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Investment Strategy | Articles

Viewpoint | Top Concerns for Community Foundations: Donor-Advised Fund Regulations

Potential regulations on donor-advised funds (DAFs) and their effect on the philanthropic sector was the most-cited concern among community foundations in this year’s Council on...

Perspectives | Press Releases

FY23 NACUBO-Commonfund Study Released

U.S. Higher Education Endowments Report 7.7% Return for FY23 While Spending More in Support of Their Missions 50th anniversary NACUBO-Commonfund Study shows participating colleges and universities...

Governance And Policy | Videos

2025 Policy Outlook: What Endowments and Foundations Should Know

Looking back at 2024, uncertainty was the name of the game: inflation, interest rates, market volatility, emerging technology, recession potential, and geopolitical risks all played a role. As we...

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Investment Strategy | Articles

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...
Perspectives | Articles

Viewpoint: Counting the Cost

How much does investment management cost? Fiduciaries, donors and stakeholders at endowed institutions have a strong interest in finding a good answer to this question, particularly in this era of...
Perspectives | Videos

No More Gatekeepers

In this Commonfund Forum Spotlight, founder of DonorsChoose.org Charles Best shares how as a 24-year-old teacher at a Bronx high school, he created a model of giving hailed as "the future of...
Perspectives | Videos

Monkeynomics

In this Commonfund Forum 2017 Spotlight, Dr. Laurie Santos demonstrates that primates have much to teach us about our own economic decision-making. Both monkeys and humans know a bargain when they...
Investment Strategy | Private Equity Insights

Venture Capital - Looking Forward and Upward

Beginning in the second half of 2015, there was growing caution that started to impact pricing and investment activity in early 2016. This valuation cooling period and subsequent shift in mindset...
Perspectives | Spotlight

Center for Natural Lands Management

These words—to protect, preserve and defend—come from the oath of office sworn by the President of the United States. At the Center for Natural Lands Management (CNLM), they refer to an unwritten but...
Governance And Policy | Articles

Viewpoint: A Firmer Foundation

How long is the long term? A year ago, private and community foundations appeared to many observers to have recovered from the losses suffered in the 2008–09 global financial crisis. Double-digit...
Perspectives | Spotlight

The William Penn Foundation

Fast Philly facts: The city is the site of the first library, hospital, medical school, stock exchange and zoo in the U.S. It’s the only World Heritage City in the U.S. William Penn founded the city...
Investment Strategy | Articles

Active Management Fatigue and What to Do About It

Active management has struggled for several years, raising questions about whether active management can ever outperform again. Traditional active manager style tilts, like value and size, have...
Commonfund Forum | Articles

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...
Investment Strategy | Articles

Ideas for Next Gen Energy Investing

Advances in alternative energy technologies promise to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. Largely, however, they remain just that—a promise. So, where are the opportunities to invest in...
Investment Strategy | Articles

Unhedged Commentary: The $3 Trillion Question

Reprinted from Institutional Investor’s Alpha Spring 2016 issue The growth of the hedge fund industry over the past decade has been tremendous, with more and more institutional and retail investors...