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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (91290)	6/20/2001 8:17:59 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

To All, I've just moved into The Bunker at work. Actually, I like it better. Our old office had the best view in town, but it was right across the hall from operations, so it was like Grand Central Station. People come in to withdraw checks all day long. And they always blow my cover by asking, "who's the guy across the hall asleep on his desk?" <g> 2 1/2 weeks until Hartford, then 3 weeks of harassment, then I'm back in the investment swing of things. I'm as eager as a teenaged boy on FrauerMallerStrasse in Amsterdam. <g>

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (91290)	6/23/2001 10:46:25 AM
From: George Acton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Knowing how frustrating it is for you not to vent concerning individual stocks, I was going to do it for you the evening that a certain Boise, Idaho semiconductor firm announced tragic earnings. Better I didn't post it, since the stock refused to die yesterday. The role model for this thing seems to be Kenny in "South Park". Or if you're short, Jason in the "Elm Street" horror flicks. The NYT writes up the Harvard endowment in the Sunday magazine. The only news is that they still have a lot of it in an internal hedge fund, with Wall Street type salaries and bonuses for the managers. This was successful when Barron's wrote them up a few years ago, so there's no reason they should have changed it. If you want the key figure of how well they've done over the years, it seems to be embedded in a chart in the "multimedia" appendix. There's been a big appreciation of capital since 1974, but about half of that is inflation. Ex that, they seem to have tripled the base, which indicates 5-6% real return. The curve looks smooth, so they have a fine Sharpe ratio. It's a very shallow article, because there are few comparative figures for other universities. Harvard is big and they run a medical school, which is expensive. Rice is probably way richer in endowment per student. Stanford has benefitted from some desirable real estate. The "appendix" shows balance sheets and cash flows, but I can't even understand those for a corporation. How am I gonna know what these numbers should look like? How many analysts follow universities? Most of the article is finger sucking about whether they should dip into capital to lower tuition or set up idealistic programs such as extensions ("Harvard in Ravenna"? Harvard in Harare, Zimbabwe"? I don't think so.) The article doesn't consider the issue of the effectiveness of the money they spend and the return to society. For the productivity of the science departments and the med school, they certainly rate an A+. If, only as a hypothetical, there were an overprivileged dunce who was destined to be President, then exposure to the B School might arguably be beneficial to us all. OTOH, if we could send them a bill for the harm that Henry Kissinger has caused, there'd be padlocks and legal notices on all the buildings.