Charles Skorina & Company
● RETAINED EXECUTIVE SEARCH ●
Our clients: visionary families, transformative nonprofits, Wall Street trailblazers
Our vision: build investment preeminence, create opportunity, enrich lives
Our work: provide talent, access, relationships, and insights
LATEST NEWSLETTER
Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong — Howard Marks
Our latest fiscal year-end 2024 endowment performance report features ten-year and one-year returns, and AUM for one-hundred-thirty-nine US and eight Canadian institutions, the latest available.
In our line of work, acquiring talent and capabilities for institutional and family office clients, we like hard data on the individuals who drive the investment decisions. Returns may be historical, but they are useful clues to an investor’s – and board’s – views, process, and discipline.
We consider a ten-year span to be a rigorous and revealing measure of the strength of an institution’s long-term investment abilities, but we remind our readers that there’s much more to the story.
Board members and administrators set the parameters for investment execution, and they are the ones to judge whether their goals are met. Every school has its own endowment payout rate and tolerance for risk and that’s what CIOs aim for. Some schools rely heavily on income, others place more weight on growing the principal.
A tale of two markets
For those institutions holding substantial U.S. public equity stakes life is sweet. As Chris Markoch at MarketBeat writes, the S&P was up twenty-three percent in 2024, “driven by earnings growth and sector leaders in AI, biopharma, and blue-chip companies.”
Sometimes it’s best to run with the herd, to paraphrase our Mr. Marks. But for endowments with heavy exposure to alts, particularly private equity, there were challenges.
PE has performed well for forty years. But there are periods when the economy tanks, deals stagnate, and returns to investors slow to a trickle.
Here’s Peter Lynch’s droll take on fickle Mr. Market, and a few partisan comments on PE from Alisa Amarosa Wood and Chris Harrington, partners at KKR, and Ludovic Phalippou, professor of Financial Economics at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.
Opposing pundits aside, we take comfort in the chart below, a cheerful visual we ran in September’s newsletter from MFS investment Management depicting the S&P’s bumps and grinds.
S&P 500 Index cumulative returns for 1-, 5-, and 10-year periods following end of bear market
Tenure and Turnover
What a difference a decade makes. Only about a third of the CIOs in our FY2024 endowment investment report logged ten years or more tenure, and those are mostly the ones on top.
Mr. Philip Zecher, CIO at Michigan State University, and our featured guest below, will soon pass the ten year mark and the endowment’s splendid performance reflects his time and attention.
Chief investment officers new to the position, Ms. Geeta Kapadia at Fordham for example, barely have time to roll up their sleeves and grab a pitchfork. It takes five years at least to clear, plough, and seed an endowment, and five more to fully bear fruit.
College endowments consist of thousands of gifts with strings and legally binding contracts attached. To repeat a well-worn trope, 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, court battles – can sap performance for a decade.
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Phil Zecher, chief investment officer
Michigan State University
Read More »NEWS AND COMMENTARY
ABOUT
Mark L. Baumgartner, new CEO/CIO University of Florida Investment Corp
Katharine “K.C.” Krieger, new CIO at The Getty
x CIO, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation , x Cambridge Associates, BA Colby College
Vincent Tuohey, next president PRINCO
13yrs MITMCo, 2yrs Littlejohn & Co. 4yrs US Army Captain (Iraq), BA & MBA Harvard, MA Cambridge U
Scott Chan, succeeds Chris Ailman as CIO of CalSTRS
SKORINA IN THE NEWS
9-2-21 Forbes: Insiders say Yale missed an opportunity to add diversity to its iconic $31bn endowment.
9-1-21 Institutional Investor: How to Reach the Allocator C-Suite.
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
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.
Leadership matters
Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality —Warren Bennis
Chief investment officers are C-suite executives. They manage a business that generates revenue and supports an enterprise. Be it OCIO, endowment, or family office, investment leadership matters.
We recruit these executives and facilitate OCIO selections so we pay attention to who they are, what they do, and how well they do it. Here are a few observations.
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, describes leadership as “a consistent voice, a clear purpose, a coherent strategy, and a long-term view.” McKinsey defines leadership as “enabling others to accomplish something they couldn’t do on their own.” Jon Hirtle, executive chairman Hirtle Callaghan and former Marine Corps officer, considers leadership “the noble cause – serving the client.”
The authors of “What Makes a Great Leader,” list three qualities as key – architects, bridgers, and catalysts. “As architects, they build the culture and capabilities for co-creation. As bridgers, they curate and enable networks of talent inside and outside their organizations to co-create. And as catalysts, they lead beyond their organizational boundaries to energize and activate co-creation across entire ecosystems.”
Myra Drucker’s prolific CIO academy
Some years ago we spoke with Myra Drucker, the former chief investment officer of the Xerox corporate pension group, and wrote about her impressive internal CIO training program.
Notable alumni include Joseph Boateng, CIO of Casey Family Programs Foundation, MaDoe Htun, CIO of the William Penn Foundation, former endowment CIO’s Mary Cahill and Matthew Wright of Emory and Vanderbilt respectively (and founders of OCIO firms Acansas and Disciplina).
Mr. Boateng recalled that “Myra told all of us in the investment office that she would consider her job a success if she accomplished just two objectives: first, meet her performance targets for the pension fund; and second, develop all of us so well that each of us could go on to become a CIO. She is a role model I still look up to.”
When we asked Ms. Drucker for the secret to her CIO sauce, she answered this way: “First, obviously, you hire the best people you can find. Every hiring decision should be a big deal that gets your full attention.
“Then, push them. Make them stretch and take on new assignments. I rotated my people among asset classes. Nobody just sits at a fixed-income desk without ever having to deal with equities or alternatives. For every asset class and major initiative, I made sure there were two team-members assigned: a lead and a back-up.
“But it goes beyond just portfolio management. Everybody is exposed to the operational and administrative tasks. Everybody has to understand fund accounting.
“I know that some fund managers think they should be the sole interface with the board or trustees, and reserve that job to themselves. I think that’s a mistake. I made sure my people were in meetings with the board members and made presentations to them. “Managing” a board is a key, make-or-break skill for a fund manager, but if you’re not taught how to do it, how can you ever operate on that level?”
Time and money
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