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Charles Skorina & Company

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We recruit board members, chief investment officers and senior investment professionals
for endowments, foundations, family offices and institutional asset managers

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Chief Investment Officer for $1.5bn insurance portfolio

INTERVIEWS

Vicki Fuller xCIO NY State Common Ret. Fund

Tony Bagwell, new CIO at Cook Children’s Health Care System

Mr. Bagwell joins Cook 4-2019. x Mgn Dir Columbia Edn 17yrs. BA Mississippi College, MA U Alabama, MBA Columbia

Alex Doñe, promoted to CIO, NYC Bureau of Asset Management

Former interim CIO, head private markets, private equity, x US Department of Commerce, x KPMG, x Merrill Lynch 11yrs, AB Princeton

Jane Dietze, promoted to CIO at Brown University

Joseph Dowling III becomes CEO. Ms. Dietze, x Bowdoin, Fortress, World Bnk, and GS. MS Johns Hopkins, BA Princeton

David Wallace, first dedicated CIO at Pomona College

Mr. Wallace, joined Pomona’s investment office ($2.4bn) in 2012 after 6 years as finance/portfolio manager at World Vision. MBA/BQ Azusa Pacific University

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SKORINA IN THE NEWS

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

4-11-19 Wall Street Journal: The Rockefellers Want to Manage Investor’ Money

3-22-19 New York Times: A College Investor Who Beats the Ivys

Ranking top colleges by 5-year returns

In February we published an abbreviated list of five-year endowment performance for fiscal year end June 30, 2018 for 61 schools to compliment the release of the annual NACUBO TIAA study. Today, we introduce our big list with one hundred large endowments.

Every CIO on our list is experienced, dedicated, and adept at running a diversified portfolio. But MIT produced a five-year return of 12 percent while the University of Chicago posted 6.87. Why the divergence?

Different institutions, different goals

Every school has its own endowment payout rate and tolerance for risk. Some schools rely heavily on the income, others place more weight on growing the principal.

It takes years to fully implement a multi-asset, multi-generational investment strategy and altering course mid-stream – a new investment chair? a change in CIOs? – can sap performance for a decade.

The challenge for the board and chief investment officer is to maintain course when market fluctuations shake conviction and crowd psychology rattles trustees.

Most high-performance institutions on our list have stable boards and long serving chief investment officers. See: A College Investor Who Beats the Ivys.

Happy boards, happy staffs

The personalities, preferences, and experiences of board members interact in a variety of ways, usually good, sometimes bad, and occasionally incoherently. The trick is to figure out how to work together, achieve a consensus on investment policy, and let the staff handle the investing.

#1: No surprises

Serving on a nonprofit board has many upsides; personal satisfaction, peer recognition, and an opportunity to make a difference. But when things go wrong, the reputational risk is brutal.

No board member at Michigan State or Southern Cal could have foreseen the scandals that erupted on their watch. And we wrote at length about past challenges at the Harvard endowment. It takes a long time to dig out from under poor management as the current board and CEO/CIO can attest.

The job of the investment staff is not to beat Yale, it’s to meet the objectives set by the board.

The mysterious shortfall in women chief investment officers

In our last newsletter we looked at the number of women CIOs at big endowments*. Among 109 North American endowments over $1 billion we identified 20 (including one female director of investments and one CFO who liaises with their OCIO providers).

That’s just eighteen percent – less than one out of five.

For this issue we also took a look at the mid-sized schools (in the $500 million-to $1 billion bracket), to see if the situation is any better.

Unfortunately, that’s a no. We found 10 females among 85 schools. That’s just 12 percent – a significantly lower representation that among the bigger schools.

We've inserted a chart below with the CIOs ranked by AUM.

Twelve percent in this group is not quite as bad as it sounds. That’s because mid-size endowments are less likely to have dedicated in-house investment staff – either men or women.

Many prefer to outsource, or to use a committee-and-consultant model without an internal investment office.

But it’s still not a great number.

Although we haven’t done an exact count, we should note that females are well represented among professional slots at the major OCIO firms and consultants. These are good jobs, and often a gateway to CIO jobs (although they usually don’t pay as well).

This may somewhat mitigate the overall situation for women jobseekers.

Charting the trend

That’s the static picture, but the trend is even more important.

Is that gap worsening, or about the same over recent years?

Unfortunately, it seems to be widening.

Looking at recent turnover, 9 departing female CIOs have been replaced by men; while only 3 were replaced by other women.

Just one departing male was succeeded by a female.

These turnovers are detailed in the next chart.

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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