That said, ~5.5% below the market every year is a pretty shitty result, at least worth putting someone's feet to the fire over.
That does make some sense, but actually endowments typically invest quite a bit in in riskier asset classes. From https://caia.org/aiar/access/article-1160:
> The average US endowment fund held roughly 70 per cent in traditional asset classes (public and private equity, bonds and cash) with the remaining 30 per cent invested in alternative assets.
Alternative asset classes basically means "anything other than stocks and bonds", and includes stuff like derivitives, commodities, PE deals, venture capital, etc. And CU's investment in alternative asset classes is called out explicitly in the complaint.
So I don't read this as a complaint that CU is playing too safe, it's that they made too many risky bets, and lost.
I'm not sure that makes the law suit any more viable, but "the endowment gambled away my donation" is a much more sympathetic complaint than "the endowment sunk my donation into bonds instead of gambling it like I'd hoped"!
> Two important observations emerge from the figure. First, large endowments have clearly generated strong excess returns, but the majority of their success occurred during the early and mid-2000s. Second, as small and medium endowments ramped up their allocations to alternative investments over the ten years through June 2013 and as more investor money has flowed into alternative categories such as hedge funds, positive excess returns have not been forthcoming. Unfortunately, small and medium endowments did not participate in the early success of alternative investments realized by their larger counterparts, and recently—after years of increasing their exposure to alternatives—they have trailed the return of the 60% stock/40% bond benchmark by larger gaps than at any point in the full 20-year period.
* https://www.vanguardcanada.ca/documents/assessing-endowment-...
There seems to have been a few 'golden years' for alternative assets at the time of publication.
Curious to know how the years 2014-2020 have treated them. A more recent 2018 study:
> Dahiya and Yermack found that the performance of the typical endowment fund [in 2009-2016] was so poor that it would have earned substantially higher returns if its trustees had followed a simplistic investment strategy of holding 100% Treasury bonds and taken no equity market risk whatsoever.
* https://www.etf.com/sections/index-investor-corner/swedroe-w...
It's very common that a shitty investment with high volatility and low returns can actually improve the risk adjusted returns of a portfolio. Like gold, for example.
Also, hedge funds are significantly less risky than holding the S&P 500, since most funds have less than 100% net long exposure. And market neutral funds have 0% net long exposure.
If you're including PE in there, you are way off base. According to the assumptions in BlackRock's Aladin platform, global buyout has an equity beta of something like 1.6.
Moreover, beta doesn't capture the whole picture. By any chance do you know what the funds correlation to the broader equity market is?
You can also back out a ballpark beta from the MM theorems and what we know about company leverage post LBO. See [2] foot note 6.
[1] https://blackrock.com/institutions/en-us/insights/charts/cap...
[2] https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Research/White-Papers/Demystify...
The goal should never be to beat the market, but to beat the market relative to risk exposure.
I don’t doubt though that a lot of money is wasted on fees and salaries can be preserved via passive investing.