Ohio Public Employees Retirement System Is Searching for a Highway to Liquidity

Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS)
277 East Town St.
Columbus, OH 43215

Assets under management:

The fund itself has $70 billion. My trading desk trades the $27 billion in equity assets.

Types of products traded:

Equities: 43 percent of fund
Global bonds: 23 percent
Non-U.S. equity: 20 percent
Real Estate: 5.2 percent
Private Equities: 1.5 percent (Rounding errors do not total 100 percent.)

Daily volume in equities:

$1.5 million shares.

Structure of trading department:

I run equities and have two traders working with me. I report to the senior investment officer of fund management. He is not a portfolio manager; he is more of a risk officer. On the fixed-income side, they report to the chief investment officer. The investment division is structured into publicly traded markets, which fixed income is part of. Trading was stripped out and put into the fund management group.

Previous Positions:

I have been with OPERS for two and a half years. Prior to OPERS, I was SVP and head of equity trading at ING Funds in New York. Before joining OPERS, I was senior trader at Strong Funds in Milwaukee for two years. My initial trading job was at Bankers Trust where I was VP of equity trading.

Education:

B.A. in economics from Mount Holyoke College; M.B.A. in finance from Fordham University (New York).

At some point, T+1 will come back again. That sort of got back-burnered for a while, but - especially if volatility picks up again - I'd expect this to come to the forefront. It would probably require investment in technology. Things would have to be done sooner in terms of clearing and settling, so we'd need a boost or an upgrade to the system.