Home - Charles Skorina & Company Charles Skorina & Company

Charles Skorina & Company

● RETAINED EXECUTIVE SEARCH ●

We recruit Board Members, Chief Investment Officers and Senior Asset Managers
for endowments, foundations, family offices and institutional investment firms

ABOUT

THE SKORINA LETTER : Sign-up
News & Research for Institutional Investors

SEARCHES

President & Chief Investment Officer: Large multi-asset manager, western U.S.

Director Private Markets: Casey Family Programs, $2.3bn Fdn, NYC/Seattle

Scott Wilson, from Grinnell to Washington U

Washington University lands a prime Chief Investment Officer

See: http://www.charlesskorina.com/?p=5094

Christine Kelleher, new CIO at National Gallery of Art

Ms. Kelleher, Avec Capital assumes chief investment officer role on Sept 5^th. Prior: 13 yrs Georgetown U, 8 yrs consulting & management focused on central European studies. MA Georgetown, BA Bucknell.

Nick Moakes, promoted to CIO at $29bn Wellcome Trust

Mr. Moakes, Managing Partner, assumes CIO role on Oct 1^st. Ex: BlackRock, NatWest, SG Warburg, Foreign and Commonwealth Office. MA, Balliol College, Oxford

Britt Harris, an Aggie comes home

Mr. Harris, new president, CEO and chief investment officer at UTIMCO, caps his career with a move from the $140bn Texas Teacher Retirement System to $40bn University of Texas Investment Management Co. starting Aug 1, 2017. Ex Bridgewater, ex Verizon, ex ABB and TX Utilities. BA, Texas A&M of course.

__________________________________

SKORINA IN THE NEWS

1-26-17 Harvard Crimson: Harvard Management Company to Lay Off Half Its Staff

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/1/26/hmc-layoff-staff/

1-26-17 Boston Globe: MIT’s endowment posts fourth-best returns

https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/01/26/mit-endowment-posts-fourth-best-returns/YErvAo2hVqwCSBR5wH1AFO/story.html

1-25-17 The New York Times: Harvard Makes Changes in Managing a Lagging Endowment

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/business/harvard-endowment-management-changes.html

1-25-17 Financial Times: Harvard’s $36bn endowment to hire external managers

https://www.ft.com/content/64711864-e32d-11e6-8405-9e5580d6e5fb

12-14-16 Washington Post: A sure sign you should ditch your money manager

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/12/14/a-sure-sign-you-should-ditch-your-money-manager/

Top endowment chief investment officers and the road ahead

This letter looks at the most recent five-year performance of over one hundred of the world’s best university endowment chief investment officers.

We rank their returns, review their performance, and reveal their strategies for the decade ahead.

Endowment chief investment officers (and other non-profit CIOs) have an infinite investment horizon, a global playing field, and can invest in anything anywhere - within the broad policy limits set by their institution. They are the top guns of the institutional investment world.

We recruit these investment heads for endowments, foundations, family offices and institutional investment firms. And, we (and many others) regard the CIOs at major American universities and foundations as the best of the best.

A CIO candidate may have a sterling character, a stunning intellect, and a winning smile. Those things do count. But will he or she make money for our clients?

Recruiting a high-profile investment executive is a complex process, but it starts with objective measurements.

We compile the information presented in this report for internal use to help us as recruiters, and we think it will be useful to boards, trustees, CEOs and all our readers.

Chief investment officers “make things happen.” Security selection, manager selection, timing, and fees play an important role in investment performance - allocations don’t explain everything!

We also uncover the emergence of a new consensus around a 60/40 – alternatives/public markets – portfolio, even as we report on the embarrassing success of the old 60/40 stocks/bonds

This is our SEER report: Skorina's Enhanced Endowment Report. The enhancements are the names and returns of individual CIOs (or OCIOs), data which are not readily available elsewhere.

If you need further information, or help with hiring decisions, please call on us anytime.

Now, on with the show:

Pay and Chief Investment Officers

Last month in Part One of this report we focused on relative performance. We ranked 107 CIOs by trailing 5-year returns.

See: http://www.charlesskorina.com/?p=4828

Now, we focus on how much institutions pay these excellent people.

The bare comp numbers lead us to the tricky and perennial question of whether their pay is properly aligned to their performance (or vice-versa), and we offer some analysis and opinion from the point of view of working headhunters.

We also consider the cost of an OCIO firm relative to an in-house CIO-led investment office.

Now, on to the charts! (See full article for CIO comp charts.)

Size matters: bigger firms pay more … way more!

In the larger corporate world CEO pay is an object of great interest and controversy for obvious reasons. But the relationship of size to compensation looks just like what we see in our set of endowment CIO data.

Kevin Hallock at Cornell University is one of the go-to experts in this field. He’s chair of their department of Labor Economics and director of their Institute for Compensation Studies. In papers with his students and colleagues he’s studied CEO pay for many years.

He says: “It doesn’t matter whether company size is measured as assets, market value, sales revenue or number of employees — bigger firms pay more … way more.”

“We can isolate the impact of all kinds of other characteristics (e.g., industry, return on assets, profitability, research and development expense, etc.) and even use complicated statistical techniques to remove the influence of “unmeasureable” characteristics, and the size-to-pay link remains intact.”

This isn’t just crony capitalists taking care of their board-room buddies, either. The same relationships are found in non-profits (e.g., endowments and foundations) and labor unions.

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 San Francisco.

Download vCard

Contact