Not Bad - We Outperformed the Harvard Endownment Plan the Past Year

It looks like Harvard very famous Endowment plan has a mid year fiscal year; it ended in June - hence it is within 1 month of ours which essentially ended last week at the "end" of July (off by a few days). For the 11 months through June 30 we were up 21.1% pre-fees, and up 19.4% post-fees. [Jul 26: 'Rising Tide Growth' Performance v Peers] Harvard came in at 7-9%; considering the millions upon millions Harvard pays people to manage their huge amount of assets, we did it a lot cheaper to boot! (obviously it is much harder to manage $35 billion than a few million) I am sure they had a better July than us however ;) but all in all despite a demoralizing past 6 weeks, it's good to read these sort of statistics to see how tough it is out there and the relative performance is still exceptional.

• Score another win for the Crimson. With endowments and pension funds struggling in a down market, Harvard University's endowment notched a strong gain for the fiscal year ending in June, up 7% to 9%, according to people familiar with the returns.
• The endowment, worth $35 billion at the close of the 2007 fiscal year, was boosted by investments in commodities, Treasurys and some strong hedge-fund performers. It was below the endowment's average annual return rate of 15% over the previous decade.
• But during a year when the subprime crisis and plunging stock markets caused many institutional investors to deliver their worst performance in six years, those returns still put it at the top of its class. "That would be easily the best performer among the foundations and endowments that we track," says Craig Tome, of Chicago's Northern Trust, which collects endowment and pension-fund performance data.
• Mr. Tome noted that Harvard's returns would top any of the nearly ninety endowments and foundations that Northern Trust follows. The group -- with an average of $1 billion in assets -- lost an average of 3.1% last fiscal year, and only one in five notched positive returns. The performance was even worse for public and corporate pension funds, which lost 4.3% and 5.1%, respectively, according to Northern Trust.
  
• Compensation for Harvard's staff managers has been controversial. With the endowment's success, staff managers' paychecks have soared, sometimes into millions of dollars a year -- far more than the school's Nobel laureates or its deans get. Critics have argued that the university should outsource more of its asset management to save costs.