Harvard University’s endowment arm is laying off about half of its 230-employee staff which has performed poorly

Harvard University’s endowment arm is laying off about half of its 230-employee staff as it outsources more of its management to outside firms.

Harvard University’s endowment arm is laying off about half of its 230-employee staff which has performed poorly TpxvLf

Harvard Management Co. will close all of its internally managed hedge funds by the end of the fiscal year, CEO N.P. “Narv” Narvekar wrote in a memorandum provided to the Business Journal. It is also moving its direct real estate investments to outside firms. The Wall Street Journal first reported the moves Wednesday.

The Ivy League school hired Narvekar away from Columbia University in September to help reverse the fortunes of its $36 billion endowment, which has performed poorly recently compared to peers. The endowment earned a minus-2 percent return in the most recent fiscal year.

Harvard Management has traditionally used both in-house and external managers, but with Wednesday’s announcement the outfit is clearly outsourcing a much larger chunk of its operations, as is common with many university endowments. At this time, it is still internally managing its natural resources portfolio.

"In the past, HMC’s unique approach of investing in internally-managed portfolios generated superior returns," Narvekar said in the letter. "In recent years, however, the tremendous flow of capital to external managers has created a great deal of competition for both talent and ideas, therefore making it more difficult to attract and retain the necessary investment expertise while also remaining sufficiently nimble to exploit rapidly changing opportunities."

The endowment arm is also shifting from a siloed investment approach, in which personnel focus on a specific asset class, to a generalist model in which each manager has a hand in the entire portfolio. It announced Wednesday that it hired a new chief investment officer, Rick Slocum from New York-based family office The Johnson Co., and three new managing directors to aid in that transition.

http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2017/01/25/harvards-endowment-manager-cutting-half-its-staff.html

Harvard University’s endowment arm is laying off about half of its 230-employee staff which has performed poorly

Harvard University’s endowment arm is laying off about half of its 230-employee staff which has performed poorly

Anarcho-Capitalist Categorical Imperatives

AnCaps & Psychology, Edumbcation, Even IndoctriNation