My name is Joseph Bohrer. I retired from the asset management industry in 2020 after a 35 year career, first as a portfolio manager for various asset classes, and then as CIO for a college endowment. Over my career, I’ve managed or allocated to just about every asset class or type of investment there is.

How I ended up working in asset management is perhaps further evidence of the randomness of human existence. I got into it with the same intentionality as someone falling through an open manhole while crossing the street. I was a clueless liberal arts undergrad at Columbia and at the end of four years hadn’t managed to graduate. My scholarship and loan money had run out and I found myself living in a part of Queens so distant from Manhattan, it might as well have been Buffalo.

Desperate for money to pay the bills, I tried to teach myself to type (could I possibly make this up?) and took a typing test at the Kelly Temp Agency (of “Kelly Girl” fame) so that I could get a high paying… secretarial position? Honestly, I have no idea. So I took the test and promptly failed it. No worries, they said, there’s a temp job in the mailroom at a company I doubt I’d ever heard of: J.P.Morgan.

No skills required, they said. That’s me, I said!

So… long story short, I started at JPMorgan Asset Management as a temp in their mailroom and ended up working in asset management for some 35 years. I managed “institutional money” — multi-billion dollar pension fund, endowment, and sovereign wealth fund assets. While at J.P.Morgan (after getting out of the mailroom), I managed broad market fixed income for 5 years in NY, global equity portfolios in London for 4, and was CIO for Asia excluding Japan and head of the Singapore office for another 4. I was promoted to Managing Director in 2000 after which I spent two years in Tokyo for JPM as head of their institutional Japan business.

After leaving JPM in 2003 after 18 years, I landed (again by happenstance) in the world of endowments and foundations — which was just beginning to achieve it’s reputation as the “smart money” among institutional investors — and stayed for 15 years, basically the second half of my career. I worked first for almost ten years as an Investment Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York City. Most recently, I was the Chief Investment Officer, based in New York, of the $1 billion Lafayette College endowment for the six years through 2020.

I should also mention that I have an illness called ME/CFS, a chronic autoimmune disorder quite similar in its effects as Long Covid. I’ve had this condition for twenty-some years but was always able to manage it without too much difficulty. But in early 2020 my condition worsened quite a lot and hasn’t improved since. The gist of how ME/CFS affects me is that the amount of energy I have to “spend” each day is very limited. I can do at most about a third or a quarter of what I used to be able to do.

I wasn’t planning on taking another full-time job after leaving Lafayette but I also had no interest in retiring in the conventional sense and had lots of ideas about other things to get involved with. As it turned out though, because of the ME/CFS, neither of those paths was possible. Currently, to keep engaged and because I enjoy it, I write pretty often on LinkedIn while occasionally writing longer pieces for this blog.