Keep pulling the thread on Scott Wilson.
Upon taking over as CIO, Scott Wilson's team at Washington University's endowment reduced its number of investment partners from over 100 to approximately 30-50 who are considered significant.
In the first several weeks of Scott Wilson's tenure at Washington University, the endowment put in redemption requests for nearly half of its portfolio.
Within three years of Scott Wilson's arrival, the Washington University endowment has turned over more than 80% of its original investment pool.
The Grinnell College endowment grew from approximately $3 million in the 1940s to over $1 billion by 2000, primarily through capital gains, with only $70 million in gifts received during that period.
The investment philosophy at Grinnell College, influenced by Joe Rosenfield and Warren Buffett, focused on making concentrated, long-term investments in individual companies, sometimes allocating over 10% of the portfolio to a single name.
The Washington University endowment's investment team prefers to partner with smaller, concentrated, long-term-oriented managers and typically avoids systematic and macro strategies.
Scott Wilson believes that a highly diversified hedge fund portfolio with many managers holding numerous positions effectively becomes an index fund with a prohibitively expensive fee structure.
The investment team at Washington University's endowment operates on a generalist model, where every team member covers all geographies and asset classes.
The Washington University endowment's asset allocation is approximately 45% in private investments, one-third in public equities, 10% in hedge funds, and 5-10% in real assets.
Washington University's endowment has successfully invested in Russian technology companies that trade at five times earnings while exhibiting a return on equity of over 60% and growth rates of 30-40%.
The Washington University endowment team uses a rule of thumb that if they are not willing to invest at least 1% of the portfolio, currently over $100 million, into a single opportunity, it does not represent enough conviction.
The Washington University endowment's portfolio performance is driven by approximately 100 core positions, with the top 100 positions representing over one-third of the total portfolio.