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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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Director of investments for $2.5bn endowment

INTERVIEWS

Vicki Fuller xCIO NY State Common Ret. Fund

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

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

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

Trustees: Are you holding your investment office accountable?

We have worked over three decades recruiting chief investment officers and advising boards on investment performance and our research on investment leaders goes back years. No one has been a stronger supporter of building internal investment management teams than us.

But lately we've been wondering if non-profit boards and trustees are holding their investment offices accountable for performance.

Here is what's bothering us: Many tax-exempt institutional investors have underperformed public markets for ten years and more and, according to board members we have spoken with, failed to meet the needs of their stakeholders.

In some cases, as we have highlighted in past newsletters, it's the board's fault. Dissension or timidity tied the hands of highly skilled staff. In others, the chief investment officer just didn't have what it takes.

So, here's the way some of our trustee clients see it: If the current investment team at an endowment, foundation, pension fund, or family office can't out-perform the market over a reasonable period, say five to ten years, then the trustees or principals should replace them with those who can...or get out of the investment business.

In our latest study of large endowment performance, not one investment office out of the hundred we ranked beat the S&P over five years and only a third managed to out-perform a traditional sixty-forty stocks and bonds portfolio.

We tend to focus on foundations, endowments, and family offices but, in the larger universe of pension investors the story is mostly the same.

The annual report of the $150-billion Texas TRS fund (seventh-largest tax-exempt fund in the country) just became available, and Scott Burns at the Dallas Morning News gave it a hard look this week.

Over ten years (ending August 2018) they earned an annualized 7.1 percent with a portfolio that's more than 40-percent invested in alternatives.

By comparison, the one-stop Vanguard Balanced Index Fund, invested entirely in marketable U.S. stocks and bonds, earned 9.95 percent. The Vanguard fund also beat them over one, three, and five years.

He concludes:

The comprehensive annual report provides thoughtful reasons for this, laying out its sophisticated case for global equity, stable value, real return and risk parity investments.

But simplicity and low cost would have been worth $46.2 billion more [over the same ten-year period].

From Russia, with math! Anastasia Titarchuk takes over New York State’s CRF fund

Anastasia Titarchuk just moved up to permanent chief investment officer and deputy comptroller of New York State’s $216 billion CRF fund after three years as Deputy CIO and a year as Interim CIO.

NYSCRF is the county’s third-biggest public pension fund after CalPERS and CalSTRS in California.

We have a revealing Q&A with her just below; but first here’s some context about CRF, which doesn’t usually get as much ink as the big West Coast funds.

Investment Performance

Here are the latest multiyear returns for these three mega-pensions and CRF hold its own very well on a comparative basis. (CRF has a non-standard fiscal year, but we have helpfully stated all figures as of June 30, 2019.)

For 2019, CRF tops both the Californians with 7.1 net return.

Over 10 years the New Yorkers were a close second to CalSTRS, with 9.8 percent vs. Chris Ailman’s 10.1 percent.

Investment Performance NYCRF, CalSTRS, CalPERS

[Click "read more" below for charts and complete report]

Only Mr. Ailman at CalSTRS was CIO for a whole decade (now approaching two decades!). Ms. Titarchuk was interim CIO for all of 2019. And, of course, Mr. Meng at CalPERS is the newbie, in office for only the last six months of the 2019 fiscal year.

Funded Status

A very big deal for public pensions is an actuarial number called funded status, which other institutional investors don’t have to think about. The calculation depends on some tricky estimates, and opinions differ about what’s a healthy number. But higher is always better.

A recent Milliman Study of 100 major U.S. pensions found that only 11 have a funded status over 90 percent, and NYSCRF is one of them, with an enviable 94 percent as of 2018.

Good investment performance can help improve this number, but it’s only one factor. Still, a low funded ratio tends to attract attention in a not-good way and can cast a pall over the whole system.

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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