Karl Scheer
Chief Investment Officer, University of Cincinnati. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorexecutiveuc.edu ↗
Scheer leads the University of Cincinnati's multi-billion-dollar endowment portfolio, a position he has held since 2011 following a senior role at Summer Hill Capital Partners. He focuses on long-term private equity and venture capital manager selection, earning CIO of the Year at Institutional Investor's 2022 Allocators' Choice Awards.
1shows
1appearances
18statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Karl Scheer said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Scheer: Avoid venture capital entirely unless you can access top-tier managers
“One key takeaway from my time in venture capital world is if you can't be with the best manager, don't do it. Not, don't spend much time on it or try to find a fancy way to, don't do it at all. Don't bother.”
Scheer: The largest fund managers are clever at charging hidden fees
“The largest fund managers not only have astronomical fee revenue streams, but they're also the cleverest people in the world about charging fees that we can't see. And I don't want to play that game with them.”
Scheer: Endowment spending rules should drop to the 3% range
“The five percent spending rule makes absolutely no sense for about the last 20 years. And so a lot of folks are addressing that by reducing their spending policies. I think four is the new five among endowments. Should probably be three handle and I bet it wil…”
Scheer: Investment committees cannot effectively pick PE managers in quarterly meetings
“I think it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a committee to pick private equity managers in quarterly meetings. I don't think, for example, that works very well.”
Scheer: Resetting high watermarks totally misaligns manager and investor interests
“You can't have a resetting high watermark. It's a total misalignment of interests.”
Scheer: Checklist-free, bespoke due diligence outperforms rigid box-checking
“I think it's valuable to Make it up as you go along because it allows you flexibility to adapt to changing market environment, to identify the key issue or issues at each individual firm, and every one of these is different, and also enables you to learn each …”
Scheer: Outperforming the S&P 500 makes no sense today
“It probably makes no sense at all to try to outperform the S&P 500 today. Similarly with our fixed income, we want to get it right one time and move on.”
Scheer stops reporting one-year returns, urges Big 10 endowments to follow
“I have ceased to show anyone one year returns versus peers, and I hope that a bunch of Big 10 endowments and those like UC that are kind of on the periphery of Big 10 endowments have agreed never to provide Nucubo, for example, with one year returns, because w…”
Scheer: Teams should ask junior members to speak first after meetings
“They believe that the youngest person should talk first, right? After a meeting, ask the youngest, newest person what his or her opinion is, and you start to train people to have good opinions and so forth.”
Scheer: Whipsawing during strategy changes is the most frequent cause of permanent capital loss
“There's only a few ways to lose money permanently fraud, buying something at an outrageously high price, excess of concentration or leverage. But the big one that everybody that happens the most frequently is whipsawing yourself and changes in strategy are whe…”
Scheer: Cutting bottom-third PE managers elevates median picks to near top-quartile
“The way we look at private equity is if we can do nothing for the wrong reasons and make all of our decisions for the right reasons, Then we can probably cut out the bottom fifth quarter, maybe third of the distribution. In which case, if we pick median now, a…”
Scheer: University of Cincinnati endowment will never do another staple deal
“I'll never do another staple deal again.”
Scheer: Moving average spending rules effectively doubled drawdowns after 2008
“After 2008, people were spending five percent Based on the last couple of years values, which was 10% based on their 2009 values. And so what that does is it takes a significant number of dollars out of the endowment. So it is very difficult to recover. The nu…”
Scheer: UC endowment caps hedge fund portfolio at 10 positions
“In our hedge fund portfolio, we have 10 positions. And we think that 10 positions is about the right amount of diversification. It's about the maximum amount of diversification in order for us to be able to monitor and manage and understand and know those hedg…”
Karl Scheer: Co-CIO structure is suboptimal and duplicates one job
“Tim Cavanaugh and I were co-CIOs, and that was fine. We made it work, but it's not an optimal structure, and either of us could have done the, basically two people doing one person's job.”
Scheer: Cincinnati endowment halved fixed income allocation to 15% in one year
“We had, I guess I'll just get specific, we had about 30% in fixed income when I arrived, and we dropped that immediately to 15%. When I say immediately, we had a responsible staged migration that took about one year”
Scheer: Made his first venture capital commitment in 2018 after ten years
“I have made my first venture capital investment about four months ago since I became a CIO in 2008.”
Scheer: Cincinnati endowment lost 40 basis points on a due diligence miss
“We invested in a hedge fund that was a low volatility hedge fund that had an outsized position in it, which I failed to identify during due diligence. It ended up costing the portfolio something like, I think, 40 basis points at the top line. So not a big deal…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Karl's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Chief Investment Officer, University of Cincinnati | 1 | 18 | — | full record on Capital Allocators → |