New York State Common Retirement Fund, Albany, returned 18.3% from April 1 to Sept. 30, the first six months of its fiscal year, helping raise fund assets to $126 billion, said Thomas P. DiNapoli, state comptroller and the fund’s sole trustee.
The fund’s assets increased $16.1 billion or 14.6% since March 31, the end of the previous fiscal year, and grew by $9.5 billion or 8.2% in the quarter ended Sept. 30.
Mr. DiNapoli said today in a news conference the strong performance was spurred by the fund’s large equity exposure: Publicly traded domestic equities were 37.2% of total assets, and international equities were 16.4%. The balance of the fund is invested in cash and bonds, 30.3%; private equity, 8.9%; real estate, 4.9%; and hedge funds, 2.3%.
Mr. DiNapoli said his investment staff is “wrapping up” a full asset allocation review and should announce the results soon; he did not say when that would be. He doesn’t expect “dramatic changes” in the fund’s allocations, but acknowledged that there likely will be some adjustments within individual asset classes and among the fund’s money managers.
The fund’s emerging manager hiring program was somewhat slowed by “all that we’ve gone through” with various pay-to-play investigations, Mr. DiNapoli said, but he added that manager hiring announcements will be forthcoming no later than the first quarter for hedge fund managers, and later for real estate managers.
