Press

“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.

“MPI’s new effort is an attempt to create an alternative to existing hedge fund benchmarks that follow the entire market and whose composition can fluctuate as smaller funds fail to report their holdings or close altogether,” explains Julie Segal in her coverage of the MPI Hedge Fund Indices launch. “MPI will instead include only the returns of the largest firms, which it believes are more stable and give a true picture of performance.” Read the full article here.

“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.

“Selection/non-reporting bias, survivorship bias, and backfill or instant history bias can all serve to artificially inflate index returns, which are often higher for non-investable than for investable hedge fund indices,” explains Hamlin Lovell, in his feature article on the launch of MPI’s Hedge Fund Indices business. “According to MPI, these biases can be overcome by building a representative index comprised of a selective group of the largest funds.” Read the article here.

“The smart beta label still represents a small, new, heterogeneous, and most likely misunderstood, group of exchange-traded funds in the fixed income space,” says MPI’s Megan Woods in this article on Smart Beta bond funds by Institutional Investor‘s Julie Segal.

“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.

“Since 2007, only half of Ivy League endowments added positive returns to their portfolios through manager and security selection,” writes Pensions & Investments’ Charles McGrath in his latest analysis of the Ivy League endowments’ investment performance, which features a chart from our 2017 Fiscal Year Ivy League endowment research report.

“These products are not any different from managed products being offered 20 to 30 years ago, except they’re accessing these market anomalies that investors believe will produce returns via an automated process,” explains our CEO Michael Markov in that ETF Advisor’s article featuring MPI research on smart beta

“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.