內華達州管理 350 億美元的基金經理人整天都在做什麼？什麼都沒有

Steve Edmundson has no co-workers, rarely takes meetings and often eats leftovers at his desk. With that dynamic workday, the investment chief for the Nevada Public Employees’ Retirement System is out-earning pension funds that have hundreds on staff.

His daily trading strategy: Do as little as possible, usually nothing.

The Nevada system’s stocks and bonds are all in low-cost funds that mimic indexes. Edmundson may make one change to the portfolio a year.

News doesn’t matter much.

Will the 2016 elections affect his portfolio? “No.”

Oil prices? “No.”

He follows Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen, but “there’s a difference between watching and acting.”

Edmundson, 44 years old, has until recently been a pension-world outlier. Other state retirement systems turned to complicated investments and costly money managers to try to outperform markets with algorithms and smarts.

His strategy is to keep costs low and not try beating markets, he says. “We’re bare bones.”

On his bare-bones desk is an inbox, a stapler and a tin cup of paper clips and business cards. A desk behind his swivel chair sports his printer and family photos. He has no dedicated Bloomberg terminal and doesn’t watch CNBC.

He brings lunch in Tupperware. “Great days,” he says, are when his wife makes lunch — a BLT or tuna-fish sandwich. Otherwise, it is leftover fish or salads. “I don’t want to spend $10 a day for lunch.”

From his one-story office building in Carson City, Edmundson commands funds whose returns over one-year, three-year, five-year and 10-year periods ending June 30 bested the nation’s largest public pension, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or Calpers, and deeply-staffed plans of many other states.

Nevada’s $35 billion plan is “dramatically smaller” than California’s roughly $300 billion, notes Calpers spokeswoman Megan White. “That said, Nevada demonstrates the benefits of reducing the complexity, risk, and costs in a portfolio.”

“Doing nothing is harder than it looks,” says Ken Lambert, Edmundson’s predecessor and only outside investment-strategy consultant. Harder, he says, because of the restraint needed to practice inaction.

Now many public pension funds are embracing Nevada’s do-nothing approach as they wrestle with dwindling cash and low interest rates. Calpers is severing ties with roughly half the firms handling its money. New York City this year slashed its hedge-fund commitments.

US public pensions have about half their traditional stocks in low-cost index funds, industry consultants say, more than double a decade ago.

“The pension world,” says Stephen McCourt, co-CEO at pension-investments consultant Meketa Investment Group, “is definitely migrating toward Nevada.”

It isn’t migrating all the way, says Vijoy Paul Chattergy, the Hawaii pension’s chief investment officer and a friend of Edmundson’s.

“If I could sit on the beach in Maui and phone it in every day, I’d do it,” says Chattergy, whose plan, which trails Nevada’s in returns, uses a variety of strategies. “But I don’t think that’s the way the world works. That’s why we have the approach we do.”

Even Edmundson can’t resist studying investment strategies. “I spend a lot of time researching things we ultimately don’t do.”

On volatile market days, though, he gets to go home on time and chill out. After Britons in June voted to leave the European Union, throwing global markets into upheaval, he left at his usual 5:00. He fell asleep at his normal time that Brexit night.

A stock-market drop of several percentage points, he says, “isn’t even going to get my heart rate up.”

Edmundson got exposed to finance writing graduate-school papers about monetary policy at the University of Nevada, Reno.

He traces his philosophy to what he learned working for a Bozeman, Montana, wine distributor. He marketed the best-selling wines without highlighting the grapes’ origins or tasting notes.

“The wine industry tends to be portrayed as something complicated and difficult with fancy terminology,” he says. “On the investment side, it’s really similar. You can focus on the small details rather than the big picture.”

When Edmundson joined the Nevada plan in 2005 as an analyst, roughly 60% of its stocks were in indexes. He turned it even more passive after becoming chief investment officer in 2012. He fired 10 external managers, and, by 2015, all of its stock and bondholdings were in passively managed funds.

Its outside-management bill is about one-seventh the average public pension’s, according to Nevada plan documents and Callan Associates, which tracks retirement-plan expenses.

If Nevada consumed a typical Wall Street diet, it would pay roughly $120 million in annual fees. In 2016, Nevada paid $18 million.

Despite shunning Wall Street help, Edmundson returns emails and calls from money managers pitching him products.

The typical call lasts about five minutes. He lets callers down gently, deflecting advances by concluding the offering isn’t a good fit and thanking them for the information.

“I’ve become very good at saying no,” he says. “I don’t try to lead them on, so they don’t get false hope.”

Edmundson spends much of his days preparing board-meeting materials and on administrative tasks. Despite the investment success, Nevada only has about 73% of assets needed to fund future retirement obligations to workers.

One recent day, he started a PowerPoint presentation on interest-rate risk and discussed investment targets with Nevada pension officials before breaking for leftover bucatini pasta with bacon atop a salad.

He sipped coffee from his “DAD” mug, the day’s fourth cup from the office pot he co-funds with other workers in the building.

He generally doesn’t work outside 8am to 5pm hours. He commutes in a 2005 Honda Element with over 175,000 miles on it. His 2015 salary was $127,121.75, according to a Nevada Policy Research Institute database.

With no one else on his investment staff, Edmundson rarely uses his conference table and four extra chairs. He volunteered his office to pension-fund employees who work for accounting or benefit calculations.

Last month, a wall went up dividing the room. “I’m not going to complain about my office,” he says. “It was too big.”

End of story.