endowments

“Even Harvard and Yale, which have expert teams of academics and Wall Street managers overseeing their multibillion endowments, have been unable to do much better over time than a simple blend of index funds,” says Ian McGugan of The Globe and Mail. “In fact, an utterly standard index fund blend of 60% stocks and 40% bonds would have outpaced the returns most Ivy League endowments have achieved over the past decade…according to a recent report by Markov Processes International, an investment research firm (subscription required to read article). Read the MPI report here.

It is generally known that endowments invest in risky assets, but quantifying such risks has remained challenging due to a lack of information about returns. We set out to address this challenge and developed a new basis for estimating endowment risks.

“We’re talking about true believers in the value of alternatives,” MPI President, Jeff Schwartz, tells the New York Times Columnist James B. Stewart. “It’s hard to take an embedded belief system like that and say, just because we’ve had an outstanding bull market, that you should move to 60-40.” Read our full 2017 Ivy League endowment performance report.

“Only Princeton and Columbia have managed to beat a 60/40 portfolio (since 2007), even though it started just before one of the worst crashes for public equities in history. Yale has almost matched it–but it went to far more trouble than it would have taken just to put the endowment’s money into conventional public assets,” writes the FT‘s John Authers in his latest article looking at Ivy League endowment returns, which cites our FY 2017 report.

“Brown and Cornell bucked their historical trends by outperforming Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. Over the past 11 fiscal years, either Brown, Cornell, or both were among the bottom two performers among Ivy League endowments.” This CIO article features interview with MPI’s Sean Ryan and discusses our 2017 Ivy Endowment returns analysis report.

In stark contrast to FY 2016, this past year was a strong one for most endowments. In fact, nearly all the Ivy League endowments, Harvard being the only exception, beat the 60-40 portfolio, a commonly cited benchmark that endowments measure their performance against.

“Markov Processes International… uses a model to infer what returns would have been from the endowments’ asset allocations. This led to two key findings… ” John Authers cites MPI’s 2017 Ivy League Endowment returns analysis in his weekly Financial Times Smart Money column.

The returns of endowments can be attributed to two fundamental components: asset allocation and security selection. Asset allocation is what a factor model is generally able to explain, shown in terms of factor exposures.

On page 12 of the article by AlphaQ, Sean Ryan, Senior Research Analyst at investment research and technology firm, Markov Processes International (MPI) examines whether endowments have adopted the Yale model.

Yale’s endowment ran away from its Ivy League peers during the 2016 fiscal year with a 3.4% total return, according to a report from Markov Process International. Princeton came in second place with an 0.8% return, the only other school with a positive return. Read more about the study on Pensions & Investments.