Our Approach
WUIMC seeks strategic partnerships with external investment managers across the globe and considers a wide array of partners with diverse backgrounds, strategies, firm sizes, and stages of maturity. WUIMC believes bottom-up diligence leads to idiosyncratic idea generation of attractive businesses and implements an active on-the-ground fundamental diligence process to understand what the endowment owns and why.
Strength of Strategic Partnerships
- Partners represent WUIMC’s primary investment relationships with external investors
- Shared values of mutual respect and aligned interests
- Wealth generated alongside WUIMC’s partners benefits scholarship support, cutting-edge research and outstanding education
- Open lines of communication for idea generation, due diligence, facilitating connections, and ongoing evaluation of investments
Common Attributes
Disciplined Capital Base
- Diminishing returns to scale in investment management; focus on inefficient markets rather than competing in larger, more efficient markets
- Capital base should be aligned with investment opportunity set being pursued
- Calling and distributing capital based on opportunity set at hand
Investment Characteristics
- Investment opportunities are considered individually and evaluated against absolute and opportunity cost of capital
- Value-sensitive fundamental approach to find asymmetric upside provides compelling risk-reward skew
- Remain vigilant for overlapping risks and correlation to ensure sufficient endowment-level diversification is maintained
Concentration
- Investing in a portfolio of highest conviction ideas is preferred relative to investing in broad partner portfolios or new managers
- Concentrate portfolio to a relatively limited number of attractive, idiosyncratic investment ideas
Long-Term Investors
- Permanent capital ensures WUIMC can be opportunistic buyer during financial downturns
- Investment in illiquid strategies ensure partners also benefit from permanent funds; liquidity premiums can be earned in both public and private markets with a sufficiently long time horizon
- Short-term underperformance is likely when investing in a concentrated, idiosyncratic manner; every investment strategy underperforms over certain time periods, conviction in underwriting and partners is essential to rebalancing with confidence to long-term results
Impact and Ethical Value Driven
- WUIMC’s purpose is to support the university in perpetuity, investing permanent funds today to benefit future generations of student, faculty and staff
- The long-term pursuit of financial returns is inherently biased toward investments that have a highly positive impact; therefore companies whose core value proposition addresses major global social and environmental issues have the potential to generate significant returns over the coming decades
Prospective Partners
If you would like to share your investment ideas with us, please email your most recent marketing materials to:
Commitment to Diversity
The university is committed to seeking and sustaining a culturally and ethnically diverse campus environment and to the principles that promote inclusive practices. The Washington University Investment Management Company fully supports the university’s commitment and is dedicated to equal opportunity and building diverse partnerships with expertise and interest in serving the university community. WUIMC sources partnerships without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, genetic information, disability, or protected veteran status.