Home > News > Manager Selection > University of Pittsburgh Names Jeffer Choudhry CIO
Manager Selection

University of Pittsburgh Names Jeffer Choudhry CIO

He will oversee the $5.6 billion endowment after more than five years at Carnegie Mellon’s investment office.
By Michael Katz

Jeffer Choudhry

The University of Pittsburgh has named Jeffer Choudhry as the new chief investment officer of its $5.6 billion endowment. The university said Choudhry’s nomination will be presented to the board of trustees for approval at its winter meeting on Feb. 25.

Choudhry, who will be responsible for the oversight and management of the fund, joins Pittsburgh from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was most recently senior managing director and head of investments. He joined Carnegie Mellon’s investment office in 2016 as managing director.

“I am excited to join the talented investment team at Pitt and steward this world-class endowment,” Choudhry said in a statement. “I look forward to working with the many stakeholders that benefit from the endowment, fostering greater understanding of the long-term value it provides.”

Choudhry succeeds Gregory Schuler, who stepped down as CIO at the end of June last year to pursue other opportunities. Pittsburgh Treasurer Paul Lawrence has been acting as the interim CIO since Schuler left and will formally hand over the reins to Choudhry when the board votes on his nomination next month.

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Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, Choudhry was an investment officer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for more than four years, and before that was a vice president at Bank of America Merrill Lynch for two years. Before joining BofA, Choudhry was an investment consultant at a family office, and prior to that was an associate at Morgan Stanley. He started his career as an integrated circuit designer at LSI Logic Corporation.

Choudhry earned his MBA from the Yale School of Management and has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles. He also holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation.

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Home > News > Risk > Today’s Wild Market Volatility Is Bad Signal for Future
Risk

Today’s Wild Market Volatility Is Bad Signal for Future

Monday’s brief turnaround only shows that turbulence will keep doing harm, says Bespoke.
By Larry Light

Volatility rules this morning, as the market is busily erasing Monday’s stunning rebound from the January slump. If history is any guide, lower markets and more trading tumult lie ahead.

Although the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite came back from 3.5% and 4.4% respective slides yesterday and finished ahead 0.28% and 0.63%, the indexes returned to their losing ways in early Tuesday trading, down almost 2.4% and 3%, respectively.

Meanwhile volatility has rocketed, with the CBOE Volatility Index, or VIX, reaching 33.7 today—that’s way up from the mid-teens mark that prevailed at the year’s start, a level that’s in line with the gauge’s average of around 15.

Volatility is getting intense, and yesterday’s drama doesn’t prove there’s underlying strength in the market. Quit the opposite, studies show.

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Monday had a surge in trading volume unseen since the scary days of March 2020, when the pandemic first hit, according to Bespoke Investment Group. Volume in the S&P 500-tracking exchange traded fund (ETF) SPDR 500 was 252 million shares on Monday, the highest level of daily volume since those dark days almost two years ago, when the market skidded more than 25%.

Such big swings lately signal that tough times will persist for stocks, Bespoke indicated. Yesterday’s Nasdaq snapback was only the sixth time since 1988 when such a turnaround occurred, Bespoke said. In the previous instances, the index was down one month later, by an average 5.6%. Three months since the reversal, the Nasdaq was only positive for a single trading session and the average drop was 8%.  

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