Press

Bloomberg News’ Opinion Column Points of Return by John Authers & Richard Annerquaye Abbey covered MPI’s annual 2024 fiscal year Ivy Endowment Review. It focuses on “For this year, Harvard, the nation’s largest endowment, which has had a tough run, made a 9.6% return, finishing third behind Columbia and Brown. Harvard’s outperformance coincides with raised exposure to public tech stocks, both via equity fund managers and hedge funds. As MPI points out, endowment managers who pivoted toward tech stocks have reason to be particularly grateful at a time when alumni donations have been trimmed in response to the fraught climate on campus.”

“In target date funds, I do think derivatives have the ability to help manage short-term risks and therefore keep employees in the funds and resist the temptation to jump into cash and time the market.” MPI’s President Jeff Schwartz was quoted in Michael Shari’s Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) article on use of derivatives in TDF. His quantitative insights appear in the story alongside comments from David O’Meara, head of defined contribution investment strategy at Willis Towers Watson.

Great to share insights and analyses of elite endowments with FundFire for their story US Stocks, Venture Capital Swayed Ivy Returns in FY24 by Sabiq Shahidullah (subscription required).

Our co-founder and CEO Michael Markov is quoted alongside FEG Investment Advisors CIO Gregory Dowling, CFA, CAIA and Rob Appling of Wilshire, as well as statements from Ivy endowment leaders Kim Lew of Columbia University, Jane Dietze of Brown University, Narv Narvekar of Harvard University and Matt Mendelsohn of Yale University.

Visit the MPI Transparency Lab, our free resource providing data and investment analysis on opaque institutional portfolios, now updated with elite endowment returns and analyses through fiscal ’24: MPI Transparency Lab

“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.

“If I need cash, I’m probably going to sell out parts of my U.S. equity portfolio, because it’s had such a great run. Interest rates are high, which means that I’m getting good yields from my fixed income portfolio.” — Jeff Schwartz, President at MPI.

FundFire’s top headline today Ivy Endowments Face Liquidity Constraints amid PE Slump — features Jeff’s comments and MPI’s latest research A Private Equity Liquidity Squeeze By Any Other Name. Sabiq Shahidullah’s story covers a lot of important concepts in endowment investing and private markets; check it out if you’re a subscriber.

In “Points of Return” this week, Bloomberg Opinion’s Richard Annerquaye Abbey and John Authers featured a comprehensive discussion of pensions investing based on our FY2024 return estimates for the largest U.S. public pensions: Magnificent Seven: Don’t Dismiss the Correction Too Much – Bloomberg
“Unlike mutual funds, it’s impossible to have anything close to a real-time measure of the performance of the big public pension funds based on their holdings, no matter how tempting the idea may be. While we wait [for pensions to publish their fiscal year performance], an analysis by Markov Processes International using its proprietary model to project the performance of public pension funds managing more than $20 billion in the year from July 2023 to June 2024, came to one conclusion — funds with higher allocation in US equities are poised to outperform. No other asset comes close.”

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

“Given endowments’ high allocations to private equity, ‘there looks to be more artful navigating ahead,’ Markov said in its study. The schools may need to come up with other sources of cash to cover future spending needs, as private equity hasn’t been returning as much money to investors as expected.

Endowments may need to rely more on their liquid holdings of public stocks and bonds to make up for the shortfall, sell some private equity positions at a discount on the secondaries market or even issue debt, according to Markov, a research firm that studies the opaque world of endowments.”

MPI research A Private Equity Liquidity Squeeze By Any Other Name was featured in Bloomberg News in a story Top Colleges’ Liquidity Pressured by Weak Private Equity Returns by Marion Halftermeyer who closely covers the intersection between GPs and LPs.

The endowment portfolios of 50 years ago are barely recognizable. As the class of 2024 looks to the future and FY 2024 closes out, Robin Wigglesworth captures the evolution of the endowment model of investing very well in his Financial Times Alphaville piece, “American endowments’ complicated love affair with private equity.” When describing risks of private investments, he mentions MPI research FY2023 Ivy Report Card: Volatility Laundering and the Hangover from Private Markets Investing.

MPI’s CEO interviewed by John Authers‘ protege Richard Annerquaye Abbey on Ivy League endowments and how MPI Transparency Lab keeps tabs on risk, return and asset class attribution at the large, elite schools employing the Yale Model. See their Bloomberg Opinion “Points of Return” column “Don’t Declare the Death of the Yale Model Just Yet” covering MPI’s latest FY 2023 Ivy Report Card.