Student funds as an alternative asset class?
Hi all, I was looking for data on the average returns of university/ college student funds as an alternative asset class but couldn't find any. Could someone shed some light on this? I was looking at the Barclays Student Fund index but there was very little data, which is puzzling as student funds have been a rising force in finance as a sophisticated, uncorrelated return stream for the portfolios of whales.
Do student funds generate alpha? What are some common strategies of student funds - quant, global macro, multi-strat, merger arb, long-short, activist? I heard some student funds generated alpha thru the WSB/ diamond hands strategy too. My school's activist student fund recently did a hostile takeover. Some macro student funds in my area also got some bad press recently for shorting some emerging markets' currencies and forcing their central banks to devalue. Personally, I don't think the media should give these student funds bad press because they hold the title of 'Portfolio Manager of xxx Student Fund'. Therefore, they should know what they are doing.
Why don't more IB analysts & S&T traders exit into student funds?
Why is there still very little awareness by the general public on student funds as an asset class? I guess someone needs to send Sebastian Mallaby an email urging him to write a new book on 'More Money than God: Student Funds and the making of a new elite'
Uncorrelated, sure.
Sophisticated? Hardly.
Your school's activist fund did a hostile takeover? More info on this, that's awesome.
My school's fund focuses mostly on activist short selling. In my pod, we open aggressive short positions mostly in oil & gas companies and have the liberal arts students tweet about how bad fracking is for the environment. It's been quite an effective strategy. I was thinking of pivoting into L/S but I've spent 4 months as a Senior Portfolio Manager on our activist team and feel I've pidgenholed myself into the strategy.
Lmfao dude college kids these days are beyond help
I know this is a joke but actually sortta genius at the same time
you don't even need to pay the libs to get pissed off about O&G or A&D companies
And if you can help organize large protests of these companies on campus you could even get some news coverage because media outlets love eating that shit up--free press campaign
Can’t wait to be on this site next week when “Student Funds is Paradise” drops
F
Student run funds make shitty returns because there is a vicious cycle of negative incentive. Except for the total nerds, people check the fuck out once recruiting is over, meaning half the leadership is coasting. I dont blame them.
For that reason, even if the student run funds are funded by having members invest, nobody is going to want to invest that much if, once again, the managers are half assing it.
Additionally, I have found in my student run fund, which includes many smart kids from ivies, their hubris is their downfall. Of course we make below market returns when the culture rewards those who "sound smart" by writing a convoluted "special situations" model on a Albanian SaaS company that hasnt made a dime. Meanwhile, the boring ideas with straightforward theses that generate returns are rejected and scoffed at by these nerds.
Thus the vicious cycle is perpetuated by 1) the nerds who care too much and would rather jerk off to Excel than meet a woman and 2) the non-nerds who check out after recruiting and dont care. The nonnerds leave because the nerds are too sweaty and dont have alpha to show for it, and the nerds get sweatier to compensate
My universities student run fund has outperformed the S&P 500 for the last 2 decades except for 3 years here and there )Non target where all the finance students are dude bros who think Northwestern mutual is the end all be all) and the portfolio gets reallocated every semester by shit like “yeah allocating 2% to X sounds good” with barely any analysis whatsoever
it accepts ‘donations’ from alumni but it’s a sliver of the schools endowment so I don’t think donors can pocket returns
is this an asset class people are investing in?
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