The state of Washington scored the highest marks (3.92%) over the last decade for state pension funds with greater than $20 billion in assets, according to a Bloomberg survey.

Sadly, they all woefully underperformed the Vanguard Balanced Index fund (4.79%) over the same period (lost decade?  really?).  An indexed strategy that included small allocations to the Vanguard REIT index fund (10.99% over the decade) and the Vanguard Small Cap Index fund (7.41%) would have blown the state pension funds away by an even higher margin.

As usual, there's more money to be made "selling the system" than there is in the system itself.