Foundations And Endowments

All endowments, foundations, and trusts face financial management challenges, they need simultaneously to protect the assets they have from material loss, to grow those assets through wise investment, and often, to attract new assets from donors, all which require demonstrated excellence in asset management.

To achieve success, the modern endowment, foundation, or trust needs knowledge and access knowledge of the complex issues surrounding risk, asset types, diversification, manager selection and suitability. But knowledge without access is not valuable this because knowing which managers to use is not rewarding in and of itself and is completely useless if those managers are closed or have minimum investment requirements that make them effectively unavailable.

For the very largest endowments those like Yale, Harvard, Stanford, The University of Chicago, and Princeton these issues are not deterring or unduly problematical. With billions of dollars under management, these endowments can recruit the very best people to develop asset allocation procedures, and they also have the ability to source and evaluate managers. Most importantly,they also have access the size and scale to get into the very best funds. >>