May 2025 Recap + A New Yale Manager

See who outperformed in May, plus some detail on Elementum, a newly-disclosed Yale manager

June 03, 2025

May 2025 Recap

Growth and Tech-focused managers outperformed in May, including our Tiger Cub group. Energy/Cyclicals, Small Caps, and India also had a strong month. While groups like REITs and Japan managers underperformed the indices, only the Biotech group had a negative month in May. For our customers, we also provide a detailed table with a selection of the best and worst performing managers in May, using OWL's return estimates. 

 

As a reminder, the table below is based on our “OWL Groups” – curated lists of over 500 managers frequently found in leading allocators’ portfolios. These lists are categorized by geography, sector, and style, enabling our users to easily monitor groups of managers and their underlying disclosed holdings.

Source: OWL estimated returns of disclosed longs through 5/29/25

 

Yale Manager Update

We recently wrote about updates to Yale’s portfolio based on a new retirement plan filing. This week, using a new tax filing (which we believe is not yet on any public platforms), we found some additional updates. Most notably, Yale disclosed an investment in the Elementum Opportunities Fund (managed by Elementum Advisors) for the first time during FY24. While the Chicago-based firm has been around since 2009, the Opportunities Fund that Yale is invested in was launched in 2023.

 

Elementum was founded by Tony Rettino and John DeCaro. They initially founded a hedge fund in the early 2000’s, which they moved to Stark Investments in 2005. In 2009, Rettino and DeCaro launched Elementum as a stand-alone fund. In 2019, White Mountains Insurance Group acquired a minority stake in Elementum, including a commitment to invest $50 million across its funds.

 

Elementum invests in instruments linked to natural event risk, including liquid catastrophe bonds and collateralized reinsurance investments. In their words: “We seek to achieve capital appreciation over time by assuming natural catastrophe risk where we believe the rate of return exceeds the long-term modeled default probability.”

 

The Ford Foundation was an LP in one of Elementum’s Natural Catastrophe funds, which looks like it has largely wound down. The Maclellan Foundation is invested in the Opportunity Fund, and the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation Fund has been invested in Elementum funds in the past as well.

 

Elementum’s AUM has remained relatively steady over time:

Source: Regulatory filings; OWL

With some of its earlier funds decreasing in size, Elementum has ramped up capital raising in recent years, primarily for the Opportunities Fund:

Source: Regulatory filings; OWL

As a reminder, OWL users can see AUM and capital raised at the individual fund level for thousands of managers, helping them better understand a manager’s growth over time.

Beyond the Elementum disclosure, Yale also noted a few interesting redemptions in the most recent filing, which were available to OWL users in our Friday newsletter. If you’re interested in learning more about how to use OWL to monitor allocator portfolios, reach out!

 

New OWL Feature – Disciplinary Disclosures

Last week, we launched a new feature highlighting disciplinary disclosures filed by managers with the SEC. On each manager’s profile page in OWL, users can now see whether the firm has disclosed any lawsuits, regulatory fines, criminal charges, or other disciplinary events. For example, you can see below that Elementum has not disclosed any disciplinary events.

If there is a disciplinary disclosure, which 1,389 managers in OWL have, users can click on the red “View Details” button and get a list of the disclosures with full details of each. In the screenshots below, OWL users can see that Two Sigma has two disclosures, including a $45 million fine from the SEC earlier this year.

This data is also available as a filter in our manager search table, and soon updates will be included in our customized email alerts, so users can find out immediately if the managers they follow have a new disciplinary disclosure.

 

Other News & Events

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.