South Dakota Retirement System, Pierre, posted a preliminary net return of 5.87% for the fiscal year ended June 30, according to a performance report presented at a meeting of the South Dakota Investment Council on Aug. 15.
The return fell short of the retirement system’s capital markets benchmark of 13.81%.
Matthew Clark, state investment officer of the South Dakota Investment Council, partly attributed the underperformance to having a high allocation to cash and significantly less in equity assets than the benchmark.
The underperformance was also due to “private equity and real estate partnerships not keeping up with the public markets,” he said.
For the three-, five- and 10-year periods ended June 30, the retirement system returned an annualized net 3.62%, 6.64% and 6.39%, respectively. Benchmark returns for those periods were not provided.
SDRS had returned a net 5.5% for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2023.
Returns by individual asset classes were not provided.
As of June 30, SDRS had $14.9 billion in assets. Its actual asset allocation as of June 30 was 37% cash, 21% public equity, 13% investment-grade debt, 12% opportunistic real estate, 11% private equity, 4% high-yield corporate debt, 1% hedge fund and the rest in other categories.
