Press

Ian McGugan, investing columnist at Canada’s premier daily Globe & Mail wrote a column reviewing the decade and discussing why beta was so hard to beat has a prominent mention of the Ivy endowments’ failure to beat a 60/40 portfolio and MPI’s research.

“The quantitative analysis firm has a method for back-solving portfolios using returns rather than squishy self-reported allocations, and produced a study for Institutional Investor,” writes Leanna Orr about MPI in her article “David Swensen Is Great for Yale. Is He Horrible for Investing?”

“Markov Processes also examined the relationship between volatility and performance of all 700 funds over both periods. It found that conservatively constructed funds that exhibited lower volatility (beta) than the market were more consistently top-ranked in the first period, which included the financial crisis. But higher beta (more volatile) funds tended to be more prominent among the better performers in the later 10-year period when the crisis had faded. Markov found a “near linear relationship” between funds’ risk-adjusted returns rankings and performance since the crisis.” Read the full article here (subscription required).

William Frank, director of client Research at MPI, joins Money Life with Chuck Jaffe to discuss the recent shakeup in U.S. mutual fund ratings as highlighted in our research series on ratings. His segment begins at 00:29:14.

“Low beta funds have seen their Morningstar ratings drop significantly since the tail end of the 2008 financial crisis fell out of the 10-year lookback window used to rate performance. According to research by Markov Processes International, nearly 15% of US equity funds saw their 10-year Morningstar ratings change by at least two stars in the 12 months to the end of April – a 500% increase over the prior year.” Read the full article here. (subscription required)

“Quantitative expert Michael Markov, co-founder of New Jersey-based Markov Processes International, points out that at the end of 2017, the S&P 500 had averaged annualised returns of 8.5 per cent over the previous 10 years – perfectly healthy, if undramatic, returns. By February 2019, however, 10-year annualised returns had almost doubled to 16.7 per cent. Casual investors who noticed the sudden jump in 10-year returns might think 2018 was a spectacularly good year for stock markets, but that’s not the case at all, with indices actually slipping last year.” Read the full article here.

“What is an investor to do when the long view of the market changes, not because of anything happening now, but because of events that took place a decade or more ago?… Michael Markov, a founder of the research firm Markov Processes International, whose studies brought the significance of the fluctuating 10-year returns to my attention, said that nothing had happened lately to make investing a better long-term bet.” Read the full article here. (subscription required)

“Bowdoin posted an 8.8 percent average annual return over the 10 years that ended June 30, handily beating the 6 percent average for all college endowments with assets of more than $1 billion, according to a national study. The school also outperformed all eight Ivy League endowments, none of which managed to beat the 8.1 percent average annual performance of a plain vanilla portfolio consisting of stock and bond indexes, according to Markov Processes International, a research firm.” Read the full article here. (subscription required)

“One way to look at a fund’s performance is by its growth in market value. Another way is to examine its returns. Analysts at Markov Processes International, a global investment research and technology firm, estimated that the fund was performing comparable to the worst-performing Ivy League endowments. One hundred dollars invested in the top-performing Ivy League endowments about a decade ago would be worth roughly $250 now. The Ivy average came in at about $220. The same cash put in the Permanent School Fund would now be valued at about $190. Read the full article here.

“Public pension funds aren’t the only institutions to fail to benefit from the heady promise of alternatives. The performance of Ivy League endowments has trailed a passive portfolio of 60 percent U.S. stocks and 40 percent bonds over the past ten years — and has been more volatile to boot, according to a report from research and analytics provider Markov Processes International.” Read the full article here.