The Wyoming Retirement System’s Endowment-Style Portfolio + OWL’s AI-Powered Newsfeed

OWL’s AI-Powered News Feed

Before getting into this week’s content, we wanted to share an exciting product update. We recently launched one of the biggest updates in OWL’s history – a customized news feed that allows users to track daily news articles and other content about the managers they care about. This is something that we always wanted as allocators. Tracking news about hundreds of fund managers has always been close to impossible - too many click-bait articles, too many Google alerts to manage one by one.

OWL now ingests news and other content from hundreds of sources and uses multiple LLMs to filter, tag, and summarize the articles, showing only what’s meaningful and relevant for each manager. OWL users can create custom lists of managers to follow or use the “Popular on OWL” feed to see news and events for a broad set of well-known managers.

News is just one of several event types we’ve added to our customized feed – other additions include LP base changes, service provider changes, address updates, AUM changes, and more - for more than 14,000 fund managers globally.

This update massively increases OWL’s value as a manager monitoring tool, helping our users track critical information about managers – from news and team changes to global ownership disclosures, LP base changes, disciplinary events, new fund launches, and more.

If you’d like to learn more about using OWL to find and monitor managers, reach out!

Wyoming Retirement System

This week, we analyzed the Wyoming Retirement System’s portfolio, whose structure aligns more closely with that of an endowment than with typical state pension portfolios. Sam Masoudi has been the CIO at WRS since 2013, following a 5-year stint as a Managing Director at Tulane’s investment office. Prior to Tulane, he was the founder and portfolio manager at Silver Peak, a L/S hedge fund. WRS board materials also note that Meketa is a consultant to the investment team at WRS. An II article from 2016 provides more history on the Wyoming Retirement System, noting that the first CIO was hired in 2009 following many years of an outsourced consulting team.

Over the past 10 years, WRS has outperformed its benchmarks by ~1% annually, driven primarily by outperformance of its Marketable Alternatives asset class.

Marketable Alternatives managers include well-known names such as TCI, Naya, Janchor, and Hillhouse. In Friday’s customer newsletter, we shared a more detailed roster of WRS’s managers, as well as a list of managers hired in recent years.

WRS also reports its gold holdings, which accounted for 1.6% of the pension’s portfolio at the end of 2024. Board minutes from 2025 indicate that WRS increased its allocation by 0.5% to reduce equity risk, noting that gold remains one of the portfolio’s best-performing assets.

LFL Advisers

WRS invested in public equity manager LFL Advisers in 2018. Based in Evanston, IL, LFL currently manages ~$450 million. According to LFL’s filings, more than 50% of the capital is internal. Peter Lewis founded LFL in 2005 after spending 4 years at Plaza Investment Managers, the group that managed the equity portfolio for GEICO.

Since OWL started tracking returns in 2017, LFL’s disclosed long positions have outperformed the benchmarks, according to our estimates:

LFL, which we estimate has ~11% annualized dollar turnover, currently discloses 9 public equity positions across consumer, financials, industrials, and tech, with a diversified sector exposure:

LFL’s largest disclosed position (18% of disclosed holdings) is TE Connectivity, a sensor and electronics company. LFL initially bought shares in Q4 2016 and has nearly doubled its position since then. As a reminder, OWL users are able to track the buying and selling behavior of thousands of managers on our platform, enabling them to better understand their managers’ trading patterns over time:

TE Connectivity Stock Price

Other News & Events

• University of California Wants to Bet $2.4 Billion on Big 10

• Coatue Public Markets Update

• Inside Steve Cohen's Cubist shake-up: How a quiet search and chance timing led to the surprising change at Point72

• The quants who built computer-run trading strategies aren't ready to hand it over to AI

• After ‘Very Long Winter,’ Emerging Markets May Finally Be Living Up to Their Potential

• Hedge fund Enko Capital raises $100m for Africa private credit fund

• GoldenTree veteran spins out $300m crypto hedge fund

• Hedge fund Lone Pine launches long-term fund to combat market volatility

• Jana Partners teams up with NFL star Travis Kelce in activist push at Six Flags

• University of Michigan reports 15.5% FY25 Return

• Princeton reports 11% FY25 Return

• Loyola University Chicago Hiring Senior Investment Analyst

   

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.