William Cottle Cfa

Bill Cottle is a principal and senior investment consultant in the San Francisco office of Milliman, where he advises institutional investors on strategic investment programs, asset-allocation studies, manager selection, benchmark construction, and performance analysis. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and a long-tenured figure in West Coast institutional investment consulting. His career spans roughly five decades of work with pension and retirement funds rather than venture or early-stage private investing.

He began his investment career at Financial Research & Systems Associates (FRS) from mid-1976 through mid-1984, reviewing common-stock analytical techniques and the investment aspects of corporate pension funds, and supporting academic and practitioner research on bond immunization, real-estate analysis, performance evaluation, multiple valuation models, and stock-sector/homogeneous-group performance. From 1984 to 1990 he worked at a large U.S. institutional investment consulting firm in San Francisco, where he supervised the consulting-support department, served as director of research for the firm's institute, supervised investment-manager evaluation, and — as a vice president — consulted to public and corporate funds across the Western United States on strategic programs, asset allocation, manager selection, and benchmarking.

In 1990 he joined Dorn & Helliesen, becoming an owner of the firm in 1993; it later operated as Dorn, Helliesen & Cottle. After more than 11 years there, the firm and its practice became the San Francisco-based investment-consulting office of Milliman, where Cottle continued his consulting responsibilities. He also contributed to the profession's literature, assisting in the revision of the fifth edition of *Security Analysis* (published October 1987), and served on the San Mateo County Employees' Retirement Association (SamCERA) board.

Educationally, Cottle holds a BA in Economics (with a business minor) from Principia College and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Colorado. He is a member of the Association for Investment Management and Research (AIMR, now CFA Institute) and the San Francisco Society of Security Analysts.

• Institutional consulting, not venture capital. Cottle's work is advising asset owners on how to allocate and oversee large pools of capital — he does not make seed or startup investments. Any characterization of him as a seed-round venture investor is a data error in the source stub.
• Core services: formulating strategic investment programs, conducting asset-allocation studies, selecting and evaluating external investment managers, creating performance benchmarks, and analyzing performance results.
• Public-market research depth: background in common-stock analytical techniques, bond immunization, real-estate analysis, valuation models, and stock-sector performance.
• Client base: public employee retirement systems and corporate pension/defined-benefit funds, historically concentrated in the Western U.S.
• Fiduciary orientation: his board service (SamCERA) and consulting practice center on prudent oversight and manager due diligence for retirement assets.