In Defense of the Endowment Model, Accurately Assessed

October 22, 2024


The Long View
—a series from GEM’s Deputy CIO, Matt Bank— explores a range of topics relevant to the fiduciaries and allocators of institutional capital.


 

In Part I of his three-part series on the Endowment Model, Deputy CIO Matt Bank argued that the Endowment Model is better thought of as a set of investment principles than a recipe to be followed. Merely replicating the asset allocation of Yale’s Investment Office or another leading institutional investor has always been an unlikely path to success for the average investor. Nevertheless, blaming the model for the disappointing performance of institutional funds over the last decade-and-a-half has become sport.

Active management in any form is, for the most part, doomed in aggregate.
But that’s not the whole story.

In Part II of the series, Bank unpacks the flawed quantitative arguments often used by the Model’s detractors in assessing endowment performance and presents a better framework for evaluating long-term success.

 

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