Charles Skorina & Company
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LATEST NEWSLETTER
Making money is art –Andy Warhol
Today’s newsletter is short and mostly sweet. First, helpful hints on building great boards and investment teams, but then some doubts on how much longer it might matter as bot-views and agentic overlords commandeer portfolio management.
Board work matters
A pithy primer on Washington University’s remarkable investment resurgence posted recently on LinkedIn. Clark Hoover, investment officer at the Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System read our report on the WashU endowment board’s laudable work and thoughtfully excerpted key dos and don’ts for his nonprofit peers.
When insights come our way – from in-depth interviews with industry veterans, for example – we feel obliged to pass them on to our savvy readers. As ‘frontier’ novelist Louis L’Amour wrote “Knowledge is like money: To be of value it must circulate.”
“What the best boards do:
- Stay aligned and engaged — committed, collaborative, and focused on long-term success.
- Keep governance lean — typically 5–7 members, low turnover, and average board tenure of 10+ years.
- Provide strategic clarity — establish clear objectives, define expectations for the investment team, and evaluate and compensate staff objectively.
- Focus on governance, not management — the board owns strategic asset allocation while empowering investment staff to execute.
What weaker boards tend to do:
- Overcrowd the boardroom — too many voices, high turnover, and excessive micromanagement.
- Send mixed signals — discourage prudent risk-taking while expecting outsized returns.
- Underinvest in talent — reluctance to pay competitively often leads to weaker performance and higher staff turnover.
Strong governance doesn’t guarantee strong investment results—but weak governance makes results much harder to achieve.”
One reader noted, however, that public pensions often have slots set aside for government and union representatives which crowd the boardroom. When it comes to public plans and their financial sway, everyone wants a seat at the table.
Iconoclasts are few and far between and CIOs on many campuses have little room to run, even when they want to. So, if most institutional portfolios look and act the same, why not just give in to AI and the algorithms? It’s cheaper, easier, and when something goes wrong, blame it on those ghosts in the machines.
Sophisticated quant strategies proliferate on Wall Street, ETFs have taken over Main Street, and AI chatbots and robo-advisors swarm financial services. In the world of HR and talent acquisition, algorithms and predictive tools are here in force and impact hiring and career advancement.
Our cyber symbiotes don’t just ease the workload they free us from the tyranny of choice. Decisions without responsibility or regret, every bureaucrat’s dream.
But there are always tradeoffs. Disruptive innovation hits hard and the effects can be brutal. As the automobile swept America, replacing the real life power of horses, entire industries collapsed. Stables, blacksmiths, harness makers, feed suppliers, auction houses, investors; so many livelihoods gone.
So, here’s my worry. These AI dislocations affect perception as well as reality. With deepfakes and synthetic friends, hallucinations and digital shadows, it’s hard to know what part of our digital collective is real.
Financial advisors, analysts, CIOs, all those corporal inhabitants in our world of finance and asset management, in ten years’ time will they still be human? Investing is all about trust and responsibility. AI doesn’t care.
—Charles Skorina
Read More »NEWS AND COMMENTARY
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Adela Skenderasi, new CIO, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
Brendon Reay, new MD investments Bush Foundation
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
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.
Washington University: movin’ on up
Diversification is protection against ignorance; it makes little sense if you know what you are doing. —Warren Buffett (1996 annual meeting)
How boards and investment offices make all the difference
Janet Lorin, Bloomberg News, reported recently that Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) could see an astonishing 3000 percent return on their endowment’s $50 million dollar investment in SpaceX.
When asked how this came about, Scott Wilson, WashU’s prescient chief investment officer said, “We try to find really great partners and do interesting things. When they find something that is super attractive we try to add capital to those individual ideas.”
[For a more substantive reveal, here’s a recent interview with Mr. Wilson, courtesy of Ted Seides, Capital Allocators]
No free lunch
There has been a perceptible shift the last few years away from broadly diversified asset-class constructs toward more concentrated portfolios.
Jagdeep Singh Bachher, Ph.D. and chief investment officer at the University of California regents, wrote in UC’s 2025 annual report that his staff intends to invest in fewer, higher quality, top-performing assets.
“Experience has shown us the value of lean, high-performance teams working collaboratively to manage a concentrated, high-conviction portfolio.
We’ve greatly reduced the number of external managers we use and the number of line items on our books. That makes it easier to understand what we own, especially in a crisis, and gives us fewer decisions to make.
The result is a small, agile team laser-focused on areas where we can outperform the market.”
Boards matter
Concentration and high conviction are all well and good, but how many university trustees have the fortitude to weather unruly markets? As it is, the double-edged attacks on university budgets from research cuts and endowments taxes have put schools in serious binds.
Richard J. Chang, reporting for FundFire (an FT service), noted recently that large endowments contribute on average about ten percent to university budgets, (source: Christian Tiu, associate professor of finance at the University at Buffalo School of Management).
However, some schools lean on their endowment for much greater support, in Princeton’s case for example, sixty-five percent of the 2026-27 operating budget.
Mr. Wilson’s winning ways
Embracing risk is a hard sell on campus these days.
As a former Wall Street trader, fly-over college CIO, and staunch individualist, how many schools would have hired Mr. Wilson as chief investment officer do you suppose? When, by our latest count, nearly two-thirds of university CIOs come from peer group endowments.
Fortunately, the WashU trustees spotted a winner and signed him up. And thanks to Mr. Wilson and his investment team, the endowment has moved from fourth to top quartile and even top decile since Scott joined in late Q4 2017.
In our latest endowment performance report, WashU ranked seventh out of one-hundred twenty-two schools over one billion AUM for the ten-year period ending June 30, 2025, doubling in size on Mr. Wilson’s watch from roughly seven billion to over fifteen billion dollars while maintaining a yearly distribution of four to five percent.
The rest of the story . . . (Paul Harvey 1918 – 2009, ABC News Radio)
How WashU built a winning team.
The Washington University in St. Louis endowment had been underperforming its peer group for years and by 2016 the trustees had had enough.
So, the President and board forged a commitment to pursue whatever measures necessary to build a preeminent investment organization – keenly aware that better returns add millions, even billions, to school coffers over time.
In 2016, while he was still CIO of Makena (OCIO), the WashU board asked Eric Upin, an alumnus, university trustee, board chair of the investment management company (and former Stanford CIO) to serve as Interim CIO and Chair of the Search Committee – with emphasis on restructuring portfolio strategy, the investment team, board governance, compensation, and retention.
As a Trustee with full-on university support, Mr. Upin wielded a forceful writ.
The IMC board began their transformation with unvarnished self-reflection and concluded that tentative, short-term thinking was part of their problem. This, in turn, had led to conflicted guidance and mixed signaling to the investment staff.
The board asked:
During the year and a half period before hiring Scott Wilson, the board studied the qualities and characteristics of top-performing endowments and portfolios, as well as those that consistently underperformed or fell out of the elite class.
In total, the board spent five years working on governance, compensation, and liquidity management.
Lessons learned
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