Institutional Investor

Institutional Investor features MPI research examining how concentrated SpaceX exposure helped drive the wide dispersion in FY2026 endowment returns. MPI’s analysis estimates that for institutions entering the year with several percentage points of SpaceX exposure, the company’s roughly 280% appreciation could have added 8–11 percentage points to annual performance. Michael Markov cautions that the outsized impact of a single investment on one year’s results should not be confused with evidence for a different long-term asset allocation.

SpaceX Boosts Returns of Endowments That Invested Early | Institutional Investor

In a December 1, 2025 feature titled “Crypto Is the Secret Sauce University Endowments Don’t Want to Talk About,” Institutional Investor’s Leah McGrath Goodman highlights MPI’s latest returns-based analysis of elite university endowments. Drawing on MPI’s work, the article reports that digital asset and AI bets boosted fiscal 2025 results at leading institutions such as Michigan, MIT, and Stanford by an estimated 200–300 basis points, helping drive average returns of roughly 11–12 percent for large Ivy and peer endowments. It also underscores MPI CEO and co-founder Michael Markov’s view that, despite crypto’s growing contribution to performance, many endowments remain reluctant to speak publicly about these exposures due to political and governance sensitivities

Institutional Investor’s John Comtois highlights MPI’s new Transparency Lab research showing that elite endowments with early, targeted exposure to AI and digital assets—often via venture capital and hedge funds and some direct stakes—outperformed peers in FY25, adding as much as ~300 bps to returns when allocations were meaningful. The article quotes MPI co-founder & CEO Michael Markov: “It is plausible that AI and digital-asset exposure is now large enough to affect overall results,” noting implications for liquidity stress and governance as these positions scale.

Institutional Investor ran Michael Markov’s op-ed, “How Dartmouth Actually Became the Ivy League’s Switzerland,” demonstrating—via quantitative analysis—that the endowment’s modest liquidity risk and limited reliance on government funding helped shield it from the political turbulence facing other universities.

The cover article of Institutional Investor, “Yale’s Potential PE Sale Won’t Solve Liquidity Challenges,” provides an analysis of the school’s rationale behind its $6 billion sale in the secondaries market. James Comtois offers a detailed account of financial challenges facing the endowment, using MPI endowment liquidity analysis framework and quoting MPI CEO.

“Overweighting IT and the Mag 7 relative to the broad S&P 500″ may have helped boost returns… “Harvard seems to have overcome the drag of their significant private markets exposure to outperform our estimates—based on our models of their portfolio behavior through FY2023—by a surprising margin.” MPI CEO Michael Markov parsed Harvard University endowment’s solid return for fiscal year 2024 with Institutional Investor for James Comtois‘ story What Drove Harvard’s Returns? The article dissects the Harvard Management Company’s CEO N.P. “Narv” Narvekar annual letter to investors and the Harvard community through the lens of MPI’s quantitative prism.

Always an honor to have our work featured atop Institutional Investor‘s daily “The Essential” newsletter: Stocks Drove Pension Performance — Again. Solid context going beyond the patterns of the past couple years in Alicia McElhaney’s story on our projections of the largest public pensions’ returns for fiscal 2024.

See our press release here: Corporate News | Markov Processes International

An extensive coverage by Julie Segal in her Institutional Investor article of the MPI’s 9-th annual Ivy League endowment report. She writes: “With little transparency into endowment portfolios, MPI used its proprietary returns-based style analysis to determine the exposure that the Ivy League and elite colleges had to major asset classes — and their contribution to the performance of the entire portfolio in fiscal year 2023… Even in a good year, “you’re not going to get a lot of transparency,” Markov [MPI’s CEO] told Institutional Investor. “But in a bad year, you’ll get zero transparency from endowments. It’s not pensions where they have to give something to people.”

Michael Thrasher with Institutional Investor provides an overview of MPI Transparency Lab’s FY2023 performance projections for major pensions and endowments in his article
Private Assets Drove Endowment and Pension Returns Last Year. Now They Are a Drag. He writes “…from returns you can glean a lot of information: risk, the skill, the trend, the style drift, you name it,” MPI chief executive Michael Markov said. Strategies change sometimes. When things don’t add up, there is a red flag.” Among MPI’s customers are U.S. regulators, who use its tools to surveil funds…

Institutional Investor article by Julie Segal based on the eight-year track record of MPI Eurekahedge 50 Tracker Index raises an important question: if the collective wisdom of top hedge fund managers results in index-like performance why take risks, headache and expense investing in large number of individual funds?