Columbia's Endowment

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. If you’re an allocator and would like to see the OWL platform, please reach out and schedule a demo. 

At OWL, we track the regulatory and tax filings of leading endowments, which often disclose details of the investments they make with fund managers. This week we’ll look at Columbia University’s $14.8 billion endowment, which is managed by the Columbia Investment Management Company.  

The endowment is run by CIO Kim Lew, who joined in November 2020 after serving as the CIO at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which we wrote about in last week’s newsletter. Prior to that, she worked at the Ford Foundation, where she spent more than a decade.

Columbia’s Fiscal Year 2024 return of 11.5% is the highest for an Ivy League endowment for the second straight year. Explaining the performance, Lew noted, “Fiscal 2024 was a strong year for public market performance. We benefitted both from our exposure to public markets and from strong performance of individual managers relative to benchmarks... While private assets lagged our marketable assets portfolio, it contributed positive performance in the past year.”  

Despite strong recent performance, Columbia has trailed many of its Ivy League peers over longer periods, with 10-year trailing returns of 7.4%.

In the four years since Lew took over, the portfolio has shifted more toward global equities and private equity, while holdings in real assets, absolute return, and cash have decreased. OWL users can see up-to-date profiles for thousands of endowments and other allocators, including asset allocation, performance, location, and AUM on our platform.

One of Columbia’s disclosed investments is with Strategic Capital, a Tokyo-based activist fund founded in 2012 by Tsuyoshi Maruki. Maruki started his career at Nomura Securities, after which he helped launch M&A Consulting (later MAC Asset Management).

Strategic’s investment approach is characterized by its focus on “companies with poor governance and management that are resistant to change,” where they accumulate significant stakes and push for changes via shareholder proposals and board nominations.

Japan is one of many international markets where fund managers such as Strategic must disclose large purchases and stock sales. While 13F filings in the US are disclosed once a quarter on a 6-week lag, many of Strategic’s purchases and sales are disclosed in Japanese regulatory filings within a few days of the action occurring. At OWL, we collect these ownership disclosures from dozens of global sources, providing timely insights into the moves of leading local investors. OWL also calculates the performance of these disclosed positions for thousands of managers – below is our estimate of how Strategic’s disclosed positions have performed relative to Japanese indices.

Strategic Capital - Return of Disclosed Positions:

OWL today shows over $650 million of disclosed positions for Strategic, including a new $91 million position first reported in recent weeks. As a reminder, OWL users now receive email alerts for the managers they follow on the platform, making it easy to monitor position changes, team turnover, and other disclosures for more than 12,000 managers tracked in the platform.

Other News & Events

• University of Nebraska returns 14.5% for FY24. 

• Lehigh returns 10.5% for FY24. 

• Wellesley College returns 7.8% for FY24. 

• Trinity University is hiring an investment manager for privates. 

• The Kresge Foundation is hiring an Associate Investment Director. 

• UTIMCO is hiring a senior investment analyst for public equity. 

• II article on strong biotech fund performance in October. 

• Conversation between Stan Druckenmiller and Nicolai Tangen.

• Article on Singapore Institute of Technology’s endowment approach.

• New OCIO directory from Charles Skorina & Co.

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.