Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
Alice Handy
Firm: INVESTURE
It’s not every investment manager who beats Harvard and Yale, but Alice Handy did just that. This year’s recipient of the Traders Wall Street Women Lifetime Achievement award runs Investure, an investment firm that manages funds for colleges such as Smith, Barnard and Middlebury and assorted private foundations. In 2007, her performance as manager beat that of Harvard’s endowment, and in 2011 she beat both Harvard and Yale by betting against U.S. stocks.
A 40-year veteran, Handy takes it in stride. As founder, CEO and president of Investure, she oversees $12 billion for her Charlottesville, Va., firm’s 14 clients. “That was a one-year headline,” she said.
For someone with Handy’s track record ? she started as a bond trader and portfolio manager at Travelers in 1970 and managed the then-$50 million endowment for the University of Virginia from 1974 to 2004 which was $2 billion when she left, with a brief stint as state treasurer for the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1998 – she likes the size of her business just fine. “We want to be the best, not the biggest. There are constraints on the number of clients we have and the size we can be and still invest nimbly,” she told Traders.
Working for colleges and foundations requires a high touch that includes three meetings a year with the financial committee and one meeting a year with the board of directors. Handy also communicates directly with the CFO on a regular basis. And the colleges and foundations have a long view of investments, so latency and high-frequency trading are not priorities.
“Colleges are a bit more complex because their boards are more passionate and engaged. People have a lot of loyalty to their alma mater, and foundations are passionate about their mission,” she said.
As the granddaughter of a cranberry farmer, Handy knows the value of hard work. Although she never sold Investure as a woman-owned shop, she concedes that it may have helped her to land Smith College as her first client. As for being a woman in a male-dominated world, the mother of three shrugged off any obstacles that came her way.
“When I started out, the barriers were more artificial,” she explained. “There weren’t any women, and so clubs were not open to you and party venues were more male-dominated. There were women who would be told that they would leave and go have a family. I was told that many times, but I just sort of laughed it off and kept going. I don’t think I intended to stay as long as I did, but I did.”
