Page 41 - 2024 July report

INVESTMENT COMMITTEE MEETING MINUTES
Attendees:
JOHNSON SCHOLARSHIP FOUNDATION MINUTES FROM INVESTMENT COMMITTEE MEETING June 11, 2024 – 9:00AM EDT – Prime Boston Office
Final – July 8, 2024
Committee Members in person: Dick Krause, Bobby Krause, Malcolm Macleod Committee Members via Zoom: Hugh Brown, Mike Miller, Angelique Albert
Staff: Tommy Pence
Prime Buchholz (Prime) Consultants: Ian MacPherson, Stephen Roche and Rick Morrison Dick chaired the Meeting.
1. Approval of Investment Committee Meeting Minutes – Minutes from the February 14, 2024 meeting were approved.
2. Investment Performance in 2024 First Quarter and Manager Comments – JSF recorded a strong 5.0% investment return in the 2024 first quarter. Total assets grew by $11.5 mill to $263.1 mill. As illustrated in Table 1, JSF has generated a total return of 13.4% over the last year exceeding its target rate of return of inflation +5% by 4.7%. Over longer periods JSF has fallen slightly short of its target rate of turn however JSF is a solid first or second quartile performer on a 5- and 10-year basis.
Performance in the Public Equity space (where the current portfolio weighting is 54.5%) has been strong led by Adage Capital Partners, which at $62.3 mill is by far the largest JSF individual investment at 23.7% of the portfolio. Adage is totally focused on US equity markets. Adage has produced a 34.4% return over the last year exceeding its benchmark by 4.5%, which is almost double the level of annual outperformance of 2.4% Adage has averaged since 2009 when JSF first invested in this manager. Another stellar performer has been GQG Partners Global Equity Fund, which invests in equity markets around the globe (although currently the USA represents 75% of the portfolio) and is JSF’s third largest manager at $16.4 mill. Over the last year GQG has achieved a resounding 45.3% return exceeding its benchmark by an outstanding 22.1%. A 10% weighting in NVIDIA (up 170% year to date with a 6% market weight) has certainly helped. Exceptional performance from these two large managers has more than offset poor performance by Champlain Small Company Fund, Baxter St. Offshore and Chinese emerging market manager Gaoling. In total, public equity managers produced a 24.4% return for JSF over the last year.
Other than redemption of the Gaoling investment ($1.6 mill) in July and a possible additional $900,000 investment in hedge fund Farallon Prime is not recommending any changes to the JSF manager lineup.
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