Tracking the Investment Performance of Private Foundations, One Foundation at a Time

Main Content

Foundation Investment Performance

According to the FoundationMark Grantmaker Investment Value Index (“GIV Index”) foundations’ third quarter investment performance was up 0.6%, bringing year to date gains to 12.9%. The GIV Index continues to lag a passive balanced portfolio consisting of 60% stocks (S&P 500) and 40% bonds (Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Aggregate Index).

Commentary

In the third quarter, U.S. equity markets outperformed international markets, particularly emerging market shares, limiting foundations’ gains to 0.6%.

The effect of a “flight to quality” can be seen as high grade bonds outperformed high yield bonds for the quarter and the year to date.

Autumn 2019 Newsletter

College Endowments Report Fiscal 2019 Returns, and the News Isn’t Good

Autumn is back to school season, and while some people might think about tailgating at football games, there is another competition that takes place on campuses every fall, colleges report their investment returns. While FoundationAdvocate’s (“FA”) focus is the private foundation universe, we are keenly interested in their nonprofit cousins, college endowments. Unlike most foundations, […]

Follow Up: Lilly Endowment is Second Largest in U.S. Ford Drops to Third

This summer we wrote that we believed that the Lilly Endowment would overtake the Ford Foundation in terms of assets, making Lilly the second biggest foundation in the U.S.  Our thesis was confirmed recently as Lilly reported total assets of $15.1 billion in its 2018 filing and Ford provided indications that 2018 total assets would […]