worked for JP MorganChase in New York City and Chicago and for Ernst & Young in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Skorina graduated from Culver Academies, attended Michigan State University and The Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey where he graduated with a BA, and earned a MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago. He served in the US Army as a Russian Linguist stationed in Japan.
Charles A. Skorina & Co. is based in Tucson, Arizona.
OCIO 2025: the winds of change
When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills ― Chinese proverb
There’s a lot of money to manage in this world, about $471 trillion US dollars according to the latest UBS Global Wealth Report 2025, and well over a third – $175 trillion – sits right here in our own back yard.
Last year Henley Global’s World’s Wealthiest Cities Report 2024 broke down US wealth distribution by individuals and location:
(chart)
All this wealth should be good news for investment outsourcers as nonprofits and the nouveau wealthy look to offload their investment headaches. But deep-pocket competition and advances in knowledge-based technologies are changing the game. It’s no time for complacency.
Bots and bolts
Not long after we published our latest OCIO directory, I got a call from the president of a large west coast foundation, unhappy with their OCIO provider’s performance and especially unhappy with the service.
The president explained that they might have stomached the last few years of mediocre returns if communication were timely and forthright, but apparently service was half-hearted and the board had had enough. They are reviewing alternatives.
In the good old days – before TikTok and cat videos – sales, service, and steady returns were the nuts-and-bolts of money management. When Hirtle Callaghan, Commonfund, McMorgan & Company, and Strategic Investment Group hung their shingles the outsourced chief investment officer concept was fresh and intriguing. Still a tough sell, but the field was wide open.
Twenty years ago, when the Princeton Theological Seminary asked me for OCIO referrals I sent the school eight names. Today there are one hundred-eleven firms on our list, and chatbots, robo-advisors, Zoom, and cloud-based access are essential parts of the full-service landscape.
Baby boomers and Gen-Xers still crowd the boardrooms and family seats and most still prefer the human touch, but how and with whom will the next-gens invest?
Digital natives, those born in the internet age – Millennials (1980–1995), Gen Z (1995–2010), and Gen Alpha (2010 – present) – grew up with tech. As long as their assets are globally accessible, secure, and returns pay the bills they don’t seem to care much about human contact.
So, will AI replace human empathy and intuition as Mr. Zuckerberg envisions? Will “Her” soon be our most trusted companion? If so, who or what will manage our money?
Digital shadows
“Most wealth managers say they want more clients. But too often, they wait for them to show up” notes the Boston Consulting Group. But, says BCG, there are powerful tools on the horizon to support business development.
GenAI-powered prospecting engines using external data can identify and profile business owners, expats, and high-income professionals and track digital indicators that suggest investable wealth, such as business sale filings, job changes, bursts of luxury travel reviews, and niche signals like luxury car forums.
“The engine doesn’t just find names, it prioritizes them. An internal scoring system ranks each lead by value and likelihood to convert. High potential prospects can be routed directly to the most suitable advisors, complete with customized outreach packs. Every interaction – open rates, meeting conversions, follow-ups – is tracked and fed back into the model, so it gets smarter over time.”
Noah Smith, in his piece “The dawn of the posthuman age” writes:
“When I was a child, sometimes I felt bored; now I never do. Sometimes I felt lonely; now, if I ever do, it’s not for lack of company. Social media has wiped away those experiences, by putting me in constant contact with the whole vast sea of humanity. I can watch people on YouTube or TikTok, talk to my friends in chat groups or video calls, and argue with strangers on X and Substack. I am constantly swimming in a sea of digitized human presences. We all are.”
Final thoughts
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