The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Druley: Only 100 to 200 hedge funds merit institutional capital
“What I would say is hedge funds is an asset class not worth the money. That said, there's seven, 8000 hedge funds. We think there's a hundred to 200 that actually do merit institutional capital and continue to merit institutional capital.”
Csicsko: Public equities have vastly outperformed broad private markets recently
“You pair that with a public market that's vastly outperformed, the broad private market measured on, say, a Cambridge index level, and it's causing most people I know to have very difficult conversations around what is the future path of private allocation in …”
Cambridge Associates Study: Over Half of Top Venture Funds Are Funds I-III
“Hambridge Associates did a study, and they looked at post-two thousand venture funds. The cohort of top 10 funds in each vintage year, typically more than half were funds with a Roman numeral lower than Roman numeral three.”
Grantham: Foundation beat Harvard, Yale, Princeton over 10 years in Cambridge data
“Three years ago, before the current unpleasantness and the venture capital green business, we were number zero on the Cambridge Associates database, which is their code for number one. On a ten-year basis, we were beating Harvard and Yale and Princeton with ou…”
MacDonald: Mean PE returns without fee and carry reach top-quartile performance
“If you take the mean return in most vintage years from a Cambridge associate and you back out fee and carry, that's top quartile.”
Sargent: Underperforming global stocks by 0.20% achieved top-quartile foundation performance
“If you underperformed the global stock market by 20 basis points a year for the five years ending twenty-twenty-one, that was top quartile performance.”
Saviano: Consultant-driven portfolios will not reach top-decile returns
“And it's the natural thing of a consultant driven pool. You're not going to be top decile. What you're really trying to avoid is you're helping them avoid being bottom quartile. You're helping them really be good stewards of the capital because you're focused …”
Hamilton: Portfolio allocators should be generalists, not asset class specialists
“A lot of people think that you have to specialize now, and I actually think the opposite. How can you pick investments in one part of your portfolio without understanding what's going on in other parts?”
Druley: Cambridge Associates holds up to 60% of endowment advisory market
“So on the endowment and foundation side, as I think probably most of our listeners know today, we have significant market share. In most cases, we're 50, 60% of the market.”
Druley: Co-investments only generate strong returns within a manager's sweet spot
“And what they found out is that when you did co-invest with the managers we like, if you did it in their sweet spot, the sweet spot being either sector or industry expertise or size deal, that co-invest worked out very well. When you did the co-invest outside …”
Druley: Only a few percent of 10,000+ managers merit institutional capital
“We think about the 10,000 plus managers that are out there. There's a few percent that actually merit any of the capital of our clients and asset owners.”
Druley: Cambridge still finds significant active value-add in liquid equities
“We are still finding the ability to generate significant value add in the liquid markets, specifically the liquid equity markets. There's pockets of those markets which are harder to generate value add, but in the most part, we're still finding the ability to …”
Early financial success blinds young institutional trustees to their own inexperience
“There's so many of even our peers who earn so much wealth at a very young age. Instead of going through the training program and going through the apprentice, you know, everyone says yes to you because you have been so successful so early.”
Veremis: Institutional crypto adoption is up 5x in clients, 20x in capital
“Cambridge would have it right now, but I would say there's probably five X from then at least, like I'm taking a guess here in terms of client number. In terms of dollars, probably 10 X or 20 X.”
Ma: Software connecting EV charging to grid offers compelling investment value
“One area that we're seeing is a lot of folks that focused on EVs and EV charging, which I think is certainly an area to look at. It's a market that's going down in terms of cost and pricing as more players come in. So I think what's more interesting in that ar…”
Ma: Sustainable managers with durable cash flows remained resilient in volatility
“And we're seeing in this environment, the sustainable managers who are focused on high quality, durable cash flows have stayed really resilient in the market volatility that we've seen.”
Ma: ESG engagement must tie to financial statements to avoid greenwashing
“So again, tying it to the financials, tying it to the economics, the fundamental economic statements are really important when you're having these conversations, because otherwise, we're going back to that greenwashing topic again, and it's not just about the …”
Ma: Clean tech VC and PE returns rebounded strongly since 2013
“Since really, 2012, 2013, and we tracked this data at the company level in our database of venture and private equity backed clean tech companies. They've actually rebounded quite significantly since 2013, where if you look at the IRRs and the TVPIs of these c…”
Ma: Allocators must probe portfolio holdings to catch ESG inconsistencies
“What's really more relevant when you're engaging with these managers is, okay, let's go through your portfolio, and let's go through your holdings, right? How did you arrive at these decisions, given you have this ESG policy? And sometimes you can call out som…”
Ma: Allocators should engage all managers on ESG, not just dedicated funds
“We think that there is a strong opportunity for allocators to be engaging with all of their managers on sustainability, on ESG integration, on team diversity, And especially for public equity firms, right, how their practices and policies are reflected in thei…”
Ma: Concentrated sustainable global equity strategies add value through market cycles
“We're finding really strong high conviction opportunities in global equities, for example, that have very high concentration and high sustainability oriented approaches. And they have added a lot of value to portfolios because again, they're focused on that du…”
Druley: Cambridge Associates takes zero money from investment managers
“We don't take any money from managers either, which is somewhat unique in our industry.”
Druley: No firm holds over 2% market share in private client advisory
“And then private client side is just very fragmented. No one has more than two percent of the market.”
Druley: Managing institutional portfolios solely through quarterly meetings does not work
“Running money with four quarterly meetings and not having people like managing the portfolio daily, that's not going to work. This is too complicated.”
Druley: Cambridge favors concentrated managers because it can diversify idiosyncratic risk
“Tend to many cases to have a bias towards concentrated high conviction managers. We can diversify out their idiosyncratic risk, and we've had great success in identifying those managers”
Druley: Investment edge today is decision-making and synthesis, not information access
“It's not so much what information you get. It's how you synthesize that information and how you make decisions. It's the edge today.”
Druley: US equities and sovereign debt are richly valued
“You have pockets of assets that are richly valued. We think U.S. Equities, sovereign debt.”
The OCIO industry and its service models will consolidate by 2028
“If we looked up five, 10 years, I'd say we're in the early innings in the sense of there will be consolidation in the industry. And there also, there will be a consolidation of models, you know, in terms of, you know, what clients want in terms of their OCIO p…”
Top-performing private fund managers rotate entirely over twenty-year periods
“If you look at sort of the top performing private funds, they may not be the same as they are in 20 years from now. Well, they won't be the same, you know, in 20 years previous. And so, there's always this I don't subscribe to a fixed pool. I do think that the…”
Cambridge Associates lets fund managers decide how to allocate limited client capacity
“So the mechanism is pretty straightforward, and that has to do with, you know, we ensure we're compliant too, but the manager decides. So that fund, the GP, decides who ultimately, as the manager does for any client outside of Cambridge or, you know, within Ca…”
The initial liquidity phase is critical when managing spend-down portfolios
“The most important concept that I always wanted to, you know, make sure we protected against was the first phase, whatever that is, one, two, three, five, whatever that first phase is, is the absolute most important critical phase. Because if you don't get tha…”
Cambridge Associates co-founder Jim Bailey sparked the endowment model in the 1970s
“But I'll give a lot of credit to Jim Bailey at Cambridge because Jim assembled a group of endowments in the seventies to talk about these issues. And that, from those meetings, came the endowment model.”
Salem: Almost all major endowments initially invested in GMO via Cambridge Associates
“Almost all the major endowments had money with GMO because Hunter or Jim or others in the early cast at Cambridge had recommended, oh, this team at Boston really has it figured out.”
Ma: Cambridge Associates has over 150 clients implementing sustainable investing
“At Cambridge Associates, we now have over a 150 clients embedding and implementing Broadly, sustainable investing in some fashion, and we're only seeing that number grow over time.”
Ma: Industry operators and family offices launch dedicated climate funds
“We're actually also seeing some, especially on the private side, some operationally focused managers who have spun out of industry, of strategics, and even some family offices who have been very active in certain areas like environmental sustainability and cle…”
Cambridge Associates conducts 6,000 investment meetings annually across asset classes
“You take these three things and it allows us to go out and do 6000 meetings a year across the globe, across asset classes.”
Druley: Cambridge Associates walks away from managers with operational red flags
“On our side, the fundamentals, we could think they're going in the right direction, but if the operational due diligence shows red flags, that's it. I mean, we'll walk away. Now we will give the manager feedback and say, we have issues with these things. We th…”
Nearly one-third of Cambridge Associates OCIO clients have SRI mandates
“Almost a third of them have some sort of unique, what folks would call a mission oriented SRI, you know, as whether it's minority managers or whether it's environmental.”
Chen personally oversees every portfolio and trade across CA Capital Management
“I see every portfolio, I see every trade, and you can, you know, you look through it, and you can see, actually, you know, we do have that core consistency in terms of the institution and the infrastructure.”
Great investment ideas are useless without stakeholder buy-in
“Management consulting is actually excellent for process and being able to take a institution or a group of people through a decision, you know, and so, Advocating for a recommendation. Those are really important skills because you have, you can have the most f…”
Carnegie Mellon transitioned its endowment from Cambridge Associates to internal staff
“It was a great opportunity because they wanted to move the program from consultant-centric to staff-centric. So we were relying on Cambridge. We moved away from them. I hired Chuck Kennedy, who is now the current CIO at CMU, as my number two, and we built out …”