Word: portfolios
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...December, the University sold $2.5 billion in bonds in order to raise cash, refinance short-term debt, and terminate certain investment agreements. (Mendillo has stated in the past that HMC began exploring private equity sales even before the financial world imploded, as part of a larger policy portfolio shift that she implemented upon her arrival.) Thursday’s endowment report said that over the past year, HMC has reduced its payments owed to outside investment firms by roughly $3 billion and raised cash in order to explore “attractive investment themes that we foresee emerging from...
Today, HMC’s Policy Portfolio aims to include a positive cash reserve of 2 percent, whereas the University had previously been borrowing a small percentage of additional money to invest—a practice that can augment gains but also magnify losses...
Mendillo partly attributed the endowment’s underperformance to “complications” within the portfolio existing before the financial crisis, including “recent over-sized commitments to illiquid asset classes; within asset classes, a larger proportion of strategies with long holding periods; [and] a lack of ready liquidity in the portfolio to meet our obligations along with the needs of the University.” For years, Harvard has been the subject of scrutiny—and idolatry—as its endowment consistently generated double-digit yearly investment returns, largely...
Mendillo said that the Company is now also considering remodeling its portfolio to encourage team collaboration, focus more on internal strengths, and reassess the endowment’s risk and the University’s needs. While overall risk management was “adequate” last year and helped avoid extreme volatility, Mendillo wrote that more is being done now to manage risk and that lessons have been learned, particularly that “the risk tolerance of the University needs to be an integral factor” when determining how the endowment is invested...
Nevertheless, HMC will likely hew to the diversified investment model that it has long championed. Mendillo pointed out that even slumping assets such as private equity have delivered high returns when annualized over the past few years. If HMC had simply invested its portfolio in a 60/40 ratio of stocks and bonds 10 years ago, the endowment today would be $18 billion smaller, she wrote...