The Washington State Investment Board’s Portfolio

This week, we’ll take a look at the Washington State Investment Board (WSIB)’s portfolio. The board manages roughly $234 billion in retirement plans and public funds on behalf of Washington state and is led by CIO Chris Hanak, who was appointed to the role in early 2022 after leading the system’s risk management and asset allocation team since joining in 2019.

Hanak previously served as acting CIO of the Group Health Foundation and as an investment professional at Cascade Asset Management, an asset management firm associated with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

For the purposes of this analysis, we will be looking just at the commingled trust fund (CTF), which is where the pension’s manager investments are held. The CTF is valued at $187.4 billion as of 3/31/26, according to documents available on OWL.

The portfolio has generated positive performance every year over the past decade and appears to be continuing that trend through the end of Q1 this year:

The public equity portfolio is valued at $51.5 billion as of 3/31/26 and has performed relatively in-line with the chosen benchmark over nearly every timeframe.

On Friday, OWL users received a list of WSIB’s public managers, which can also be found on our platform.

WSIB’s private equity portfolio is valued at $53.4 billion as of 3/31/26 and has underperformed the pension’s chosen benchmark in recent years.

The WSIB also discloses the Net IRR for each of the subcategories within its private equity portfolio on a quarterly basis:

The private equity portfolio is heavily weighted towards buyout strategies, and leans on IT, industrials, healthcare, and financials for the majority of its investments. OWL users can see a list of WSIB’s private equity and venture capital managers on our platform.

Through a FOIA request, OWL obtained WSIB’s investment committee recommendations for new fund investments, though many of the details are redacted. OWL has compiled a list of the most recent investment recommendations:

All of the data above (and much more) is included on WSIB’s Docs tab on OWL. This recently-launched feature allows users to easily access publicly available materials across our allocator database. If you’d like to learn more about tracking allocators and their holdings, reach out!

OWL is an intelligence platform built for allocators, by allocators. Leading endowments, foundations, and family offices use the system to find, monitor, and connect with thousands of fund managers globally. OWL's analytics engine has collected over one billion data points from 65 countries. We make it easy for allocators to find and track information about the managers they care about – not just positions but also performance analytics, people data, business information, and details about the manager investments of other allocators.

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