For the most recent fiscal year, the endowment’s return was the sixth highest among the 43 college and university endowments whose returns for the period have been tracked by Pensions & Investments as of Nov. 8. The median return for the universe is 9.9%.
“The portfolio’s global (long-only) equities allocation makes up 39% of the portfolio and captured roughly 93% of the public equity market’s rally in the fiscal year,” Kemp said in an email. “Several actively managed equity strategies generated positive outperformance, which made up for being underweight (vs. a market-cap-weighted index) the largest mega-cap technology stocks.”
Kemp said that 28% of the portfolio is allocated to private markets, of which roughly 78% is made up of private equity.
“While the allocation (to private equity) outperformed relative to the peer fund landscape, overall performance did not keep pace with the narrow rally in public equity markets,” Kemp said.
He also noted that the portfolio was underweight duration relative to its policy benchmark and maintained a small allocation to fixed income “positioned at the short end of the yield curve.”
“In place of a large allocation to fixed income, the portfolio maintained a 10% allocation to absolute-return strategies (typically hedge fund strategies with low correlation to equity or fixed-income markets, across relative value and other strategies),” Kemp said. “In FY24, this positioning was beneficial as the absolute-return allocation returned 11.1% vs. short-duration fixed income (at) 2.6% and longer duration, which was roughly flat.”
As of June 30, the endowment's actual allocation was 38.6% global long-only equities, 16.5% private equity, 9.2% absolute return, 7.5% fixed income, 6.9% hedged equities, 5.7% venture capital, 4.2% private equity real estate, 3.6% each cash and credit, 2% private debt, 1.8% inflation-linked bonds and the rest in liquid real assets.
Partners Capital is the endowment’s outsourced CIO.
