St. Mary's County trust approves U.S. equity restructure, names Vanguard small-cap value manager

The St. Mary's County Retirement Benefits Trust voted June 27 to restructure its U.S. equity allocation to increase mid-cap exposure and adopt a new small-cap value manager. The board approved staff's recommendations as presented on page 27 of the meeting materials, including a swap of the current Schwab S&P 500 large-cap index exposure into an index intended to track the Russell 1000 and the appointment of Vanguard's small-cap value index fund as the new small-cap value manager.

Consultant Patrick Wing summarized the rationale: the trust was modestly overweight large caps and underweight mid caps relative to the policy benchmark. Staff recommended replacing the Schwab S&P 500 holding (a large-cap index) with a Russell 1000 index exposure to move incremental weight from the largest-cap stocks into the 501'1,000 range, thereby increasing…