Are the trustees of the Tampa firefighters and police officers pension fund out of their minds?

“Quite a few people tell me we’re crazy,” Richard Griner, a 41-year-old Tampa police detective and vice chairman of the
pension fund’s board, told me this week. “I go to quite a few investment conferences. They just can’t believe that we do this
the way we do. But then I tell them the numbers, and they tend to shut up.”

The Tampa, Fla., pension fund may be unique in its approach to managing its assets, which totaled $1.76 billion as of
last September. Unlike the so-called Yale model, which has been widely copied and stresses alternative investments, the
Tampa fund has no hedge fund or private equity investments.

But neither does it follow the low-cost, index-oriented approach championed by Vanguard and others. The Tampa fund
doesn’t own index or mutual funds.

As for being diversified, which is the mantra of nearly all institutional money managers and consultants, it isn’t. A single
outside manager makes all investment decisions, and the fund’s assets are concentrated in a relatively small number of stocks
and fixed-income investments.

In short, the Tampa pension fund pretty much breaks all the conventional rules of fund management….

Read the rest of the article at the NY Times.