NYC Pension Launches Dashboard, Reveals 25% Alts Allocation

New York City’s comptroller has launched interactive websites that allow the public to view the asset allocation and performance of the city’s five public pension funds. And the new online tool shows that more than a quarter of the city’s funds’ assets are allocated to alternative investments.

The New York City Employees’ Retirement System, the Teachers’ Retirement System, the Police Pension Fund, the Fire Department Pension Fund, and the Board of Education Retirement System have approximately $242.4 billion in assets under management as of August 31. Of that amount, approximately $61.5 billion, or 25.3%, is invested in alternative investments. Approximately $22.5 billion, or 9.3% of the pension systems’ assets is invested in private equity, with $22.26 billion (9.18%) and $16.74 billion (6.91%) invested in alternative credit and private real estate, respectively.

“Increasing transparency around the assets that the comptroller’s office manages on behalf of the New York City retirement systems is a critical part of our work to guarantee that these funds will be there for public sector retirees for years to come,” New York City Comptroller Brad Lander said in a statement.

There are two dashboards available to the public: an asset allocation dashboard and an asset performance dashboard, both of which display data that can be broken out among nine asset classes: public equity, fixed income, alternative credit, private equity, private real estate, infrastructure, hedge funds, real estate securities, and cash.

The asset allocation dashboard provides information on investments by manager, asset class, and asset type, with the value as of the end of August and goes back to 2018. It also breaks out the values for each asset class for each of the five pension funds. The TRS and NYCERS pension funds had asset values of $91 billion and $77 billion, respectively, followed by the $48 billion police pension fund. The fire department and board of education’s pension funds were valued at $18 billion and $8 billion, respectively.

Meanwhile, the asset performance dashboard includes performance data by fund and asset class from fiscal year 2018 to fiscal year 2022. It showed that for fiscal year 2022, the top-performing asset classes were private real estate, private equity, and infrastructure. Private real estate returns for the five pension funds ranged from 28.80% to 33.62%, while private equity returns ranged from 25.2% to 28.3%, and infrastructure returns ranged from 14.38% to 15.47%.

At the other end, the worst-performing asset classes were public equity, fixed income, and alternative credit. Public equity losses for the pension funds were between 17.01% and 20.41%, while fixed-income losses ranged from 8.91% to 11.24%, and alternative credit losses were between 2.76% to 8.47%.