Institutional Investor

MPI Announces Key Drivers of Performance at Bowdoin, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania

Institutional Investor features MPI’s latest research series on university endowments in fiscal year 2021. In the article, Co-founder and CEO Michael Markov discusses how asset allocation played a far more important role in returns than manager selection.

How Did Investors End Up on the Other Side of This Trade?

“MPI deconstructs complex volatility strategies to find that many investors might have been doing the opposite of what they thought,” writes Julie Segal from Institutional Investor in her article about MPI’s analysis of the Structured Alpha hedge fund.

If the Ivy League Can’t Get This Right, Who Can?

“Last year was a great one for private equity and venture capital, but Ivy League endowments, with their huge allocations to alternative investments, didn’t all benefit, according to MPI.,” writes Julie Segal about MPI’s research in her article in Institutional Investor. 

Bad Manager Picks Have Sunk Pensions’ Bet on Alts

“Public pension funds aren’t the only institutions to fail to benefit from the heady promise of alternatives. The performance of Ivy League endowments has trailed a passive portfolio of 60 percent U.S. stocks and 40 percent bonds over the past ten years — and has been more volatile to boot, according to a report from research and analytics provider Markov Processes International.” Read the full article here.

Not One Ivy League Endowment Beat a Simple U.S. 60-40 Portfolio Over Ten Years

“There’s a tug of war going on in endowments, as well as in asset management,” said Jeff Schwartz, president of MPI. “A lot of people are hoping that there is no point in investing in these complex alternatives. Then you have devotees of the Yale model who want to show there is a payoff for putting so much of the portfolio into private equity, VC, and all the things we think of as sophisticated and expensive. This report shows that the reality is much more complex than either narrative.” Read the full article here.

How Ivy League Endowments Performed in Fiscal 2018

“This year’s gains were driven by alternative investment strategies. Ivy League asset managers have been ramping up allocations to alternative asset classes in recent years in hopes of outperforming broad market indexes. “What we definitely see is that the funds that were highly exposed to private equity and venture capital did very well,” said Jeff Schwartz, president at MPI.” Read the full article here.

The Revenge of Unconstrained Bond Funds

“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.

 

Yale’s Risk-Adjusted Returns Not So ‘Superior,’ Firm Argues

“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.