Institutional Investor is proud to recognize leaders within the allocator community for their outstanding contributions to portfolio development at the second annual AlphaEdge Recognition Dinner. Prior to the event, we sat down with Meredith Jenkins, recognized in the category of Most Influential Women in Investment Management.
Meredith, Chief Investment Officer at Trinity Church Wall Street, has a broad perspective of the investment industry, having worked as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, investment associate at Sanford C. Bernstein, and Investment Director then Co-Chief Investment Officer at Carnegie Corporation of New York.
She is a graduate of University of Virginia, where she received her bachelor’s degree in English Language & Literature, and Harvard Business School, where she earned her MBA. She assumed her current role at Trinity Church Wall Street, the New York-based $6 billion endowment, eight years ago. The Episcopal congregation was founded in 1697. Its endowment supports all the activities of Trinity Church, including a vibrant and growing parish of more than 1,600 members that is located in downtown Manhattan; outreach, grant-making and other supportive ministries that serve Trinity’s neighbors and community; and grant-making aligned with four mission initiatives of addressing housing and homelessness, racial justice, mission real estate development, and leadership development.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
What is the biggest challenge facing the industry today?
Looking forward is always a challenge, especially after the past 10 to 15 years, post-Global Financial Crisis, where we think, “Why didn’t we just do a pretty plain, passive, vanilla portfolio? How did we miss this?”. I think the biggest challenge is not to let that be too much of a distraction in building a portfolio for the next 10 to 15 years and risk being whipsawed.
I started in the industry in 1999 when many investors were frustrated at missing parts of the internet run up and bubble; between that bubble popping and the GFC, value and active management and diversification really benefited people’s portfolios. Even since the GFC, active managers have outperformed so I have faith that there are managers who are great at underwriting opportunities that are poorly understood by the market.
I continue to believe in the endowment model and active management, and I regularly remind myself that if you’re sitting with a truly diversified portfolio and there isn’t anything that you’re unhappy with, you’ve probably done a bad job of diversifying your portfolio, or you don’t understand what’s in your portfolio.
Which part of your portfolio are you most excited about?
We’ve got a pretty unique portfolio: About 40% of our portfolio is Manhattan real estate, office-focused because of our 300-year plus history of owning significant land in downtown Manhattan. We have beautiful buildings, and I’m so excited about the Hudson Square (not Hudson Yards!) neighborhood; we’ve got Google and Disney coming into new buildings that they have each built in the neighborhood; a lot of that is on the horizon because it’s been a tough slog over the past couple years., but looking out over the next decade it’s something that I find exciting.
New York City is one of those places where every year a group of young people graduate and are attracted to move here because of everything it offers – from other young people, great restaurants and bars, going out, the waterfront that has undergone so much revival and redevelopment over the past couple decades, to great neighborhoods and shopping and the theater. It’s a place where you could have been born anywhere and you can move here and make it your home. There is a constant spigot of people who want to be part of, and I don’t think that changes for New York – and that’s a huge benefit for the city.
Who were your mentors and what made you go into the industry?
I’ve been extremely fortunate with an amazing group of women that I have worked with over the years. The first was a woman named Debra Fine at Sanford C. Bernstein, before it was part of Alliance. She was a research analyst in their main buyside fund, and she trained me to look at companies, doing a Bernstein-style research analysis, thinking about things from a value perspective. She was also extremely generous and blunt and direct in terms of my own career, not just the job tasks: “You need to do this and talk to this person,” “You need to get to know this senior woman,” and “You need to talk to this person about going to business school.” She was phenomenal, and she has continued to be a mentor throughout my career.
My second mentor was Ellen Shuman. I had no idea that the endowment and foundation investment management world existed. I fell into the opportunity to do an internship at Cambridge Associates before I started business school and during that internship everything clicked for me. Both getting to meet with and learn about different investment managers and thinking in the context of a whole portfolio was fascinating to me.
I was coming out of business school looking for something in the endowment and foundation investment management space was a very networked job search (It was a cottage industry back then), and Ellen was willing to hire me as the most senior person on her team; she had an analyst, so it was the three of us looking at the Carnegie portfolio, and she was phenomenal. She gave us enough rope to hang ourselves alongside the skills and support to make sure that was unlikely to happen. She had a great eye for investment talent and management when looking at opportunities, and I learned from the questions she would ask and seeing when she would get excited. She was always willing to send me to meetings and let me take the frontline, listen to my opinions and challenge me.
Finally, I count Kim Lew as one of my most important mentors. Working with her as co-CIOs at Carnegie was the absolute best working experience in my life. I learned so much from her in terms of being open to ideas, people and opportunities. When my knee-jerk reaction is to say no or to shut something down, I’ll often ask myself, “What would Kim do here?” and it regularly guides me to a better, more well-thought-out outcome.
If you weren’t an allocator, what would you be doing today?
When I was graduating from college, I was an English major and thought I wanted to work for a magazine. My dream was to be working for a literary magazine like the New Yorker or The Atlantic. However, my bigger dream was to live in NYC, and I quickly realized that an entry-level publishing job probably wouldn’t pay the bills for that dream.
What is the one thing that needs to change?
We still need to improve the levels of diversity of all kinds – gender, ethnicity, experience, thought – in this industry. Although I went into this industry because I did see a lot of senior women, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, and it’s not just increasing the numbers of women: It’s all sorts of diversity that has to be stronger in this industry.
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