Ted Ballantine | Pension360

Chicago Fund Looks To Fill New Deputy Executive Director Position

The Chicago Public School Teachers’ Pension & Retirement Fund has created a new “deputy executive director” position and is looking for someone to fill it.

The job listing reads:

DEPUTY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR RESPONSIBILITIES

The Deputy Executive Director will report to the Executive Director and provide support in leadership of functional departments that support Fund operations. The Deputy Executive Director will be actively involved in strategic planning activities. The Deputy Executive Director will advise the Executive Director, Trustees, and other management personnel regarding operational and planning matters.

Key areas of responsibility will include, but will not be limited to: assuring confidentiality, integrity and availability of information and information systems throughout CTPF; ensuring, along with the CFO, fiscal integrity and proper reporting, including the CAFR and budget preparation; planning/coordinating departmental goals and objectives; workforce planning, hiring, evaluating and developing staff; and monitoring Fund operations for compliance with regulations, internal controls and industry best practices.

[…]

REQUIREMENTS

Viable candidates will have significant leadership experience within a public pension system, financial services organization, or other customer service-oriented organization; solid staff management experience; solid fiscal management, budgeting and planning skills; strong project management skills, specifically related to IT initiatives; experience managing external relationships, including legislative ones; working knowledge of institutional investment concepts; and, an understanding of actuarial concepts. An advanced degree is strongly preferred.

FOR MORE INFORMATION / TO APPLY

For more information, or to apply, contact:

Lorraine Gallick

Research Associate

EFL ASSOCIATES

lgallick@eflassociates.com

According to Pensions & Investments, the fund is looking to fill the position by January 1.

The job listing can be found here.

CalPERS Chooses Firm to Manage $200 Million Private Equity Commitment

CalPERS announced Wednesday that it had chosen a firm to run its new $200 million private equity emerging manager commitment. The firm: GCM Grosvenor.

From Reuters:

Calpers said the new program would launch by the end of the year via a fund-of-funds vehicle. The pension fund would also invest $100 million in AGI Resmark Housing Fund, LLC, a San Francisco Bay Area-focused multi-family residential apartment development fund.

Calpers considers itself a leader in developing and implementing newly formed firms or firms raising first- or second-time funds, called emerging manager programs. Since 2010, the pension fund has committed $900 million to these types of funds.

Grosvenor, a large independent alternative asset management firm, manages approximately $47 billion in assets and multiple emerging manager programs for large institutional investors, including public pension plans and corporate plans.

San Francisco-based AGI Capital is an emerging manager-led real estate investment company that focuses on enhancing communities while delivering strong market returns for investors and partners.

CalPERS has invested $12 billion with emerging managers since 1991.

Dan Primack: All Alternatives Are Not Created Equal

Pension funds have been receiving flak from all sides lately regarding alternative investments.

The criticisms have been varied: the high fees, opacity, underperformance and illiquidity.

But, outside of official statements from pension staff defending their investments, it’s not often we get to here from the people on the other side of the argument.

Dan Primack argues in a column this week that not all alternatives are created equal—and the fight against the asset class has been “oversimplified”.

From Fortune:

Hedge funds are considered to be “alternative investments.” So is private equity. And venture capital. And sometimes so is real estate, timber and certain types of commodities.

A number of public pension systems have increased their exposure to “alternatives” in recent years, at the same time that they either have curtailed (or threatened to curtail) payouts to pensioners. The official line is that the former is to prevent more of the latter, but many critics believe Wall Street is getting rich at the expense of modest retirees.

The complaint, however, generally boils down to this: Alternatives have underperformed the S&P 500 in recent years, even though many alternative funds charge higher fees than would a public equities index fund manager. In other words, state pensions are overpaying for underperformance.

Great bumper sticker. Lousy understanding of investment strategies.

The simple reality is that not all alternatives are created equal. Some, like private equity, are more tightly correlated to public equities than are others. Some are designed to chase public equities in bull markets without collapsing alongside them (that’s where the name “hedge” name from). Real estate is largely its own animal. Same goes for certain oil and gas partnerships.

Lumping all of them together because of fee strategies makes as much sense as arguing that a quarterback should be paid the same as an offensive lineman. After all, they both play football, right?

Primack uses New Jersey as an example:

For those who want to criticize public pensions for investing in alternatives, be specific. New Jersey, for example, reported alternative investment performance of 14.21% for the year ending June 30, 2014. That trailed the S&P 500 for the same period, which came in at 21.38% (or the S&P 1500, which came in at 16.99%). But that alternatives number is a composite of private equity (23.7%), hedge funds (10.2%), real estate (12.74%) and real assets/commodities (6.12%). The sub-asset class most tightly correlated to public equities actually outperformed the S&P 500 (net of fees).

Would New Jersey pensioners have been better off without private equity? Clearly not for that time period. Having avoided real estate or hedge funds, however, would be a different argument. But even that case is tough to prove until New Jersey’s relatively immature alternatives program experiences a bear market. For example, both hedge funds and the S&P 500 went red last month, but the S&P 500’s loss was actually a bit worse. And macro hedge fund managers actually had positive returns. Does that make up for years of the S&P 500 outperforming hedge? Likewise, should real estate performance receive an indirect bump from recent rises in venture capital performance, just because they are both “alternatives?”

Again, that’s a judgment call that should be based on voluminous data, rather than on knee-jerk anger that alternative money managers are getting paid while retiree benefits are getting cut. If alternative managers are helping to stem the severity of those cuts, then everyone wins. If not, then the state pension needs a change in policy. But, in either case, the specific alternative sub-asset classes should be analyzed on their own merits, rather than as one homogeneous bucket. Otherwise, critics may throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Read the entire column here.

Photo by 401kcalculator.org

CalPERS Board Member Faces Quadrupled Fine After Repeatedly Failing To Disclose Campaign Finances

CalPERS board member Priya Mathur failed to turn in campaign finance and conflict of interest statements in 2002, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013.

She’s been fined numerous times, but her next one is going to be bigger the biggest yet: the panel that levies the fines has agreed to quadruple Mathur’s latest fine, from $1000 to $4000. From the Sacramento Bee:

The Fair Political Practices Commission plans to impose a $4,000 fine at its Oct. 16 meeting. Mathur has agreed to the fine, according to FPPC documents.

The agency’s staff had proposed a $1,000 fine for Mathur’s most recent violation, in which she failed to file campaign finance statements on time. But the commissioners decided at their August meeting that Mathur’s repeat offenses warranted a penalty of $4,000. The fine comes to $1,000 for each of the four campaign finance statements that she was late in filing.

In a Sacramento Bee interview earlier this summer, she blamed the latest problems on a paperwork snafu. But FPPC staff said it took “numerous requests” from investigators to get Mathur to finally submit the documents.

Mathur last week was declared the winner, based on preliminary results, in her bid for re-election. An official with the Bay Area Rapid Transit district, Mathur will serve another four-year term starting in January.

Mathur has been fined $13,000 by the Comission during her time on the CalPERS board.

Florida Pension Cuts PIMCO

In the latest vote of non-confidence in a post-Bill Gross PIMCO, the Florida State Board of Administration (SBA), the entity that manages investments for the Florida Retirement Systems, has announced it will drastically cut its investments with PIMCO.

From the New York Times:

The investment body overseeing the state of Florida’s retirement system said Tuesday that it would be sharply curtailing the funds that it has allocated to the shaken bond giant.

In a statement, Dennis Mackee, a spokesman for the $147 billion pension fund, said that $1.9 billion in assets managed by PIMCO as a separate investment account for Florida would be “significantly reduced.”

Mackee also said that Florida’s investment plan would be terminating PIMCO’s Total Return Fund and its Inflation Response Multi-Asset Strategy Fund. Together, the funds managed just over $1 billion for Florida retirees.

Adding insult to injury, Mackee said that this money would be steered toward two funds belonging to PIMCO’s archrival, BlackRock.

Mackee said that Blackrock would also be one of several other money managers receiving the separate account money withdrawn from PIMCO.

As with many state retirement funds, Florida had put PIMCO on its watch list after reports that its two leaders, Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian, were feuding.

The Florida Retirement System is one of the largest public pension funds in the United States. It manages $147 billion.

Would An Elected Comptroller Ease New Jersey’s Pension Pain?

Fixing New Jersey’s pension system has been the talk of the state lately, and as far as ideas go, all the usual suspects have been proposed: cutting benefits, making full actuarial contributions, transferring new hires into a 401(k)-style plan, etc.

One idea that is rarely discussed is the creation of a model similar to New York: the appointment of a comptroller to oversee and have authority over the pension system.

Under this model, the comptroller would take significant authority out of the governor’s hands regarding pension matters.

This hypothetical comptroller, if he wished, could have overridden Chris Christie’s decision to cut the state’s pension payments. More analysis from NJ Spotlight:

While New Jersey governors and legislatures have been cutting, skipping, or underfunding pension payments for the past 20 years, New York does not have a similar pension crisis because its elected state comptroller has the power not only to set the actuarially required pension payment each year, but also to require Albany’s governor and Legislature to fully fund it, according to a senior Moody’s Investors Service analyst.

New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli is required to calculate the state’s pension payment by October 15 to give the governor’s office and legislative branch sufficient time to include his calculation in the budget for the fiscal year that begins the following June 30. That amount is then required to be paid into the state’s pension systems on or before March 1 — three months before the end of the fiscal year.

“In New York, the state comptroller is responsible for the entire pension system,” Robert Kurtter, Moody’s Managing Director for U.S. Public Finance, explained at a forum on pension funding at Kean University last week. “The comptroller’s power to require full pension funding has been litigated and upheld by New York’s highest Court of Appeals.

“The New York Legislature tried to underfund the actuarially required contribution, but couldn’t,” Kurtter said. “It’s a two-edged sword for New York. Their unfunded liability is low, but they don’t have a choice, even when revenues are down.”

The soundness of New York’s pension system is one of the principal reasons that the state enjoys a AA1 bond rating from Moody’s — one of 30 states in the top two rating categories — while Illinois and New Jersey are the nation’s fiscal basket cases, the only two states with lower-tier single-A bond ratings. While New York was upgraded this year, New Jersey’s bond rating has been downgraded a record eight times under Gov. Chris Christie.

But creating a comptroller position and giving it authority is a politically tricky process – because it involves not only amending the constitution, but also taking away significant power from the state’s governor. From NJ Spotlight:

New Jersey’s governor has more power over state spending than any other governor. New Jersey’s governor has unilateral authority to determine the revenue projections that determine the size of the budget — which Christie has consistently overestimated, as previous governors have when it met their political needs.

New Jersey’s governor also has the ability to make midyear budget cuts without seeking legislative approval — as Christie did when he retroactively changed the pension formula in March and cut $900 million in Fiscal Year 2014 pension payments in May.

Adding an elected state comptroller or state treasurer or establishing an ironclad requirement that the state make its actuarially required contributions to the pension system annually would require a constitutional amendment. The Democratic-controlled Legislature would need the governor’s signature to pass a new law, but not to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot — a strategy it used to bypass Christie on the minimum wage last year and on guaranteed funding for open space this fall.

Last spring, Christie cut $2.4 billion in payments to the pension system and diverted it to help balance the state’s general budget.

What Types of People Should Manage Institutional Money?

What traits does it take to be a successful manager of institutional money? A high IQ? A steady temperament? A penchant for going on lucky streaks?

Jack Gray, of the Paul Woolley Centre for Capital Market Dysfunctionality at University of Technology, Sydney, dives deep into this question in a recent article published in the Rotman International Journal of Pension Management.

From the article:

Successful investors are likely to be overweight on several the following traits:

• A paradoxical blend of arrogance, to discover and arbitrage opportunities ahead of the market, and humility, to simultaneously be skeptical about those discoveries.

• A commitment to the principle “know thyself” – for instance, recognizing when previously justified contrarianism has degenerated into unjustified stubbornness.

• The ability to make effective decisions under uncertainty, ambiguity, and pressure. A temperament that seeks comfort and stability will likely be ill-suited to investing.

• The confidence to encourage and absorb dissent yet to know when to act. Almost all organized human endeavors have at their core a paradigm of broadly agreed beliefs, stylized facts, and patterns of thought that impose a uniformity of views.

Ideas that challenge the paradigm tend to be ignored, not absorbed: Markowitz’s thesis was not rated as genuine economics, while Akerlof’s ground-breaking paper on the pricing impact of information asymmetry (Akerlof 1970) was twice rejected. Both eventually won Nobel prizes.

• The wisdom to know when to cooperate, a rare trait in a culture that has elevated competition to quasi-religious status. Much (though not all) investment information is “non-rival,” so that its value increases through sharing, as evident in open-source ventures. Yet by temperament, training, and incentives, many have an antipathy to sharing. In a study that engaged students in a game in which participants do better by cooperating, 60% of general students cooperated while only 40% of economics students did (Frank et al. 1999).

• The self-control to value patience, and so resist the short-term imperative and its eternal concomitant, being busy.

• A willingness to question and be curious, traits lacking in many boards that oversee other people’s money. After spending time embedded in American pension funds, the anthropologists O’Barr and Conley (1992) reported “a surprising lack of interest in questioning and surprisingly little interest in considering alternatives.”

Gray goes on to write that we can put people into two categories: hedgehogs and foxes. And while the investment world has plenty of the former, it is short on the latter. From the article:

Isaiah Berlin (1953) bequeathed us a crude but useful typology of people: hedgehogs view the world through the lens of a single defining, and usually substantial, idea; foxes view it through multiple lenses. Both types are needed in investing, but we are over-populated with hedgehogs who better fit compartmentalized corporate structures and are more fecund. We need more foxes, people with broader perspectives willing to trespass—a notion coined by Albert Hirschman (1981)—into foreign fields.

[…]

Cultural change is needed to recognize, support, and reward foxes, who tend to be spurned by tribal hedgehogs as soft-headed dilettantes. To Charlie Munger (1994), having different mental models is the most important thing in investing, because they expose new opportunities and drive a dialectic of risk. Investment organizations should seek more people with “contrary imaginations,” as the psychologist Liam Hudson (1967) phrases it: people with exceptional intelligence in alternative but meaningful ways; people with intelligence about the humanities, especially history and psychology, the disciplines that underlie and drive markets; people with emotional intelligence to direct and manage others; and people with organizational intelligence to get things done.

Gray provides much more analysis in the full article, which can be read here.

Photo by Nick Wheeler via Flickr CC License

Supreme Court To Hear Case on Excessive 401(k) Fees

Mutual fund fees will soon have their day in the highest court in the land.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case centered on “excessive” fees collected by mutual funds in 401(k) plans. The case will also determine whether there should be a statute of limitations on lawsuits alleging fiduciary breach. From Investment News:

As a landmark 401(k) excessive fees lawsuit makes its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, industry experts say the court’s decision could set off a domino effect of changes — from the process of choosing plan funds to fiduciaries’ ability to obtain liability insurance.

The case in question is the famed Glenn Tibble v. Edison International, a suit originally filed in August 2007 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The original suit centers on six retail mutual funds in Edison’s plan menu, which were offered instead of cheaper institutional share classes.

Though the plaintiffs eventually received a 2010 judgment from the district court, they were granted only $370,732 in damages related to excessive fees in three of the mutual funds. The saga continued as both parties battled over fees, bringing the suit to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case.

Currently, the defendants are arguing a statute of limitations requires that plaintiffs bring a suit alleging fiduciary breach within six years of the last action constituting the breach.

The ruling will have big implications for retirement plans and the people that run them. From Investment News:

Though some ERISA attorneys interpreted the focus on the six-year statute of limitations as a litigation tactic, other retirement industry experts noted that where the court lands on that issue could shape how fiduciaries serve retirement plans and participants.

“The theory of open-ended liability that could be continuing: On the one hand, you might be more protective of participants, but on the other hand, it can limit the degree to which [liability] insurance is written,” said Jason C. Roberts, CEO of the Pension Resource Institute, a retirement plan consulting firm for broker-dealers.

Aside from the statute-of-limitations issue, the retirement industry will likely be shaken to its core given the fact that the highest court in the land is going to address the issue of excessive fees in 401(k)s. Greater attention to fees by the powers that be could tip the scales even more in favor of cheaper retirement plan offerings.

“It depends on what the Supreme Court is going to do: Will they answer the questions of whether there’s a bright line with institutional versus retail funds,” said Marcia Wagner, a managing director of The Wagner Law Group. “If the Supreme Court says something that clearly, I think the entire industry will move in that direction.”

“I think you’ll see the larger plans, and even the small to midsized plans, going institutional,” Ms. Wagner said. “The salient issue for the Tibble case is that the same funds were available in both institutional and retail. What’s the difference that justifies the fees?”

CalPERS Dials Up Real Estate; Will Increase Allocation By 27 Percent

CalPERS has beefed up its real estate portfolio this summer, but the fund is far from finished: by 2016, it plans to increase its real estate holdings by 27 percent.

The pension fund says real estate will largely fill the void left in the wake of its hedge fund exit.

From Bloomberg:

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the biggest U.S. fund, is increasing investments in real estate by about $6 billion within a year as it begins to exit hedge funds.

The $295 billion fund had 8.7 percent in real estate as of July 31. Since then, the allocation has risen to 9.9 percent, and the fund has set a target of 11 percent in fiscal 2016, according to documents posted on its website.

Calpers began restructuring its real estate portfolio after suffering a 37 percent loss in 2010, when it wrote off speculative residential investments as property values slumped. As part of the overhaul, the fund has focused on core income investments such as rental apartments, industrial parks, offices and retail space.

The shift will mean an increase in commercial real-estate investments by 27 percent, the Wall Street Journal reported.

More details on the strategy from the Wall Street Journal:

[CalPERS] is focusing on investments such as fully leased office towers and apartments in big cities, which it argues are safer because there is established demand for these properties. In another shift, the giant pension fund has been investing almost exclusively through real-estate funds that manage separate accounts created for Calpers, which offers more control over how that money is invested.

Some of Calpers’ real-estate consultants are warning that moving too much money into pricey properties could backfire. Pension Consulting Alliance Inc. cautioned in a July report to Calpers not to expect “these increases in value to be sustained when interest rates and new construction starts return to more normalized levels.”

Ted Eliopoulos, Calpers’ recently appointed chief investment officer, changed the fund’s real-estate approach in 2011, when he led that group. Since then, the fund has delivered average annual returns of 14% in its real-estate portfolio. But Mr. Eliopoulos acknowledges the recent high returns are unsustainable.

The fund’s goals now are to diversify its portfolio risk and generate steady, modest gains, rather than striving for outsize returns with more speculative bets, he said. Likewise, Calpers on Sept. 15 said it would shed its $4 billion investment in hedge funds as part of an effort to simplify its assets and reduce costs.

“Our strategy is to focus on high-quality real estate,” Mr. Eliopoulos said. “We’re still on track.”

CalPERS was a large real estate investor in the years before the financial crisis and frequently saw returns of 30 percent or more within the asset class. But the economic downturn led to losses of $10 billion, or 50 percent.

CalPERS’ CIO, Ted Eliopoulos, maintains that the fund learned from those losses and staff plan to make less speculative investments this time around.

San Francisco Pension Fund Votes Today On Whether To Invest in Hedge Funds

San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System (SFERS) will vote later today on whether to invest in hedge funds for the first time.

If the board votes “yes”, the fund will have the ability to allocate up to 15 percent of its assets toward hedge funds. Reported by Bloomberg:

The hedge fund proposal stems from a June meeting when staff recommended changes to the fund’s asset allocation and the board voted to take 90 days to study options. At a meeting last month, staff suggested shifting the allocation to invest 35 percent in global equity, 18 percent in private equity, 17 percent in real assets, 15 percent in fixed income and 15 percent in hedge funds, according to the [fund CIO] Coaker memo.

The retirement system administers a pension plan and a deferred-compensation plan for active and retired employees. Retirement members include those who had worked for the City and County of San Francisco, the San Francisco Unified School District, the San Francisco Community College District and the San Francisco Trial Courts.

Herb Meiberger, a commissioner and retirement board member, last month called for keeping hedge funds out of the mix. Hedge funds are complex, difficult to understand and carry high management fees, he said in a September memo.

“SFERS is a public fund subject to public scrutiny,” Meiberger wrote in the memo. It’s “one of the best-funded plans in the United States. Why change course?”

[…]

The San Francisco fund had $17 billion in assets based on market value and an unfunded liability of 15.9 percent as of July 1, 2013, a decline from 21.1 percent a year earlier, according to its most recent actuarial valuation report.

The chief investment officer of SFERS, William Coaker, recommended approving hedge funds in a memo this month.

“They have provided good protection in market downturns,” he wrote.

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