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
I never wanted this for you. We just ran out of time, Vito Corleone ― The Godfather
Our spring 2025 Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO) directory update features one-hundred-eleven service providers with pertinent particulars on each. We include names, numbers, emails, and titles of business executives at each firm ready to take your call.
Our goal is to help families and institutions locate, review, and connect with full-service discretionary outsource investment managers. Our directory makes it easy for prospective clients to reach them. No ads, no paywall, no charge.
Time and Money
Time is a beguiling thing. “The relative progression of existence” posited Einstein. “Mostly a human affair” adds theoretical physicist John Kitching. But for the rest of us, aging is more akin to Hemingway’s famous line, “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Succession, like the passage of time, is something most families and institutions are aware of, but surprisingly few do much about it.
To be fair, sometimes age and events disrupt the best laid plans. A few weeks ago, I met with a notable, highly successful founder and entrepreneur who wished to discuss recruiting a new family office head. Due to this individual’s distinctive longevity, past occupants in the position are no longer with us.
This patriarch is still sharp as a tack and busy juggling ideas and opportunities, but time is short, there’s much to do, and the odds of replacing a time-tested veteran with a like-minded newbie and bringing this fresh hire up to speed in months, not years, are growing longer by the day.
Planning ahead
In the OCIO business it takes years to establish a presence, polish services, and build a solid investment record. Few firms manage the task. Even fewer adapt, revitalize, and deliver across generations.
Recent years have seen a steady stream of outsourcing hopefuls merge with better-resourced patrons as founders age out and cash in. Recent capitulants include Hall Capital, NEPC, Agility, Truvvo, Ellwood Associates, New Providence, CornerStone, PFM, and Permit Capital.
But now and then a firm manages the transition. Hirtle Callaghan, a pioneering OCIO serving philanthropic families and mission-driven nonprofits, opened for business thirty-seven years ago and recently finished fine-tuning their plans for the next fifty years.
Jon Hirtle remains Executive Chairman and works full-time, but the firm has transitioned to a distributed leadership structure with firm-wide support to provide stability and continuity. A three-member management committee now leads the firm, buttressed by ten managing directors and thirty directors.
While controlling interest remains within the Hirtle family – two generations of family members currently in leadership positions – the firm continues to parse out equity and mentor next-gen talent.
There were a few twists and turns along the way, but clients are pleased and the future looks bright.
The sunny side
It turns out, when time flies by, we’re usually having fun. That’s according to a University of Nevada, Las Vegas report.
“We tell time in our own experience by things we do, things that happen to us,” said James Hyman, a UNLV associate professor of psychology and the study’s senior author. “When we’re still and we’re bored, time goes very slowly because we’re not doing anything or nothing is happening.
On the contrary, when a lot of events happen, each one of those activities is advancing our brains forward. And if this is how our brains objectively tell time, then the more that we do and the more that happens to us, the faster time goes.”
In other words, we can choose between a seemingly short but fruitful life, or one long boring slog. Me, I think I’ll fruitfully keep on recruiting.
― Charles Skorina
(download OCIO Directory only as PDF)
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
2-19-25 Institutional Investor: Most endowment returns aren’t high enough to cover universities’ costs
11-15-24 Institutional Investor: Nokia taps mercer to navigate evolving corporate pensions
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.
The 8% solution
Activity is the enemy of investment returns —Warren Buffett
Endowment board members tell us their schools must earn at least eight percent on average to support operations and administration, student aid, and capital conservation. Unfortunately, that’s a tough nut to crack based on recent performance.
Only forty-two of the one-hundred-nineteen funds over one billion AUM in our latest FY2024 endowment performance report achieved eight percent or more over the most recent ten-year period. Roughly one third. The average return for the entire group was seven-point-seven percent.
Even worse, just one of twenty-two endowments between five hundred million and one billion in our report beat the eight percent hurdle. Sadly, those are usually the ones that most need the income.
NACUBO-Commonfund will publish their annual report in a few weeks and we will see how their endowment universe performed. But for FY 2023 NACUBO reported an average return of seven-point-seven percent net of fees for all participating schools. Not much has changed.
The NACUBO chart below shows the volatility of 10-yr returns year by year from 2002.
Here’s the problem: over the last three decades most large endowments have tried to mimic the “Yale model.” But there was only one David Swensen, and he was an outlier, a different thinker, a trailblazer and his first book was called Pioneering Portfolio Management for good reason. It was all new stuff. Forget public markets. Spend your time uncovering private opportunities with less visibility and more upside. And get in early.
The School of Swensen produced many top-flight acolytes, but the master is gone and the world has changed. Today that trail he cut through the wilderness has become a freeway and the endowment model is a very crowded trade. Let’s let Mr. Swensen explain the conundrum.
I figured out when I revised Pioneering Portfolio Management that the most important distinction isn’t between the institutional investor and the individual. It’s between those that are set up to make high-quality active management decisions and those that aren’t.
The investment management world is a strange place in that the right solution is not in the middle. The right solution is at one extreme or the other. One end of the spectrum is being intensively active. The other is being completely passive.
If you end up in the middle, which is where almost everybody is, you pay way too much in fees and end up getting subpar returns . . . The passive group is not nearly as big as it should be. Almost everybody should be there.
First level thinking
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