Hedge Fund Specialist Joins Investment Office
Brings new expertise to endowment management team
Charles L. Haigh brings extensive hedge fund expertise to his role as a director of investments for BU’s investment office, where he will help manage the University’s endowment. Photo by Cydney Scott
Hedge fund specialist Charles L. “Chuck” Haigh has joined the investment team managing Boston University’s $1.6 billion endowment. Haigh, who for most of the past 18 years worked at Cambridge Associates in Boston, where he was cohead of hedge fund research, is a new director of investments. He brings valuable hedge fund experience to BU’s team of investment generalists.
Clarissa C. “Lila” Hunnewell, the University’s chief investment officer, says she is thrilled to have Haigh as a member of the eight-person investment office.
“Everyone is excited to have a person of Chuck’s caliber joining our close-knit team,” says Hunnewell, who worked with Haigh at Cambridge Associates before she came to BU. “He’s jumped right in and has already had an impact on the team and the portfolio.”
At Cambridge Associates, Haigh led a 10-person team that sourced, monitored, and evaluated hedge fund managers focused on activism, long/short equity, event-driven, and distressed investing globally. He also advised clients, including universities, how to invest their endowments in hedge funds. He is now focusing on how best to invest across all asset classes for the University.
He says being part of BU’s team is rewarding because of the opportunity to have a direct impact on a pool of capital and to broaden the scope of his work. “The generalist model doesn’t exist everywhere, so that’s something that really attracted me to BU after focusing on one area for almost 20 years,” he says. “I’m really delighted to get to know the team and to think more broadly about other asset classes.”
Haigh is part of a BU team of three investment directors. Brian Erickson has a background in beta-replication and hedge fund investing, along with risk and operations management, and Daniel Steele (Questrom’85) has experience in private equity.
Under Hunnewell’s guidance, the investment office earned a 16.9 percent return on the endowment in fiscal year 2014 and 2.4 percent in fiscal year 2015. The University’s $1.6 billion endowment supports about 2 percent of the University’s operating budget of approximately $2 billion.
“Lila Hunnewell is incredibly well-respected,” Haigh says. “I know I’ll be challenged and get to learn a lot from her.”
A graduate of St. Lawrence University, Haigh earned an MBA in 2005 from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. He lives in Newton with his wife and 16-month-old daughter.
Other recent hires in the investment office are market analyst Alexandra Sing, who came to BU from Forester Capital, L.L.C, in Greenwich, Conn., and investment associate Andrew Schwert, who graduated from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business with an MBA in June. Sing is a 2013 graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University. From 2009 to 2013, she was the editor-in-chief of Consilience: the Journal of Sustainable Development.
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