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UWire – The Washington State University Foundation’s Endowment is starting to snap back. Endowment funds like the WSU Foundation’s are essentially a large pool of money, usually donated by alumni, which is placed in an account with a high rate of return. The interest is then invested in the hopes of yielding money that can then be used for the benefit of the university.
The endowment money is allocated by an investment committee of seven people. The committee divvies the money up into eight different areas, which include hedge funds, U.S. equity and private equity.
WSU Foundation’s Endowment Fund increased by 5.8 percent from April 1 to June 30, tying off the 2009 fiscal year. The endowment increased another 3.4 percent in July. This fiscal year’s endowment totaled $261.5 million.
Philadelphia Inquirer – The University of Pennsylvania’s endowment fund lost a lot less than other big Ivy League schools during the grim financial year ended June 30.
That’s a switch for the better at the West Philadelphia campus of the city’s biggest private employer, which trailed its peers during the financial-asset inflation of the mid-2000s.
Penn had ranked last among the 25 largest university endowments in the year ended June 30, 2008, with a 6 percent decline, according to the yearly performance numbers posted by the National Association of College and University Business Administrators.
Globe and Mail – The multimillion-dollar bills continue to creep up on the Olympic village project.
The city has stashed $25-million into a contingency reserve for the project, while its property endowment fund has now disbursed $100-million for the city’s own "public-realm" improvements for the new neighbourhood.
Those amounts are on top of the half a billion dollars that the city had lent to the private builders of the Olympic village by the end of last month, which is about two-thirds of the $860-million the project is anticipated to cost by the end.
Daily Freeman – Bard College said on Thursday that it lost about $3 million in investments tied to disgraced Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff.
Bard spokesman Mark Primoff said the losses came in the Northern Dutchess school’s $270 million endowment fund.
Primoff said the college invested in the Ariel Fund run by J. Ezra Merkin, who was a governor of Bard’s Levy Economics Institute until his recent resignation. Primoff said Merkin never told the board he was investing the money with Madoff.
The Associated Press – College endowments and state pension funds plowed billions of dollars into hedge funds and private-equity investments as a way to balance their stock holdings, and for a time they got supercharged returns.
Those days are over. From Harvard University to the state pension fund of California, officials are watching the value of their alternative investments shrink.
So far, the losses are mostly on paper, but analysts say they could eventually lead to reduced payouts to retirees, higher taxes so state governments can fulfill their promises, or less cash available for colleges to give out financial aid.
Wall Street Journal – In 2006, Lawrence Summers resigned as president of Harvard University and took a position as a part-time managing director with D.E. Shaw Group, a New York hedge fund with a reputation as one of the most secretive trading outfits in the world.
D.E. Shaw is known for using sophisticated computer-based quantitative strategies to make money on fleeting movements in the stock and bond markets. The fund has been a top performer, returning 15% to 20% a year over the long term, and in two decades has grown into a global powerhouse. But like many funds, it has taken hits in the credit crisis.
Falcone, 46, has been dubbed the "Midas of misery" for taking lucrative short positions in the shares of struggling banks including HBOS and Wachovia. He lives in a 27-room townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side bought for $49m. The youngest of nine children, he grew up in Minnesota and was a young ice hockey star dubbed "the phantom" for his ability to elude defenders.
Kenneth Griffin
The Boy Wonder As a Harvard University student Griffin installed a satellite dish on his dorm to help him trade options. His Citadel Investment Group, founded in 1990, has 1,200 staff and was tipped as the next Goldman Sachs, but its two main funds have lost 35% of their value in the market turmoil. Griffin, 40, was a high-profile donor to the presidential campaign of fellow Chicago resident Barack Obama.
James Simons
The Mathematician Born in 1938, Simons was a maths prodigy. He worked as a codebreaker for the US defence department in the 1970s and set up his Renaissance Technologies fund, which has some $20bn under management, in 1988. Known as a "black box" fund, it uses opaque quantitative techniques. Its core Medallion fund rose 49% in the year to September. Simons has a $600m charitable foundation.
John Paulson
The Sub-Prime King Low-profile Paulson made $3.7bn last year betting against sub-prime mortgages. A 52-year-old father of two, he was raised in the New York borough of Queens, gained an MBA from Harvard and has a $41m lakeside retreat in the Hamptons. His firm, Paulson & Co, manages $35bn and its advisers include Alan Greenspan. Reports suggest a bumper year, with the firm’s main funds rising by between 15% and 25%.
Boston Globe – Massachusetts again has some of the best money managers in the world. But unless you’re a public employee or the parent of a Harvard student, you won’t benefit much from this tremendous talent.
Harvard University’s endowment, already the nation’s largest university endowment, earned 7 to 8 percent over the past year, a period when stock markets tanked and many investment professionals lost substantial sums. Harvard’s performance, first reported yesterday by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by a financial industry source briefed on the school’s returns, puts it at the top of an elite group of institutional investors.
Financial firm Northern Trust col lects returns on 87 endowments and foundations but not Harvard. Nevertheless, the Cambridge university’s performance would put it "at the top of the class," said Northern Trust spokesman John O’Connell.
