The Wyoming Retirement System achieved a 17.81% return in 2025, outperforming its strategic benchmark of 13.92%, according to information from the pension fund. Assets of the fund, which administers retirement benefits for more than 82,000 members, rose to $13.134 billion.
Core return drivers in 2025 were both equities and gold, as well as hedge funds. WRS has a 4.8% allocation to gold—roughly $630 million invested in the asset class—which is well above its policy target of 1.5%, as of December 2025.
The price of gold increased by 66.5% in 2025 and has risen more than 20% year-to-date against a backdrop of market volatility and geopolitical instability.
“That was responsible for about 20% of the outperformance,” says Sam Masoudi, the Wyoming Retirement System’s CIO.
The WRS began investing in gold in 2019 due to concerns about U.S. federal debt levels.
“We realized that it would be a good crisis hedge that would respond differently than many other defensive investments,” Masoudi says.
Last year, the WRS allocated 35.3% to marketable equity, 20.4% to marketable alternatives—including hedge funds—11.7% to private equity, 10.7% to private real assets, 9.9% to marketable fixed income, 4.8% to gold, 4.3% to private debt and 2.8% to cash with overlay.
The fund also benefited from its allocation to global equities, which largely outperformed the U.S. last year.
“Within public equities, a lot of our managers outperformed, and we had a tilt towards non-U.S. equities,” Masoudi says, also highlighting exceptional performance from WRS’ private equity managers and outperformance in hedge funds.
“Within fixed income, we were underweight in favor of cash and gold,” Masoudi says. “We were also underweight credit, which helped quite a bit. Those tilts all added to our [performance] attribution.”
Over the past three-, five- and 10-year periods, the WRS returned 14.01%, 10.6% and 9.69%, respectively, as of December 31, 2025.
“We stopped investing in private credit about a year ago, and we’re going to continue to let that run off,” Masoudi says. “We’re going to continue to be tilted away from U.S. equities as well, and if gold continues to rise, we will trim it. If there’s a major crisis and it spikes, then we’ll look to really lighten up on it, and we’ll continue to have short duration and fixed income.”
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