Yale Trims Hedge Fund It Helped Launch
Another liberated Wall Street Journal article, this time in the Washington Post, tells us that Yale University is taking its money out of Christopher Hohn's hedge fund, known as TCI, but officially Children's Investment Fund Management LLP.
Funds like these, which regularly engage in high-stakes financial deals that often involve taking huge positions in companies and then actively engaging in company management and governance issues, are one of the reasons why large university endowments are doing much better than smaller ones, a phenomenon we described back in February (University Endowments: Bigger is Much Better). But at this point Yale has decided that it has made too large a commitment to these high-risk ventures.
Other than the PR impact, the pull out of Yale's $500 million investment will have little effect on the $7.5 billion fund.
As a side note, TCI makes a practice of donating a (very small) percentage of its profits to a charity foundation, the Childrens Investment Fund Foundation, which is run by Jamie Cooper-Hohn, Christopher Hohn's wife.
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