Georgetown's Direct Portfolio

This week, we’ll take a look at Georgetown’s internal direct portfolio, which has meaningfully outperformed its benchmarks since inception.

Until he moved to Johns Hopkins in early 2025, Michael Barry was the CIO at Georgetown. He had been with Georgetown since 2011, and prior to that was the CIO at the University of Maryland Foundation. Chris Gill is currently serving as Georgetown’s interim CIO and has been with the university since 2014.

In the university’s 2024 letter, Barry noted that the direct portfolio was established in order to complement the endowment’s manager investments, with a small amount of capital invested directly into public securities. Capped at 10% of the endowment, the initial intent of the portfolio was to address underexposure to mega-cap stocks. The university bought shares in Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft in the late 2010’s and still owns them today.

Georgetown’s disclosed asset class returns show that its internal direct portfolio has annualized at 18% over the last 3 years and 36% over the last 5 years, substantially ahead of its benchmark:

Digging deeper into the annual returns, the outperformance is largely driven by meaningful outperformance vs. the benchmark in 2020-2022:

Because Georgetown files a 13F for its direct equity positions, OWL users can use our tools to analyze the drivers of its success. Using OWL’s P&L by Position and Batting Average tools, we can see that some of the endowment’s highest returns to date have come from energy stocks including Antero Resources, Turquoise Hill Resources, Range Resources, and PDC Energy. In Friday’s newsletter for our users, we provided more detail on Georgetown’s energy holdings over time and looked at where its energy exposure stands today. We also looked at a comparison of its entire direct portfolio today vs. five years ago, using our Historical Shares feature that explores portfolio shifts over time. If you’re interested in seeing more of this detailed portfolio analysis in OWL, reach out!

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