[throw0101a]

A 2014 Vanguard research paper:

> Two important observations emerge from the figure. First, large endowments have clearly generated strong excess returns, but the majority of their success occurred during the early and mid-2000s. Second, as small and medium endowments ramped up their allocations to alternative investments over the ten years through June 2013 and as more investor money has flowed into alternative categories such as hedge funds, positive excess returns have not been forthcoming. Unfortunately, small and medium endowments did not participate in the early success of alternative investments realized by their larger counterparts, and recently—after years of increasing their exposure to alternatives—they have trailed the return of the 60% stock/40% bond benchmark by larger gaps than at any point in the full 20-year period.

* https://www.vanguardcanada.ca/documents/assessing-endowment-...

There seems to have been a few 'golden years' for alternative assets at the time of publication.

Curious to know how the years 2014-2020 have treated them. A more recent 2018 study:

> Dahiya and Yermack found that the performance of the typical endowment fund [in 2009-2016] was so poor that it would have earned substantially higher returns if its trustees had followed a simplistic investment strategy of holding 100% Treasury bonds and taken no equity market risk whatsoever.

* https://www.etf.com/sections/index-investor-corner/swedroe-w...