Topic: Investment Approach

TIFF collaborates with clients to understand their distinct goals and situations and to define their investment needs.  Additionally, TIFF seeks out those active managers that we believe to be the best from across the investment landscape to meet these needs. Less apparent is the third leg of TIFF’s investment work: the portfolio construction that allows TIFF to harness active management risk and mold it to meet our clients’ investment needs. TIFF employs a multi-layered approach involving asset-class allocation, diversification, exposure management and focused asset-class views. This process helps us tailor a portfolio’s return potential, drawdown risk and liquidity profile, bridging the gap between active managers’ capabilities and clients’ objectives.

The materials are being provided for informational purposes only and constitute neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. These materials also do not constitute investment, legal or tax advice. Opinions expressed herein are those of TIFF and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any securities.

Discover how TIFF seeks to use idiosyncratic active managers in portfolios in search of outperformance and meet individual client risk tolerances. Jessica Bolster, CFA, from TIFF’s Portfolio Construction team, details how the strategic deployment of passive hedging instruments helps fulfill custom client liquidity and exposure needs while maintaining potential for alpha delivery.

Watch here: TIFF Spotlight Series: Risk Management

The materials are being provided for informational purposes only and constitute neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. These materials also do not constitute investment, legal or tax advice. Opinions expressed herein are those of TIFF and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any securities.

Last year, we advised members on how to take advantage of rising short-term rates and harvest yield on cash holdings. Now, as this period of rapid and frequent rate hikes may be ending, we offer our guidance on how to navigate a phase of stable and possibly declining interest rates. Specifically, we share views on:

• Adding duration to lock in yield
• Mitigating the duration risk that comes with longer-term rates

We also review the four categories we use to group cash, determined by timing of expected need.

• Reserve funds provide the greatest opportunity to extend duration and lock in yield

We recommend a strategy to take advantage of the current rate environment using Reserve funds – even as we caution that members must have some degree of confidence that those funds will not need to be accessed prior to maturity of the recommended investments.

Cash is an unglamorous – but critical – element of portfolio management. For the past couple of years yields on cash-like instruments were negligible, leading endowments to hold cash in bank accounts bearing little to no interest. This year’s increases in short-term interest rates have changed this calculus. Non-profits are now able to explore more active approaches to cash management which have the potential to realize some additional return in a market environment that has been challenging for all asset classes. TIFF explores how organizations can define cash needs and help identify what strategy may be appropriate for them.

Endowments using time-tested principles can attain excess returns and long-term results above what the global economy and indices offer, according to recently released research.

TIFF Investment Management’s Higher Education Endowment Results: Reflections on Recent Returns and Outlook for the Future whitepaper finds that institutions will attain alpha if they use equities as the cornerstone of their portfolios, alternative investments in a research-driven, intelligent way and pick public market managers using a set of key characteristics.

Read the full article, Financial Investment News: Endowments Can Obtain Alpha By Using Time-Tested Elements: Study