By Muskan Arora
Owing to great year-to-date returns at 6.6%, the $36.2bn San Francisco City & County Employees’ Retirement System disclosed allocations of $67bn, as a part of its November 13th meeting.
A report from CEO/CIO Alison Romano, appointed
in 2022, unveiled a $50m allocation to Voleon Institutional Strategies Fund, a
quantitative hedge fund and $17m to LAV Fund VII, a biomedical venture capital
fund.
The Voleon commitment, which was closed on November 1, builds on an initial allocation of $50m made in 2019. This was facilitated through San Francisco Absolute Return Investors II, a partnership between SFERS and Blackstone Alternative Asset Management.
Voleon conducts investment management “through the prism of machine learning, applying flexible statistical models to the problem of financial prediction,” stated the website.
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“Rather than relying on human intuition to discern how the market works, machine learning employs statistical algorithms capable of detecting persistent effects across large swaths of data,” said the website.
Also, the $19.6bn Maine Public Employees Retirement System committed $100m to Voleon Composition Fund in June.
While the LAV commitment builds on an initial
allocation of $32m in April. The pension plan has an existing relationship with
the manager and has also made commitments to other funds including $32m in LAV
Fund VI and $16m to LAV Fund VI Opportunities in 2021.
SFRS’s portfolio currently shows allocations of 27.5% to private equity, against a target of 20% and 8.7% to absolute return strategies, against a target of 10%.
In September, the pension plan made an
allocation of $50m to Thoma Bravo Discover Fund V, a buyout fund alongside
committing $75m to Sculptor Real Estate Fund V, an opportunistic real estate fund.
Romano, who is currently wearing two hats, moved
to the system from SBA Florida where she served as deputy CIO for almost three
years.
