US Endowment Study: Top 17 Funds Asset Allocation, Risk, and Risk-Adjusted Returns

CAIA Association

Mila Sherman

Research

8 Pages

CAIA Association examines how the top 17 U.S. endowments differ in allocation, risk, and efficiency. The key point is that strong headline returns can hide big differences in volatility, factor exposure, and risk-adjusted results.

Key Takeaways

Scale Has Grown: The top 17 endowments grew from roughly $247bn in FY2016 to about $426bn by FY2025, a gain near 70% to 73%.
Equity Risk Dominates: Even with 60%+ in alternatives, 86% of ex-ante volatility across large endowments still came from equity factor risk.
Efficiency Gap Persists: The Over $5B cohort had a 0.56 Sharpe and 0.76 Information Ratio, versus 0.90 and 1.43 for the Maple 8.
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