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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

"We have no way of knowing which are the better pension funds and which are the worst,” the co-author of a recent paper by researchers at McGill and elsewhere told me. Fun! My latest for The Allocator newsletter from With Intelligence/S&P Global. pardot.withintelligence.com/e/284832/reg...

Shocked to Find That Gambling Is Happening Here
Measured against a reference portfolio at the total portfolio level, a typical institutional fund’s performance can take more than 20 years to reveal whether its managers are skilled or merely lucky, said Sebastien Betermier, a McGill University finance professor, in an interview with The Allocator.

“It’s not five or 10 years that you need, it’s 20-plus years,” said Betermier, who’s also executive director of the International Centre for Pension Management. “CEOs and CIOs will not have that long tenure.”

The observation comes as many large institutional investors moving from strategic asset allocation to a total portfolio approach (TPA) are also swapping traditional policy benchmarks for reference portfolios. CPP Investments describes its reference portfolio as “a globally diversified two-index portfolio of publicly traded securities that could be invested in passively, at low cost.” A policy benchmark, by contrast, is built from a fund’s own target asset allocation, so it doesn’t measure the allocation decision itself.

For the recent academic paper “Evaluating Total Portfolio Performance: Pitfalls and Solutions,” Betermier and co-authors Alex Beath and Laurent Barras built a model of a large institutional portfolio and calculated how often comparing it with a reference portfolio would misjudge its hypothetical managers’ skill.

The model portfolio added value of 1.2 to 1.4 percentage points a year, but there was still a 13% to 15% chance that it would trail its reference portfolio over 10 years, according to the paper. That chance didn’t fall below 5%, a common threshold for statistical significance, for more than 20 years.

A sobering implication is that capital allocation is perhaps not so much like chess, a game of clear skill. There may be some dice-rolling involved. “Investing is … a little bit more like snakes and ladders than we’d like to admit,” said Beath, who’s founder and CEO of consultancy Alex Beath & Associates.

The conundrum seems to be built-in. A CIO’s efforts to add value, whether through diversification or taking advantage of temporary mispricings, all tend to take the portfolio further away from its reference and create tracking error, Betermier said.

“The more you do what you’re paid to do, ironically enough, the less reliable the reference portfolio becomes as a benchmark because it becomes noisier and noisier,” he explained. “And what we find is if you want it to be really reliable, you need your portfolio to have approximately the same volatility as the reference. When I say ‘approximately,’ I mean like less than 1% difference. And you need the correlation with that reference portfolio of about 99, 98%.”

The researchers stressed that the paper is not an attack on TPA, benchmarks, or reference portfolios. Rather, the predicament applies widely across the industry. “It’s an issue for everybody,” Beath said. “It depends on what you want to measure.”

To help address the matter, Betermier said, boards could weigh how much noise each source of value-add creates, measure the noisiest ones separately, and more clearly report the odds of a misleading outcome. “It will put us in a situation where we can have these discussions and take the current results with more of a grain of salt,” he added. Betermier also recommended considering more process evaluations before the fact—with a group of independent experts brought in to audit and point out limitations—rather than relying so heavily on performance metrics afterward.

Then there’s the pesky topic of compensation, which tends to be tied to, well, all of this. “I don’t think it’s a topic that funds have found the magic answer to,” Betermier said.

In the meantime, it disconcertingly appears that lucky allocators can look skilled, and unlucky ones can look unskilled, not only for a single year, or even three or five, but for decades. “We have no way of knowing which are the better pension funds and which are the worst,” Beath said. “And that’s an extreme problem.”

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The ex–chief investment officer of the Kentucky retirement system—recently fired too in Iowa—can't keep his whistleblower suit in the Bluegrass State alive, an appeals court ruled. My latest for The Allocator newsletter (With Intelligence/S&P Global.) pardot.withintelligence.com/e/284832/reg...

‘Rude, Condescending, and Abrupt’
The ex-CIO of the $35B Kentucky Public Pensions Authority has lost a bid to revive a nearly four-year-old whistleblower lawsuit against his former employer.

A state appeals court last month upheld a trial court’s 2024 summary judgment ruling against Steven Herbert, who joined the retirement system in January 2021 and was fired about 18 months later.

Herbert failed to challenge the trial court’s central finding that the information he was supposedly blowing the whistle about was already public, a three-judge Kentucky Court of Appeals panel held in an August 14 ruling.

Indeed, Herbert’s appeal “presents no identifiable argument that the circuit court erred in its conclusion that he had disclosed no information that was concealed or not already publicly known,” Appeals Judge Jacqueline Caldwell wrote in the 31-page opinion.

Herbert sued KPPA in December 2022, contending that he was wrongfully terminated in retaliation for purportedly exposing alleged waste, fraud, and abuse involving a real estate firm and cash flows for county retirement plan contributions.

Franklin Circuit Court trimmed some of Herbert’s claims in June 2023. Almost a year later, KPPA asked the court for summary judgment on Herbert’s remaining whistleblower claims. Among other arguments, the retirement system contended that undisputed evidence showed that both the real estate and the cash flows issues were known throughout the agency long before Herbert joined.

The circuit court agreed, handing KPPA a pre-trial victory in December 2024. Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd wrote at the time that KPPA had demonstrated legitimate reasons for firing Herbert, “including that he was rude, condescending, and abrupt with KPPA staff, did not cooperate with other departments, did not follow instructions and avoided accountability, and was deficient in performing the CIO’s duties.”

As the appeals process unfolded, Herbert joined the $51.1B Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System in March 2025 as chief benefits officer.

IPERS fired Herbert earlier this year after an investigation found violations of policies on sexual harassment, workplace violence, discrimination, ethics, and personal conduct, according to multiple reports and a May 7 termination letter viewed by the Allocator.

(Greg Samorajski’s resignation as CEO of IPERS was announced on the same day. Samorajski has since been replaced by Martin Noven, previously executive director of the Maryland State Retirement and Pension System.)

A lawyer for Herbert and a spokesperson for KPPA did not respond to the Allocator’s requests for comment prior to deadline.

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Talked to the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Timothy Riddiough about his research on pension plans' investor networks, for The Allocator newsletter (With Intelligence/S&P Global). I don't always post my work here because it's mostly paywalled, but I appreciate being able to share these!

Network Effects

LPs looking to gain an edge from the strength of their GP networks have another reminder that they may always have more work to do.
The diversity of a pension plan’s relationships with GPs and consultants is a better measure of network quality than the sheer number of relationships, Timothy Riddiough, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Allocator in an interview.

Riddiough, who studied the matter with co-author Da Li across thousands of pension-plan commitments to private equity real estate funds going back to the early 2000s, said plans with more relationships overall tend to select funds with lower net-of-fee internal rates of return. By contrast, plans with relationships that bridge otherwise-disconnected parts of the market tend to select funds with higher net IRRs.

“Most people think that more networking is good,” Riddiough said. “I think our headline finding says, well, not necessarily. More is not better. Better is better.”

However, maintaining an edge from a better GP network may depend on continual, deliberate effort to seek out new GPs. The bridging premium is steepest for less experienced managers and fades as they build a track record, according to Riddiough.

He pointed to the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, which he said scores highly on bridging, as an example of an institution that built that position deliberately, over years, through “a very competent staff, a very dedicated staff” willing to reach into unfamiliar parts of the market.

For other pension plans, the research may underscore that, like it or not, investment consultants provide value. “One of our results is that it looks like it pays to hire consultants,” Riddiough said. “So at some level, our paper is a bit of an advertisement for the consulting industry.” However, consultants are especially worth it for LPs that have not invested in the staff or don’t have the experience to have a great network, he noted.

A staff with expertise in private equity is not enough by itself to develop a strong network, according to Riddiough. “What explains the results is recognizing and building networks with intent,” he said. Another factor, he added, is “a willingness to take risks and go out on a limb.” All of this, he noted, takes time and money. As the example of SWIB shows, though, the effort can be worth it. No rest, then, for the networking-weary LPs.

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Only took a couple of pics because I was absorbed in the show but really special @bigthiefmusic.bsky.social gig in my suburb tonight

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Love this correction of John Roberts's misattribution of the group that recorded a 1959 song. (Don't love how the New Yorker website has for decades now seemed surprised to encounter an actual subscriber.) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Some Justices socialize with one another over the summer, he added, but, as for himself, “I’m a—I think I’ve got the group right—Four Seasons fan, and my approach is ‘See You in September.’ ” (He got the group wrong—the song was recorded by both the Tempos and the Happenings.)

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Happy album release day to L'Rain btw!

The author interviewing L'Rain's Taja Cheek and her band in I guess it had to be 2022. Not an intentional advertisement for a burrito delivery app.

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

For today's issue of The Allocator newsletter (With Intelligence/S&P Global), I talked to the authors of two academic papers addressing the family office landscape. pardot.pageantmedia.com/l/284832/202... On confidential disclosures, and more:

Family Office Matters
The most sophisticated family offices would face new confidential disclosure requirements under regulations proposed in a new academic paper.

The aim is to help other investors avoid contagion from undisclosed blow-ups, although how the effects of such new disclosure might ripple through the financial plumbing—or the jobs landscape for institutional allocators—is unclear.

“All in the Family: Family Offices and the Limits of Financial Regulation” contends that while single-family offices may not require financial regulators to perform their traditional role of investor protection, the 2021 collapse of Archegos Capital Management shows that these institutions may still generate systemic risk.

Melinda Roth, a visiting professor of practice at New England Law Boston who wrote the paper, assured The Allocator in an interview that she wants to keep the exemption that removes qualifying SFOs from the definition of an “investment advisor” under federal securities law. “I want to be really clear,” she said. “The exemption is critical.”

However, the paper recommends a few new disclosure requirements:

Family offices whose total leveraged exposure or aggregate derivatives position exceeds certain thresholds would confidentially file periodic position reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Likewise, family offices managing above a particular level of assets under management would confidentially file annual reports with the SEC. The disclosure would be a simplified version of Form PF, the SEC’s existing confidential filing for private fund advisors.

Prime brokers, meanwhile, would be required to report aggregate credit and swap exposure to any SFO client that exceeds $500m.

“We regulate financial institutions for a reason,” Roth said. “And while there’s not that same reasoning for family offices, a little bit of disclosure would go a long way to allowing regulators to be able to at least not fly as blind as they are flying with regard to these vehicles.”

That said, the likelihood of such regulations being implemented anytime soon looks remote. “The SEC is moving in the absolute opposite direction,” Roth acknowledged. “Even if the opposite political party was ruling the SEC, I don’t think this would be a priority.”

Elsewhere, a separate academic paper offers an unusual look behind the curtain at how family offices are viewed by private banks.

“Psychographic Value Articulation: Assessing The Family-Office Industry and its Value Articulation Based on Segmentation” uses Banco Santander’s wealth management division as a case study to demonstrate how a global institution can win family office business by segments.

A CIO at a large multi-family office, for instance, may recognize their own institution in the “Complex Multi-Family Offices” segment in the paper’s “market attractiveness matrix.”

Banks keep an eye on the long haul when approaching family office clients, said Raphael Dakik, a consultant pursuing graduate studies at Cranfield School of Management who wrote the paper, in an interview. He told The Allocator, “Especially in the family office industry, you really benefit from generation-for-generation strategic alliances instead of just those that are short-term.”

Despite academic proposals for tweaks around the edges, the SFO disclosure exemption appears here to stay too.

— Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Private equity–owned life insurers' aggressive investments in private credit have an overlooked public backstop, a new paper contends. Wrote about it, and the angle for my readers (for them, this broader taxpayer issue could be weirdly good?), for The Allocator (With Intelligence/S&P Global).

“Circular” Reasoning

Discussions on private credit risks are missing a crucial area that may paradoxically be a boon for most allocators, a recent academic paper indicates.

It’s familiar by now to hear concerns raised around lack of transparency in parts of the private credit market or whether semi-liquid funds can meet withdrawal requests. “Private Credit’s State Backstop: How Private Equity Socializes Risk Through Insurers” contends that private equity–owned life insurers, through aggressive deployment to private capital, manage to extract value while shunting off potential losses to taxpayers.

The risk transfer, co-authors Andrew Granato and Pranjal Drall contend, comes through the obscure mechanism of state guaranty funds, which bail out policyholders when an insurer goes bust.

State guaranty funds charge surviving insurers a fee to cover the shortfall. But because the insurers can often subtract that amount from the taxes they owe, the paper argues, the public ends up footing the bill.

The prospect of quiet bailouts for PE-backed life insurers whose private credit bets go bad may not be great for policy wonks or, let’s face it, society at large. However, an implicit backstop could help LPs at endowments, foundations, and other institutions deploying to private debt, the authors suggested in an interview with The Allocator.

“If you are an institutional investor at a private credit fund, this is actually good, because the fund manager has this kind of permanent option of being able to offload poorly performing assets to the insurer at inflated prices,” said Granato, an assistant professor at the UT Austin Law School.

Other recent research has shown that PE-owned insurers pay seven basis points more when buying from affiliates, and 40 basis points more in deals involving privately placed securities, said Drall, a JD-PhD student in financial economics at Yale.

The paper arrives as US life insurers maintain a robust appetite for private credit and alternative assets. Life general accounts held $1.97tn in private bonds at year-end 2025, accounting for 45.6% of general account bonds—both records, according to a recent report by S&P Global Market Intelligence (S&P Global owns With Intelligence, which publishes The Allocator). Total assets in life general accounts reached $5.97tn, up 6.2% from a year earlier.

Private equity sway over life insurance also remains undiminished. At the end of June 2025, there were 139 PE-owned life insurers, NAIC figures show, up from 137 at the end of 2024.

US insurance watchdogs have begun ringing alarm bells. Among the issues drawing their attention are “circular ownership” and “interconnectedness,” according to a document published ahead of this week’s summer meeting of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the umbrella group representing state insurance regulators.

As regulatory scrutiny increases, arbitrage opportunities due to insurers’ private credit allocations look poised to fade, for better or worse.

The authors’ recommendations include penalties on insurers for opaque balance sheets and on ratings agencies for systematically positive ratings. Another proposal would end tax credits for guaranty-fund premiums and make insurance holding companies at least partially liable for the guaranty-fund costs of affiliated insurers’ collapses. If state regulators and lawmakers can’t get the job done, the paper contends, the federal government should apply pressure.

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

WashU's Scott Wilson received about $12 million in compensation for the most recent fiscal year, the highest I've come across in public tax filings. My latest, a co-byline with the newsletter's one-of-a-kind founder, Leanna Orr, for The Allocator (With Intelligence by S&P Global).

Such misery loves company.

Alice Ruth, CEO of the investment office at Dartmouth College, secured about $5.1M in reportable compensation for the year ending in June 2025, according to another of the latest filings to surface.

That’s broadly similar to Ruth’s pay the previous year. Dartmouth CIO Kelsey Morgan, for her part, collected $2M, also close to her nearly $2M a year before.

The $9B allocator’s return was a little below the median at 10.8%. But back in FY2022, WashU’s blowout year, Dartmouth itself posted an eye-popping 46.5%.

Elsewhere, Cornell University CIO Kenneth Miranda received $2.2M, down from $2.8M, per the filings.

Former Johns Hopkins CIO Jason Perlioni got almost $4.9M, up from $2.1M.

Hamilton College CIO Lauren Jacobson’s $1.7M last year rose from nearly $1.5M in FY2024.

Amherst College’s Letitia Johnson also scored nearly $1.7M, up from $1.5M.

Former Williams College CIO Collette Chilton — “the GOAT,” as The Allocator declared quite accurately in 2023 — got $1.6M, up from $916,166. (Her successor, Abigail Wattley, received $585,520, up from $565,011.)

Also in the $1.5M+ range, Georgia Tech CIO Brian Pellegrino secured $1.6M, up from $1.5M, while Boston University CIO Clarissa Hunnewell collected $1.5M, up from $1.4M.

Virginia Tech CIO David Greenberg’s FY2025 comp rounds up to $1.5M, compared to his $921,129 (and former CIO Daniel Ward’s almost $1.4M) the previous year.

Meanwhile, over in foundation-land, the Metropolitan Museum of Art CIO Lauren Meserve and the Museum of Modern Art’s Lou Fernandes each received more than $1.6M, up from about $1.5M apiece a year earlier.

Spokespeople for Williams and Hamilton declined to comment to The Allocator. Media reps for the other universities and the two foundations didn’t respond to requests for comment prior to deadline.

One CIO told us we shouldn’t publish their salary, but them's the breaks of tax-free investing.

Happy Friday, Allocators,

—LO & MH

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Wrote about the latest pay data for chief investment officers of large university endowments. Strong returns, rising comp. Big numbers at Notre Dame. Hefty bumps at Wellesley, UMass. Down for the now-gone CIO at the UC Berkeley Foundation. My latest for The Allocator (With Intelligence/S&P Global)

The judging calls have been fascinating and fun. I'll share tidbits in the next edition; enjoy the comp scoop from our man Marc Hogan in the meantime.

—L

Pay Day

The University of Notre Dame paid their CIO the highest comp package disclosed thus far for the (very good) fiscal year ending June 30, 2025.

Mike Donovan, who retired as CIO of the $25.4B allocator in June 2024, after 27 years on the endowment team, received $3.8m for the year, per the IRS filings required of U.S. endowments and foundations. His successor, Tim Dolezal, secured $2.3m.

Notre Dame’s latest returns were robust, too: 13.6% for the 2025 fiscal year. The median return over the same period among $1.8B+ endowments was 11.3%, according to NEPC data.

The Fighting Irish weren’t the only ones dishing out a pot of gold. Rice University CIO Allison Thacker received around $2.9m, up sharply from $1.1m the previous year, filings show. The $7.9B portfolio returned a median-ish 11.4% for the year. CIO comp figures typically reflect rolling 3-year or lagged returns, plus other factors like Did You Beat Yale (+$500k)?

University of Chicago CIO Andrew Ward pulled in $2.7m, up from around $2m a year earlier. The $10.9bn allocator returned merely 10.2% in fiscal 2025.

Wellesley College CIO Deborah Kuenstner saw a healthy pay rise, to $1.8m from $1.3m. The $3.2bn allocator returned a similarly sturdy 12.2%.

Also closing in on two milli: Tulane University CIO Richard Chau, who cleared $1.7m, up slightly from $1.6m. Meanwhile, the $1.9bn allocator returned 9%.

Georgetown University CIO Michael Berry likewise pocketed $1.7m, a slight decrease from about $1.8m before. The $3.9bn allocator reported a whopping 14% return.

For its part, the University of Wisconsin-Madison was the top performer in NEPC’s January report. The $4.9bn allocator returned an eye-watering 16.2%. Its CIO, Michael Stohler, collected $1.6m, up from $1.2m the prior year.

One of the sharper pay increases went to the University of Massachusetts’s Jonathan Gibbons. The $1.8bn allocator’s CIO scored $1.5m, up from $1m a year earlier. The return? A staggering 15.9%.

Now-former University of California Berkeley CIO David McAuliffe went the opposite direction. He received $947,222, down from $1.2m, while the $3.2B allocator returned 10%. The Berkeley foundation’s endowment recently hired Brandeis University CIO Tarek Saghir for McAuliffe’s old role.

Meanwhile, Carnegie Mellon University CIO Charles Kennedy brought in $1.5m, about as much as the year before. The $3.5bn allocator returned 10.9%.

Also among the $1 million club in the recent crop of endowment 990s: University of Delaware CIO Keith Walter. He got $1.1m, holding steady from fiscal 2024. The $2.2B allocator returned 9%, trailing a 9.7% return for its benchmark.

Nearly everybody in large endowment–land is generating double-digit returns these days. And they’re getting paid for it.

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Wrote about my wife's pension fund for The Allocator (With Intelligence by S&P Global):

The Greatest Portfolio in the Universe

A lawsuit is headed toward trial accusing the Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System of setting artificially low expectations that it could easily exceed.

The suit — originally filed last year in state court by former IPERS risk officer Rich Wiggins — highlights how custom benchmarks have grown so complicated that manipulating them to boost bonuses could be more common than boards and pension plan participants may realize.

“Everybody games the benchmark to some degree,” Wiggins told The Allocator in an interview. “Then there are bad practices where you can change the benchmarks retroactively, which is kind of like cheating.”

The situation at IPERS has become so fraught that the Financial Times recently peered in on the prairie to dub it a “governance crisis.”

The CEO of the $48.7B allocator, Greg Samorajski, resigned in May, and the chief benefits officer, Steven Herbert, was fired after being placed on leave amid separate misconduct investigations, according to reports.

A judge in April allowed Wiggins’s suit to go ahead. The suit alleges that Greg Samorajski and CIO Sriram Lakshminarayanan manipulated IPERS’ benchmarks to make the fund appear to be doing better than it really was, so that they could then request bonuses.

“A huge swath of the portfolio is benchmarked directly to itself so it is impossible to underperform,” the court filing states. “If IPERS’ private equity, real estate, direct lending, opportunistic credit, and real assets all went to zero, the plan would not underperform its benchmark.”

According to the suit, Wiggins regularly raised his concerns to Lakshminarayanan and was terminated in 2023 for being a “bad fit.”

An IPERS spokesperson declined to comment to The Allocator, citing the ongoing litigation.

Samorajski and Lakshminarayanan also declined to provide comment on the record.

IPERS last month told the FT that the benchmarking methodology was designed to “separate out excess or tracking error that is intentional and unintentional.” Benchmarks are certainly an area of scrutiny far beyond the Great Plains at the moment.

The $571B Canada Pension Plan Investment Board last month adopted new benchmarks that make past performance look better and increase compensation, especially for senior management. A CCPIB spokesperson told the Toronto Star that “it would be misleading to imply” the change was meant to boost pay or that it established “an easier hurdle.”

Also from last month, a report by a nonprofit advocacy group points to IPERS-like concerns at the biggest US pension fund, the $607B California Public Employees’ Retirement System. “While CalPERS has some of the worst public pension investment performance in the country, it has created and utilized benchmarks to measure its performance that make it appear better—i.e., average, or even above average,” the Retired Public Employees Association of California says in the report.

CalPERS’ CEO Marcie Frost, in a statement to NBC News, slammed the report as “an opinion piece full of baseless assertions and breathless language designed to make our members needlessly fear for the stability of their pensions.”

Wiggins, now an associate fiduciary officer at Peak Trust Co. in Alaska, told The Allocator that public funds need more independent monitoring. “It is weird having the investment staff mark their own grade,” he said.

Call it the Lake Wobegon effect: When you outperform already low benchmarks, any pension can look — if not like the greatest in the universe — then at least above average.

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

In other news, wrote about the latest pay figures for several endowments' chief investment officers. Baylor's Dave Morehead graciously discussed his own with me. By me for The Allocator newsletter, from With Intelligence/S&P Global. pardot.withintelligence.com/e/284832/l-2...

Bonus ups and downs

As LP disclosures to the IRS via 990 forms for 2025 continue to trickle in, we can get some sense of how individual reward structures have been set up to incentive market-beating performance. But for investors ramping up their private markets exposure, there can be a bit of short-term pain ahead of (hopefully) longer-term benefits.

Baylor University’s filings show that CIO Dave Morehead saw a slight pay decrease for the fiscal year ending in May 2025, to about $1.25m from roughly $1.3m a year earlier.

Addressing the pay figures, Morehead was unruffled. “Pretty simple,” he said in an email to The Allocator. “We didn’t beat our benchmark.”

While he didn’t share the specific benchmark, he said the endowment effectively has to outperform the median to have any bonus consideration, and that didn’t happen during the period in question.

“It’s all part of the game and the plan we were/have been implementing,” Morehead elaborated. “We set up a number of Funds of One in the years prior and it takes a few years for some of those to ramp, which led to not keeping up with the market last fiscal year.”

He continued: “We expect we’ll more than keep up with the market when these accounts mature, of course, else we wouldn’t have set them up. We don’t ‘take our ball and go home’ when markets don’t go our way, we just work harder.”

Morehead isn’t alone in not pocketing a pay rise in the most recent fiscal year. Boston College CIO John Zona received about $1.1m, down from $1.3 million a year earlier, according to the 990s. And Carleton College CIO Kelsey Deshler got $925,537, down a touch from $928,506 in fiscal 2024.

Others did enjoy bumps in compensation, per the filings. Texas Christian University CIO Jason Safran took home more than $1.3m in the year ending in May 2025, compared with $944,440 a year earlier. Bryn Mawr College CIO Brooke Jones likewise scored more than $1.3m, after collecting slightly less than $1.3m the prior year. At the University of Minnesota’s endowment, CIO Andrew Behrens received more than $1.2m, up from $931,838 a year earlier.

Elsewhere, Trinity University CIO Craig Crow received $1.05m, up from $907,597 in 2024, filings show. Villanova University CIO Shane McAndrew nabbed $808,237, versus $709,568 the previous year. And Southern Methodist University CIO Rakesh Dahiya got $758,956, up from $715,417.

Aside from Baylor’s Morehead, spokespeople for the colleges and universities didn’t immediately respond to The Allocator’s requests for comment.

Before you take your ball and go home, remember: There’s always next year.

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Really lovely early-evening set yesterday by Mirah. She mentioned that the vinyl pressing of her album will be plant-based, would be interested to learn more!

Mirah concert at Locals in Des Moines. Bubbles surround a barefoot singer on a stage.

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Screenshot from the bad site but wow, I wrote stuff!

"Stockholm's indie-pop pied pipers whistled, and music lovers couldn't help but follow: MySpace, YouTube, the BBC, NPR, first-wave blogs, Pitchfork, blogs by kids who stalk Pitchfork writers on IM... even "Grey's Anatomy". In a year of The Long Tail -- when nobody didn't have a website (not even Ryan Adams), and music listening followed TV viewing and political wingnuttery into Big Bang-style fragmentation-- "Young Folks" belonged to everyone. Taken from Writer's Block, the latest album by Swedish trio Peter Bjorn and John, the summer single's spacious reverb leaves two world-weary strangers alone over the busy rhythms of a crowded nightlife scene. Their seduction becomes a metaphor for our own."

— Marc Hogan writing for Pitchfork about the genius of "Young Folks"

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

All this for a $28 martini? Wrote about a longtime wealth manager alleging that she was fraudulently lured to a job at the expense of other seven-figure opportunities. A Midtown brasserie I've read about in the New Yorker gets a mention. My latest for The Allocator (With Intelligence/S&P Global)

When You Pick Wrong

A veteran wealth strategist alleges she was poached from a multi-family office under bogus pretenses, according to a recent lawsuit.

Karen Creel, who as of 2023 was a managing director and private advisor with Rockefeller Global Family Office, brought the suit against affiliates of Sequent Group, a wealth planning firm that spun off in 2019 from Rothschild & Co.

The suit, filed on May 1 in federal district court in Manhattan, also targets Richard Martin, the executive chairman and controlling shareholder of Switzerland-based Sequent.

Creel is a wealth manager, insurance professional, and trusts and estates lawyer with more than 30 years of experience developing complex wealth strategies for ultra-high net worth clients, according to the complaint.

Martin began recruiting Creel in June 2023 to spearhead Sequent’s new US-based global wealth structuring division, per the suit. Martin and his Sequent colleagues allegedly assured Creel in many talks over several months that she would have access to Sequent’s existing client base and would have a CEO role in the new US-based division, along with equity in the company.

Creel decided to forgo other seven-figure opportunities, according to the suit, and joined Sequent in March 2024.

However, Creel was never given leadership responsibility in the new Sequent division, nor equity in the company, and she was also blocked from accessing Sequent’s client base, costing her millions in expected income, according to the complaint.

The suit offers up plenty of gossipy details, such as a Sequent honcho’s purported assertion that the firm’s clients included the single wealthiest family from Venezuela and the two wealthiest families from Mexico.

Creel apparently met with another Sequent bigwig at Le Rock, an upscale French brasserie in Midtown Manhattan where a martini will set you back a cool $28.

New York-based Safra National Bank was also recruiting Creel around the same time to head its US estate planning, per the suit.

In which fine dining establishments Creel may have met with Safra unfortunately wasn’t disclosed.

In any event, with her eye on the two potential roles, Creel resigned from New York-based Rockefeller — part of the $20B Rockefeller Capital Management Group — in February 2024.

Martin allegedly then told Creel to join Safra and then resign from it, meanwhile dangling the possibility that she could be poised to succeed him in his role at Sequent.

Creel did just that (except for the whole succeeding-Martin bit, that is): She started work at Safra the following Monday and stepped down at the end of the week.

Based on Sequent’s promises that she would have access to its clients (and their hefty commissions), plus equity and a CEO role, Creel hopped to Sequent in March 2024 for millions less in salary than she had received at her previous positions over the past decade, according to the suit.

Clearly, it didn’t work out. Although Creel managed to independently source $2m in revenue in her two years at Sequent, by early this year Martin gave her a statement purportedly showing that she owed the firm more than $400,000, per the court filing. Sequent allegedly fired her in March right after she revealed she’d lawyered up.

Creel is seeking damages for fraudulent inducement, breach of contract, and unjust enrichment.

Martin didn’t respond to a request for comment prior to deadline, and neither he nor Sequent have formally responded yet in court. Creel’s attorney didn’t reply to The Allocator either.

Prior to Rockefeller, Creel was a senior managing director of estate and business planning at New York-based First Republic.

The lawsuit didn’t specify how much Creel wants in damages, but I’d…

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Opener Micah Preite (I hope I’m spelling that right) was a treat too, the sort of singer-songwriter set where you’re glad when someone asks what tuning he is in and charmed when he advises about practicing scales. He also played the house piano.

Micah Preite playing piano in Des Moines

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

I don’t think they’re on here and I don’t know that I was familiar with them before finding out they were playing in the Drake neighborhood but Atlanta band Lowertown put on a great Wednesday night set for a modest but passionate crowd.

The rock band Lowertown plays Des Moines venue xBk Live and a mosh pit ensues while one of the singers is standing on a piano stool

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Heard it's the 20th anniversary of @loscampesinos.bsky.social! Thrilled I got to review "You! Me! Dancing!" a little more than 19 years ago: web.archive.org/web/20080307...

On Repeat: Los Campesinos!: "You! Me! Dancing!"
Great, so indie kids know how to dance again. Cardiff, Wales seven-piece Los Campesinos! might finally be the band to get more of us to show off our clumsy moves in public. Exuberant "You! Me! Dancing!" easily lives up to the group's excitable punctuating habits. After teasing us with a slow-motion intro for more than a minute, Los Campesinos! (Latin-American Spanish for "The Farmers!") start dropping exclamation points all over the place: Trebly, distorted guitars twist and shout while xylophones and reedy synths unlock a Boy Least Likely To-like toyshop playfulness.

A song about fear of dancing in public, "You! Me! Dancing!" shakes off its phobias in a spree of contagious, footloose giddiness. "If only there were clothes on the floor/ I'd feel for certain I was bedroom dancing," lead singer Gareth Campesino! worries, amid charmingly unpolished backing oohs. As frontman, he treads the line between irony and earnestness with the poise of Art Brut's Eddie Argos, then leaps into a spoken-word epiphany that could've been borrowed from Scotland's Ballboy. Confessions are made, love is quietly declared, and the chorus is exactly what you'd hope. Bailamos!

MP3: > Los Campesinos!: "You! Me! Dancing!" [demo] (removed)
["We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives" single due 02/26/07 on Wichita] | [PRE-ORDER]

Posted by Marc Hogan on Thu: 01-25-07: 03:30 PM CST | Digg this article | Add to del.icio.us | Permalink

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Nothing important going on in the world so I am here to say, I have never seen "memento mori" used this way? www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

“Jellicle Ball,” in contrast, confidently fills its space, starting with its lovely, simple opening image, of a d.j. pulling a Diana Ross album out of a plastic crate—a memento mori of the eighties—and holding it up to the knowing crowd

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

sorry, jeez, just remembered this too

Re: hehe
Sep 19, 2002#698

Also, after the Marc shout out:

Amity: he is going to love that you said that
johncmayer: I know. That's why I like him

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

apologies for hijacking (it's what I seem to do when the JM signal goes out) but almost 24 years later and there's still almost zero utility for me from AIM transcripts like this, craziness. really thought our trajectories would eventually collide (again).

a message board post from September 19, 2002, with an AIM chatroom transcript, which follows. amity: john who is your favorite fan? john: my favorite fan? john: MarcNU.

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Email subject for today's issue of The Allocator newsletter: Losing Their Edge. Wrote about research from the University of Missouri's Matteo Binfarè into varying returns in those private markets we keep hearing about. For With Intelligence/S&P Global: pardot.withintelligence.com/e/284832/l-2...

When Human Capital Matters

A tightening range of private market returns has heightened the focus on LPs’ internal processes and the ability to be quick and nimble to take advantage of market opportunities. That’s according to Matteo Binfarè, a finance professor at the University of Missouri, discussing his latest research.

"I think it's all about your internal capabilities and governance,” Binfarè told The Allocator. “If you’re nimble, if you can do the right due diligence, you have access to those more active strategies like value add and opportunistic real estate, that's where you can add value with manager selection."

Prior research logged wide variation among LP returns in private equity and venture capital, at least until the PE industry matured in the 2000s. In “Institutional Investors in Private Markets: Limited Partner Performance Beyond Private Equity,” Binfarè and colleague Omer Sany Prakash find that such performance differences across LPs’ extended to other private market asset classes—and have similarly been shrinking over time.

“Again, this is consistent with a maturing industry,” Binfarè said. “There’s less room for those large differences than were maybe available back in the ’90s and early 2000s.”

A broad sample of LP fund commitments from 1991 to 2018 showed that endowments and foundations outperformed public pension funds in private real estate, in core and core-plus infrastructure funds, and in energy-oriented natural resources funds, according to the paper.

However, in private credit, financial institutions such as banks and insurers evidenced the most outperformance, specifically in mezzanine and direct lending strategies.

Those differences started to shrink in 2007, the paper added.

While some research has argued that endowment and foundation superior returns in PE resulted more from access than skill, with other private asset classes the two stories “are really hard to disentangle,” Binfarè said.

For instance, in real estate, endowments and foundations outperformed even among first-time funds, according to the research.

This table reports summary statistics for fund-level investments by limited partner (LP) type. The sample includes funds raised between 1991 and 2018. Entries report the number of unique LPs and mean values of fund and LP characteristics. Panel A reports statistics for real estate funds, Panel B for real asset funds (Infrastructure and Natural Resources) funds, and Panel C for private debt funds. LP types include Corporate Pension Funds, Endowments & Foundations, Financial Institutions, Other LPs, and Public Pension Funds. Fund Size is reported in millions of U.S. dollars. Fund number measures a fund’s sequence within a GP’s fund family.

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

For today's issue of The Allocator newsletter, I dug into some 990 filings and looked at chief investment officer compensation for Rockefeller University, Oberlin, American Red Cross, and more. I also piggybacked on Bluesky's Dan Loeb noticing. pardot.pageantmedia.com/l/284832/202...

The Scoop
Variable Compensation

Slowly but surely, LP disclosures to the IRS via 990 forms for 2025 have begun to surface. Judging by the latest filings to turn up, some but not all CIOs enjoyed pay rises last year.

Among the best paid in the disclosures so far was the $4.1bn Rockefeller University’s CIO Paula Volent. She logged taxable compensation of about $1.9m for the year ending June 2025. That’s up nearly 6% from around $1.8m a year earlier.

The equivalent figure for the $2.2bn Oberlin College’s CIO Jun Yang was about $755,000. However, that was a decline of some 13% from almost $870,000 in the previous year.

Elsewhere, the $4.6bn American Red Cross’s CIO Brian Rhoa recorded taxable comp of more than $731,00 for the year ending June 2025. That’s up about 4% from roughly $704,000 a year earlier. Rhoa has been CIO since 2022. Previously, when Rhoa was CFO, the nonprofit had gone with Cambridge Associates as an OCIO beginning in 2018, following a split with prior CIO Greg Williamson. But then it reversed course.

Speaking of OCIOs, the $1.2bn Macalester College announced in August 2024 that it was outsourcing its CIO function to Investure. Its former CIO Gary Martin still logged IRS-reportable pay of nearly $520,000, according to the Saint Paul, Minnesota, liberal arts school’s 990 for the year ending May 2025. That compares with almost $397,000 a year earlier. Seems like a sweeter farewell for Martin than it could otherwise have been, then.

Back in foundation-land, the $1.7bn Rotary International’s CIO Eric Jones logged more than $371,000 in reportable compensation from the nonprofit for the year ending June 2025, up almost 5% from about $355,000 the previous year.

By comparison, though, one of the first organizations to file 990s is usually the $10.2bn Young Men’s Christian Association Retirement Fund, whose CIO Hunter Reisner recorded $1.8m in pay for the year ending June 2025. That said, Reisner’s compensation was down sharply from nearly $2.5 million a year earlier.

Pay disclosures vary. For consistency of comparison, the figures above typically include base, bonus, and other compensation reportable as income to the IRS, but not retirement or other deferred compensation.

A Macalester spokesperson replied to The Allocator to emphasize that the college no longer employs an in-house CIO. Spokespeople for the other institutions didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

More compensation data to come as the 990s keep trickling in.

—Marc Hogan

A series of tweets in which Dan Loeb cites Claude on Iran oil production, is fact-checked by a professed oil production expert, and then posts a shrugging emoji and blames AI. A caption below the series of tweets reads, "Source: Daniel Loeb, CEO of Third Point, which manages $24.7bn"

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

In my continuing coverage of private credit, I got ahold of some quirky data about "PIK," a kind of IOU that has been much in the financial news lately, and wrote about it for The Allocator newsletter (from With Intelligence/S&P Global). pardot.pageantmedia.com/l/284832/202...

Cloudy PIK

Mortgage-backed securities. A couple of construction loans. And an Apollo Global Management vehicle.

These are among the investments on US life insurers’ books with the largest amounts of what’s known as payment-in-kind, or PIK, interest outstanding. That’s according to data shared with The Allocator by S&P Global Market Intelligence and based on newly required disclosures.

PIK, a financing tool that allows borrowers to add interest to a loan instead of making cash payments, has drawn scrutiny as investors fret about private credit.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, in a recent letter to shareholders, cited “more use of PIK” as a reason that, in his view, losses in private credit and other forms of leveraged lending will be higher than expected.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the umbrella group representing state insurance regulators, added a column tallying PIK interest to life insurers’ 2025 annual filings.

“This is the first time we’ve seen this data,” Tim Zawacki, a principal research analyst covering the US insurance industry for S&P Global Market Intelligence, told The Allocator. “Obviously it’s a point of concern.” (S&P Global is the parent company of With Intelligence.)

While PIK interest as a percentage of overall assets under management for any given life insurer isn’t going to be a meaningful number, the instruments that are accruing PIK interest are notable, Zawacki said, “because a lot of this stuff is pretty opaque.”

Indeed, the new data combine minute granularity with bewildering obscurity.

The single investment held by US life insurers that had the largest aggregate amount of PIK interest as of Dec. 31, 2025—to the tune of $127.1m—was from an issuer identified in the underlying reporting as “BSSP 0528 A2 - ABS.”

“We believe it to be the A2 tranche of the Bear Stearns Structured Products-managed CMO Holdings II Ltd. 2005-28 securitization,” Zawacki said.

Perhaps more recognizable, and also in the top five at $51.3m, is “AP GRANGE HOLDINGS LLC AP GRANGE SR SECU.” AP Grange is affiliated with alternative investment giant Apollo.

Your eyes aren’t deceiving you: The names of the issuers are cut off due to a character limitation in the original disclosures, according to Zawacki.

Nevertheless, evident in the top 10 as well, at $36.9m, is an investment associated with the Federal Home Loan Bank.

Apollo’s insurance arm, Athene, was reportedly the second-biggest borrower last year from the FHLB, a Depression-era program designed to provide low-cost funding to mortgage lenders.

Another striking issuer name on the list, at No. 14 with $27.5m, is “UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESE SR-SEC.”

“I don’t know what that could possibly be,” Zawacki said, flagging that the data comes through as reported by the institutions.

It’s certainly true that the amount of PIK interest held by US life insurers on any particular investment is small potatoes in a private credit market that totals, according to Dimon’s letter, $1.8tn. And aside from any concerns about deteriorating credit quality, PIK interest is sometimes a useful tool when lending to earlier stage or high growth businesses that are likely to be more profitable in the future.

US life insurers had almost $6tn to their names as of year-end 2025. But the new disclosures don’t allow analysts to determine with certainty how much of that is in private credit, Zawacki said.

“The question we get more than any other,” he told The Allocator, “is how much private credit insurance companies own. And despite the very deep granularity of the data, we can’t give a straightforward answer to that question. There’s no magic bullet in the data that allows you to come up with that number. It’s very much an art more than a science.”

As a step toward greater transparency around an aspect of private credit that’s garnering more and more attention, the list of securities is still meaningful, according to Zawacki.

“This is part of the evolution of the disclosure that the regulators have about increased exposure to private credit,” he said. “That’s the big takeaway here.”

The presence of PIK interest is not necessarily a sign of elevated risk, Zawacki noted. “However,” he said, “where there’s not an implicit government guarantee, perhaps it is a characteristic of an investment that does carry incrementally higher levels of risk.”

See the full list below.

Investments held by US life insurers with largest aggregate amounts of PIK interest accrued and outstanding at YE 2025

Issuer

PIK interest accrued ($000)

1

BSSP 0528 A2 - ABS

127,126

2

VITA LIVING T1 LIMITED AND VIT CONSTRUCT

121,334

3

UES COMMERCIAL LLC DELAYED DRAW CONSTRUC

102,589

4

MHS ACQUISITION HOLDINGS LLC SENIOR PROM

64,368

5

AP GRANGE HOLDINGS LLC AP GRANGE SR SECU

51,277

Investments held by US life insurers with largest aggregate amounts of PIK interest accrued and outstanding at YE 2025

Issuer

PIK interest accrued ($000)

1

BSSP 0528 A2 - ABS

127,126

2

VITA LIVING T1 LIMITED AND VIT CONSTRUCT

121,334

3

UES COMMERCIAL LLC DELAYED DRAW CONSTRUC

102,589

4

MHS ACQUISITION HOLDINGS LLC SENIOR PROM

64,368

5

AP GRANGE HOLDINGS LLC AP GRANGE SR SECU

51,277

6

REP TRAINING EDUC CERTIF HLDGS INITIAL N

50,994

7

MTI INTERMEDIATE-INC. SUB-UNSEC

47,025

8

FH SUNRISE INTERMEDIATE INC PIK NOTES

41,980

9

OPTIV PARENT INC SECOND LIEN TERM LOAN

37,041

10

FEDERAL HOME LOAN BANKS SCRT 2018-3 MZ

36,929

11

DHL-ZERO COUPON SR

32,184

12

BEACH HOTEL ASSOCIATES LLC CONSTRUCTION

28,558

13

GS-SM CITY NORTH II BORROWER DELAYED DRA

27,588

14

UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESE SR-SEC

27,462

15

REGED HOLDCO, INC ALL PIK

26,826

16

125 WEST 57TH STREET MEZZ LLC SENIOR MEZ

26,671

17

FHR 4444 CZ Z SEQ

24,895

18

IQHQ-RADD HOLDINGS I LLC CONSTRUCTION LO

24,101

19

VALUE DEMONSTRATION UK HOLDING PIK FACIL

24,068
20

FNR 2014-53 VZ Z SEQ

23,948

21

CF INTERMEDIATE LLC NA-SUB-SEC

22,985

22

FHR 4377 LZ Z SEQ

21,565

23

FNMA_15-65

21,184

24

CERRO DOMINADOR INVERSIONE SPA SR SEC

20,681

25

PROTOTEK NA-SUB-UNSEC

19,886

SOURCE: S&P GLOBAL MARKET INTELLIGENCE

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Huh! From March 2021, when Live Nation's stock was at all-time high despite Covid shutdowns: pitchfork.com/thepitch/why...

Live Nation’s stock price, in other words, might be high not because it’s making money now, but because its dominance blocks a path for new entrants to the marketplace. Being willing to lose money for competitive advantage is part of the business philosophy of Live Nation’s most powerful owner, billionaire John Malone, whose Liberty Media holds a 33 percent stake in the music giant. Live Nation itself is only a single kingdom in Malone’s wider media empire, which spans satellite-radio goliath SiriusXM, streaming service Pandora, and a growing stake in broadcast-radio hegemon iHeartMedia. The consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen was not being hyperbolic when it called out the “insane corporate concentration” of the iHeartMedia move.

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Thanks to the band Skorts and the local venue Xbk Live!

The rock band Skorts performs in Des Moines

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Got to go a bit longer for this edition of The Allocator (from With Intelligence/S&P Global). Talked to folks in the UK, Switzerland, Australia, and Indiana about the pluses and minuses, if you're investment talent, of working in a single-family office. pardot.withintelligence.com/e/284832/l-2...

Proximity to the principal is one plus, according to Latsos. Rather than steward assets whose ultimate stakeholders may be distant, CIOs at single-family offices can hear directly from the capital owner what they want to do with their investments and how much risk they want to take. “You have more interesting conversations,” Latsos said.

Single-family offices can also bring fewer constraints on investments. “You don’t have a private equity bucket that nothing else can go in,” Latsos said. “An idea might come from you, and it might go in that bucket. Which will not be the case with an institutional investor, which says if you’re working as a private equity analyst, and you’re shown an amazing idea on the public equity side, you cannot assess it. That’s it, period.”

The three primary factors drawing institutional allocators to private wealth management more broadly—and that includes single-family offices—are scale, flexibility, and governance, said Craig Dandurand, CIO of the Tuckwell Family Office. “The single-family office that I work for has got enough capital to do interesting stuff but not so much capital where it has to do only big stuff,” Dandurand told The Allocator. Within a smaller portfolio, even an adjustment that may be modest in dollar terms can feel meaningful.

At the same time, the potential for flexibility goes beyond buckets. Rather than spread their bets across the typical asset classes, a single-family office can be “much more idiosyncratic,” said Dandurand, formerly of CalPERS and Future Fund. “The family office has every right to be as undiversified as it wants to be.”

Then, on the governance front, there’s the relative lack of bureaucracy. Rather than sit in a CalPERS board meeting that is broadcast to the world in real time, requesting approval for a program that has been months or years in the making, Dandurand can simply ask Graham and Louise Tuckwell what they think. “For a lot of folks that move out of the institutional realm, it’s bec…

The chance to have more investment freedom is one of the reasons allocators consider a switch to single-family offices, said Tory Hyndman, a partner at executive search firm Sainty Hird & Partners. And while compensation varies depending on the office, co-investment opportunities can add to the attraction, she said. Plus, the chances to build your network should be different than what you’d find at a bigger firm. “Family offices have always been quite an interesting destination for investment talent,” Hyndman told The Allocator.

All that said, people thinking about going into a family office should do as much due diligence as they can, according to Hyndman. “Understand the culture of the principal and really understand how the governance framework works,” she advised. If doing a single trade is going to require 15 signatures, better to find out now. Same goes for working with a principal who might be headstrong or mercurial, whether today or in the next generation. Culture always matters, Hyndman noted, but at family offices it can be “much more nuanced.”

Being closer to the capital owner can have its own downsides, such as the risk that the job becomes all-consuming. “For some family offices, you are also signing up to shooting every weekend in the UK or skiing at the chalet in Switzerland every weekend, or whatever it might be,” Hyndman said. “Being on the yacht, which sounds fantastic, but actually when it starts to take over your weekend, it can be quite a lot.” Given how distinct each family office can be, she said it’s worth considering as well as what your next move would be and how to ensure your skills remain transferable.

Some of the possible challenges of working in a family office are more prosaic. The CIO might not have to attend as many meetings, but they have to perform a wider range of tasks, according to Latsos, the Swiss single-family office CIO. “What do you do when your printer breaks down?” he said. “Who assesses the cybersecurity?” Working i…

Although Latsos noted that the business model of family offices is largely untested by a major recession, plenty more allocators may yet end up weighing the pros and cons of joining one. In 2019, some 6,130 single-family offices managed a total of $3.3tn according to Deloitte estimates cited in CJ Ryan’s "The Invisible Firm." Five years later, those numbers had grown to 8,030 and $5.5tn; by 2030, more than 10,000 single-family offices are projected to manage $9.5tn.

“It’s going to continue to be a very appealing destination for talent,” Hyndman said. Gordon Gekko should do his due diligence first.

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

A strange day to share new work but I talked to the ex-CIO of the IMF's pension plan about his own plans for retirement. When he mentioned that he "felt anxious about not feeling anxious," I could relate. My latest for The Allocator newsletter (With Intelligence/S&P Global).

Reflections From a Retiring IMF Allocator

Derek Bills’ last day at the International Monetary Fund was on March 31. After nearly a decade running the fund’s roughly $20B retirement and retiree medical benefits plans — and more than 27 years in total with the organization — he isn’t yet sure what retirement holds.

Figuring out what’s next is what’s he’s most looking forward to, in fact, he told The Allocator.

“I haven’t given it much thought as to what I want to do,” said Bills, whose official title was advisor and CIO of the investment office of the IMF. “It’s been a very successful journey, and now that I have some time to myself to think about what I want to do next, that’s exactly what I want to focus on.”

He left open the possibility of returning to the investment management space but said that he might also do something “completely unrelated.”

He noted that he was fully vested in the pension plan that he oversaw, so “it made sense” for him to retire at this point.

What might be most relatable to fellow allocators — well versed in checking the markets and worrying about what could go wrong in their portfolios — is how different Bills said he felt upon relinquishing his duties.

“I felt anxious about not feeling anxious,” he said. “I know, it sounds strange, right?”

Although technically on an extended “gardening leave” until he finishes burning through his accumulated paid time off, Bills isn’t necessarily a green thumb. “Believe it or not, I don't particularly enjoy gardening,” he said. “But I know I have gardening duty to do.”

Travel, catching up with people he hasn’t been in close enough touch with, and reading are also on Bills’ post-retirement docket, as is simply having some time to think.

On his first day of retirement, Bills, who lives in Virginia, took the day off and visited his youngest son at the University of Virginia.

The IMF has yet to announce his successor, and a spokesperson for the Washington, D.C.-based international economic institution didn’t immediately provide a name when asked.

Whoever that person is, it’s their turn to worry about the IMF retirement portfolios now.

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

Pre-2001 even! I know I have a checkered history among Jimmy Eat World fans but I did see them perform "Sweetness" live in Tempe when we only knew it as an mp3

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

Wrote about oil volatility jitters and tech entrepreneurs invoking Robert Frost in investment lawsuits, for The Allocator newsletter from With Intelligence (S&P Global). I hope I can get the screenshots right this time. Subscription information: pardot.pageantmedia.com/l/284832/202...

Dispersion Vs. Correlation

As allocators eye turbulent public equity markets, a key factor to watch could be how much various stocks are all moving up or down together.

Dispersion, or the spread of returns within an index, has been up for the S&P 500 benchmark over the past few months, according to Anu Ganti, senior director and head of U.S. index investment strategy at S&P Dow Jones Indices.

For instance, the S&P 500 was down 1% month-to-date as of Ganti’s interview with The Allocator on the morning of March 10. In tech alone, however, amid concerns about the threat that AI could pose to the software industry, Microsoft was the biggest contributor to the index over the past week, while Apple and Alphabet were the biggest detractors.

“Now, adding to that, you’ve also got the oil volatility jitters,” Ganti said. Dispersion within the S&P 500 energy sector index has “spiked,” she noted, since Feb. 27, the eve of the war in Iran.

Throw in private credit concerns and inflation worries, and as of the end of February, dispersion was at “historic levels,” according to Ganti. The reading for mid-cap dispersion alone was the third highest on record.

Along with dispersion, of course, another ingredient of volatility is correlation: How frequently are stocks moving up or down at the same time?

Correlations among stocks in the S&P 500, while still low by historical standards, have started to tick up, Ganti said. “I would keep an eye on that,” she explained, “because if that number continues to go up—the correlations—plus you’ve got higher dispersion, chances are you could get higher volatility, right?”

While Ganti can’t predict the future, she noted that the Cboe S&P 500 Dispersion Index, or DSPX, measures the market’s dispersion expectations for the S&P over the next 30 days.

“It’s still relatively high, but it’s starting to go down,” she said of the DSPX, “which tells you that the market may be perceiving more macro going on as opposed to the more idiosyncratic, stock-level risk.”

As for recent private credit headaches, the S&P BDC index—which tracks 44 business development companies that trade on major US exchanges—was up 1% in the month to date, despite being down 11% in the quarter to date.

Asset managers’ woes so far this year are reflected in the spread between the S&P 500 financial sector index and the broader index excluding financials. For the quarter to date, the S&P 500 financials benchmark was down 8%, while the S&P 500 ex- financials was up 1%, Ganti said.

—Marc Hogan

What’s $22M Between Friends?

Meanwhile, in family-office land, the investment arms for a New England technology executive and his wife are suing a fund manager for allegedly holding their assets hostage.

Cashman Family Investment LLC and Cashman Family Investment II LLC filed a lawsuit last month in Massachusetts state court against ArrowSide Fund GP LLC, Arrowside Capital LLC, and Tucker Walsh.

The Cashmans in question are Carlos—a serial entrepreneur who in 2018 co-founded an eventual e-commerce “unicorn,” Thrasio, that has since gone through bankruptcy—and his wife, Jennifer.

The suit contends that Walsh, who was the Cashmans’ Boston-area friend and neighbor and previously a portfolio manager at Polen Capital, approached them in 2021 to act as the lead investor in ArrowSide Fund, which Walsh was to manage through Arrowside Capital.

Through Cashman Family Investment, the Cashmans invested $22m in ArrowSide Fund as an LP, while Walsh invested $150,000, according to the complaint.

Walsh also allegedly swayed Cashman Family Investment II to transfer certain private placement interests to the fund.

The fund’s performance tanked in spring 2022, and Walsh locked in the losses by liquidating most of the investments to cash, in the meantime pocketing more than $2m in management fees, the suit alleges.

Cashman Family Investment withdrew its liquid investments in June 2025 and requested the withdrawal of its remaining assets—allegedly about $8m in private placements and $250,000 in cash—a month later, but the request has yet to be honored, the suit says.

The Cashmans’ investment offices are seeking a temporary restraining order and damages for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.

They’ve also separately filed a suit in Delaware state court to dissolve ArrowSide Fund, court records show.

The situation is all a bit more curious because, according to the Massachusetts suit, Carlos Cashman owned minority stakes in both Arrowside entities and was named as a manager of the GP alongside Walsh.

According to an earlier Forbes.com report, Arrowside Capital’s website originally included Cashman’s biography. (The Allocator was unable to independently corroborate this detail.)

A 2022 lawsuit filed by former Founders Fund chief of staff Stacy Chang claims Carlos Cashman lured her away from the VC fund to work at Arrowside Capital—then changed his mind about raising outside investments and dismissed her six months later.

Chang reached a confidential settlement with Cashman and the Arrowside entities in February 2025, according to court documents.

The recent suits in Massachusetts and Delaware also accuse Arrowside Capital of operating without proper registration and failing to provide audited financial statements.

Walsh and attorneys for the Cashman investment offices didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

“Good fences make good neighbors,” the Massachusetts complaint states, channeling New England’s own Robert Frost. “The Cashmans have learned this the hard way.”

It would be an expensive lesson, for sure—and perhaps a reminder that even tech entrepreneurs shouldn’t neglect the humanities.

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

Wrote about USDA staffing changes. The agency's statement came in hot: “As Secretary Rollins has stated, ‘Food security is national security,’ and we will not compromise this critical work. Any suggestion otherwise is misleading and risks undermining public confidence in the nation’s food supply.”

The top of a feature story bout the USDA in the January issue of Meatingplace magazine. Headline: "USDA, a-okay?"

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

sorry i realize people on Bluesky don't follow me for most of my paid work these days but I just noticed I left out what Mullally was responding to in that last screenshot!

“Effectively no one is let go for performance reasons,” Ray said, citing previous research.

Okay, but there’s also the inconvenient fact that public pension CIOs are long-term investors, so any bad moves they made with an eye on future employment (or for that matter positive decisions) might take years to show up in performance results.

“Your point is well taken,” Mullally responded. “We totally agree with you.”

And if conflicts of interest really do goad allocators into picking underperforming investments?

“The simplest fix here seems to be if you pay more,” Mullally said.

Not expecting to hear any conflict over that.

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

I enjoyed pressing a couple of finance professors on their findings about conflicts of interest for public pension plans' chief investment officers, only to discover they were considering similar questions. For The Allocator (With Intelligence/S&P Global). pardot.withintelligence.com/e/284832/l-2...

A Revolving Door for Allocators?

Public pension plans whose chief investment officers jump to private asset management or investment consulting tend to underperform—and pay higher fees to outside vendors—in the years prior to these exits, according to academic paper “Conflicted CIOs.”

The paper focuses on 46 CIOs who left public pension plans for private investment firms from 2001 to 2020, out of a total sample of 367 CIOs. So the sample size isn’t huge, but then, neither is the world of US public allocators.

The researchers define a CIO as “conflicted” if they eventually leave to join a private asset management or investment consulting firm.

Controlling for other factors, their findings indicate that “conflicted” CIOs underperform their “unconflicted” counterparts by 56 to 71 bps per year.

The researchers also found evidence that conflicted CIOs increase their plans’ fees to external vendors by between 2.5 bps and 9.4 bps (as a percentage of plan assets) each year prior to the CIO’s departure, when compared to unconflicted peers.

Younger conflicted CIOs further underperform their unconflicted CIO peers, while CIOs without prior private fund experience also underperform, according to the paper.

All told, the findings suggest that conflicts of interest influence public pension plan CIOs and lead to underperformance, the researchers assert.

What about the possibility that public pension CIOs who leave to the private sector are worse at their jobs? Or are worried about their future prospects given this underperformance and are therefore more likely to jump ship? After all, this isn’t Lake Wobegon—not everyone can have above-average performance. Or maybe they just prefer a more corporate salesy role (and a larger wallet) to investing?

The researchers are considering such questions, said co-author Kevin Mullally, a finance professor at the University of Central Florida, in an interview with The Allocator.

“I find it implausible that private firms, who are going to pay more, are going to just take the castoffs from this public pension space,” Mullally observed.

And it’s not as if public pension plan CIOs are joining private asset managers because they’re getting fired for being lousy at their jobs, suggested co-author Sugata Ray, a finance professor at the University of Alabama.

“Effectively no one is let go for performance reasons,” Ray said, citing previous research.

Okay, but there’s also the inconvenient fact that public pension CIOs are long-term investors, so any bad moves they made with an eye on future employment (or for that matter positive decisions) might take years to show up in performance results.

“Your point is well taken,” Mullally responded. “We totally agree with you.”

And if conflicts of interest really do goad allocators into picking underperforming investments?

“The simplest fix here seems to be if you pay more,” Mullally said.

Not expecting to hear any conflict over that.

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Felt pretty corny for a recovering music critic to share a New Yorker article about Walter Benjamin but I keep thinking about this, it's what it's all about www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

:For them, an art work became a “medium of reflection,” no longer simply a mirror of the world but a tool for understanding things about history, society, and politics, as well as about more familiar matters of the human heart. As for criticism, it was both a means to discover what the art object had to say and an extension of the object itself."

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

An investment group called the Family Office Club was hit with a proposed class action over after-hours text messages. The person suing them? The head of a Florida law firm—and, the club's CEO told me, a paid guest at one of their investment workshops. My latest for The Allocator/S&P Global.

U Up?

A business that describes itself as the largest association in the family office wealth management industry has been sued for late-night texting.

The Family Office Club sent three marketing text messages before the hour of 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. in the recipient’s local time, according to a complaint filed on February 23 in federal district court in Miami.

The messages were according to the suit, which was filed by Broward County, Florida resident Mario I. Molina.

Specifically, the Family Office Club sent the marketing texts on January 23, 2025, at 1:02 a.m. and 4:16 a.m., and on February 21, 2025, at 2:35 a.m., said to a 1991 ban on telemarketing at indecent hours. The first two touted strategies on offer at an investment workshop and the third hawked investment-related AI tools, according to the screenshots from the complaint.

Richard C. Wilson, CEO of the Family Office Club, disputed the allegations in an email response to The Allocator.

“We have never intentionally sent a text message outside of business hours, and this person never approached us about any issue with a message arriving after hours,” Wilson said. “If there was a technical glitch with the platform we use, that may be what happened here. We are addressing it now, and gathering the facts.”

Wilson added that the Family Office Club expects the matter to be resolved quickly. He asserted that Molina was a paid guest at one of the organization’s 30 annual investor club events.

Molina is asking the court to greenlight a class action on behalf of everyone in the U.S. who has received more than one after-hours marketing text from the Family Office Club in a given year. His suit requests statutory damages of $500 for each and every negligent violation and $1,500 for each and every willful or knowing violation, the suit says.

His lawyer, Joseph Varona of Miramar, Florida-based PLG Damage Attorneys, didn’t respond to The Allocator’s requests for comment. The CEO of this law firm specializing in …

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

More work I can share without a paywall: As concerns about private credit hit the mainstream, a group of regulators is working on changes that, I'm told, could shift the demand for the asset class "overnight." My latest for The Allocator/S&P Global. pardot.withintelligence.com/e/284832/l-2...

Not Yet Rated

In a tumultuous month for private credit markets, another potential concern for asset allocators looms from perhaps an unlikely source: the umbrella group representing state insurance regulators.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners is working on a new framework for due diligence of credit rating providers, said Nathan Houdek, insurance commissioner of Wisconsin and chair of the NAIC’s financial condition committee, in a recent webinar by S&P Global, With Intelligence’s parent company.    

The regulatory group is working to determine how suitable the ratings from credit rating providers really are, according to Houdek. “We often like to say that we’re moving from blind reliance on CRP ratings to informed reliance,” Houdek observed.

A new NAIC procedure will allow state regulators to challenge credit ratings that differ from the group’s valuation assessment by at least three notches. Set to take effect in January, the challenge process has been delayed pending system updates, said webinar moderator David Knutson, head of industry outreach for S&P Global’s chief client office.

“The demand for private credit literally could materially change overnight, depending on an NAIC policy,” Knutson told The Allocator  in an interview.

As the NAIC develops its new framework, chief investment officers — at insurance companies and beyond — are left to play wait and see. “I don’t know what the outcome is going to be,” Knutson said. “It creates a lot of uncertainty.”    

In the meantime, a representative of a big GP group is urging the NAIC to be open about the next steps.   

“The CIOs of insurance companies really have a strong aversion to what they consider uncontrollable or unpredictable risk,” said Joe Engelhard, Americas head of private credit and asset management for the Alternative Investment Management Association, in the webinar. 

Engelhard continued, “We believe it’s very important for the NAIC to implement this new authority in a very clear and transparent manner that will reassure insurance companies and investors [and] at least remove the expectation of significant unpredictable outcomes.”

One non-U.S. regulator, the Bermuda Monetary Authority, recently dropped ratings firm Egan-Jones — an early leader in the private credit market — from its list of recognized credit rating providers.

With some investment industry observers lately speculating that Blue Owl’s shift on redemptions might be private credit’s “canary in the coal mine,” LPs allocated to private credit surely have more urgent worries. But as the year goes on, they may want to keep an eye on the NAIC, too.   

As they (used to?) say in the television business, it’s all about the ratings.

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

In a five-year-old class action on behalf of current and former Pennsylvania teachers, three investment consultants have now agreed to pay a total of $30 million. A fourth has yet to give up the fight. My latest for The Allocator/S&P Global. pardot.withintelligence.com/e/284832/l-2...

Payouts for PSERS

Aksia is the lone consultant still fighting a pension client lawsuit that Hamilton Lane Advisors, Portfolio Advisors, and now Aon have paid a combined $30m+ to settle, according to court records.

The lawsuit alleges that the four firms, as investment advisors and consultants, recommended unsuitably expensive investments to the $81.4B Pennsylvania Public School Employees Retirement System (PSERS).

Suburban middle-school teacher Kevin Steinke originally filed the suit in Pennsylvania state court in June 2021, alleging that PSERS paid its expert advisors millions of dollars for woeful returns — while also paying “exorbitant” fees to private investment managers.

Aksia, Aon, Hamilton Lane, and Portfolio Advisors all denied the allegations, but three out of the four have now settled.

Last fall, Hamilton Lane agreed to pay $4m and Portfolio Advisors $11.25m in a joint settlement approved last fall, according to court documents.

Aon is the latest to relent, striking a $15m payout deal, per new court docs. This is on top of $7m Aon paid its grumpy customer in 2024 over errors in a 2020 risk share analysis.

With Pennsylvania-based Hamilton Lane dropped from the suit, Aksia and Aon filed last December to move the case to federal court, albeit still in Philly. The teacher’s lawyers asked that the case be sent back to state court, contending in a January filing that Aksia and Aon missed a 30-day window for making the matter federal.

Aksia and Aon have since opposed that request, arguing that the 30-day window began later than the teacher’s attorneys claim and that they were well within it.

PSERS’ most recent annual report, for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, lists Aksia as a private markets consultant and Portfolio Advisors as a private equity fund manager. The report doesn’t refer to Aon or Hamilton Lane.

Portfolio Advisors was acquired by FS Investments in 2023, and last year they rebranded together as Future Standard.

Representatives for all parties involved didn’t immediately respond to The Allocator’s requests for comment.

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Hey, not every day I get cited in a statement before the U.S. Senate www.commerce.senate.gov/services/fil...

Footnote: 12 Marc Hogan, A Guide to “Fan” Organizations Funded by the Ticketing Industry, Pitchfork (Aug. 3, 2023),
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/consumer-groups-take-money-from-ticketing-industry/

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

While many of you are likely yelling "go Harry Styles" or "it's negative degrees outside" I'm yelling "I put a Bun B reference in a newsletter article about asset-backed finance" OK actually this post format doesn't work, posting anyway

II Trill

As the new year settles in, credit ratings analysts are projecting private credit growth to continue to gain pace—and the risks associated with it to mount more quickly too.

Assets under management focused on corporate direct lending will top $2trn by year-end and near $4trn in a decade, according to the 2026 outlook for private credit by Moody’s Ratings.

What’s more, asset-backed finance—although more difficult to track—could potentially overtake traditional direct lending as alternative asset managers seek out consumer loans, data infrastructure credit, and other newer, more diverse asset pools, the ratings agency said.

We also predict further ABF dominance.

ABF is “the new frontier for private credit,” Moody’s global head of private credit, Marc Pinto, told Bloomberg, which first reported the news. (Pinto wasn’t available for an interview with The Allocator prior to deadline.)

However, all this innovation has also spawned new risks. The recent defaults at First Brands and Tricolor drive home the risks of off-balance-sheet financing, right as such transactions increase in the ABF space, the Moody’s outlook notes. What’s more, the expansion of ABF into cyclical areas such as consumer or small business receivables could lead to potential performance volatility.

“ABF deals’ structural protections and lender oversight will be key in mitigating downside risks to investors,” the Moody’s analyst team writes.

Although ABF represents a “significant growth” space for private credit, running a successful ABF portfolio depends on areas of strength that aren’t exactly universal, according to Kroll Bond Rating Agency’s 2026 outlook for private credit. These factors include operational infrastructure, monitoring and execution capabilities, and asset-level expertise.

Meanwhile, back in direct lending, KBRA forecasts the default rate will rise slightly in 2026.

For allocators, careful manager selection seems critical. They’re set to have an embarrassment of opportunities this year in private credit. But buyer beware.

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Was doing some research today that reminded me to check up on 3-D movies. A futuristic technology decades in the making that became genuinely popular and then faded away due to quality control and cost issues. Many such cases. trends.google.com/explore?q=%2...

A Google Trends chart for search term "3-D movies" and its popularity from 2004 to present. Line go up, then line go down (and, more recently, flatline).

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

I enjoyed overseeing today's The Allocator newsletter (from With Intelligence/S&P Global) while founder Leanna Orr is away. I wrote about animated GIFs! Subscription info for institutional investing pros, very few of whom likely follow me here but hey: pardot.withintelligence.com/e/284832/l-2...

Subject: Pure Moods

How do you do, fellow meme investors?

The Scoop

Popcorn.gif, But Michael Jackson Is Watching the Stock Market

There’s more to animated GIFs—the short, looping video clips that have become the dominant visual shorthand of social media platforms—than meets the eye.

The dynamic images that investors post online can stand in as a proxy for market sentiment, according to the new academic paper “GIFfluence: A Visual Approach to Investor Sentiment and the Stock Market.”

Ingeniously, the researchers focused on GIFs embedded in messages posted on Stocktwits.com, a platform for sharing opinions about financial assets. Stocktwits allows users to self-declare posts as bullish or bearish, so the scholars had a ready-made way to determine the bullishness or bearishness of particular visuals.

(This text is followed by the actual animated GIF of Michael Jackson eating popcorn.)

In 2020, Stocktwits began giving users a built-in tool for searching GIPHY, a vast repository of animated GIFs from the infamous “distracted boyfriend” to that viral blinking guy to Homer Simpson disappearing backwards into the bushes.

Based on millions of GIF-bearing Stocktwits posts from 2020 to 2024, the researchers built a sentiment index, which they aptly call GIFsentiment.

Meme stocks are one thing, but GIFsentiment uses memes to measure the mood on Wall Street.

Apparently, it works. The sentiment index predicts aggregate stock market returns for up to one month ahead, the researchers find.

“GIF sentiment reflects how investors feel, not what they know,” said one of the paper’s authors, Shijia Wu of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, reached via email due to time zone differences.

The evidence shows that a higher GIFsentiment reading predicts short-term market strength—but also signals emotional overreaction and later reversals, Wu told The Allocator.

So when it comes to institutional investors, the index is more relevant for risk management than for return forecasting, she explained.

And is there a meme for “irrational exuberance”? The GIFsentiment index mainly pinpoints moments of excessive bullishness, rising volatility, and reallocations across asset classes, according to Wu.

“For asset allocators,” she continued, “this means GIF sentiment can be used as a behavioral overlay: a tool to flag sentiment-driven risk, crowded positioning, and moments when markets may be more vulnerable to corrections, rather than as a signal to increase exposure.”

Here’s to that.

(this is followed by the actual animated GIF of Leonard DiCaprio toasting in The Great Gatsby)

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

New from me in S&P Global's The Allocator newsletter: Pension funds rarely win lawsuits over investment losses, as a Missouri pension's recent legal defeat shows. Subscription info: pardot.withintelligence.com/e/284832/l-2...

Get Mad, Not Even

Suing managers after investment losses is about as bad a strategy for making money as whatever those managers were doing to lose it in first place.

A recent defeat in court for the $10.2B Missouri State Employees’ Retirement System (MOSERS) added another case to the point. A Missouri state court judge last month tossed MOSERS’ five-year-old lawsuit accusing Toronto-based Catalyst Capital Group of mismanaging some of the pension’s investments.

In a Dec. 19 ruling, Cole County Circuit Judge Daniel Green also ordered MOSERS to pay the private equity firm’s defense costs.

Missouri’s largest state employee pension plan initially sued the Canadian buyout firm in October 2020. An amended version of the suit, filed in December 2021 and obtained by The Allocator, says Catalyst’s alleged misconduct caused “hundreds of millions of dollars of losses to innocent investors, including MOSERS.”

The amended suit is partially redacted and doesn’t specify how much MOSERS itself allegedly lost on the investments.

However, MOSERS said at a 2020 hearing that it lost about $59.2m across three Catalyst funds, the Missouri Independent reports. Lawyers for MOSERS said in court appearances that the pension invested $120 million of $175 million it committed to the funds, according to the Independent.

The suit’s ultimate dismissal came after a series of rulings trimming MOSERS’ case.

In one January 2025 order, the judge held that MOSERS could not pursue damages on behalf of all investors in the funds because it had failed to involve the other investors—including the $2.5bn University of Missouri—in the suit.

Chuck Hatfield, an attorney representing Catalyst, said the ruling barring MOSERS from suing on behalf of its fellow shareholders was “the big blow” to the pension’s side.

“That changed the momentum in the case completely,” Hatfield told The Allocator in an interview. “They were on an island when it came to pursuing these claims.”

MOSERS spokesperson Candy Smith said the pension’s board would continue to assess next steps. “The judge’s rulings did not evaluate the actual misconduct at issue,” Smith said in an emailed statement to The Allocator.

Institutional investors rarely win on claims against asset managers related to investment losses, said securities attorney Robert Heim, a partner at Tarter Krinsky & Drogis, who is not involved in the case.

“Courts can be very skeptical of these claims, for a variety of reasons,” Heim told The Allocator. He noted the sophistication of institutional investors and their access to legal advice, as well as the typical amount of risk disclosure they receive from GPs.

Hatfield, the Catalyst attorney, acknowledged that MOSERS’ lawyers had their work cut out for them.

“It is an extremely high bar for one disgruntled limited partner to try to control the fund through litigation,” he said.

“There is a reason you don’t see a lot of suits like this.”

—Marc Hogan

001

Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

ha that reminds me of the a Ghost of Social Apps Past, Peach dot Cool, and the time I got a presumably fake invitation to connect from one Justin

An email notification from 2016 that someone allegedly named justin (boniver)"wants to be friends" on the now-defunct social media app Peach. Presumably this was not really Justin from Bon Iver.

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

A colorful story from before the holiday break: A Las Vegas investor who posts influencer content as Kris Krāze has filed a lawsuit over an alleged "sham" family office in Florida. My latest for The Allocator newsletter, from With Intelligence/S&P Global. pardot.withintelligence.com/e/284832/l-2...

Florida Man Fakes a Family Office

Justin Godur and his father, Jaime Godur, both based in Boca Raton, “operated through a so-called ‘family office’ to project an illusion of immense wealth and success,” according to a recent lawsuit against the pair.  

“By leveraging this facade,” the suit continues, the Godurs induced Nevada investor Kristopher Mullins and his Las Vegas-based business KCM Investments “to pay nearly half a million dollars for illusory lines of credit, sham business opportunities, and other nonexistent ventures.”   

Capital Max’s website is no longer online, but a LinkedIn page still exists. As recently as February, the website called Capital Max “a commercial real estate family office” that offered “creative financing to help our clients fund deals,” supposedly including a $36.5m construction project in Miami, according to an archived page on the Wayback Machine. 

Elsewhere, the site describes Capital Max as an “investment, advisory, and fund placement firm, with a focus on alternative investments.”   

As for the plaintiff, Mullins also posts influencer-style online business content under the alias Kris Krāze. His YouTube channel has 164 videos and 900 subscribers. 

According to the suit, Mullins and a business partner met Justin Godur in Las Vegas in November 2023. “Based on Godur’s representations, Mullins understood that Godur and his family ran a highly successful and wealthy family office comprised of different entities that offered lending to high-end clients for high-value investments and real estate purchases,” the complaint states.   

Long story short(ish): From November 2023 to March 2024, Godur allegedly induced Mullins to pay Capital Max, then known as Q7Capital Group, a total of $430,000 to secure three lines of credit adding up to $750m. More payments followed.

In the meantime, Mullins became chief marketing officer of the rebranded Capital Max in April 2024, traveling to Florida for two weeks at a time for the job. He wangled quotes as an expert source in articles by National Mortgage Professional, Realtor.com, Consumer Affairs, and more.     

The case gets complicated in summer 2024. Around this time, Godur hired DeFrank as Capital Max’s director of real estate, according to the suit. Godur also allegedly told Mullins about a potential deal where an affiliate called Pinnacle One Capital Group would buy a residential property in Deerfield Beach and remodel it to add a second story.   

According to the suit, Godur and DeFrank got Mullins to agree in advance that he would buy the Deerfield Beach property from Pinnacle Capital after the remodel. 

Two of the non-Godur owners of Pinnacle Capital told Mullins in November 2024 that they believed Justin Godur had misappropriated $1m from a Pinnacle Capital fund, the suit says.   

Will the real Kris Krāze please stand up?   

Confronted by Mullins, Godur said he had never applied for one of the lines of credit but maintained that the other payments were legit, the complaint says.  

Godur also allegedly told Mullins that the Deerfield Beach property could not, in fact, support a second story. Godur agreed in late November 2024 to repay Mullins $445,000, according to the suit. Eventually, Mullins was also able to cancel the purchase agreement for the Deerfield Beach property.   

Shockingly, the accused phony family office head did not repay the real-life money, the complaint says.

Ever the optimists that one day Capital Max would be a real firm, Godur promised to pay Mullins an additional $250,000 for his work as chief marketing officer.

Shockingly, the accused phony family office head did not repay the real-life money, the complaint says.

Ever the optimists that one day Capital Max would be a real firm, Godur promised to pay Mullins an additional $250,000 for his work as chief marketing officer.  

The Pinnacle Capital lawsuit   

Pinnacle Capital sued Justin Godur, Jaime Godur, Mullins, and Capital Max in June 2025. The lawsuit alleges that to induce Pinnacle Capital to buy the Deerfield Beach property, Godur presented a misleading purchase agreement with Mullins’ help. The case is ongoing, state court records show. 

Mullins, stiffed on his promised pay, is seeking damages for violations of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, as well as civil conspiracy and various fraud-related counts.  

A lawyer for Mullins and KCM Investments didn’t respond to a request for comment. The named attorneys for the defendants were unable to answer questions, as they’d quit or been dropped from the case.

The 3,000+ single-family offices tracked by With Intelligence—real ones, we’re pretty sure—had $4.7trn in combined investable assets as of September.

—Marc Hogan

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Really weird footnote in 2024's lavishly blurbed R.E.M. band biography www.google.com/books/editio...

* "Awards! They do nothing but give out awards!" Woody Allen's character Alvy Singer grumbles about Los Angeles and/or show business in general in the film Annie Hall. "Greatest fascist dictator, Adolf Hitler!" Say what you will about W.A.'s personal life; he was on point there.

181

Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

You say corporate magazines still suck, and yet

A screenshot of the news headline "Nirvana raises $100mn Series D at $1.5bn valuation"

1101

Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

Wearing my institutional-investing reporter hat, wrote about new academic research showing that US public pension plans, when overallocated to private equity, increasingly use secondary sales to rebalance. My latest for The Allocator newsletter (from With Intelligence/S&P Global).

First Shall Be Secondary

US public pension plans that are overallocated to private equity increasingly use secondary sales to rebalance, according to the academic paper “Overallocated Investors and Secondary Transactions.”

Overallocated pension plans were 8.6 percentage points more likely than underallocated plans to sell private equity stakes, finds the paper. Other factors such as liquidity needs, funding ratio, and plan size played less of a role.

The authors — University of Virginia’s Rustam Abuzov, University of Amsterdam’s Aleksandar Andonov, and Harvard University’s Josh Lerner — pored over 1,278 secondary sales by 137 US public pension plans between 2021 and 2022.

The researchers then matched the secondary sales with public data on the plans’ actual and target asset allocations.

Secondary sales, despite the cost of typically having to sell funds at a discount, provide an immediate way for LPs to rebalance illiquid portfolios, the paper notes.

By contrast, tweaking target allocations can be a lengthy process and often requires board approval, while reducing new commitments may mess up pacing plans or create tensions with GPs.

The results should apply to all types of institutional investors with firm asset allocation policy targets, although only US public pension plan data was available to study, co-author Aleksandar Andonov told The Allocator in an interview.

“Usually we don’t get a lot of evidence on what happens beyond the initial commitments, and we do see that there is increased management of the exposure to private equity beyond the initial commitments,” he said.

“Of course there can be many factors driving secondary sales,” Andonov continued, but when overweight in private equity, “many pension funds these days do tend to resort to secondary sales”

The researchers chose to focus on a period with sharp market volatility. Private equity’s portfolio share grows automatically during public market downturns, because private equity valuations adjust more slowly.

The private equity overallocation issue could become more glaring.

After all, as private equity allocations grow to take up a larger share of a portfolio, “similar return differences will cause more overallocation in terms of percentage points,” Andonov said.

“This was not an issue when private equity was, say, 1% or 2% of assets. Then, it’s a noise.”

The findings suggest that LPs will look for more flexibility when it comes to investment vehicles, because they want to be able to exit without needing to hold a fund until the end of its life, according to Andonov. Indeed, the paper points to the rise of co-investment vehicles and continuation funds.

LPs — and their boards — should also consider that if they want to invest significantly in private markets, they may need to be more flexible with target weights, Andonov said.

Could this be another argument for the total portfolio approach, which CalPERS recently adopted? “That approach gives, on paper, more flexibility,” Andonov said. “But in both cases, it requires strong governance.”

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

An investment officer at the California State Teachers’ Retirement System has sued the pension plan and a recently retired investment director, alleging that their anti-Black discrimination against him led to potentially $10bn in losses. Wrote about it for The Allocator, now part of S&P Global.

CalSTRS Sued Over Alleged Anti-Black Bias

The California State Teachers’ Retirement System is accused of racial discrimination against a Black investment officer.

Former investment officer Ibukunoluwa Aina filed the suit last month in state court in Sacramento. It contends that CalSTRS and Steven Tong — the $385.8bn fund’s recently retired director of risk-mitigating strategies —denied Aina multiple promotion opportunities and undercut his work, causing substantial losses to the plan.

A CalSTRS spokesperson declined to comment. Attempts to reach Tong by phone and email weren’t successful. A report on diversity said CalSTRS strives to achieve workforce diversity. Of the investment branch’s 225 non-administrative staff members, 107 were white (48%), 69 were Asian (31%), 25 were Hispanic (11%), and 10 (4%) were Black, according to the report. Of 14 investment directors, the level including CIO Scott Chan, 10 were white, while the other four were Asian.

“Soft Skills”

Aina joined the investment team at CalSTRS in January 2020, receiving salary raises, incentive bonuses, and a promotion, according to the 22-page complaint. Multiple documents on the CalSTRS website confirm his position with the risk mitigating strategies portfolio.

Aina applied for an associate portfolio manager role overseeing strategy and risk, which was an entry-level management position, in late 2022, the suit asserts. However, Tong allegedly told Aina, without explanation, that a committee had requested Aina’s name be removed from the list of interviewees for the position.

When no suitable candidate was found, CalSTRS readvertised the job later in 2022, and Aina raised concerns with Tong about his exclusion from the initial interview pool, according to the suit. Afterward, Tong targeted Aina for broaching his worries about possible racial discrimination in the organization, the complaint alleges.

Aina interviewed for the readvertised role, but CalSTRS discriminated against him by giving the role to a white employee who was less qualified, the suit claims. Tong went on to relieve this person of most of their risk management duties, announcing in early 2023 that he would be separating risk management from the role, according to the court filing.

Aina again offered himself for the risk management role, but CalSTRS discriminated against him again by once again assigning the job to a white employee who was less qualified, the suit alleges.

Fast forward a few months to July 2023. Aina applied for another opening for an associate portfolio manager, and Tong told him he could not be promoted because he lacked what Tong allegedly called “soft skills,” according to the complaint.

To ensure no reasonable case could be made for Aina’s further career progression, Tong tried to undermine his professional work, rejecting Aina’s contributions, suggestions, and ideas on the management of the risk management strategies portfolio, the court filing alleges.

Tong’s alleged actions may have cost the pension plan more than $10bn in investment losses and underperformance between late 2022 and mid-2025, according to the suit.

Aina filed an internal complaint with CalSTRS in November 2023, and he later filed a complaint with the California Department of Civil Rights that was formalized in December 2024, the suit says.

Aina applied for a portfolio manager role in May 2025, but CalSTRS discriminated against him again by yet another time offering the job to a white employee who was less qualified, the document alleges.

Also in May, CalSTRS announced that Tong would be retiring.

“$10bn price tag”

Aina filed a whistleblower complaint about the alleged economic losses with the California State Auditor General’s Office in June, according to the lawsuit.

Tong’s last day at Calstrs was July 31.

Aina withdrew his case from the California Department of Civil Rights in September, and the agency granted him the right to file a private civil suit, per the complaint.

Aina alleges discrimination based on race as well as based on his Nigerian national origin, along with breach of fiduciary duty and retaliation, the suit says.

He’s seeking damages, back pay, and corrective action, plus court orders compelling CalSTRS to address various alleged disparities affecting “non-white and non-Asian employees,” per the filing.

“This act of discrimination seemed to have had a $10bn price tag attached to it, and this should be punished significantly to prevent a repeat of such actions by any group of employees within and outside California who are well remunerated to protect Other People’s Money,” the complaint states.

In an interview with The Allocator, Aina confirmed he still works at CalSTRS and said he filed the lawsuit to protect the interests of more than 1m California teachers. He is not represented by a lawyer.

“I’m hoping it can be resolved,” he said. “I feel very disappointed.”

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

Wrote again about what seems to me like one of the year's big stories, life insurers pouring money into credit vehicles that are less liquid and more opaque, for The Allocator newsletter. This time the news peg is a Moody's report. Subscription details: pardot.pageantmedia.com/l/284832/202...

Dance Like It’s the Last Day of Solvency

Life insurance companies are rushing to credit’s center stage even as fresh scrutiny puts them under a spotlight, according to Moody’s research.

Following the September collapse of subprime auto lender Tricolor Parts and car parts manufacturer First Brands, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon remarked that like cockroaches, more troubles lurked in the credit markets.

Since then, BlackRock has acknowledged a 100% loss on a private loan, the chair of UBS warned of “looming systemic risk” from private credit ratings, and terms like “bad PIK” are mainstream. Large U.S. corporate bankruptcies are on pace for a 15-year high amid “credit jitters,” as Reuters delicately put it.

Nevertheless, private credit — which tends to offer higher yields than publicly traded bonds — continues to expand, and life insurers keep gorging on it.

Investments with private ratings, no formal rating from a credit agency, and with valuations based on significant unobservable inputs made up $685B — 18% — of the industry’s $3.8 trillion in fixed-income holdings at year-end 2024, according to Moody’s latest research.

In the first half of 2025, those first two categories accounted for $118B or 23% of the US life insurance industry’s total bond spend (data on the third type, so-called Level 3 investments, wasn’t available).

In other words, the broader financial and regulatory system sees what’s going on and alarms are sounding about the risks. Insurers know they’re under scrutiny and have kept at it, fattening their portfolios with private credit.

The three life insurance companies with the most exposure to less-liquid credit as of year-end 2024, according to Moody’s, were: Security Benefit Life, owned by investment firm Eldridge Industries; Delaware Life, part of insurance holding company Group 1001; and MassMutual.

Manoj Jethani, vice president and senior credit officer at Moody’s Ratings, told The Allocator in an interview that the question is which of these investments could come under pressure during an eventual downturn. “And the bigger question,” he said, “is which are the companies that are going to be holding these assets in some of those, and is there a correlation?”

Moody’s is watchful – but the music is still playing, and life insurers dance like no one’s watching.

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Marc Hogan @marchogan.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

For The Allocator newsletter from With Intelligence, I talked to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation's first-ever chief investment officer, Jack Mahler, about what he's excited to do after he retires at the end of the year. Subscription information: pardot.withintelligence.com/e/284832/l-2...

Jack Mahler: Over & Out

When Jack Mahler retires at the end of the year, after nearly a decade as the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s first chief investment officer, he’s looking forward to adding some frequent flier miles.

“We’re headed to Chile, actually,” the $4.7bn allocator’s CIO since 2016 told The Allocator in an interview. “Patagonia.” 

Mahler and his wife, Marla, have been trying to travel with some friends for the last five years but never have been able to get their schedules aligned. This year, they’re planning to take three weeks to go and check out “the amazing natural beauty,” Mahler said.
 
Along with travel, he’s also looking forward to spending time with the couple’s grandchildren. 

“They’re really, really important to us,” he said. “We’ve stayed on a pace of trying to see them every other month, but it’s not always easy.” 

Retirement, he expects, will help. But slowing down may not be easy.  Before joining the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Mahler was the head of equities and alternatives at OMERS for seven years. Unusually for an allocator, Mahler is an MD, and worked in clinical research at Cornell University Medical College before heading to Columbia University Business School with plans of becoming a physical executive.

Finance, fueled by a mission, won him over. With Mahler as CIO, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation noted in a press release, the nonprofit built a diversified portfolio and pursued a “venture philanthropy” approach to power cystic fibrosis treatments.

He’s succeeded at the Bethesda, Md.-based foundation by Adela Skenderasi, who was most recently partner and senior member of the OCIO investment team at Brown Advisory. Previously, she held investment roles at the International Monetary Fund and Georgetown University. It’s a CV that suggests the foundation could be well positioned for its next chapter. 

As for Mahler, beyond sightseeing and family, there are other aspects of what he called “the next phase of life” that he’s still mulling. A retired friend recently advised him not to do anything in the first year, such as serving on boards, but Mahler doesn’t know that he’ll follow the recommendation.     

“His point is, you know, it clears your mind and then you can really decide what you want to do rather than just naturally continue what you’ve been doing, or a version of it,” he said. “So we’ll see how good I am at that. I don’t know yet. 

“It’s hard to step back and just focus on your life and not think about giving back to the community in some way, shape, or form.” 

—Marc Hogan

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