Active Index Investing: Maximizing Portfolio Performance and Minimizing Risk Through Global Index Strategies
Foreign Diversification Questioned: Data Show Benefits Make It Worthwhile
In the context of portfolio management, the terms private client, high-net-worth investor, and individual investor are used virtually interchangeably to reference the unique challenges of managing personal or family assets. Although a more precise definition of the individual investor is elusive, the basic need to properly manage one’s financial affairs is self-evident, and the precedent for seeking professional management is well established.
Managing Investment Portfolios: A Dynamic Process
Masters in Management in Finance, Accounting, Management Policy
Recognized expertise in DB and DC plan design, fee disclosure policy, and retirement security; congressional and DOL advisory council testimony on these topics.
Defined Benefit & Defined Contribution Retirement Plans
Decades of leadership in institutional asset management, including running BGI's Americas institutional business and serving as CEO of multiple asset management firms.
Co-author of the award-winning 'Five Myths About Fees' on fee structures and risk-adjusted returns.
Investment Management Fees & Cost Analysis
Operating executive and strategic operating partner roles in private equity (Golden Gate Capital, Valeas Capital Partners), focused on financial services.
Masters in Management, Finance, Accounting, Management Policy
Matthew Scanlan is a Strategic Operating Partner at Valeas Capital Partners, a role he assumed in 2024 to advise the firm and its portfolio companies in the financial services vertical. His career in the investment management industry spans more than three decades and includes chief executive officer positions at several asset management firms.
Member of the Board of Directors of Adams Street Partners, a leading private markets investment firm headquartered in Chicago.
Member of Board of Directors at Adams Street Partners
Led the Institutional Business for the world's largest institutional investment management firm. Managed 80 professionals across San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, Brazil, and Mexico City. Managed five major account relationships, all ranking among the top ten revenue-generating clients in the firm. Served on BGI's Americas Executive Committee and Technology and Operations Executive Committee.
Managing Director & CEO of Institutional Business
Managing Director & CEO of Institutional Business at Barclays Global Investors
Operating Executive focused on investment opportunities in the financial services sector.
Operating Executive at Golden Gate Capital
Internal Fund Manager responsible for managing funds in select portfolios. Developed and programmed a proprietary computer stock index arbitrage trading program for proprietary trading accounts, which achieved superior performance in all periods managed.
Internal Fund Manager at O'Connor & Company
President and CEO of Renaissance Institutional Management, the institutional subsidiary of Renaissance Technologies, based in New York. Led client management and product development; reported directly to James Simons.
President & CEO at Renaissance Institutional Management (Renaissance Technologies)
Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of RS Investments, a $20 billion San Francisco-based investment management firm. Also served as President and Trustee of RS Investment Trust and RS Variable Products Trust. Served on the Senior Leadership Team of Guardian Life Insurance, New York.
Chief Executive Officer & Chief Investment Officer
Chief Executive Officer & Chief Investment Officer at RS Investments (RS Investment Management Co. LLC)
Developed and marketed financial planning models for wealth management clients. Marketed directly to senior institutional wealth advisors and family office legal staff. Taxation specialty for large multi-family trusts.
Financial Advisor at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, Inc.
Personally managed portfolios and provided investment counseling to large institutional and trust clients. Managed over $3.5 billion of client funds across various portfolios. Specialized in quantitative asset allocation, equity diversification, structured products, and management of concentrated low-cost tax basis portfolios. Principal speaker at Northern Trust's Family Financial Forum and the Goldman Sachs Equity Workshop.
Vice President & Senior Portfolio Manager, Structured Equity Group
Vice President & Senior Portfolio Manager, Structured Equity Group at The Northern Trust Company
Advises the firm and its portfolio companies in the financial services vertical.
Strategic Operating Partner at Valeas Capital Partners
Served on the Board of Governors of the CFA Institute, chaired its executive advisory board, and served on the candidate curriculum committee advisory board (concurrent with later BGI years).
Board of Governors; chaired executive advisory board; candidate curriculum committee advisory board
CFA charterholder. Served on the Board of Governors of the CFA Institute, chaired its executive advisory board, and served on the candidate curriculum committee advisory board.
Served on the Finance Board of City College of San Francisco (confirmed in 2007 congressional testimony introduction).
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Member of the Kellogg Private Equity Advisory Council.
Member of the Board of Trustees of the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco.
Member of the board of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.
Barclays Global Investors Research Study (not a journal publication)
The Journal of Portfolio Management, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 56-64
Member of the Board of Directors since 2018.
Former employer; Scanlan headed the Americas institutional business for approximately 12 years.
Global CEO / CIO counterpart at BGI throughout Scanlan's tenure.
Former BGI Managing Director who testified jointly with Scanlan before the DOL ERISA Advisory Council in 2009.
President & CEO of Guardian Life Insurance; a 2011 chance meeting led to Scanlan joining RS Investments as CEO.
Former employer; Scanlan was an Operating Executive focused on financial services.
Matthew and Joseph have collaborated on a number of efforts ranging from asset management to technology
Direct report at BGI (MD, U.S. DC Group); co-presented the BGI annuity product launch and testified on a successor 401(k) bill.
Parent firm of Renaissance Institutional Management, where Scanlan was President and CEO.
Founder & Chairman of Adams Street Partners; Kellogg '77 MBA; co-presenter with Scanlan at the Kellogg Asset Management Practicum; appointed Scanlan to the Adams Street board.
Outgoing CEO of RS Investments who recruited Scanlan as his successor and stayed on to assist the transition.
Current employer; Scanlan serves as Strategic Operating Partner. Co-founded by Rob Little and Ed Woiteshek, former Hellman & Friedman executives.
Of the three dimensions of investing - return, risk, and cost - investors have direct control only over cost. The subject here is five common assumptions about fees, which are a major component of costs. Three of the myths concern appropriate fee level and structure, fixed versus incentive, and the value of high water marks; two others concern fees in particular contexts. Do hedge funds deserve their high fees, and can investors always separate alpha from beta, and pay appropriately for each? The core thesis is that fees should not be an overriding investor concern, and high-fee products are worthwhile only if they deliver sufficiently high risk-adjusted returns.
fees, hedge funds, alpha and beta, investment management
Although finance practitioners almost universally learn in school that the Sharpe market model, which separates all returns into alpha and beta, is the starting point for a number of key investment insights, they often forget, or disregard, this knowledge once they are on the job. The five most important insights that a practitioner should hold dear, regardless of what the boss says, are 1) the importance of making alpha and beta decisions separately; 2) the zero-sum nature of active management; 3) the different criteria needed to make alpha and beta decisions; 4) the great value of alpha successfully delivered; and 5) the desirability of paying appropriate fees for each return component or, in other words, high fees for alpha, low fees for beta.
Five Principles to Hold Onto (Even When Your Boss Says the Opposite)
portfolio theory, exchange-traded funds and applications
In this article, Donoho, Crenian, and Scanlan report the results of their study into the cost of institutional investor impatience. Using Monte Carlo simulation techniques, the authors construct an idealized world with a universe of investment managers of precisely quantified skill, with skill levels varying among the managers. Although many institutions base manager hiring decisions heavily on the manager’s performance in the most recent months or years, the authors’ simulations show that institutions that rely on longer performance horizons of 5–10 years are more likely to find and stick with the better managers. This happens because on shorter time scales, the relatively few highly skilled managers are often temporarily outperformed by one of the many lesser-skilled managers, specifically, unskilled managers who have recently happened to simply be lucky. Hence, if a plan that previously was long-term oriented starts to hire managers based on short-term results, it will often find that the newly chosen manager underperforms both his own previous performance and also the manager previously managing the plan’s funds. It can, however, truly take patience to keep a skilled manager in a fund portfolio. In the authors’ simulations, skilled managers have deeper, longer, and more frequent drawdowns than many investors would expect.
Is Patience a Virtue? The Unsentimental Case for the Long View in Evaluating Returns
manager selection, simulations, portfolio management, multi-asset allocation
Although the theory of active management suggests that breadth is the key to a high information ratio (IR) and thus success in active management, high conviction is another route to a high IR and one at which most investment management firms are more likely to succeed. High-conviction active managers are those that develop forecasts for a small number of securities that they are willing to hold in substantial weights. Such 'concentrated active' funds deserve serious consideration by investors building broadly diversified portfolios of managers. The authors indicate how one might conduct the fundamental analysis leading to high-conviction portfolios. The principles discussed apply equally to long-only and long–short portfolio structures, although long–short investing involves risks (and thus risk-control disciplines) that long-only managers need not worry about.
No Fear of Commitment: The Role of High-Conviction Active Management
fundamental equity analysis, portfolio construction
The movement toward indexation in the past decade has left many institutional investors thinking, 'This can’t be all there is to my job. Let me learn something about active management.' In an interview with Institutional Investor Journals, Larry Siegel and Matt Scanlan urge investors to include high-conviction active managers in their portfolios and describe how to identify those with true skill. The process of building a winning portfolio of managers is akin to a high-conviction manager building a winning portfolio of a few concentrated positions, they explain. Siegel and Scanlan discuss the evolution of their thinking on this topic and reveal some personal vignettes. Siegel is Gary P. Brinson Director of Research at the CFA Institute Research Foundation and Senior Advisor to Ounavarra Capital. Scanlan is Chief Executive Officer at RS Investments .
Practical Applications of No Fear of Commitment: The Role of High-Conviction Active Management
A BGI research study using data from the Health and Retirement Study that simulated shocks to Social Security and home equity to strip out the false sense of security those assets provide. Key findings: among the middle wealth decile, 40% of total wealth comes from Social Security and home equity; controlling for reductions in government benefits and home equity, one-half of middle class Americans stand to lose 25% of their retirement wealth compared to expectations. The study identified the 'wealth effect' - counting illiquid home equity as spendable retirement wealth - as a major source of retirement insecurity, and proposed solutions at the government, employer, and individual levels.
retirement security, Social Security, home equity, defined contribution plans
Since the middle of the twentieth century, employees have reasonably expected their employers to provide a major part of the means by which they can retire. The traditional pension plan, known as the defined benefit (DB) plan, and one of the legs of the 'three-legged stool' of retirement security, is the focus of this article. All three legs of the stool are now arguably in crisis, but if you like to find encouragement in small blessings, the problems of DB plans are in principle the easiest to solve. This article examines the current crisis and makes suggestions on a plan of action to rectify it.
long-term investing, retirement investing, retirement, pension funds
13G SEC Filing for The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America
Adams Street Hires Matthew Scanlan for Board of Directors
Adams Street Partners Adds Board Directors
Barclays Adds Annuity Feature to 401(k)s
Charles J. Yang, CFA, Elected Chair of CFA Institute Board of Governors
Class Notes 1981 - Kellogg World Alumni Magazine
Guardian Life Insurance 2012 Annual Report
Matt Scanlan Becomes CEO of RS Investments
Matthew H. Scanlan Joins Adams Street Partners Board of Directors
MOVES-Renaissance, Fidelity, CastleOak, Oppenheimer
Profiles of the Top 50 Global/International Managers
Renaissance Institutional Management Taps Scanlan as New Chief
Renaissance taps Barclays Global Investors for chief executive
RS Investments Announces Formation of New Investment Adviser, SailingStone Capital Partners LLC
RS Investments Names Chief Executive Officer
RS Investments Ready to Take Bigger Piece of Pie
RS Investments Strengthens Value Team with Addition of Key Energy, Technology Analysts
Scanlan's BGI Departure Is a Symptom of Rough Times
J.L. Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
University of Southern California (Marshall School of Business)
BGI colleague (Global Head of Equity Research) and co-author of 'Five Myths About Fees.'
Director of Research at the Ford Foundation Investment Division and co-author of 'Five Myths About Fees.'
Matthew Scanlan is an investment executive with 40+ years of CEO-level experience across indexing, quantitative, active, and private equity strategies.
Bernstein Fabozzi / Jacobs Levy Award - Best Article (Jacobs Levy Equity Management / PM Research (Journal of Portfolio Management), 2007)
C. Stewart Sheppard Award (CFA Institute, 2006)
Matthew Scanlan is an investment executive with 40+ years of CEO-level experience across indexing, quantitative, active, and private equity strategies. He currently serves as Strategic Operating Partner at Valeas Capital Partners and as a board director of Adams Street Partners and Exos Financial Group. He previously held CEO positions at RS Investments, Renaissance Institutional Management, and Barclays Global Investors' Americas institutional business.