RYAN ALM ADVISERS

Ronald J. Ryan, the founder, leads all portfolio design and client-strategy decisions. Ryan developed the firm's custom liability indexing methodology personally and has been the public face of the approach through decades of industry conferences, legislative testimony, and published research. The firm operates with a small, specialist team reporting directly to him, without a separate CIO or investment committee structure.

Ryan ALM does not source deal flow in the private-market sense — it builds portfolios exclusively from highly liquid U.S. Treasury, agency, and investment-grade corporate bonds. The firm screens its proprietary Ryan Index database to select securities whose cash-flow profiles align with client liability schedules. Securities are purchased in the secondary market through institutional execution desks, not through direct origination or private placement.

The firm operates as a boutique fixed-income asset manager with discretionary authority over segregated accounts, but it embeds consulting-grade actuarial analysis into every mandate. Ryan ALM is registered as an investment adviser with the SEC and acts as a fiduciary, constructing and managing dedicated bond portfolios while also advising on liability-benchmark construction — a hybrid role that few other firms occupy.

The firm runs only direct, segregated mandates — one portfolio per pension plan, each engineered to that plan's specific benefit-payment stream. Ryan ALM does not offer commingled funds, pooled vehicles, or fund-of-funds strategies. Every account is a separately managed dedicated bond portfolio with no cross-client risk-sharing or amortization.

Ryan ALM avoids any asset class that cannot generate a known, contractually fixed cash flow — equities, real estate, private equity, hedge funds, and commodities are all excluded. Within fixed income, the firm avoids securities whose credit risk would threaten the cash-flow match, including high-yield and unrated bonds. The entire portfolio construction philosophy is built on the premise that only investment-grade, fixed-coupon instruments are suitable for liability matching.

Standard LDI strategies typically manage duration and convexity to track a liability benchmark, but they still accept benchmark-relative tracking error and market-to-market volatility. Ryan ALM goes further: it constructs portfolios designed to be held to maturity and never traded, extinguishing each bond's cash flow exactly as a liability payment comes due. The firm argues this is true "defeasance" rather than risk management — it removes the need to mark the portfolio to market at all, provided the plan sponsor can hold the assets to term.

Ryan ALM's historical and current client base is concentrated among U.S. public-sector defined-benefit plans, with an emphasis on municipal police officers' and firefighters' pension funds in states such as Florida, Texas, and Illinois. The firm also serves a number of multi-employer Taft-Hartley plans. These plans share a common structural stress — mature liability profiles with negative cash-flow ratios — which makes the cash-flow-matching proposition particularly relevant.