endowments

UPenn’s $20.5 Billion endowment posted a return of 41.1% for FY 2021, driven by strong returns in private equity and venture capital.

The reason behind Brown University’s endowment outperformance is not what most people think, according to an analysis from MPI. Read more from Julie Segal, in Institutional Investor.

In his latest article, Chief Investment Officer’s Michael Katz, explores MPI’s analysis of how Brown University’s endowment has managed to outperform its rivals in recent years.

For the second straight year, Brown outperformed all other Ivy endowments by a large margin. Our research team, using MPI Stylus Pro to dissect the endowment annual returns, provides a plausible explanation of the endowment’s spectacular results.

Read more on MPI’s annual assessment of the Ivy League Endowments, featured in Chief Investment Officer, where our analysts provide a deeper look into FY20 performance and the likely reasons behind the sharp drop over FY19.

We take a quick look at Ivy schools’ endowments’ performance results both for the 2020 fiscal year and also long-term for 10-year periods.

“…how was it possible for so many endowments to make bad choices among private equity and venture capital funds? The following chart from Markov suggests that it is down to outlandishly wide variations in performance within the private equity/venture capital world,” writes John Authers about MPI’s research in his opinion piece on Bloomberg.

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?”

“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)