The Alaska Permanent Fund’s new Chief Investment Officer will be Jay Willoughby, a New Jersey investment manager.
The announcement was made Thursday by Executive Director Mike Burns, who has also been acting as CIO of the $38 billion state savings account since previous CIO Jeffrey Scott left during the summer.
“Jay comes to us with experience managing funds of different sizes with different goals and risk parameters, as well as experience working directly with equities and real estate,” Burns said.
“Like many of our peers around the world, he is interested in the risk-based asset allocation we have created and looks forward to having it as part of his tool kit for managing the Fund’s investments.”
Willoughby was among 53 applicants for the job, with the other top finalist being an in-house candidate, Maria Tsu, the fund’s equities manager.
Willoughby has most recently worked for an equity hedge fund, Ironbound Capital Management, following nine years at Merrill Lynch Institutional Management, where he was head of equity research and managed a 160-person team, which managed assets of $40 billion for high net worth individuals.
Ironbound was founded by former Merrill managers, but is now in the process of closing down.
Willoughby was originally hired by Merrill to manage a real estate fund, following work with AEW Capital Management, a highly regarded real estate investment trust manager that has worked for the Alaska Permanent Fund.
Peter Naoroz, a former APFC real estate manager who worked with Willoughby in the mid-1990s, praised the decision.
“Jay’s a good pick,” said Naoroz, now president of Kootznoowoo, Inc. the Juneau-based Angoon village corporation.
“He’s got a history with the permanent fund, and helped us put together a REIT portfolio that has been meaningful performance contributor to the permanent fund,” he said.
Willoughby told the APFC Board of Trustees that he and his wife were looking forward to living in Juneau. Their children are away at college.
He’s originally from Olympia, Wash., and has worked in the Pacific Northwest as well, at Crabbe Huson Co. and Black and Co. in Portland, Ore, doing fund management and stock research.
Scott was also from the Northwest, but never actually moved to Juneau, angering some legislators who wanted to see more of a commitment to the state.
Willoughby is a 1981 graduate of Pomona College in California, and has a Master of Business Administration degree with a finance concentration from Columbia Graduate School of Business in New York.
He will begin work on Nov. 1, and will be paid $325,000.
• Contact reporter Pat Forgey at 523-2250 or at patrick.forgey@juneauempire.com.
Comments (5)
Add comment$325,000
That sounds like a lot to many folks for whom $35,000 a year is a big year for income. That's about $1,000 a day year around. Maybe that is what it takes to hire a trained and experienced investor.
Now, let's see if he earns that salary by improving earnings more than that amount every year.
Top .001%ers
"Willoughby has most recently worked for an equity hedge fund, Ironbound Capital Management, following nine years at Merrill Lynch Institutional Management, where he was head of equity research and managed a 160-person team, which managed assets of $40 billion for high net worth individuals."
Those few "high net worth individuals" paid 15% capital gains taxes on their hedge fund earnings, because they're not really considered income.
Bet most of you paid a lot higher rate than that...and you had to earn that money by actually working for it, not having a team of 160 people shuffle money around on your behalf. And you didn't donate big bucks to politicians to make sure that sweet tax code never changed.
Hedge fund
Aren't hedge funds one of the reason we are in an economic mess? Hate to thing of what what will happen to the permanent fund when a hedge fund manager gets his hands on it.
Well ?
Local Hire ?
bad decision
This is another bad decision for the CIO. First of all, he should have hired someone inside the state. He should have learned this with the last hire. A lot of the managers of the fund are grossly overpaid, including Burns. Perhaps, they ought to think of replacing him along with his overpaid side kicks.