CalSTRS CIO Christopher Ailman says State Street’s benchmark is a major step up from the fund’s in-house metric. Those holdings are easily tracked against dynamically weighted benchmarks based on the S&P 500 and the MSCI World Index, Ailman said. The frustrating attempts at building benchmarks for those assets led CalSTRS to turn to State Street’s private equity index. CalSTRS has used the GX Private Equity Index since 2007, first as its secondary benchmark and recently as its main measuring stick. Schmidt recalls one fixed-income manager who was urged in early 2008 to take a bigger position in Lehman Brothers to more closely mirror his benchmark index.