With more than 35 years as a CIO, and 20 at CalSTRS, Ailman is one of the longest-serving and most influential US CIOs. Leading a staff of 190, he is considered one of the top 10 CIOs in the world for his integration of the standards in security analysis and portfolio construction. He was the inaugural chair of the SASB Investor Advisory Group and currently chairs the North American Chapter of the 300 CIO Club, the Milken Global Capital Markets Committee, and the Pacific Center for Asset Management.

With 35 years in the industry, Al-Sa’ad’s influence as board chair and CEO extends across the globe. He is also a board member of BlackRock, Daimler Truck, and the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development. He was a founding member and chair of the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds (IFSWF).

In 2020, the fund had a solid 8.3% return, thanks to its strong equity position (69%) in a year when stocks staged an impressive comeback from a plunge. Tapping the plan’s solid assets, MIT was able to give coronavirus tests to those accessing its campus.

Auby was hired by TRS in 2009 right after the great financial crisis, and he spent 11 years managing risk before taking the CIO helm. Appointed to CIO from within the fund in January 2020, he comes from a background in structured credit at Lehman and fixed income at Goldman Sachs. He is on track to hire 120 new positions between 2018 and 2023, primarily to increase his internal management capabilities. In its first two years, this internal management focus has saved the fund $111 million in fees. In addition, Auby has increased his allocation to private markets and added leverage at the total fund level.

In a year in which many funds pledged to reduce their carbon footprint, Bachher and his team declared that UC’s investment portfolio shed its direct exposure to fossil fuels and met its commitment of investing $1 billion in clean energy projects.

Barrett is a big proponent of teamwork, noting a CIO is only as good as the team and talent he attracts and nurtures. With that in mind, he and his team have undertaken a new strategic direction that has challenged the team from a creative perspective to think outside the box, which has helped it respond to the difficulties in manger underwriting given the pandemic. 

Baumgartner is one of the few CIOs new in his role on the Power 100 list. Emphatically nominated as a thought leader by other CIOs, Baumgartner made a name for himself as CIO at the Institute for Advanced Study by building a high-performing portfolio entirely of alternatives. An actual rocket scientist, he has a Ph.D. and two master’s degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University.

Being based in the Silicon Valley, Bill tries to think like an entrepreneur with institutional resources. He and his team have slowly transformed VTA’s defined benefit (DB) plans from traditional 60/40 allocations to include core real estate, diversified real assets, private credit, and absolute return hedge funds. On a forward-looking basis, he is very bullish on the digitization of the economy and financial assets generally, and the fund has built a small position in Bitcoin, which has grown significantly to represent approximately 0.5% of the plans’ AUM.

After Raphael Arndt was promoted to CEO, Brake was appointed CIO from her post as deputy CIO.

Brown divides the power provider’s portfolio into thirds: equities, fixed income, and alternative investments. One aim of the stock segment is to keep up with inflation. And part of Exelon’s holdings aim to handle the decommissioning of the company’s nuclear power plants.

In the past year, Buk has funded custom strategic partnerships to implement a liquid multi-asset exposure along with some of the fund’s private credit allocation. The strategic partnerships augment the effectiveness of her small team, which includes four other people. Her two-way pension liability-driven investment (LDI) glide path that allowed for re-risking proved to be beneficial in 2020, and her implementation of crossover fixed-income mandates for the plan’s NDT (Nuclear Decommissioning Trust) allowed for consistent expression of tactical views on the relative attractiveness of taxable and non-taxable bonds; this will likely also be helpful if there is a change in tax rates under the Biden administration.

HIERS has a diversifying strategies program with a strong rebalancing aspect. The fund also made updates to its governance structure, which helped it capitalize on new opportunities in Q4 2020 and Q1 2021. Burton is re-evaluating what the fund’s goals are with real assets, as well as post-COVID-19 public market equities and credit. 

Carlson brings 20 years of accumulated CIO experience to his role and has hit his 6.75% target return for 10 years. In 2020, he was able to outperform the public pension median by almost 500 basis point in the first quarter. Also last year, the board delegated manager selection to the staff investment committee (within certain bands).

CPPIB created a CIO role in September and appointed Cass to the role, the first time the fund has had a dedicated chief investment officer. Cass’ priority for the first 100 days was to hear from everyone across the organization, so he embarked on a listening tour to put his biases aside and hear from internal stakeholders. Based on that listening tour, Cass’ team has developed seven key priorities and is laying out a multiyear strategy. His CEO, Mark Machin, resigned in February over a decision to be vaccinated against COVID-19 while on a personal trip to the United Arab Emirates.

By building his in-house investment team, in his short time at GE, Chaudhari has already increased the plan’s funded status from 81% to 85% and achieved strong returns of 17.6%. Chaudhari is the former CIO of IBM and has a background as a software engineer.

Chen and her team navigated the market meltdown that was caused by the global pandemic and employed a “break the glass” plan that enabled quick and deliberate actions. The fund’s venture capital strategy and investment decisions that were implemented roughly a decade ago produced extraordinary gains last year.

The public pension fund helmed by Clark maintains its top ranking with a fully funded status. Clark is a trusted mentor to many CIOs. Despite volatility that caused negative returns for many pension plans by their fiscal year filing dates, Clark’s fund returned 1.6% in fiscal year 2020 (as of its June filing), and has gained 9.4% over one decade and 6.5% over two.

SFERS emphasizes investing in technology, software, the digital transformation, cloud computing, biotech, the United States, and China. In FY 2020, its public equity returned almost 30% and its private equity strategy returned 22%.

Raytheon spun off Carrier and Otis into two separate companies and  completed the merger of the UTC and Raytheon pension plan into a unitized daily valued trust. This included completing asset liability management studies and resulted in new strategic asset allocation policies. Raytheon also increased its hedge ratio by approximately 10% while maintaining expected assets on return. Diamonte continued to fine-tune the fund’s liability-driven investment (LDI) strategy by adding a $600 million securitized credit sleeve to its diversify corporate credit exposure.

Brown has seen remarkable returns over the past several years. In the past fiscal year, the endowment led the Ivies with a 12% return, jumping to $4.7 billion in assets.

Working under the long-serving Scott Malpass, who retired as CIO last June, Donovan (who was Malpass’ roommate when the two were Notre Dame students) oversaw the endowment’s private equity investments. His unit has enjoyed a stellar run. Donovan is known for recruiting and molding teams.

The Ford Foundation is moving forward with impact investing and its mandate to hire diverse managers. Strong CIOs not only drive performing portfolios, but also mentor rising stars. During his tenure at Ford, Doppstadt has had at least four members of his team who moved on to CIO positions, including Kim Lew at Columbia Investment Management Company, Mark Baumgartner at Carnegie Corporation, Jeffrey Gatto at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Devana Cohen at the UJA-Federation.

The NYC Pensions Funds is made up of five separate funds, serving teachers, city employees, police, firefighters, and the board of education. Doñé and his team navigated 2020’s volatility by adhering to their asset allocation targets and opportunistically taking advantage of market dislocation in certain markets such as a credit.

AP4 was early in introducing climate risk into its portfolio and has a strong focus on environmental awareness and sustainability. It posted 9.6% returns for 2020 and its total costs amounted to 0.09% of assets under management. AP4 has cut the carbon footprint of its investments in its listed equities portfolio in half since 2010 and plans to halve them again by 2030 and have net-zero emissions by 2040.

Falls, who was just named investment chief at Northwestern University, has been gaining more recognition in recent years. She has delivered top-decile positions in her two prior CIO roles. At Rockefeller University, she delivered the second-highest performance among university endowments with more than $1 billion in assets, at 10.7%, behind Brown University. In 2016, she was a contender for the CIO position at Harvard Management Company, losing the position to Narv Narvekar. 

NEST announced a new climate change policy, with a portfolio target of net-zero by 2050. It’s already transitioned its developed market equities into a climate-aware strategy and has divested from tobacco, while building up a sizable private credit portfolio. In the coming months Fawcett is planning to begin investing in infrastructure equity and transition the fund’s emerging market (EM) equity portfolio to a newly designed climate-aware strategy.

Fyfe underweights fixed income in favor of equities. Over the past five years, he has enlarged the portion of holdings managed in-house, to 80% from 57%.

Garcia and the executive team at New Mexico PERA have worked collaboratively with stakeholders to improve long-term pension sustainability by modernizing investment governance and achieving pension reform. Additionally, Garcia has led the effort to integrate a risk-based approach, which separates alpha and beta in the multi-asset investment portfolio. Garcia serves as an advisory member to AIF Global, Managed Funds Association (MFA), and Accelerate Investors.

Gilmore takes environmental goals seriously. He and his team have exceeded the fund’s carbon reduction targets, which were originally set in 2016, and it now has no material long-term holdings of fossil fuel reserves. Gilmore has also reduced the fund’s exposure to carbon emissions by 40%. Despite the challenges COVID-19 presented last year, the fund returned 9.7% for the 2020 calendar year. Also last year, Gilmore strengthened investment partnerships, onboarded new managers remotely, and enhanced the fund’s systems.

Delta’s corporate revenue was down 97.5% year over year in March, but the fund monetized its tail-hedging strategies, which generated more than $900 million in proceeds and allowed the plan to make benefit payments, maintain the integrity of its asset allocation, and invest in discounted assets during a period of existential crisis. It also expanded its hedge fund co-investment program coming out of the drawdown, which led to strong investment returns in pre-initial public offerings (IPOs) and special acquisition companies (SPACs) and allowed the plan to comfortably outperform its policy benchmark in a very difficult year.

Golden emphasized the importance of diversity within the investment ecosystem and the need to hire diverse firms, coupled with the obligation to help improve diversity among existing managers, in a letter sent to two congressmen last year. In fiscal years 2019 and 2020, the fund partnered with seven US-based managers, of which five were considered diverse.

Grabel and LACERA demonstrated adaptability and resilience through an unimaginable 2020. The investment team focused on its mission to members by widening the aperture of its lens on risk and return factors. It heightened its operational due diligence by expanding its emphasis on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) integration and the benefits of diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout its investment partnerships.

Grisi’s fund boasts an overfunded status and a nearly 100% hedge, and it experienced minimal funded status volatility last year, validating its liability-driven investing (LDI) strategy. The firm’s US plans had surplus gains of almost $800 million despite being 80% in fixed income and majority rate-hedged. 

Grossman has increased the amount of internally managed asset exposures at Pennsylvania PSERS by approximately $8 billion and recently implemented a tail-risk mitigation program. The fund achieved its targeted three-year fee savings goals laid out in a July 2018 plan.

A titan himself, Harris’ extensive experience in both the public and private sectors allows him to have a unique perspective on not only managing portfolios but schooling potential future titans.

Hewsenian’s experience as a consultant, manager, and allocator leads to a perfect trifecta. Her strong preference for liquidity and at times conservative approach have allowed the foundation to focus on its mission regardless of volatile market environments.

Holmgren’s direct co-investment program has now matured and accounts for some 7% of the fund’s AUM. It is internally managed through collaboration with strategic partners in the highest conviction positions. Author Malcolm Gladwell would call Holmgren a “connector” for the CIO community. This innovative thought leader is known to punch above his weight and his returns are top decile among endowments and foundations: 14.6% for 2020, 10.9% for five years, 8.2% for  seven years, and with a seven-year Sharpe ratio of 1.0.

During the height of the pandemic, Hunkeler’s team pulled together like a well-drilled platoon, enabling the pension plan to not only survive, but thrive. Its high-quality, derivative-based interest rate hedge was one of the key contributors to its success last year. In 2021, Hunkeler is looking for ways to accelerate the de-risking process.

Jacksha has implemented  an “other diversifying assets” program, which has produced an attractive return that has proven to be uncorrelated to the plan’s other assets, in particular equities. NMERB also recently completed the search for an overlay manager.

The international-minded Jaensubhakij has upped the fund’s deal activity over the past year. GIC led an investment round into fintech startup Affirm, headed by a PayPal co-founder. Plus, it set up joint ventures to acquire and develop warehouses in India and Britain.

In April 2020, Jenkins was asked to take on interim chief operating officer responsibilities across Trinity’s broader activities beyond the investment portfolio, while her established investment and real estate teams remained reactive to the markets, rebalanced proactively, and achieved attractive returns. The investment office was able to add two people to the team and ended the year on a high.

As a trailblazer within responsible investing, the Church Commissioners for England was recognized within the PRI’s Leader Group for its exemplary climate reporting practices last year. This was the second consecutive year in which the church was recognized; in 2019, it was named within the Leader Group for its election, appointment, and monitoring of external managers.

Klein completely reorganized his investment team to deploy 30% of his staff elsewhere during the COVID-19 market crash. Despite being short-staffed, the CIO used his gold holdings, venture capital, and acumen to still achieve top quartile, exceptional returns for 2020.

Despite the tight mandates of managing a fund for a public accounting firm that cannot use clients as its managers, Kress manages to impress other allocators with his high returns. He draws on both buy-side and sell-side experience to manage a group of open and closed funds with strict liquidity mandates. Kress’ 2020 strategy included large-scale rebalancing from long-term US Treasurys in early March and equities during the latter part of the month, followed by new investments in fallen angels at the beginning of the second quarter, when credit spreads were elevated.

Kuenstner and her team have added significant value through active management, particularly within the private sector, while maintaining sufficient liquidity to remain a champion for the college.

Larson leads a fund created to accelerate growth and stimulate private sector innovation and investments, giving partners additional tools to effect change and improve lives, from vaccine development to education in the United States.

With a funded ratio of 99.6% in 2019 (up from 99.2% in 2018,) Lee’s plan is among the largest, highest-achieving, and most secure plans in the country. Returns over the past 30 years have averaged 8.6%, and the fund returned 3.5% net of fees for FY2020. He has been creating a system to manage a larger percentage of public markets internally.

Leegwater is new to the fund, which, despite the pandemic, implemented, under the Brexit scenario, a new Treasury setup and a new information technology (IT) infrastructure in the internal organization. PGGM also developed and began implementing a new innovative and sustainable investment policy for its largest client. Leegwater is also determining and implementing a long-term vision for the new Dutch pension system and a formal plan for sustainable practices. She is responsible for servicing the second largest pension fund in the Netherlands (one of the largest in Europe.)

While moving the team to a fully remote COVID-19 environment, and steadily navigating through the spring market volatility, on the pension side, Lenzo did a sizable annuity lift-out and merged two plans, which in combination, will result in some significant savings for the organization.

Lew, former CIO of the Carnegie Corporation, became new chief executive officer of Columbia last year. She is a strong relationship builder and is currently focused on increasing Columbia’s venture allocations. Lew has a solid history of investment in India and China.

Lewis oversees both defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) plans, and the board’s key priority is keeping the funded status stable. It barely moved in Q1 of 2021. Lewis’ team is working on including new asset classes such as illiquid credit and building and refining alternative allocations in the DB, overhauling its DC investment options, and assisting on non-US plans.

With a focus on improving overall fund performance, risk management, and cost control, and positioning the portfolio for long-term outperformance, at the end of 2020, Majeed’s fund achieved 10.06% annualized returns over the past five years, exceeding the benchmark by 0.8%. Under his tenure, the fund has invested in infrastructure and private credit as new assets with the aim of increasing income returns and eliminating target allocation to hedge funds. His fund has been ranked one of the top 10 private equity institutional investors, achieving 16.1% returns for the past 10 years. Majeed brings a wealth of knowledge to his role from his past experience at CalPERS and as the first CIO of Abu Dhabi’s retirement fund, and other senior roles with public funds in Minnesota, California, and Ohio.  

The value of understanding the pool of diverse managers available for CIOs across the industry has not been lost to either Susan Manske at the MacArthur Foundation or Manilla at Kresge. Both powerhouse CIOs jointly partnered with financial technology firm Lenox Park Solutions to assess the racial and gender diversity makeup of the US asset management firms. The CIOs also plan to actively recruit their peers to use the standardized Lenox Park survey platform.

Since taking office as CIO in 2015, Manola-Bonthond has made a radical strategic shift, focusing on building internal capabilities as well as defining and implementing a truly diversified investment strategy to achieve optimal use of the fund’s relatively constrained risk budget. The robustness of this strategy and its implementation were confirmed by last year’s remarkable investment performance. 

The value of understanding the pool of diverse managers available for CIOs across the industry has not been lost to either Manske at the MacArthur Foundation or Robert Manilla at the Kresge Foundation. Both powerhouse CIOs jointly partnered with financial technology firm Lenox Park Solutions to assess the racial and gender diversity makeup of the US asset management firms. The CIOs also plan to actively recruit their peers to use the standardized Lenox Park survey platform.

With top-decile returns, Marshall and her team embraced the value of diversification of thought long before it made headlines. A majority of Marshall’s staff are either women and/or people of color.

Respected for his acumen as an investor, Masoudi and his team were able to recognize the magnitude of the pandemic risk in February and reduce equity exposure, and then had the confidence to rotate into risk assets after the downturn in March. The team’s relatively small assets under management (AUM) allowed it to move quickly and invest in some premier funds that were previously closed.

Maynard turned around the ailing PERSI fund when he arrived almost three decades ago. His hallmark is a simple and patient investing style. Adhering to a 70-30 stock-bond allocation, the fund avoids private equity and emerging markets, for instance.

The Royal Mail Pension Plan enjoyed excellent funding level protection during the sell-off in Q1 2020 thanks to strong positioning and a successful absolute return program, implemented dynamic allocation changes over the year, and continued the search for alternative hedging assets via income strips and selected infrastructure debt exposure. McKnight also materially expanded the fund’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impact investments covering renewable energy as well as social impact investments. 

Michalakis implemented a nine-point risk management plan to navigate COVID-19 that provided guidance to the Trustee Board regarding the overall liquidity, member switching, currency hedging, asset allocation, unlisted valuations, and stress tests during the crisis. The fund has also maintained conviction in key strategies (e.g., value vs. growth in equities, maintaining currency hedging and adding new credit dislocation strategies). Its returns in credit reflect the opportunity to buy during the crisis.

Moakes and his team support one of the world’s largest medical research foundations and are driven by the mission they champion. Their close links with Wellcome’s scientific network helped them navigate market volatility during the early stages of the pandemic. Wellcome does not receive any grants or donations, so the team focuses on carefully managing its liquidity to ensure support for the mission, while maximizing investment returns to grow the endowment. The investment portfolio reached an all-time high valuation last year. 

The work Moore has done to de-risk his plans really paid off in 2020 by limiting funded status volatility. He and his team have also been working to further diversify their liability hedging assets beyond publicly traded investment-grade bonds. This has led to new investments in infrastructure and high-quality private debt, and a rethinking of the potential hedging properties of the fund’s return-seeking assets.

There has been a buzz about Mucha as an intelligent thought leader for the past two years. In 2020, Mucha and his team team achieved strong absolute performance as well as a substantial funded status gain in 2020 despite a relatively low public equity allocation. The team also figured out remote investment sourcing and due diligence, continuing its bottom-up focus on differentiated niche leaders regardless of geography or strategy.

Over the past three years, Murphy’s fund returned 7.8% annually, and in volatile 2020, 11.8%. During her tenure at OCERS, she has given the portfolio a larger equities tilt, as well as more of a value orientation. To be sure, Murphy prefers to style the investing bent as “opportunistic.” She built a very diverse team, with a 50-50 gender split, and two-thirds of the investment team are people of color. OCERS has staffers who are native speakers from five different nations, including China. Being located in Southern California is a help as it’s a desirable locale and attracts a diverse population.

Nieuwland assumed the CIO role in February 2015, and in 2020, Mars’ largest pension funds generated excellent absolute and relative performance with a weighted average outperformance of 3.4%. The tail risk hedge that Nieuwland has implemented for some plans paid off in March 2020 and the fund was able to retain the gains from the hedge. Nieuwland is planning to further integrate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations in the investment process.

O’Neil and his team continued to refine the investment portfolio to reflect the RWJF’s principles and values in 2020. The team sought new investment tools to improve equity, and maximized returns such that the foundation’s mission remained secured for the future.

Known to keep a low profile, Oliveros is regarded as a thoughtful investor by other CIOs. Previously, he managed the pension plan and endowments at the World Bank and was a member of the senior treasury team that managed more than $100 billion for the bank and for external clients. He advised central banks, pension plans, and sovereign wealth funds on multi-asset management. A Spanish national, he holds a Ph.D. and an master’s in economics from the University of Minnesota, where he was a Fulbright Scholar and a recipient of the Andreas Scholarship.

Palmer not only maintained productivity during last year’s transition to working from home, but he generated close to $1 billion in excess returns.  Contributing to this success are the fruits of his ongoing work to build out his staff and his progress implementing his strategic plan, which includes a nascent direct management effort.

Park oversees the Korea Investment Corporation, which has $183.1 billion in assets under management. It returned 13.7% for 2020, beating benchmark indexes, as well as its own targets for equities and fixed income. The sovereign wealth fund credited its prompt response rebalancing portfolios last year after markets tumbled.

Three years ago, this top investor retired from his CIO post at UPS and joined Georgia Tech. In 2020, Pellegrino initiated investments in local venture capital (VC) firms that are providing capital to support entrepreneurship and innovation in the Atlanta ecosystem. He also increased active management in less efficient markets while neutralizing country and sector allocations through the use of notional exposures and built out the hedge fund portfolio with high-quality managers and uncorrelated return streams. 

Perry’s priority is ensuring payroll to beneficiaries. He structures his fund to remain stable during volatility, and he has partitioned the fixed-income portfolio to include a short-term Treasury ladder to generate cash for benefit payments. Under Perry’s leadership, the fund has returned 17.6% halfway through the 2021 fiscal year, and when comparing his returns against other reporting public plans of $20 billion or higher, Perry’s plan has been ranked (by TUCS) in the top 1%  for the past 10 years.

Pierce’s fund has made a strong recovery since a tough fiscal year end result in June. So far in the new fiscal year, SBCERA has seen a 22% return through February. A number of factors played a part, including the fund’s delayed pricing recovery of private equity, the slow but steady recovery of the plan’s structured credit portfolio, and the announcement of the COVID-19 vaccines that have kickstarted a strong recovery in small-cap stocks, emerging market stocks, and credit. Pierce has an informed rebalancing program using Russell Investments to implement both tactical and strategic allocations based on a model developed with Mcube.  The program results over the past 14+ years have added $1.4 billion to the plan; in 2020 alone, the program added $421 million.

Recker’s returns were up 31% last year and 17% annually for the past three years, which could help the foundation expand its grantmaking budget by 50% in 2022 versus 2020. He also led the foundation through a process that created a consistent approach to downturn scenario planning, which prepared the fund for 2020, and increased its credit line capacity from six weeks of annual payout to a full year of payout, which was extremely valuable during the market selloff as the foundation didn’t have to sell assets to fund payouts.

Ridlen’s dynamic management of liquidity, rebalancing, redemptions, and contingency planning helped her keep her fund balanced without skipping a beat while preparing for the next move in the markets. Ridlen and her team think opportunistically by leaning into separately managed accounts and leveraging strategic partnerships and can move quickly to seize an opportunity. Her review of managed accounts and financial advisory services inspired consultants to talk about doing the same exercise.

Rieder and her team generated strong returns that solidly beat their short- and long-term benchmarks while successfully integrating the investment program after a merger made it the largest nonprofit hospital system in the country. She has promoted environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) efforts, while addressing the social determinants of health and and continuing to build her team. 

Despite the volatile market environment, Ruth and her team’s focus on diversification and liquidity steered the endowment to remain a reliable source of funding for the college.

Schmid and his team have successfully increased beta in the endowment to take advantage of the bull market and significantly enhanced liquidity/risk stress testing systems. In addition, the fund partnered with the university’s administration to navigate through the pandemic while the school and medical centers were under significant financial stress.

Harvard Management Company (HMC)’s goal to revitalize its portfolio and organizational structure toward the use of external managers and a generalist model has endured. Last year, the fund’s natural resource team spun out into a separate firm. It represented the last group inside Harvard to manage an entire asset class directly without outside fund managers.

Smith’s top-down, macro-oriented investment process helped his portfolio be prepared for market conditions which CIOs have not faced in modern times. It also kept his oversight council and executive leadership prepared to weather the uncertainties and outsized volatility of the year, and provided secure footing for the investment team as it managed the environment and portfolio assets.

Snider is the first CIO at HMH, a startup investment office for a health care system that was formed in 2016 through the merger of Hackensack University Medical Center and Meridian Health. She’s been at the helm since last March. She’s working on establishing a portfolio strategy and governance structure to allow HMH to achieve its long-term goals. 

As a health care system, the most important thing for UPMC in 2020 was ensuring adequate liquidity to keep functioning as an essential service. Stilley and his investment team did that through prudent management of both the right and left sides of the fund’s balance sheet. As a secondary benefit, that prudence also allowed them to take advantage and rebalance into the weakness in the first half of the year, which led to strong results for 2020.

Not all CIOs can claim to have implemented a preparedness plan in the event of a disaster. Instituted after a tsunami, over the past decade Strack and her team had processes for the investment portfolio and support for the foundation outlined should a crisis arise, to ensure seamless transitions.

Swensen has been a long-time proponent of diversifying investment portfolios outside of traditional asset classes. Last fall, the veteran chief formally extended his views on the value of diversification, when he notified the endowment’s managers to take “a more a more systematic approach to the problem of the lack of women and minorities in the asset management industry.” He further noted that Yale’s office would do the same.

Nicolai Tangen, at the fund since October, has overhauled the leadership team at the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, which has two CIO posts and a chief risk officer. Since the fund processes 30 million transactions per year, he has stated that he wants it to be both a financial institution and a leader in technology and data analysis. When he took the top job, the founder of the $20 billion hedge fund AKO Capital reportedly liquidated his entire stake, transferring it to the AKO Foundation.

Of Norges Bank’s two CIOs, Mie Caroline Holstad was appointed chief real assets officer in October, and she’s responsible for investments and portfolio and asset management in unlisted and listed real estate and unlisted renewable energy infrastructure. She also oversees real assets operations, ensuring adequate guidelines, resources and tools, and encouraging continuous improvement of processes. 

Geir Øivind Nygård, also a CIO at Norges Bank, is responsible for portfolio management, external management security selection, security lending, and trading. Nygård was appointed chief asset strategies officer in October from the position of CIO for asset strategies that he had held since January 2017. 

Norges Bank is the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, holding the Government Pension Fund of Norway as well as the Central Bank. 

Tarbox, a thoughtful chief investor for the Taft-Hartley multiemployer pension fund, categorizes all of his asset classes as either gross domestic product (GDP)-sensitive or rates-sensitive. (Most depend on a steadily growing global economy, except, perhaps US Treasurys, mortgages, and other fixed-income instruments that respond directly to changes in interest rates.) His real estate and infrastructure investments have a sustainable strategies checklist with a “high road” approach to value creation that takes into account whether they are the best trained and compensated workforces, hired by employers who meet high operational and regulatory standards.

The PSF staff moved quickly and effectively to teleworking and was able to implement high volumes of rebalancing trades, which added substantial value—about $500 million—to the fund. It also began an emerging manager program in private markets and implemented a portfolio to manage committed cash for its sister fund in higher return liquid assets.

Titarchuk and her team had a good handle on liquidity and stuck to their plan as the market sold off in 2020. The team was able to maintain the fund’s strength and grow value amid turbulence. As for the year ahead, Titarchuk is continuing to improve operations and technology as well as grow her team.

Sometimes Trotsky is called “PRIM’s single greatest asset.” The former Intel engineer and top managers guided the fund to record-breaking returns in private equity of 26.4% in 2020. PRIM has invested in private equity since the mid-1980s, and its PE portfolio is overweight to tech, health care, and business services, which experienced increased demand due to the pandemic. 

Van Vleet continues to disaggregate allocations in Europe, Australasia, and the Far East (EAFE) and in emerging markets (EM) by expanding single-country equity mandates. He’s also continuing to add to sector-concentrated private real estate investment trusts (REITS). Van Vleet is often sought by other allocators to play devil’s advocate and vet new ideas. 
The CIO of Textron turns first to his existing managers with seed capital for his portfolio solutions, but when choosing new managers, he avoids companies that cultivate or promote a “star culture” and prefers to hire a firm, not an individual. Since history suggests that 90% of returns are due to asset allocation, he tries to spend 90% of his time allocating, and only 10% on manager selection. “

Villa, who also served as the organization’s executive director, took advantage of opportunities that the early-2020 market plunge presented. He was a strong proponent of private equity and hedge funds, to add alpha to the portfolio, achieving 15.2% net returns in his final year. He never retired.

Volent brings her 21 years of experience at Bowdoin College to her new post at Rockefeller. She is meticulous, and her due diligence, patience, and history of cultivating strong relationships with managers have allowed Volent and her team to provide continued support to the college, often beating the returns of larger college endowments.

Ward was able to deliver excellent investment results in a year that provided no shortage of challenges. His team navigated through very turbulent markets to generate strongly positive outcomes across the portfolio.

Watson took on the CIO role 11 years ago. He implemented two strategies that have come into play over the past year: adding incremental return to the fund through modest leverage and protecting against significant downside with tail-risk hedging strategy.

CIC broke $1 trillion this year, after posting a 12% gain. It is on track to become the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund and may soon overtake Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. To attract technology and brainpower to China, it creates multilateral alliances with foreign funds and companies.

By evolving its liability-driven investing (LDI) approach and finding innovative ways to diversify its portfolios, Wendling’s 80-member internal investment team successfully navigated the shutdown of the global economy in 2020 to deliver very strong results. The fund’s liquidity and collateral management capabilities, along with a strong cash position, ensured HOOPP could act decisively when presented with significant buying opportunities. Combined with its long-term investing strategy and 10-year annualized return of 11.38%—among the highest in the world, according to CEM Benchmarking—HOOPP is very well positioned.

Universally admired by his peers, Williams commands a broad and deep portfolio with an expert internal asset management team. Returning to the SBA as its leader in 2008, he developed a strong cadre of investing pros. He is well-known for his timely and wise decisionmaking. Williams has served as chair of the Council of Institutional Investors. He recently overhauled the SBA’s compensation scheme to integrate the organization’s objectives, priorities, and goals with those of individual employees, beneficiaries, and stakeholders.

Starting with an empty slate, Wischmeier built a world class portfolio with a strong team at the Philanthropies. Unlike some of his peers, Wischmeier runs a more risk-balanced portfolio, generally relying less on equity beta, and yet has secured decent returns.