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Charles Skorina & Company

● RETAINED EXECUTIVE SEARCH ●

Our Clients: Boards & Trustees, C-suite Executives, Family Offices
Our Services: we recruit board members, chief investment officers, senior asset managers

Tilly Franklin, new CIO at $3.9bn U Cambridge endowment

Cambridge board member, x PE head at family office Alta Advisers, x Apax Partners, x BBC Americas. MA London Bus School, Harvard Kennedy Scholar, MA U Cambridge, Westminster School

Anastasia Titarchuk, promoted to CIO at $216bn NY State Common Ret. Fund

Ms. Titarchuk promoted from dep CIO, 8yrs NY Common, x BofA, Barclays, JPMorgan, BS Yale

Letitia Johnson, new CIO at Amherst

2006-2019 Cambridge Assoc., MBA Yale, BA Brown

Joe Cullen, new CIO at Penn State University

Mr. Cullen joins investment office Sept 2019. 4yrs as CIO at Montana Board of Investments, x Fidelity, x Amherst, x Lucent. MBA Carnegie Mellon, BA Ripon College.

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SKORINA IN THE NEWS

9-27-19 The Boston Globe: Harvard endowment underwhelms again

8-9-19 Bloomberg News: Yale’s David Swensen and His Alums Are Among Best-Paid Endowment Heads

5-7-19 Institutional Investor: Fight Over Pay Erupts at New Mexico’s Pension Fund men

5-7-19 Pensions & Investments: Endowments led by women outperform those led by men

5-7-19 Institutional Allocator: Shortfall in Women CIOs at Endowments is Mysterious

Family Wealth: Finding Purpose, Fighting Entropy

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

- Oscar Wilde

A conversation with Stuart Lucas: wealth manager, educator, and family scion

Stuart Lucas has double-barreled credentials as a wealth manager.

He's a Harvard MBA who worked for years with top-shelf financial firms including Wellington Management Company and Banc One (now JP Morgan Chase), where he led their Ultra HNW unit.

And, he is himself an heir to family money by way of his great-grandfather, E. A. Stuart, who founded the Carnation Company. In 1985, the closely-held business was sold to Nestle, and the proceeds were distributed among Mr. Stuart's descendants.

In 2004, Mr. Lucas merged his professional and personal worlds by founding Wealth Strategist Partners, which continues today as the investment advisor to his and selected other family offices.

He has gone on to design and lead a Private Wealth Management executive education program, designed specifically for wealthy families at the University of Chicago Booth School, now in its 12th year. And, as an adjunct professor, he has taught a Wealth and Family Enterprise Management course at the MBA level.

All this experience has also been distilled into his widely-read book, Wealth: Grow It and Protect It, for general readers; and into academic-quality papers for The Journal of Wealth Management.

We're delighted that he made some time to talk to us.

Keeping it in the family

Skorina: Stuart, where do you begin with a new client who has to deal with all of this for the first time?

Lucas: Charles, a family office with significant wealth has many moving parts. There's money-management per se, which you focus on; and it's crucial.

But, there are also the structural, legal, and tax issues. And there are opaque but vital intra-familial and cultural issues that have to be dealt with. They're all important, and all inter-related.

The laws and tax rates keep changing, so do markets, and so do the families themselves. We try to design and execute an integrated strategy that balances all these elements.

Skorina: So, how do you start the conversation with a new client?

All-Weather Investment Leaders: We Need Them!

We've had a remarkable run in the institutional asset-management biz. Good enough to camouflage a lot of mismanagement and sub-optimal decisions.

But we all know that there is trouble ahead and that sooner or later there's going to be a reckoning.

When things fall apart again, will your foundation or family office be managed by experienced, agile leaders who can cope? Will they keep cool heads when others are losing theirs?

A few years ago an endowment CIO told me: “The board hired us [investment staff] after the 2008 crash because they realized that they never fully understood what they had in their portfolio and there was no one on the inside who could expose and explain the risks.”

“The consultants at the time met with the board once a quarter and kept telling the trustees that everything was fine until our portfolio fell off a cliff.”

The Reckoning

Are there new bubbles about to burst? Here are two possibilities; the unprecedented growth in index vehicles, and the stampede into private equity funds.

The Wall Street Journal reported late last year that the value of US index equity funds had just surpassed US actively managed funds by $4.27 trillion to $4.25 trillion. The Investment Company Institute disputes the Morningstar data, but the growth and appeal of indexing is undeniable.

Who can resist the allure of cheap and easy index funds and ETFs? From 2009 to 2019 the S&P returned a beguiling 11.27 percent annualized, excluding dividend reinvest, and indexers could do no wrong.

Unfortunately, bull markets breed short memories. Few recall that in the prior decade from 1998 to 2009, the S&P actually lost money, delivering a negative 2.72 percent. (Falling a calamitous 55 percent in the final two years, September 2007 to March 2009.)

As for private equity, PitchBook Data calculates that over the last ten years more than three trillion dollars has flowed into private equity and venture capital funds worldwide.

This despite the fact that since 2005, the returns from these illiquid funds have been little better than liquid public market performance.

Some of the best investors in the business have taken notice and are preparing for the possibility of a collapse.

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.

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