Press

“Between 2010 and 2015, many investors could have dismissed non-traditional bond funds as a high-priced gimmick, delivering no benefit over traditional core bond funds. As the economy recovered and interest rates rose, however, these funds look to have been well positioned to benefit, helping them to outperform since 2015,” says MPI’s Sean Ryan in this article looking at the performance of the unconstrained bond funds by Institutional Investor‘s Julie Segal.

“(MPI), a New Jersey quantitative research and analytics provider, has constructed indices that track the performance of elite hedge funds which can be replicated by low-cost exchange traded funds,” explains Chris Flood of the Financial Times. “Its newest benchmark, the MPI Barclay Elite Systematic Traders index, aims to capture the returns of the 20 largest quantitative hedge fund managers.” (subscription required to read article) Learn more about MPI Hedge Fund Indices.

“MPI has evaluated endowment returns using its patented process, called “Dynamic Style Analysis,” which was designed to model the behavior of otherwise secretive investments such as hedge funds or university portfolios,” explains Julie Segal of Institutional Investor. “The annual results of Yale and the Ivy League colleges and universities, which have huge commitments to private investments, are closely watched by the industry.” Read the full article here.

“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.