The 2016 Hedge Fund Rising Stars: Craig Huie

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Craig Huie
Office of the Treasurer of the Regents, University of California

The hedge fund portfolio at the University of California’s $97 billion Office of the Chief Investment Officer of the Regents has gotten an extreme makeover, thanks to investment officer Craig Huie, 37, and managing director Edmond Fong (a 2013 Hedge Fund Rising Star). Intending to get more bang for their buck, the duo have been cutting bigger checks to fewer managers — with a taste for funds that are less correlated to traditional asset classes like macro, relative-value and multistrategy firms — to tailor strategies to the needs of the pension, endowment and working-capital accounts they oversee. Now down to about 15 managers from more than 30 last year, the absolute-return portfolio, which had $4.7 billion in assets at the end of March, will serve a more opportunistic role as Huie and Fong hunt for hedge funds that complement the university’s other investments. After trimming their equity long-short allocation, they also handed off the remaining managers to Scott Chan and the equities team to better align the institution’s risks across portfolios.

Prior to joining the University of California in 2011, Huie was an associate at Khronos, a New York–based family office, where he focused on private equity but gained an introduction to a variety of alternative asset classes, including hedge funds. Concurrently, he pursued an MBA at New York’s Columbia Business School, receiving his degree in 2011. Before joining Khronos in 2004, he spent two years as an analyst at J.P. Morgan covering the industrials and transportation sectors.

Of Chinese and Lithuanian descent, the Randolph, New Jersey, native had landed an internship with J.P. Morgan’s investment banking division in 2000 through Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO), a New York–based nonprofit that helps underprivileged minority students with career development. But when he graduated from the University of Florida with a bachelor’s in finance and international economics in 2001, following the dot-com bubble, hiring had slowed. As a result, Huie spent half a year as an associate at Breakstone Group, a New York–based investor relations boutique, before rejoining J.P. Morgan in 2002. Now in a position to give back, he volunteers with SEO by fund-raising and mentoring students.

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