Texas Children's Investment Portfolio

An endowment-style portfolio + Fourth Sail profile

April 21, 2026

This week we analyze the Texas Children’s Hospital Pension portfolio, a subset of Texas Children’s broader investment portfolio. The Pension’s investment activities have been managed by executive vice president and chief investment officer Keith Nelson since he assumed the role in 2018. He originally joined the organization as an investment director in 2013 after serving as a portfolio manager at the North Carolina Department of the State Treasurer in its retirement systems division.

 

Founded in 1995, Texas Children’s Pension serves all employees of the health system and its affiliated entities and maintains total assets of just over $679 million with its investment portfolio valued at $661 million as of September 30, 2024.

 

The pension’s asset allocation is below, with just under two-thirds of its portfolio invested in external managers (partnership interests):

 

 

It is worth noting that while a few of the managers that Texas Children’s has invested with do engage in private equity or venture capital, the Pension has primarily disclosed investments in hedge fund and public equity funds:

 

 

 

Fourth Sail

 

For our users, last Friday’s newsletter contained a list of some of the managers Texas Children’s currently invests with, one of which is Fourth Sail Capital.

 

The manager, which first received a commitment from Texas Children’s in 2020, stands out in the Pension’s portfolio as its only Latin America-focused manager. The Sao Paulo-based investor was founded in 2018 by Ariel Merenstein following his decade-long career at Prince Street Capital, where he mostly recently served as a partner and portfolio manager overseeing its Latin America L/S fund.

 

Fourth Sail’s regulatory AUM has grown healthily since it launched with just under $400 million:

 

 

Its disclosed fundraising now totals roughly one-third of its total AUM, with notable fundraise disclosures of $474 million in 2022 and $448 million earlier in 2026. The McKinsey Retirement Trust and the Pattis Family Foundation are among other disclosed LPs.

 

Fourth Sail currently discloses 33 public positions across a fairly diversified portfolio, with 19 positions each making up between 3% and 6% of its total disclosed portfolio.

 

According to OWL estimates, Fourth Sail’s position in Moura Dubeux Engenharia has generated its highest estimated percentage return on invested capital of 443% in the nearly six years since the manager initiated its position. Fourth Sail made a single purchase of 5.3 million shares of the Brazilian residential real estate company in June 2020 at a share price of around $1.40 and has not changed its position as the company’s stock has risen to $6.76 as of 4/15. The fund owns 6.2% of the company and the position is Fourth Sail’s fifth largest disclosed position.

 

As a reminder, we recently refreshed how several of our manager analytics are presented on manager profiles. Now users can go to a manager’s profile, click on the “Return Estimates” tab on the left-hand side, and see a list of the analytics options across the top of the page, including monthly returns, exposures, batting average, and various P&L measures.

 

 

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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.

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