The GHR Foundation’s Portfolio

This week, we’ll look at the investment portfolio of the Minneapolis-based GHR Foundation. Started in 1965 by Gerald and Henrietta Rauenhorst, GHR focuses primarily on three philanthropic domains: global support for the Catholic Church and related networks, local initiatives in the Twin Cities, and groundbreaking biomedical research, particularly in Alzheimer's dementia. The foundation’s investment portfolio has been run by CIO Jason Matz since 2017, after he spent nearly 13 years as CIO of Carleton College’s endowment. As of 12/31/2023, the foundation's investments stood at just over $900 million.
 
Gerald Rauenhorst was born in Olivia, Minnesota, one of eight children in a family of tenant farmers during the Great Depression. His early life was marked by financial hardship, including a vivid childhood memory of walking behind the family wagon loaded with possessions after losing their farm to foreclosure in the 1930s. Gerald’s first business venture was selling sweet corn on the highway at six years old. He later married his wife Henrietta in 1950 and used their savings of $354 to start what would become the Opus Group, pioneering the “design-build” approach to construction, which provided clients with both architecture and construction services.

 By the time of Gerald's death in 2010 and Henrietta's in 2014, the foundation had quietly given away millions to philanthropic endeavors over the course of nearly 50 years. GHR is now run by their youngest child Amy Rauenhorst Goldman.

GHR’s portfolio includes a few large allocations to index funds, with the remainder in a concentrated portfolio of active managers across asset classes. The passive investments include $145 million in a government bond index fund and $108 million in a US equity index fund, both managed by Blackrock. Public managers include D1, Park West, and Blacksheep. GHR also made a new investment in a China strategy managed by Two Sigma in 2023. OWL users can see GHR’s complete portfolio of managers on our platform.

GHR first disclosed an investment in Alfreton Capital, a UK-based manager, in 2020. The firm was launched in 2015 by Dan Abrahams, Alfreton’s Managing Partner, and his Co-Founder Charlie Stone after they spun out of Praxient Capital. Dan had previously been a partner at Praxient since the firm’s first fund launched in 2007.

Alfreton has a research-intensive, bottoms-up approach to value investing, allowing them to “search carefully for the very best investment opportunities globally.” According to filings, the firm’s HQ is 20 miles outside London in the small town of Radlett. Using OWL’s global manager map, we can see that none of the other 12,000+ managers in OWL are within a 10 miles radius of Alfreton’s office:

Alfreton’s portfolio is highly concentrated, with multiple disclosed positions accounting for nearly 10% of its disclosed AUM. OWL users can track these positions for Alfreton and thousands of other fund managers using our global ownership database. While 13F filings in the US are widely followed, there are dozens of sources outside of the US where international positions can be tracked. These international disclosures are one of the primary reasons we started building OWL years ago, as we couldn’t find a reliable source to track the disclosed buys and sells of leading managers who invested outside of the US. In Alfreton’s case, the fund discloses several positions listed in Europe, in addition to a handful of names that appear on its 13F.

Alfreton’s AUM has steadily grown since launch, and is at new highs after a dip in 2022 when most fundamental equity managers saw drawdowns:

A more detailed version of this newsletter is sent to OWL customers, including more detail on GHR’s manager investments. If you’d like more info, reach out for a demo!

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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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