Were You There? | Chief Investment Officer

From aiCIO magazine's February issue: With an estimated $3 trillion in institutional capital in the room, the annual Influential Investors Forum and Industry Innovation Awards are must-attend events for asset owners and managers alike.

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A little party never hurt nobody.

That’s the ethos of the Industry Innovation Awards, which (we hope) combines the best of a serious day of intellectual challenge with an evening celebrating true innovation in asset management—and a few bottles of wine to top it all off.

We do realize that the vast majority of our readers were not able to attend the dinner and its preceding Influential Investors Forum, so we’ve taken the liberty (vanity?) of recapping the day and its events below. If you were there, you can cross-check our account with reality; if you weren’t, we promise you this is 100% accurate.

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And thus, we begin.

The Influential Investors Forum

For the second year running, aiCIO brought together the elite of the asset-owning world for our Influential Investors Forum. One hundred invitees were selected from our annual lists—the Power 100, Forty Under Forty, and Knowledge Brokers—and welcomed to the Harvard Club of New York for the afternoon preceding our annual awards dinner.

This year’s theme: risk-factor investing and the many tangential issues that arise from it.

CIOs from California (Chris Ailman of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System [CalSTRS]); Georgia (Brian Pellegrino, UPS); Michigan (Ken Frier, UAW Medical Benefits Trust); Denmark (Henrik Gade Jepsen, ATP); and Canada (Donald Raymond, Chief Investment Strategist, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board [CPPIB]; and James Donegan, CEO, Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System [OMERS] Capital Markets) delivered presentations, debates, panels, and case studies.

Capping off the day was a showdown between Bridgewater co-CIO Greg Jensen and Kepos CIO Mark Carhart, both representing the firms that sponsored the event. And it was lively: Moderator and Editor-in-Chief Kip McDaniel had to diffuse the situation at one point by admitting he had applied for a job at, and quickly been rejected by, Jensen’s firm. The only shame is to have none, as Pascal said…

The Industry Innovation Awards

For the fourth time in as many years, aiCIO hosted our Industry Innovation Awards. This year (and next, we can now say), it was held at the New York Public Library. Four hundred fifty people were in attendance, the room bursting at the seams. (Sorry to those who had to sit behind view-obstructing pillars…)

Among our usual plethora of honorees—ranging from the top corporate fund to the most innovative securities-lending provider—aiCIO presented for the third time our Lifetime Achievement Award.

Joining NISA Investment Advisor’s Jess Yawitz and Bill Marshall, as well as Strategic Investment Group’s Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg, was the 2013 recipient: Teacher Retirement System of Texas CIO Britt Harris.

Harris is much loved in the institutional investment world—and not only because he can write $3 billion checks, as McDaniel joked in his opening monologue. (We are much relieved that Harris laughed at this jab.)

As always, the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award was asked to enlighten the crowd about his inevitably successful career path. Harris’ has taken him from corporate pensions to hedge funds to the public pension world—and warranted a robust time limit.

Enough people have asked for a video of Harris’ speech—something that the editors of aiCIO overlooked—that we thought it appropriate to reprint some of his remarks below:

“I will use the rest of my time to make some observations about life that, in my opinion, we need to hear at this particular time in history and in our lives.

I want to spend a few minutes with you on:

• The importance of true friendship;

• The desperate need that we have today to re-discover our “true north”; and

• The importance of decision-making.

The first is about the importance and value of true friendship.

I sat with a close friend not long ago who was realizing how diluted the term ‘friendship’ has become in his life. He mentioned to me that the definition of a close friend had become someone that he had met with twice in a year. His father, however, defined it as someone that he had met with almost daily for 40 years.

A part of a successful and useful life is in the accumulation and active development of truly close friends. That takes time and effort, but is well worth it. It also is helpful in creating a successful business and a significant life, which are not the same thing.

As they say, ‘If we know your five closest friends, then we will know you.’

I have many more than five close friends, and I am very grateful for each one, and more importantly would feel honored if you tried to reach a conclusion about me from knowing any of them. Those friendships have come through the fire.

The second is the importance of having a “true north.”

Knowing what your ultimate purpose is for being here at all.

A true north is something that simplifies your life and provides direction for what is of ultimate value, for what is the right path to take among the many competing alternative paths of life.

I have two that I have found pre-eminent. Both are ancient and have served many very well for thousands of years.

First: ‘Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, mind, and soul.’ Discovering that you are not God, while pretty obvious to others, is a big relief to you, and leads to the discovery of many other mysteries of life.

Second: Choose to consider others as more important than yourself.

Now, honestly, there are probably a bunch of people who really are more important than we are, but this life philosophy actually makes that moot. This makes all of mankind the same to you, which is a pleasure.

And since it is your choice to do this, and not a choice that was forced on you, it also brings freedom as well as eliminates fear.

The third is knowing how you make decisions.

It is a sad fact that while all of mankind makes hundreds of decisions a week, thousands a month, and millions in a lifetime, that almost no one can answer the simple question: ‘How do you make decisions?’

Of course, that observation means at least two things: Our decision-making has more randomness in it than we want to admit; our decision-making doesn’t improve as fast as we would like.

This is the sad fact of the human condition.

I am stressing this for your individual benefit and because the decisions made by the people in this room impact literally millions of lives.

There are actually only five factors in any decision, and I would like to set them out for you now. Thankfully, they all start with the same letter: ‘F’. The only real difference in any two people’s decision-making processes is in the order in which these five factors are considered when a decision needs to be made.

The Five Fs of Effective and Wise Decision-making, in the order that I believe is most effective.

The five questions to a wise decision.

Faith: Is what I am considering consistent with my faith?

Family: Is what I am about to do going to bring me closer to my family?

Friendship: Will this decision increase my high-quality friendships?

Fitness: If I do this, will it kill me physically, emotionally, or spiritually?

Finances: What is the financial impact of this decision?

People who choose to make decisions in this order, and in this way, come through the fire in better condition than those that don’t. They have a lifetime of true achievement. They come through the fire with a grounded faith, their families intact, their friendships enlarged, their health, and also with all the financial resources that they really need. They are worth following.

Yet too often we make our decisions in the reverse order. We start with, and emphasize, the finances—and then we simply hope for the best regarding our fitness, friendships, family, and faith.

Friends, that is a mistake. Frankly, if we made our decisions based on this more helpful order, can you imagine the positive impact that decision-making would ultimately have on our families, our friends, our businesses, our communities, and our country? We would avoid a lot of unnecessary pain, injustice, and suffering. We would also be happier, more effective, and our country would be in much better condition than it is. We have all taken this too lightly. Too often we have reaped the consequences of a mis-ordered decision-making framework rather than reaping the benefits of a proper one.”

Harris’ remarks were extremely well received—so much so that CIO of the Year victor Chris Ailman proclaimed that the Texan’s speech had cemented his decision to stay with CalSTRS, despite a lucrative job offer.

The Afterparty

“One does not leave a convivial party before closing time,” Winston Churchill liked to say, and it seems many of the day’s attendees heeded his advice.

That’s all we will say on that. If you want to know more, mark December 8, 2014, on your calendar—and remember, a little party never hurt nobody.

To view this article in digital magazine format, click here.

Scott Minerd, the global CIO of Guggenheim Partners, recently tweeted his thoughts on two of the biggest risks facing institutional investors. He predicted “US inflation problems are years away,” adding that US interest rates will likelier fall than rise because of current market turbulence.

For many CIOs, the two risks cannot be separated. “Interest rate risk will only become an issue if inflation risk rises sharply,” says Stefan Dunatov, CIO of the UK’s Coal Pension Trustees Investment. “This can happen in two ways. Either inflation rises sharply and central banks are forced to raise rates, or the bond market anticipates inflation is likely to rise sharply and forces rates at the very short end higher. Either way, you can’t have rate risk without inflation risk.”

For the UK’s pension lifeboat fund—the Pension Protection Fund (PPF)—fast-rising rates are the biggest problem.

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According to CIO Barry Kenneth, if the fund has hedged effectively, it is essentially left with a cash-based benchmark. With the PPF’s high proportion of global bonds, credit, and other debt, rising rates potentially spark a duration problem.

A different perspective comes from America. Frank Ahimaz, CIO of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, says he’d be very surprised if investors were concerned about inflation over interest rates—but that a rising-rates market should worry investors, particularly if they’re investing in emerging markets. “We tackled our developed interest rate exposure by moving all our securities to floating rate notes,” he says. “Our gut feeling is it will be 12 to 18 months before the Fed does anything to rates, and then it will be little by little.” Ahimaz has no exposure to emerging market securities, but fears for those who do. “Let’s say you have some exposure to Turkey, where they’ve seen a 500 basis points increase to rates overnight. I can only imagine what impact that would have,” he says.

Deflation risk is also creeping up the agenda. Aviva pension CIO Ian McKinlay explains that he manages that risk by delta hedging as inflation expectations fall or the volatility of inflation rises. He also carries a reserve for deflation risk.

“The pricing of linkers suggests the market worries more about inflation than rates,” he adds.

He’s right: For many, inflation is the far scarier prospect. Centrica pension CIO Chetan Ghosh speaks for many pension funds when he highlights the added cost caused by inflation increases.

“If inflation is 10%, then we need to pay our pensioners 10% more,” he explains. “Interest rates and inflation expectations matter for the mark-to-market position, but as inflation also affects the benefit promise, we attach greater importance to our inflation risks.”

Pension funds that bought inflation hedges back in 2008 might be feeling the pain, given the low inflation environment we’ve endured for the past five years.

Low inflation levels have at least one benefit, however, in cheaper hedges. Yet the question remains: Should you buy insurance while it’s cheap, or ride it out for a couple more years?