An Early Look at FY24 Endowment Performance

Analysis of Endowments' FY24 returns relative to their private asset exposure

October 22, 2024

I’m excited to introduce Allocator Insights, OWL’s brand-new newsletter! At Old Well Labs (OWL), we’re trusted by leading endowments, foundations, and other allocators to sift through billions of data points to help them find, monitor, and connect with fund managers globally.

Our platform delivers timely insights on the positions, performance, team changes, and business trends of more than 11,000 fund managers worldwide. OWL also gathers public data about thousands of allocators, providing insights into the positions and performance of thousands of endowments, foundations, pensions, and other LPs. Every week, we curate detailed highlights from OWL for our customers. Subscribe to Allocator Insights for bite-sized examples of these data points and trends.

If you’re an allocator and would like to see all of the data available on the OWL platform, please reach out and schedule a demo

In our inaugural edition, we’re diving into FY24 endowment returns. While some schools haven’t reported yet, OWL users can track the latest numbers as they come in using OWL’s Endowment Performance tracker.

The table below shows returns for the schools that have reported FY24 numbers so far. Several big names, including Yale, WashU, Princeton, and Notre Dame, haven’t weighed in yet, but are likely to be near the top in terms of long-term performance. 

Similar to last year, FY24 performance was uncorrelated with longer-term results, with overall private exposure a significant factor. Last week’s WSJ article discussed some of the same trends, as CIOs noted the drag of venture capital write-downs.

Given the strong performance in public markets over this period (S&P +25%; ACWI +20%), it’s no surprise that endowments with more exposure to public equity outperformed. Michigan State, the best performing endowment for FY24 thus far, is a good example of this, with nearly 40% of their endowment invested in global equities, with most of that in passive and index-like exposure.

It looks like endowments will once again outperform pensions for FY24, after a rare year in FY23 when the median pension outperformed the median endowment:

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About Old Well Labs

OWL is an intelligence platform built for allocators, by allocators. Leading endowments, foundations, and family offices use the system to find, monitor, and connect with thousands of fund managers globally. OWL's analytics engine has collected over one billion data points from 65 countries. We make it easy for allocators to find and track information about the managers they care about – not just positions but also performance analytics, people data, business information, and details about the manager investments of other allocators.

Disclaimers

Returns represent the return on invested capital of publicly disclosed long positions, as calculated by OWL. Actual returns may vary based on a number of factors, including (but not limited to) undisclosed positions, short exposure, non-equity holdings, cash holdings, and lagged disclosure of positions.

This newsletter and the material on the Old Well Labs platform are for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, manager, or strategy. Old Well Labs shall not be liable for any investment gain or loss that may occur from the use of this material. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or used in any publication without express written permission from Old Well Labs.