Category: Insights

As we enter 2023, TIFF’s CEO, Kane Brenan, shares a 2022 year-end review and 2023 outlook. Kane writes about TIFF investment, service, and addresses the 2023 initiatives and priorities that will help TIFF achieve our mission to deliver investment excellence in 2023 and beyond. To read TIFF’s Annual CEO Letter, please download the PDF.

Cash is an unglamorous – but critical – element of portfolio management. For the past couple of years yields on cash-like instruments were negligible, leading endowments to hold cash in bank accounts bearing little to no interest. This year’s increases in short-term interest rates have changed this calculus. Non-profits are now able to explore more active approaches to cash management which have the potential to realize some additional return in a market environment that has been challenging for all asset classes. TIFF explores how organizations can define cash needs and help identify what strategy may be appropriate for them.

Over the course of our careers, we’ve learned some important lessons that professors didn’t teach us in economics or finance classes. We believe it is useful to discuss three of these ideas that we wish we had understood on our first days on the job. In our new white paper, “Three Ideas I Wish I Had Understood From The Start: Lessons That Have Made Us Better Investors”, we examine:

• The importance of creativity and how it is often unappreciated
• Why being open-minded is more important than being smart
• Why a steady temperament might be the most important characteristic of all

Investors have endured a challenging six months in the markets as multiple macro-economic events have driven uncertainty to near-term highs. With risk being top of mind for investors, we believe it is useful to discuss how TIFF approaches risk management within our Diversifying Strategies team. In our new white paper, “Stayin’ Alive: The Importance of Risk Management in a Risky Market”, we aim to:

• Introduce some of the metrics and tools we use to monitor risk
• Explain the philosophy behind how we measure hedge fund risk management
• Help readers gain a better understanding of why risk management is critical to long-term portfolio performance
• Bonus: recommend some great tunes to listen to while reading the paper!

The always highly anticipated annual university endowment results for fiscal 2021 (FY 2021) were released in February, triggering the usual flurry of articles in the financial media. These results received a great deal of attention, largely because of the uniquely strong returns. In our new white paper, “Higher Education Endowment Results: Reflections on Recent Returns and Outlook for the Future”, we aim to:

• Explain the context for the strong returns, focusing on the asset classes that drove this outcome
• Give our perspective on the outlook for market returns in the coming years
• Discuss some of the key investment tenets that, we at TIFF, believe contributed to strong outperformance from some select institutions