WashU Portfolio Update

This week, we’ll take a fresh look at Washington University (WashU)’s portfolio. We last profiled WashU in late 2023, where we shared some history on the endowment and its CIO, Scott Wilson.  Wilson joined WashU in 2017 and in a Capital Allocators interview in 2020, he noted that his team had turned over 70-80% of the portfolio in his first three years, focusing on making the portfolio more concentrated. Over his tenure, the portfolio has also shifted heavily into private investments:

This overweight in privates resulted in significant outperformance in 2021 and relative underperformance since then, compared to the median of endowments we track in OWL. That said, WashU has annualized returns of 11.5% over the past 5 years, near the top of endowment league tables and ahead of all Ivy League schools except for Brown.

WashU’s Manager Roster

While public filings do not disclose all of WashU's investments, tax filings give us a glimpse into some of the endowment's manager relationships. In our customer newsletter on Friday, we shared a list of disclosed managers for WashU including EQMC, Caledonia, and Kora. OWL users can see full details of these investments, including specific fund names, on WashU's allocator profile.

WashU disclosed a relationship with Incentive AS for the first time in FY24. Incentive AS was launched in 2014 by Svein Høgset, Niklas Antman and Mikael Berglund, and currently has offices in Oslo and Stockholm. The fund launched under the Sector Asset Management umbrella, which it leverages for operational support.

Incentive manages a concentrated, value‑oriented portfolio focused on publicly listed mid‑ and large‑cap companies, primarily in Northern Europe. In a 2014 interview with HedgeNordic shortly after the fund’s launch, Høgset described the strategy:

“The typical company in our portfolio will have a market cap somewhere between EUR500m and EUR5bn and it will be covered properly by only a few, if any sell side research houses. Our portfolio will be concentrated, with only 10-20 investments at any given point in time and we are looking for companies that we think will perform well for us over multi-year periods. We will stay close to the management teams of the companies we invest in and from time to time, we may engage actively if there are areas where we can contribute positively to the value creation process.”

In addition to the three founders, the investment team includes Alexander Kopp, who joined the firm in 2015. Despite significant growth in AUM, the firm’s investment team headcount has remained steady at 4 throughout its history, with only small increases in the operations team over time:

If you’d like more info on the managers and allocators we track in OWL, reach out!

Other News & Events

• Rich Colleges Would Face Lower Tax Hike Under Senate Bill

• Activists up Japanese campaigns to record high

• Chris Hohn’s TCI Is Once Again a Top Performer

• The Florida Pension Fund Managers Who've Beaten the S&P 500 Over 50 Years

• Cornell’s CIO on Endowments Selling PE Stakes: ‘I Don’t Know What’s Going on There’

• WSJ Article on Pod Shop Recruiting

• NC State Treasurer Wins His Fight for Reforms to Resuscitate State Pension

• Millennium in talks over minority stake sale at $14bn valuation

• Ken Griffin on Trump, Harvard and Why Novice Investors Won’t Beat the Pros

• UVIMCO hires Jason Chang from Lockheed Martin as Managing Director

• TTSTC hiring Investment Associate

• Hilton Foundation hiring Investment Associate

• Fiducient Advisors hiring Senior 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

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.