Dale Connors

Dale Connors is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) with more than four decades of experience in financial services and institutional investment consulting. He began his career in 1986 at Principal Financial Group and moved into consulting in 1988 at Mercer, where he held leadership roles across multiple client practices and directed the investment-consulting team in Mercer's Denver office. He earned a BBA in Finance, with honors, from the University of Iowa, and is a member of the CFA Society of Denver.

In 1998, Connors co-founded Watershed Investment Consultants, a Colorado-based, SEC-registered investment consultancy in Greenwood Village (outside Denver), alongside principals Paul Schreder and Kevin Yoshida. Watershed provided research-driven investment counsel to institutions and high-net-worth families. In June 2016, Watershed was acquired by Chicago-based Ellwood Associates; the three principals, including Connors, became senior consultants with equity positions, and the combined firm reported roughly $56 billion in assets under advisement at the time. In 2021, Ellwood Associates was acquired by CAPTRUST, which folded Watershed/Ellwood into its endowment-and-foundation practice.

Effective August 4, 2025, Connors joined RVK, Inc. as a Senior Consultant, based in Denver with support from RVK's Chicago office. In that role he contributes to general consulting and manager research, with a particular focus on core and core-plus real estate strategies. Across his career he has specialized in advising governmental defined-benefit (public pension) plans and conducting extensive research into core real estate markets.

• Client type, not startup type: Connors advises *institutional asset owners* — public pension plans, endowments, foundations, and high-net-worth families — on portfolio construction and manager selection. He is not, on the available public record, a startup/angel investor writing seed checks.
• Real estate specialization: His stated focus at RVK is on "core and core-plus real estate strategies," and his research history centers on core real estate markets.
• Public / governmental pension expertise: LinkedIn and industry profiles describe him as a governmental pension-fund / public-fund specialist, reflecting a career advising defined-benefit plans.
• Research-driven, independent counsel: The firms he built and joined (Watershed, Ellwood, RVK) all position themselves as independent, research-based, unbiased investment advisers rather than product sellers.