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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

Lisa Howie, new CIO at Smith College

12yrs Yale investment office, AB, molecular biophysics Yale ’00 & MBA Yale ’08

Amy Falls, moves to Northwestern University as CIO

x CIO Rockefeller U, x CIO Phillips Academy, x MD Morgan Stanley, MPP Harvard, BA, Georgetown

Mark L. Baumgartner, joins Carnegie Corp as CIO

7yrs CIO Inst for Advanced Study, 5yrs Ford Fdn, ex Morgan Stanley, ex Boston Consulting Grp, PhD Mech & Aerospace Eng Princeton, BSE Aerospace Eng U Florida

Brooke Jones, Bryn Mawr College’s first Chief Investment Officer

8yrs at Carnegie Corp, 3yr Stanford MC, Fulbright Scholar, MBA Stanford, BS, U Penn Wharton

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SKORINA IN THE NEWS

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

12-22-20 The Wall Street Journal: Calpers Seeking an Investment Chief with Staying Power

2-04-20 Yale News: US Education endowment hit 8.5 percent for the past decade

Latest Endowment Performance Rankings

Our 2020 endowment performance report features ten-year returns -- the latest available. We consider a ten-year span to be a rigorous and revealing measure of the strength of an institution’s oversight and long-term investment abilities.

However, as always, there are caveats.

Timing

Most endowments close their books for the fiscal year on June 30 then prepare for the auditors. Soon thereafter, usually in mid to late fall, the schools release preliminary performance results.

These numbers are “official” but Non-Time Matched because private market performance reporting – real estate, private equity, etc. – lags public market results by three to six months, and sometimes longer.

Usually, this does not matter because public and private market investments tend to move pretty much in sync.

However, in spring 2020 with covid on the loose, the June 30th fiscal close missed a big uptick in private market valuations because those numbers were not ready and therefore not reported to the investment offices. This hit big endowments hard, those with heavy allocations to alternatives.

Costs

Not all returns are equal.

Some schools report their numbers net of all costs including external management fees, internal office costs, and the endowment tax.

However, many endowments when computing their returns subtract external management fees but not office costs or the endowment tax.

Over a ten-year period that makes a difference.

Turnover

Turnover affects performance. Only about a third of the one hundred CIOs on our list have held the top investment position for ten years or more and they tend to have the best performance

For example, in our chart below, ten of our top fifteen endowments by 10-year performance had investment heads with ten years or more in tenure.

David F. Swensen, End of an Era

-- Lux Et Veritas

David F. Swensen, Ph.D., Yale '80 and chief investment officer Yale endowment, died May 5th, 2021.

Mr. Swensen was a 32-year-old kid in 1985 with no endowment experience and a couple of years on Wall Street when William Brainard ’62 Ph.D. and Yale provost hired him as the university’s first endowment investment manager.

When Swensen accepted the position at Yale, most endowments held US stocks and bonds. That’s it!

His iconoclastic views on markets and investment opportunities led to a fundamental shift in how and where institutional investors sought to make money.

The conceptual groundwork had been laid for Mr. Swensen’s investment heresy in 1967 by another Yale alum, McGeorge Bundy A.B. ‘40, then-president of the Ford Foundation.

In the Foundation’s ‘67 annual report, President Bundy noted that “…the true test of performance in the handling of money is the record of achievement, not the opinion of the respectable.”

Mr. Bundy commissioned influential studies attacking the old assumption that the “prudent man” rule of personal trust law applied to management of endowment and foundation funds.

Along with the dissemination of modern portfolio theory, these initiatives cleared the path for Swensen’s sophisticated and non-traditional portfolio management style at Yale and, in the years that followed, other Ivy schools.

Today, thanks to Mr. Swensen's "Pioneering Portfolio Management", endowment investment chiefs are the ultimate long-term, strategic investors.

They have an infinite investment horizon, a global playing field, and can invest in anything anywhere - within the broad policy limits set by their institution.

He will be missed and hard to replace.

Swensen’s investment portfolio and returns are baked in for at least five more years. But good management starts with good succession planning.

As I mentioned to Bloomberg News, culture and institutional memory play an important role in top quartile investing. And in the case of Yale, we should add “tradition.”

Our first headhunting calls would be to two of the top CIOs on our list; 47 years old MIT CIO Seth Alexander ‘95, and Stanford University’s CIO Rob Wallace ‘02, 55 years old.

Both have years remaining in their careers, stellar track records, and strong ties to the school and the Yale investment office (YIO).

If not Messrs. Alexander or Wallace, well there’s plenty of Yale alumni and YIO talent to pick from.

See the YaleNews' touching "In Memoriam", next article.

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Updates and Erratum

We have updated our charts to include more schools and highlight more women CIOs among the top performers.

Also, the University of Virginia earned ten and five-year returns of 10.1% and 6.6% (not 8.10% and 5.80% as we first reported) for June 30, 2020.

We have made the changes to our charts and added Emory University, Phillips Academy Andover, Grinnell College, University of Toronto, and University of Western Ontario.

See: Endowment Returns 2020, Strange Days for updated charts and rankings.

-- Charles Skorina

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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