General Treasurer Magaziner Works to Make Information More Accessible
PROVIDENCE, RI - General Treasurer Seth Magaziner released new investment performance data for the Employees' Retirement System of Rhode Island today. In an effort to make Rhode Island pension investment information more accessible to members of ERSRI and the general public, Treasurer Magaziner will make quarterly updates on the state's investments in addition to the materials released each month by the State Investment Commission:
For the first quarter of 2015, the pension system returned at total of 2.21%, beating the policy benchmark return of 1.88% and the 60/40 return of 2.10%.
The Retirement System's strongest performing asset classes for the quarter were non-US equity (+3.4%), equity hedge funds (+3.4%), and absolute return hedge funds (+3.3%). The worst performing asset class for the quarter was MLPs (-2.6%), although the retirement system's MLP allocation still outperformed the Alerian MLP Index by 2.7%.
"I am pleased that Rhode Island's investment performance was strong relative to our benchmarks in the first quarter," said Treasurer Magaziner. "The financial markets remain volatile, and we will continue to improve our state's investments to deliver strong long-term growth."
While short-term performance will vary, the Employees' Retirement System aims to achieve long-term average annual performance of 7.5%. As of March 31, the Retirement System returned 5.28% over the previous year, returned an average of 8.67% annually over the previous three years, an average of 8.49% over the previous five years, and a 6.31% average over the previous 10 years.
"We always need to focus on the strong long term returns," said Chief Investment Officer Anne Marie Fink. "It is also important to focus on minimizing unnecessary risk. An important measure of risk, the trailing 3-year standard deviation of the portfolio, was 5.5%, which is well below the 6.3% 3-year standard deviation of a typical 60% equity / 40% fixed income portfolio."
The Employees' Retirement System serves more than 60,000 active and retired public employees and as of March 31, 2015 had a total market value of $8.03 billion. All performance numbers are net of fees and expenses.
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