Asset Allocation – Improving Alpha:

Improving Alpha: Andrew Junkin on Strengthening Defensive Layers in Pension Retirement Plans

By Improving-Alpha | January 26, 2026

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There’s a famous sports adage on how great defenses win championships, but can defensive layers be efficiently applied to pension plans that have close to $128 billion in AUM and provide secure retirement benefits to 850,000 participants?

In addition to positioning your defense, how can CIOs reduce drawdown risk while navigating investment board politics, innovation goals, and uncovering longer-term sources of strategic alpha? In our first episode of 2026 for the Improving Alpha podcast, we uncovered allocation strategies for the Employees’ Retirement System of Hawaii.

This time, we traveled ~5,000 miles to welcome Andrew Junkin, Chief Investment Officer of the Virginia Retirement System (VRS). Host, Michael Oliver Weinberg, speaks with Andrew about his journey from investment consulting to moving east of the Mississippi, where he took on the CIO role at the State of Rhode Island during COVID, before landing at VRS.

Key takeaways from Andrew’s discussion include:

Why, after 150 nights on the consulting road, did Andrew look for a career change?
How does Andrew balance the Code of Virginia rules in avoiding large drawdowns by adding layers of defense to the portfolio?
Can good investment decisions be freed up from political perspectives, and how does that shape governance of the $128BN fund?
Does cash on hand actually create drag in asset owner portfolios, or does it help liquidity, avoiding the ‘shaking of couch cushions to fund capital calls and more?
With equity prices and valuations at all-time highs, and spreads tightening, are there still investment opportunities out there to take advantage of for your beneficiaries?
Red flags on asset gathering mode by fund managers, and flipping the right switches on investment partnerships.
Why the Chief Investment title shouldn’t be about picking investments, but rather focus on machine building for the future.
And more!

Connect with Andrew Junkin:

Connect with Michael Oliver Weinberg:

About Our Guest:

Andrew Junkin serves as the Chief Investment Officer of the Virginia Retirement System where he manages and oversees the investment program for the fund, valued at more than $100 billion. The fund serves approximately 773,000 active members, retirees and beneficiaries. VRS covers teachers, state employees and most employees of the Commonwealth’s counties, cities, towns and political subdivisions.

Previously, Junkin served as the Chief Investment Officer for the State of Rhode Island’s pension plan, defined contribution and 529 plans, as well as cash and operating funds and debt management program.

Prior to his public fund experience with Rhode Island, he worked at Wilshire Associates in California and Colorado, where he served in various capacities, including Managing Director and President from 2015 to 2020. During his tenure, Junkin also served as the Lead Consultant for a $400 billion pension plan and was responsible for driving overall strategy, asset allocation, risk management, implementation and sourcing new strategies.

From 1995 to 2005, Junkin was the President of Asset Services Company in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma where he served as Lead Consultant for family office and foundation clients.

Junkin holds a Master of Business Administration from the Wharton School and a bachelor’s degree in Business from Oklahoma City University.

The information covered and posted represents the views and opinions of the guest and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of Vidrio Financial, and/or our host, Michael Oliver Weinberg. The Content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only. The Content is not intended to be a substitute for professional investing advice. Always seek the advice of your financial advisor or other qualified financial service provider with any questions you may have regarding your investment planning.

The release date may not correspond to the recording date.

Improving Alpha: Dave Morehead on Driving Convex Investment Strategies for Endowment Innovation

By Improving-Alpha | October 31, 2025

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Institutional investors continually seek top-tier managers, relying on insights, industry signals, and rigorous due diligence led by expert portfolio teams before committing any capital. While these preliminary drivers are widely adopted and can often contribute 100 to 300 basis points above relevant benchmarks, the pursuit of above-average alpha remains relentless. Could convex alternative investments help add alpha to a university, library, hospital, pension, or endowment system?

The Improving Alpha podcast is pleased to welcome Dave Morehead, CIO, Baylor University. In this episode, Michael Oliver Weinberg chats with Dave about his journey in the world of marketable investments, while sharing allocator insights that have defined his 15-year tenure managing Baylor University’s endowment.

Key takeaways from Dave’s discussion include:

What was the evolution of Baylor’s endowment, now valued at $2.3Bn, coming out of the global financial crisis and the steps needed to stabilize its future?
Why is there less focus on a hard percentage return target for Baylor and more emphasis placed on strategic internal goals?
Tweaking the traditional diversification strategies that many endowments use today in order to diversify the means by which alpha is created.
How data center and marina investments play a role in Baylor’s convexity investment approach.
Baylor’s triangulation approach in combining the quantitative with qualitative manager checks and character assessments in order to more effectively avoid red flags in investing.
Why the institutional investment market can kneecap you when you make assumptions on manager purity and humility prior to an allocation decision.
Lessons learned about portfolio risk, organizational structure, and mentoring the next generation of investment professionals.
And more.

Connect with Michael Oliver Weinberg:

Connect with Dave Morehead:

About Our Guest:

Dave Morehead joined the Baylor University Office of Investments in 2011 and currently serves as the Chief Investment Officer. From 2019-2024, Mr. Morehead co-taught the Large Cap and Small Cap practicum classes at Baylor’s Hankamer School of Business. Previously, he was a senior portfolio manager at Lotsoff Capital Management, where he managed securities across the corporate capital structure, and a partner at Highview Capital Management, where he focused on public and private energy investments.

Prior to this, he was a portfolio manager at Ritchie Capital Management, responsible for a generalist corporate relative value and distressed portfolio and spent time performing equity research on the transportation/logistics and specialty retail sectors at William Blair & Company.

Mr. Morehead also held roles at Bank of America, where he was responsible for the risk management of the bank’s interest rate derivatives desk, and First Trust Advisors, where he advised community banks on their investment portfolios.

Dave graduated summa cum laude from Wheaton College and earned his MBA in finance and entrepreneurship with honors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He also holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation.

The release date may not correspond to the recording date.

Improving Alpha: TC Wilson on Advancing the Practice of Good Medicine through Better Asset Allocation Strategies

By Improving-Alpha | July 30, 2024

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Today there’s tremendous focus around the practice of good medicine, the advancement of healthcare innovations, and positive patient outcomes. One company that embodies these characteristics and provides services to the healthcare industry is The Doctor’s Company. The Doctors Company began in 1976 during a crisis period in medical malpractice claims that were skyrocketing. Formed out of historic legislation for the time, and starting with only 450 members this organization has grown to over 90,000 members.

As the nation’s largest physician-owned medical malpractice insurance company it takes a steady hand and solid grasp of the balancing that needs to occur in both the underwriting and asset allocation areas of the business.

Join Michael Oliver Weinberg, host, Improving Alpha Podcast, as he sits down with TC Wilson, Chief Investment Officer, The Doctors Company. Learn more about TC’s journey and the balancing of investments and underwriting to help generate alpha.

TC highlights the following:

the generation of alpha opportunities across US investment grade and non-traditional investments and how they differ from an endowment or foundation.
how he’s looking at private credit and private equity and where the innovation and creativity lie today.
how The Doctors Company integrates ESG considerations and supports California’s climate and carbon initiatives in asset allocation strategies, governance, monitoring, and due diligence.
what does the organization known as California Organized Investment Network, (COIN) do for environmental benefits in California?
how does the challenging regulatory environment impact TC’s diversification strategies in managing his shop? Does he believe that they might be getting penalized prematurely for other players’ bad market moves?
steps for identifying red flags in investment strategies and culture.
And more

Resources:

The Doctors Company
California Organized Investment Network (COIN)
Body by Science by: John R. Little & Doug McGuff

Connect with TC Wilson:

LinkedIn: TC Wilson

Connect with Michael Oliver Weinberg:

About Our Guest:

Chief Investment Officer and Senior Vice President TC Wilson joined The Doctors Company as its first Chief Investment Officer in 2017. Mr. Wilson is responsible for the development, management, and oversight of the company’s strategic investment program. He also ensures that overall investment and growth objectives are met in support of the company’s underwriting profile and operating results. He contributes to The Doctors Company’s strategic growth plan as it relates to investment review and assessment of new partnerships and opportunities. On a day-to-day basis, Mr. Wilson oversees the company’s investment portfolio with the goal of preserving and growing surplus. He also serves as Chairman of The Doctors Company’s 401(k) Committee. Prior to joining The Doctors Company, Mr. Wilson served as Head of Institutional Consulting for The Optimal Service Group (OSG), an investment consultant that specializes in investment advice to the medical malpractice industry. At OSG, he was the lead investment consultant to The Doctors Company from 2000 through 2017. Mr. Wilson has nearly 30 years of investment and consulting experience, including his initial five-year stint with one of the nation’s leading benefits consulting firms in Richmond, Virginia.

The release date may not correspond to the recording date.

Improving Alpha: A Zero Sum Behavioral Psychology Approach for Innovative Allocators

By Improving-Alpha | January 6, 2023

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In the world of finance, there are many discussions around the topics of economic challenges or inequality when it comes to how asset managers or asset owners navigate the market. The volume certainly increases on this theme around bonus time when performance incentives are being paid out despite market volatility and declining returns.

In this episode, Michael Oliver Weinberg, co-founder, Improving Alpha Podcast Series, is joined by Shai Davidai, Assistant Professor, Management Division, Columbia Business School, to go under the hood of economic behavioral psychology at work across asset managers and owners.

Shai discusses:

How economic inequality is different from economic mobility and why we tend to overestimate upward mobility.
How philanthropy factors into the internal attributions that people assume about the person that is promoting their Giving Pledge.
How does the hypothesis of a zero-sum game factor into an asset manager or owner’s strategic plan?
How does the zero-sum game tie itself into organizations and retaining talent by offering either a zero-sum incentive program vs. a non-zero-sum program.
And more!

Connect with Shai Davidai:

About Our Guest:

Shai Davidai is Assistant Professor in the Management Division of Columbia Business School. His research examines people’s everyday judgments of themselves, other people, and society as a whole. He studies the psychological forces that shape, distort, and bias people’s perceptions of the world and their influence on people’s judgments, preferences, and choices. His topics of expertise include the psychology of judgment and decision making, economic inequality and social mobility, social comparisons, and zero-sum thinking.

His work has been published in top-tier journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Perspectives on Psychological Sciences, and the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.

Shai received his PhD from Cornell University in 2015. Prior to joining Columbia Business School, Shai spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and 3 years as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research

Connect with Michael Oliver Weinberg:

To learn more about our host visit: https://www.vidrio.com/blog/improving-alpha-podcast-columbia-business-davidai

The release date may not correspond to the recording date.

Improving Alpha: Jonathan Grabel, LACERA on Consolidating a Strategic Asset Allocation for Growth

By Improving-Alpha | December 9, 2022

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Allocators today can’t predict the future state of the market, especially given recent volatility, needing to rely on several viewpoints and data benchmarks to reach their goal. This is true in the case of LACERA where Jonathan Grabel and his team manage over $70 billion in AUM.

In this episode of Improving Alpha – Innovation in Investing, ESG & Technology, Michael Oliver Weinberg, co-founder, Improving Alpha Podcast Series, is joined by Jonathan Grabel, Chief Investment Officer, LACERA. Learn about Jonathan’s career journey and how he has achieved a high degree of professional happiness by working in a public pension like LACERA.

Jonathan discusses:

How LACERA addresses market volatility today and how innovation plays into that strategic allocation focus.
How LACERA views ESG in a three-dimensional space and what factors help optimize LACERA’s fiduciary duties for their members.
The intersection between technology and ESG and how human capital helps evaluate new investments.
Moving from a monthly close to a daily NAV, and how it helped LACERA improve portfolio monitoring.
LACERA’s co-investment program and the growth it has seen in outpacing its private equity allocations.
Investment inefficiencies and innovating through investment seeding, and how it can provide a new revenue stream to LACERA.
Observing investment teams that support DE&I and the performance impact to their investment strategies.
And more

Resources:

The End of the World is just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan

Connect with Jonathan Grabel:

About Our Guest:

Mr. Grabel manages the multibillion-dollar defined benefit pension fund on behalf of LACERA’s active and retired members. He also oversees the investments for the LACERA-administered healthcare benefits program.

Prior to LACERA, Mr. Grabel was the CIO for New Mexico PERA, where he oversaw the investments for the agency’s $15 billion defined benefit fund and the associated PERA SmartSave deferred compensation plan.

Previously, he was a general partner at a private equity firm focused on growth-stage investments in technology, networking industries, and digital communications. Earlier in his career, Mr. Grabel was an investment banker and licensed CPA (inactive). He received his Bachelor of Science in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Connect with Michael Oliver Weinberg:

To learn more about our host visit: https://www.vidrio.com/blog/improving-alpha-podcast-lacera-grabel

The release date may not correspond to the recording date.