投资就有风险,谁能保证只赚不赔.
脑袋没被炉子踢坏的人都知道这个理. 看一看下面的文章你也可能明白点什么了.
Why Harvard Is Smarting --- Bet on Former Manager, Faulted for High Pay, Leads to Crimson Loss
By Craig Karmin and Gregory Zuckerman
1 August 2007
Harvard University's endowment fund has graduated some of the most sought-after money managers in
the hedge-fund world.
Now one of those stars is teaching Harvard a lesson of its own.
In the past month, the university lost about $350 million through an investment in Sowood Capital
Management, a hedge-fund firm founded by Jeffrey Larson. Mr. Larson managed Harvard's
foreign-stock holdings until 2004, when he left to set up Sowood, which recently lost more than 50% of
its value amid bad bond investments.
Mr. Larson isn't the only high-profile former Harvard-endowment manager with a mixed record since
leaving the ivory tower. Jack Meyer, Harvard's former top investment manager, last year raised a $6
billion hedge fund, Convexity Capital, including an initial $500 million investment from Harvard. While
Convexity's returns were subpar early on, its performance has improved lately, according to people
familiar with the figures.
University spokesman John Longbrake said the school doesn't discuss individual endowment
investments. Mr. Meyer, and a representative from Sowood, declined to comment.
While $350 million is a relatively small hit for the $29 billion Harvard endowment, the nation's largest, it
highlights the risks as colleges nationwide embrace nontraditional investments such as hedge funds and
private equity. Investments like these are less regulated than more traditional options, and often engage
in the risky practice of investing borrowed money in hopes of amplifying their returns.
Along with Yale University -- where the roughly $18 billion endowment has achieved annual returns of
about 17% in the past decade -- Harvard was among the first universities to embrace such alternative
investments. The goal is to seek good returns that don't move in tandem with stock and bond markets,
thereby giving diversity to the overall portfolio.
The strategy worked particularly well in the 2000-2002 period, when hedge funds generally did a much
better job than other investments in protecting their clients' money from losses in the aftermath of the
dot-com stock bust. That subsequently helped to spark new interest from institutional investors.
Sowood chalked up three years of gains for Harvard. But recently, it ran into difficulties navigating
troubles in the bond market, suffering losses last month that cut the firm's assets in half, to $1.5 billon.
This week, big Chicago hedge fund Citadel Investment Group agreed to buy much of Sowood's
investment portfolio.
Harvard Management Co., which manages the endowment, has long been viewed as one of the nation's
more successful and trailblazing investment-management firms. It boasts an annualized return of 15.2%
in the past 10 years through June 2006. That compares with an 8.9% median return for endowments
and foundations over that time period, according to Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service.
As Harvard's returns grew, so did its money managers' paychecks, which soared into the millions of
dollars a year. That sparked controversy among alumni and others associated with the university, who
argued that investment managers shouldn't be paid better than the school's Nobel Laureate professors,
or its deans.
Mr. Larson's $17.3 million in payments in 2003 from Harvard were among the large salaries that drew
complaints from alumni several years ago.
In 2005, Mr. Meyer and some of his top staff left the university amid complaints about their pay. Harvard
hired Mohamed El-Erian from giant bond house Pacific Investment Management Co., an Allianz AG unit
better known as Pimco, to run the university's investments.
2007 Factiva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Mr. El-Erian received compensation of $2.3 million for the fiscal year ended June 2006, and a portion of
his pay is tied to investment performance. Mr. El-Erian couldn't be reached to comment yesterday.
For some detractors, Harvard's Sowood losses serve as proof that the money managers didn't merit
their compensation. "We felt it was inappropriate then, and we don't feel it's appropriate now," says
William Strauss, an author and Harvard graduate who is an outspoken critic of the salaries at Harvard
Management.
"This is not a mutual fund," says Mr. Strauss. "Harvard needs to set limits on what it pays fund
managers."
Nationwide, university endowments continue to show a greater risk appetite than pension funds and
other large institutional investors. The top 53 university endowments, with nearly $217 billion in assets,
have invested about 18% of their money in hedge funds, according to data provider HedgeFund
Intelligence. The average public pension fund has only about 5% in hedge funds.
Kevin Lynch, a managing director at consulting firm RogersCasey, says there are at least two good
reasons why universities have more readily welcomed hedge funds and private equity. Unlike public or
corporate pension plans, which make annual payouts to beneficiaries, endowments have longer-term
investment horizons, and therefore are more comfortable with the fact that alternative investments
generally require investors to stay in for years.
Universities are also less worried about so-called headline risk, where news of a bad investment may be
splashed across the front page, Mr. Lynch says. "The larger endowments often have hedge-fund people
on their boards or committees," he says. "They are not as taken aback by a blowout."
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