Chairman Mayor Smiley.

Vice Chair Women's Leveria.

City Treasurer, her husband.

Present.

Councilman Ryan is absent.

Mr.

Costello is also absent.

Mr.

Hirsch.

Absent Mr.

Lincoln.

We have four present three absent.

We have four.

Great.

Welcome everybody.

Umbody in here that we um we uh we'll start with that one, investment performance analysis.

Uh and asculating from uh single year provision.

Very good.

Uh good afternoon, everyone.

Uh if I could uh bring your attention to the first document in the three documents that we can do out.

Uh this is entitled City of Providence Employee China System Monthly Flash.

This would be the report uh on the market in very much brief terms as well as uh on the performance of the portfolio.

The retirement system portfolio and uh good strong returns in the month of May.

Uh, if you look at page one, the strong performance of the portfolio is flying by good market environment for public equities in May.

We saw continuation of strong returns in stocks due to uh the market's reaction, strong corporate earnings, a little bit of optimism about uh cooling down of tensions in the Middle East, which of course would uh hopefully lead to uh a resume of flow of energy and for all other goods and services uh that have been uh interrupted uh due to war.

And so you saw just to pick out a couple of indexes that the portfolio is invested against the SP five hundred year to date now through May, uh plus eleven point three percent, establishment on US equities, uh high single digits returns and the best performing part of the public equity market, where you're invested as well, uh, emerging markets, particularly in Asia, you saw strong returns.

Bond returns, the U.S.

aggregate index, which is on the far right hand side of page one.

This is all in more detail in a uh longer report.

That's the third document that we won't get to here.

But just want to give you the highlights.

But lately yields have come down a little bit.

So you're more or less in a flat return of the bond mark.

If we go to page three, uh, this would just be a summary of performance and I'll ask you to speak to the financial reconciliation.

Upper left hand side, uh, you can see the market value, and please stop me if uh if I'm getting other people.

Uh six hundred and thirty-six point three billion.

Uh and if you move from left to right, you can see the return in the month, fourth calendar for the left in the month of May, 2.6%, of course, driven overwhelmingly by stock market returns, which are strong.

And then uh the year-to-date return, which is the first five months of the calendar year, 7.1%.

And looking at the one-year rolling return, which should be June through May, 17.2%.

Of course, your fiscal year uh we're nearing the end of your fiscal year.

So hopefully there'll be a good strong return for the fiscal year with the uh year is over.

Looking at the portfolio itself, about 71% of the portfolio's assets were in public equities as of the end of the five-month uh calendar year period, the public equity portfolio returns for the year to date period 10.6 percent.

If we go to the next page, you can see fixed income about halfway down page four, approximately 20.5% of the portfolio uh in fixed income return in line with the market, uh, more or less flat, three tenths percent return for the year to date.

That's about halfway across from left to right and halfway down the page.

And then you can see uh at the bottom uh for, I'm sorry, on page five, the alternative portfolio, which we're doing some work on, uh hedge funds in particular.

Uh is you could see uh had a negative return.

I'll just focus on year to date hedge funds held 6.8% of the total portfolio.

Uh the return was negative 3.7% again.

We'll be reporting back uh to finance staff of Board of Investment Commissioners uh at a future meeting uh the work we're doing there.

And you can see cash at uh 1.4%.

Bottom line on the portfolio is return, good strong return, absolute terms, a little bit of underperformance, uh, some of which we're working on, obviously, uh in the alternative portfolio in the public equity portfolio, the managers there who have been underperforming uh brandyce in international equities, Robico, Boston partners, all those managers have outperformed since you've hired them.

Now that's the only metric we use to determine whether or not uh they still are suitable for the portfolio, but we have a good strong conviction.

We've had some active managers underperform the benchmark indexes in recent periods, a little more than usual, and partially uh that is attributable to kind of the buying and selling in tech stocks based on speculation about how much uh the hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in artificial intelligence are going to yield in terms of uh profits.

So that's the bottom line uh on the performance for the portfolio.

And I'm gonna let Peter speak to the financial reconciliation, unless there's any questions uh on the performance.

The only other point I'd make is the market environment through the first three weeks of June has been modestly negative.

Uh, some of that again selling off of tech stocks.

I think it was modestly positive this morning, probably a little more than modestly positive uh because of my current earnings, uh, one of the technology companies.

So uh this is volatility in the market right now, the stock market due to tech stocks, but on balance it's been uh more positive and negative, and you can see that uh in the in the relatively strong returns for the retirement system portfolio.

And Peter, I'll let you speak to uh the cash movements and for the reconciliation.