Measuring the Ivy 2019: Decoding the Performance Gap
Fiscal year 2019 was a curious year for the Ivy League endowments. In a year with strong returns in key private market investment classes, the average Ivy underperformed a traditional domestic balanced 60-40 portfolio in FY 2019. Ivies also experienced a wider dispersion of returns and saw a shift in the historical positioning of performance leaders and laggards.
Fiscal year 2019 was a curious year for the Ivy League endowments. In a year with strong returns in key private market investment classes, the average Ivy underperformed a traditional domestic balanced 60-40 portfolio1 in FY 2019. Ivies also experienced a wider dispersion of returns and saw a shift in the historical positioning of performance leaders and laggards.
In this review, we decode what may have happened in FY 2019 and suggest private market investments typical of larger endowments as the likely root of the year’s anomalous results.
A Surprising Year of Underperformance
As we wrote in our recent 2019 review, the average Ivy return for FY 2019 was 6.7%, significantly underperforming a reference 60-40 domestic portfolio. All the Ivies but Brown fell short of this measure of a balanced portfolio.
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