Letitia Johnson
Chief Investment Officer, Amherst College. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorexecutiveamherst.edu/about/investments/team ↗
Appointed in 2019, Letitia Johnson oversees Amherst College's roughly $4 billion long-term investment pool using a bottom-up, concentrated manager-selection approach. She previously spent over a decade as a managing director at Cambridge Associates.
1shows
1appearances
24statements
3resolved
2supported
0contradicted
67%fully supported
4said about them ↓ Everything Letitia Johnson said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Amherst concentrates 50% of its assets in top 10 managers
“So we have less than 40 managers in the portfolio. Half of our assets are in our top 10 managers.”
Amherst omits real estate, private credit, and emerging markets managers
“We have some very meaningful holes in the portfolio when you look at us compared to peers, one of which is real estate. We have very little private credit to speak of. We don't have any global emerging markets managers. There are all sorts of things that we do…”
Johnson: Manager Selection Matters as Much as Asset Allocation
“There's a real difference that comes in in the manager selection piece. And I think one of the things that I started to realize over time is that the manager selection piece is as important and as impactful”
Letitia Johnson: Rigid asset class delineations fail to reflect manager opportunities
“These delineations and asset classes don't actually reflect the manager opportunity set.”
Johnson: Uncalled commitments cause institutional crises, not private marks
“I have no control over private marks. The one thing that I do have control over is my commitment. Amounts. And oh, by the way, that's what gets me into trouble in times of crisis. The private NAV doesn't get me into trouble in times of crisis. It doesn't matte…”
Johnson: Beta is completely useless for private asset portfolios
“Like this notion of beta basically becomes completely useless when you have privates. It's not helpful.”
Johnson: Long-term allocators should back generalists over unpredictable 10-year horizons
“An important result of that is that you tend to invest with generalists because we do not know what the market is going to look like in 10 years. We need these people to be building investment processes and have diverse enough interests that they can thrive ac…”
Johnson: Top managers often endure awful periods that catalyze renewal
“Some of the best performing ones are ones that had absolutely awful periods, because those awful periods catalyzed an incredible renewal of the organization. And if you can stick with managers through that, it's so extremely powerful”
Johnson: Governance fails when roles are unclear or history is ignored
“A lot of institutions fall down is if it's not clear who is deciding what. The other place where you can fall down is if you have a solution that might be clear But it doesn't even remotely take into consideration the history or the portfolio itself, then the …”
Johnson: Amherst managed its endowment bottom-up despite a written policy portfolio
“They did have a more traditional policy portfolio that was written down in paper, but in actuality, the way that they had managed the portfolio over time was a much more bottom-up, flexible framework.”
Amherst allocates half to privates with heavy venture concentration
“Half of our portfolio is public, half is private. Of the private portfolio, we have a lot in venture and growth.”
Johnson: Institutional Allocators Cannot Trade Venture NAV Cycles
“Venture is incredibly cyclical. There are going to be times when our venture NAV really spikes, and we just had that, and then it's going to come back down. I am in absolutely no position to trade our venture NAV. No one is. So that's not what I'm going to do.…”
Johnson: Amherst avoids niche strategies to keep manager concentration high
“Doing very nichey things is generally not something that we're doing. We're trying to get those interesting kinds of investments through more generalist broad managers because we want to keep the manager concentration so high.”
Johnson: Amherst has exited zero new managers in five years
“I started five years ago, and maybe this is just a really good example of the long-term nature of the way that we do things. I've exited nothing that we have put in.”
Amherst CIO Johnson views public biotech as an interesting investment opportunity
“I think biotech is a really interesting place to be investing in the public markets right now.”
Johnson: Autonomy and runway from governance committees are remarkably rare in investing
“Feeling like the committee has your back and that you have the runway to actually figure out what you want to do is incredibly helpful. And again, is analogous to what we were just talking about with managers. This is the entire investment world. You need to f…”
Johnson: Most Endowments Maintain 5% to 10% Bond Allocations
“Asset allocation doesn't tend to vary that dramatically. Most endowments tend to have an equity bias. Their bonds are going to be somewhere between five and 10%.”
Amherst added zero new managers in 2023
“We do maybe one to two new managers a year. Some years we will do none. We did none in 2023.”
Johnson: Amherst unfunded commitments stand at 12% against 50% private NAV
“Our unfunded, just as an example today, is 12% to support a 50% NAV. It's extremely low. We have a very mature private portfolio. We're not trying to grow our private portfolio.”
Amherst holds 4% to 5% cash and remained cash flow positive
“That's why we hold four to five percent of our portfolios in cash. That's a really important feature, but through this entire time period, our portfolio has been cash flow positive, and I think that's a function of incredibly high-quality managers that have co…”
Johnson: Amherst College has generated roughly 10% annualized returns over decades
“AMRS' 10, 20, and 30 year return has been about 10% compound annualized over that period of time.”
Johnson: Amherst College is at maximum capacity for unfunded commitments
“A lot of the conversation comes into competition for capital within illiquids, because we are basically at the max that we can be in terms of unfunded capital.”
Johnson: Amherst benchmarks endowment against 70/30 and peer median long term
“For us, our benchmarks are much longer term than that, and they're the 7030 and the peer median.”
Johnson: Asbestos trusts hold billions and pay out half within five years
“The quick and dirty on asbestos trusts is they tend to be low to mid single digit billions. So these are large pools that were created out of the bankruptcies of these companies to pay out claims against asbestos litigation for people who are exposed to asbest…”
The other half of the tape: Letitia Johnson's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Tom Lenehan 2Ted Seides 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 4
2024 2 mentions in 1 episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Letitia'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, Amherst College | 1 | 24 | 67% 2/3 | full record on Capital Allocators → |