2021 Industry Innovation Awards

The Next Generation Award

New York State Common Retirement Fund

Evril Clayton Jr., Deputy Director of Global Equity
Evril Clayton Jr.
Photography by Anthony Collins

Evril Clayton’s first experience with investing came when he was just a teenager, watching his parents invest in their own small business in 1996. His parents, who immigrated to the US from Jamaica, decided to create a Caribbean restaurant. 

“It was really successful business,” Clayton said. “But they weren’t aware of what to do with some of those proceeds, which is invest in the capital. They weren’t able to take that money and invest it into the market,”

That missed opportunity, combined with the mentorship of a high school basketball coach who also worked as a financial adviser, made Clayton want to learn more about investing and money management. “As I embarked to college, that was something that gave me a passion for understanding how to invest in other ways than just where my parents had,” he said.

Clayton studied business administration and went on to work as a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch after graduating. After two years there, he transitioned into a senior investment analyst role at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). It was a much smaller pool of funds than what he now manages at the New York State Common Retirement Fund.

“At that time, we were making investments that were $5 million to $10 million, and those were significant for us,” he said. “Here at New York Common Retirement Fund, we have some relationships that are $3 billion to $4 billion. So that became a big adjustment.”

Clayton was hired by New York Common Retirement in 2011 as a special investment officer.  Clayton credits Vicki Fuller, who took over as CIO in 2012, and Anastasia Titarchuk, who was then the deputy CIO, with mentoring him into his current role as deputy director of global equity.

“Working under Anastasia and Vick and receiving that mentorship was really important,” he said. “Even when she wasn’t the CIO, Anastasia would always take time to give me 10 minutes to help me along my way. I think I’ve been really lucky because every job I’ve worked, I’ve had great mentors.”

Clayton has been in his current role for three years, and he counts winning the Next Generation award as one of his career highlights. To win the award, someone must first be nominated by others in the industry. That person is then evaluated by CIOs and interviewed by our reporting staff. Finally, several finalists are selected to answer hotseat-style questions about their investment philosophies in front of the members of the CIO Industry Innovation Awards Dinner audience, who then get to vote on who should win.

“There were some great people on that panel, and it was an honor just to be in consideration with them,” Clayton said. “To actually win is still kind of unbelievable.”

For Clayton, the highlights of the panel were the conversations about risk management, diversity, and climate change. “We all have a similar problem in that we understand that perspective returns going forward are potentially going to be less that what we had over the last five to 10 years,” he said. “I thought it was very interesting to hear the different perspectives about how we’re going to allocate capital to meet that return target.”

Clayton also said that hearing what his peers had to say about environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing and the importance of diversity made him feel optimistic. “To hear all these organizations moving together toward a goal was very exciting for the future,” he said.

As far as his own investing strategy goes, Clayton and the team at New York Common try to use the efficient market hypothesis. The hypothesis states that for assets in which price reflects all information available, it will be impossible to beat the market. Clayton thus generally tries to use a passive allocation in US large-cap equities, where active rarely beats passive anyway.

However, when it comes to parts of the market that may be prone to more inefficiency­­—particularly emerging markets—Clayton relies heavily on active managers. Additionally, within the small-cap US market, Clayton also relies on active strategies.

Nevertheless, Clayton said many of the traditionally inefficient markets are growing to be more efficient by the day, making it slightly more difficult to chase alpha. “We have to be more creative in terms of how we allocate capital to those parts of markets,” he said. “And we’ve done that by looking at factor investing, customizing, indexing, and utilizing some climbing solution overlays to get exposure to parts of markets.”

—Anna Gordon

The Next Generation Award Finalists

  1. Director, Cleveland Clinic Investment Office
    Alex Ambroz
  2. Managing Director, University of Southern California Endowment
    Samantha Foster
  3. Managing Director, Columbia Investment Management Company
    Lauren Jacobson
  4. Managing Analyst, State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB)
    Jason Rector
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