TRS Investment Funds well-positioned to weather market turmoil

Sep 22, 2008 4:08 PM

The Board of the New York City Teachers’ Retirement System oversees several investment pools on behalf of its members including the Pension Fund and the Tax Deferred Annuity (TDA) Funds.  

Although the investment objectives vary among these Funds, a number of critical investment principles are applied across all the Funds. First, all the Funds are managed by experienced investment professionals who report monthly on their performance and portfolio holdings. These performance results are reviewed by the Board at its monthly Investment Meetings. Second, all the Funds are managed against carefully defined guidelines which, among other things, require that the portfolios be broadly diversified across a large number of individual securities.  

As a result, although these Funds are certainly impacted by the market turmoil of the past few weeks, they do not have significant exposure to any one company. The Board, the TRS staff, the Comptroller’s Office and our consultant will continue to monitor the Funds closely, but, due to the deliberate diversification of the Funds across individual securities, asset classes and investment management organizations, we believe we are well-positioned to weather this difficult market environment, just as we have in prior periods.