Tulane Investment Chief Jeremy Crigler to Retire

Tulane CIO Jeremy Crigler. Photo credit: Paula Burch-Celentano

Tulane University investment chief Jeremy Crigler will retire this month after spending more than a decade building one of the nation’s largest endowment funds.

After Crigler steps down September 30, the endowment’s managing directors Richard Chau and Julia Mord will take over the $1.4 billion portfolio as interim CIO and interim deputy CIO, respectively, the school said Monday.

“It’s been a privilege working for my alma mater,” Crigler told CIO. “This has been my way of giving back to the university, if you will, and I’ve enjoyed it.”

A spokesperson said the university does not currently have plans to find a permanent successor through a search firm. The spokesperson also declined to divulge any salary information for the position.

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The Tulane CIO will be leaving the endowment just as schools across the US are contending with continued financial pressure from the coronavirus pandemic and discerning how to make campuses safe for returning students. But Crigler said he will be leaving behind a mature portfolio that is in “good” shape for the coming year.

“Our 10-year numbers have consistently been in the top quartile of all universities in the country and will be again this year,” Crigler said. (The university has yet to release numbers for the 2020 fiscal year).

Over the course of his 12-year tenure, Crigler built a reputation for generating returns without taking on outsized risk. After joining the fund in January 2008, Crigler took the risk tolerance temperature of his board and started restructuring his fund to get rid of its beta and make a payout during the financial crisis. Earlier this year, he told CIO that his team diversifies risk by spreading it across managers for the fund.

Anticipating a downturn in fiscal year 2019, Tulane also held onto cash in the margins. The school’s pooled endowment returned just 5.4% during last year’s market rally because of what Crigler called an “overabundance of caution.” The prior fiscal year, the same portfolio returned nearly 11%.

Crigler stuck to the same cautious investment philosophy going into the market drawdown in March and April from the pandemic. “While our caution was not rewarded in fiscal year 2019, we remain committed to our investment process, which has proven itself over the long term,” he wrote in the fiscal 2019 report.

Crigler has built a team of 10 professionals, many of whom were hired from the school and started as interns or analysts at the fund. Crigler also is a Tulane graduate.

“Jeremy has built a superior investment office and had established quite a legacy for Tulane,” Patrick Norton, senior vice president and chief operating officer (COO) at Tulane, said in a statement.

Crigler has worked more than 30 years in the investment industry. Previously, he was senior investment officer at Cornell University and investment director at Duke Management Company. He started his career at Fidelity Management and Research in Boston, where he was an equity analyst.

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Tags: chief investment officers, Financial Endowment, Investment, Jeremy Crigler, Tulane University, University

The prospect of a coronavirus vaccine is a big driver in the current bull market, says UBS. When positive news breaks about vaccine developments, the S&P 500 jumps 1.6% on average for the day, according to a bank study headed by strategist Keith Parker.

Upbeat vaccine news has added around 6.5 percentage points to the S&P 500’s return since May, UBS calculates, after doing an artificial intelligence (AI) review of market performance. May is when vaccine developments started getting news coverage. Since then, the index has risen 25%, which means that a quarter of that increase came from optimism about a vaccine.

An example of the buoyancy: On Aug, 24, the market rose 1% and hit another all-time high after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced its approval for the emergency use of convalescent plasma—the antibody-heavy blood component taken from people who have recovered from COVID-19. While the efficacy of this treatment has lately been called into question, in that one shining moment last week, investors’ pulses quickened.

A host of drug firms are toiling away on a serum to inoculate the population from COVID-19: Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Pfizer, to name a few. Johnson & Johnson has undertaken the largest clinical trial of a virus vaccine to date, signing up 60,000 people globally as test participants. Some of these companies’ shares have benefited more than others, with Moderna up 34% since May and J&J flat.

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Perhaps the lack of an overall pharma stock boost stems from the fact that only one or two of those firms will likely emerge as the developer of the salvation vaccine. In the UBS study’s view, a greater than 50% probability exists for a working vaccine in 2021’s first half. Nonetheless, the study went on to say, “the equity market is pricing in less than that” for pharma stocks. “This implies the balance of risks is tilted to the upside.”

But right now, it’s the broader market that is taking heart: An effective vaccine, from whichever company, would solve a lot of problems for the economy at large, and for stricken industries such as airlines and hotels in particular.

By UBS’s measure, on days with positive vaccine news, the winners are airlines, hotels/leisure, autos, energy, durables, apparel, industrials, banks, and consumer finance. Pharma and biotech, not so much.

The UBS study also had some salutary tidings for small-cap stocks, which have trailed in the current rally. On good news days for vaccine, the smaller stocks outpaced the larger ones by 2 percentage points. For whatever reason, that halo effect didn’t extend to value stocks, which also have been laggards.