Allocators chose Mark Steed as the Public Pension Plan CIO of the Year.
Institutional Investor honored Steed and other investors Thursday evening at the 2024 Allocators’ Choice Awards in New York City. Asset owners, including staff at pension funds, endowments, family offices, foundations, healthcare funds, and sovereign wealth funds, voted for the winners after finalists were vetted by II’s staff.
Steed, the CIO at the Arizona Public Safety Personnel Retirement System, was nominated for his long-standing devotion to innovation. He uses machine learning, big data, and coding to inform his investment process and has consistently posted strong results at PSPRS. He also set up a model that links portfolio volatility to contribution rate volatility, allowing the fund to take on more risk and improve returns. Last year, Steed won the Innovator of the Year award for his volatility analysis.
Cliff Asness and Deborah Kuenstner were Institutional Investor‘s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award winners.
Asness, a co-founder of quant firm AQR Capital Management, who is known for his humor that can be self-deprecating and savagely pointed, was this year’s recipient of II’s Hedge Fund Lifetime Achievement Award. Kuenstner, the CIO at Wellesley College who has eschewed private credit and crypto while profiting off a seasoned VC portfolio, is receiving II’s Allocators’ Choice Lifetime Achievement Award.
During the evening, Institutional Investor presented six other awards to allocators. The 2024 Hedge Fund Allocator of the Year was the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, for growing its hedge fund portfolio to $8.3 billion and adhering to a low realized beta of 0.07. Edwin Denson, the executive director and CIO at SWIB, leads a team that focuses on fostering and maintaining strategic partnerships, which include co-investments.
Meanwhile, Ernie Caballero was named the Corporate Pension Plan CIO of the year at UPS, where he is shepherding a massive change as Goldman Sachs takes over the management of UPS’s corporate pension assets. (Caballero and his team are joining Goldman and will continue to oversee the pension assets in their new roles.)
Erik Lundberg at University of Michigan was voted Endowment CIO of the Year for his long dedication to developing the endowment; he’s been there 25 years and continually posting strong returns on its behalf. He also recently undertook a plan to grow the school’s commitment to ESG investing.
Stefan Strein, CIO at the Cleveland Clinic, was the Healthcare System CIO of the year for both posting quality returns and for producing the industry’s next generation of talent — former staffers Alex Ambroz, Adam Smith, and Kelli Washington have all gone on to become CIOs following their work at Cleveland Clinic.
This year’s Insurance Company CIO of the Year was Tim Schmidt, a senior vice president and the CIO at Prudential Financial. Schmidt’s decades of experience managing insurance company portfolios proved valuable as he successfully navigated Prudential through an unprecedented period of low interest rates that ended with a sudden spike when the Federal Reserve started its battle against inflation in early 2022.
Alisa Mall, the chief investment officer at DFO Management (the investment office of Dell Technologies Founder Michael Dell and his family), was named Family Office CIO of the Year for steadfastly maintaining a portfolio at one of the nation’s top family offices. Mall, who previously worked at Foresite Capital and Carnegie Corp., has been with DFO for just two years but already made an impact. “The bar was high, and she has maintained it,” her nominator said.
Institutional Investor also recognized a group of rising stars who reflect a new generation of talent and innovation in investing and have made other contributions to their organizations and the industry in 2024.
This year’s rising stars were: John Atsalis, managing director at Columbia Investment Management Company; Brad Bauguss, associate director at Tulane University; Chloe Breider, vice president at GIC; Renee Hanna, managing director at Baylor University; Sam Johnson, director of investments at Loyola University Chicago; Chase Nicholson, senior portfolio manager at the State of Wisconsin Investment Board; Jocelyn Bilkey Saldana, managing director of investments at Emory University; Caroline Thomas, investment director at Smith College; Michael Watson, associate director at NewYork-Presbyterian; and Summer Zhao, investment director at Lafayette College.
