Marcus Frampton, CIO of the Alaska Permanent Fund, is unique in his field: When he got the gig, he was not yet 40 years old, far younger than his peers. But he tells CIO that he always wanted to be a chief investment officer.

“I was working in private equity in 2008, and our fund wasn’t making a lot of investments at the time because of the crisis,” he says. “So I used that time to get my CFA [certification]. I also have my CAIA [certification] and my [Financial Risk Management certification]. At the time, people in my firm were a little surprised—private equity professionals don’t typically have a CFA or the other credentials. But I was investing in myself.”

When he applied for the CIO position in Alaska, one of the first states to set up a permanent fund to invest on behalf of its citizens and help diversify state revenue, he had credentials other candidates did not, which he says likely helped him overcome any objections to his relative youth. Now that he has been in the role more than 10 years, he credits that time spent developing new credentials with expanding his investment perspective and providing a solid foundation to be a CIO: “Investing is a discipline, and it is always worthwhile to learn new things and give yourself more tools,” he says.

Those tools are likely to help Frampton navigate markets over the next decade. He says he and his peers spent the past 10 years building out private investment portfolios, and the next 10 will be all about execution.

“We’re likely to see a rockier macro environment,” Frampton says. “I think it’s also a fair assumption to assume that interest rates remain somewhat elevated. That’s going to require more of a hands-on approach than we had 10 years ago, when everything was just rising, seemingly no matter what was happening.”

He expects to see a much wider differentiation between the performance of private equity and other alternatives, like absolute-return strategies. Alaska Permanent maintains allocations to both. The absolute-return portfolio contains primarily global macro managers and market-neutral equity managers, a mix Frampton says has performed well. On the private equity side, he says manager selection remains as important as ever, given how long it can take within private equity for underperforming managers to be revealed and then for investors to exit those funds.

“We try to stay engaged with our peers and learn about what they are doing,” he says. “It helps to know and also makes things clearer in my own mind. We’re also making big investments on the personnel side to help us execute better. Having more people with direct investing experience has been helpful to our process and also to our engagement with our stakeholders, because we have more evidence, more experience that we can draw on.”

Over the 10-year period ending in fiscal 2024, the fund achieved a 7.69% return, surpassing the 5.45% performance of its benchmark.

—Bailey McCann