The Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System (PSERS) is attempting to sell a significant portion of its stakes in various private equity funds.
The pension fund is looking to sell off $2 billion of such investments, a total that amounts to about 22 percent of its private equity holdings.
PSERS is putting the stakes up for sale to cash in on high prices.
From Bloomberg:
Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System is offering about $2 billion of private-equity fund stakes for sale after prices for such investments reached the highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis
The $53.3 billion system, known as Psers, hired Dallas-based investment bank Cogent Partners to manage the sale process, said three people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The amount for sale is less than a quarter of the plan’s $8.7 billion private-equity holdings as of June 30.
“We are considering a secondary sale since we are overweight in our long-term allocation to private equity and have been since coming out of the financial crisis,” said Evelyn Tatkovski Williams, a spokeswoman at the plan.
The pension system’s level of private-market investments was near its 21 percent target as of June 30, according to data on the Psers website. Private markets includes private equity, private debt and venture capital.
Bill Murphy, a managing director at Cogent in New York, declined to comment on the sale process.
The pension plan reported a net investment return of 3.3 percent for private markets during the quarter ended June 30 and 14 percent for the latest fiscal year.
PSERS manages $53.3 billion in assets and is 63.8 percent funded.
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