Insights from Institutionally-Related Foundations
Last month at Commonfund Forum 2025, we convened senior leaders of institutionally-related foundations (IRFs) to discuss trends among their institutions and peers uncovered in the FY2024...
Portfolio Construction in the Era of the Mag 7
How do you build your U.S. equities allocation when a handful of stocks account for more than half of the S&P 500’s return? The aptly named Magnificent 7 stocks (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta...
Governance Lessons from Commonfund Benchmark Studies
Commonfund has been partnering to produce industry insights and thought leadership across the nonprofit institutional investor space for decades. Central to these efforts have been benchmark studies...
How to Implement ESG at Your Institution
The following has been adapted from a presentation delivered at Commonfund Forum 2023. The presenters were Rachel Stavola Clivaz, Associate Director, and Anthony Peretore, Managing Director,...
Hedge Funds: Is Now Their Time to Shine?
Diversification may be underappreciated when both equity and fixed income allocations have been broadly positive. With both these allocations facing significant and potentially long-lasting...
Dynamic Workforce = Dynamic Portfolios
The Surprising Outcomes When Diverse Groups and Homogeneous Groups Tackle the Same Problem In late 2018, Commonfund established a Diversity Office with the objective of benefiting from the strengths...
The Global Economy and the Return of Risk
How to think about tariffs, deficits, valuations, leverage, growth and other issues What signals should institutions be mindful of as they make portfolio decisions in the current environment? A panel...
Diversity and Emerging Managers
The benefits of diversity are widely recognized in the work place and among educational institutions and other nonprofits. Yet, the concept of investment management firms that are minority owned and...
Should Investors Be Concerned with ESG Investing
The subject of ESG, or investing in accord with environmental, social and governance principles, arose in several sessions at Commonfund Forum 2018. One session, in particular, was devoted to the...
CIO Roundtable: Is the Endowment Model a Crowded Trade?
Stuck in the past or ever-evolving? The endowment model gets a hard look eight years into the current market cycle. With core tenets of the endowment model seemingly under stress for the last several...
What’s Next for Cash Investors?
In the static low-rate environment of recent years, it seemed as though there was no “what’s next” for cash. Today, that has changed, as there are major forces reshaping the regulatory and interest...
The Big Picture: Integrating Investments, Finance and Development
Most things function a lot better when all the moving parts work together—nonprofit institutions included. The synergies afforded by collaboration across organizational boundaries may be the most...
Evolving Challenges in Nonprofit Governance
Commonfund recently convened an expert panel moderated by Myra Drucker (standing, left), Chair of the Board, TrustedPeer Inc. and former chair of the Commonfund Board of Trustees. The roundtable...
Tour de World: Global Equity Investing Now