Coolabah promotes John Phokos

Coolabah Capital Investments portfolio manager John Phokos has been promoted to chief strategy officer after just eight months at the firm.

The former Australian Catholic Superannuation investment manager landed at Christopher Joye's Coolabah  in July also taking looking after quant analysis.

At Australian Catholic Super, he served as the investment manager for private markets.

Two years ago, the asset owner merged with UniSuper to form a $115 billion asset super fund.

The merger came about after ACS failed APRA's performance test in 2021.

At ACS, Phokos managed a multi-billion-dollar credit, fixed-income and alternatives portfolio for seven years to 2022.

He played a key role in research, portfolio construction, and asset and manager selection across fixed-interest, credit, cash and hedge funds.

While at the super fund, Phokos delivered the top ranking for a multi-manager fixed interest product over 1, 3, and 5 years.

Before ACS, John directly managed and oversaw a $2 billion sovereign bond portfolio and $1 billion in cash at WorkCover NSW from 2006 to 2015, and also selected and managed external managers across multiple asset classes, including credit.

Earlier, he was a senior performance analyst at JP Morgan, at Commonwealth Bank and at Tower.