Stock markets love to take everyone by surprise, and less than a year from now a very big surprise will have played out: Stocks will be a lot higher by June as the economy moves into overheat mode. How do we get from the current grim state of affairs to this very different world? Two steps.

As donations to nonprofits have decreased during the Covid-19 pandemic, those with endowments are turning to these funds to help them survive the crisis. But not all endowments are created equal. Factors such as size, management, and investment allocation significantly affect how much revenue endowments generate.

“The parallels between video games and day trading is becoming closer and closer,” says Andrew Lo, a finance professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “For many gamers, particularly the younger ones who are not used to trading and don't fully understand the impact of significant losses and gains on their psychophysiology, it could have some significant adverse consequences.”

One thing we’ve learned from the Covid-19 crisis is that there can be a conflict between resilience and optimisation. If, for example, the NHS had had lots of spare beds, ventilators and PPE equipment before the pandemic began it would have been more resilient and better able to cope with the crisis. But this would at the time have appeared sub-optimal, as these resources would have been wasted for months.

More than 35,000 nonprofits have investment funds, with $800 billion in assets managed. The funds generate an average return – net of administrative expenses – of 5.3 percent, according to The Risk, Reward, and Asset Allocation of Nonprofit Endowment Funds, a research paper from Andrew W. Lo and Egor Matveyev of the MIT Sloan School of Management and Stefan Zeume of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In the past two months alone, Wall Street investors have pumped billions into a handful of biotech companies in the early stages of producing vaccines or drugs to combat the novel coronavirus. Some of these companies are pursuing promising treatments, experts say, but others are likely to strike out on finding a cure. The result: a coronavirus investment bubble that's already approaching nearly $200 billion in stock market value.

Yet, little is known about which NPOs have endowment funds and how they invest. A new paper by MIT Sloan School of Management Prof. Andrew W. Lo and Visiting Prof. Egor Matveyev sheds light on the “black box of endowments,” revealing that bigger funds and NPOs with stricter governance generate higher returns.

How important is it for endowments to have a chief investment officer? Not very, according to new research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Illinois.

The study, which examined characteristics linked to higher returns at nonprofit endowment funds, found no “systematic evidence” that funds with dedicated CIOs perform any better than endowments without dedicated CIOs. Furthermore, compensation for CIOs was found unrelated to returns, according to authors Andrew Lo and Egor Matveyev of MIT and Stefan Zeume, a business school professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

For Jim Simons, history is repeating itself, at least when it comes to meltdowns in the quant fund world. Computer models at Renaissance Technologies, the firm founded by the mathematician and former codebreaker, misfired when volatility surged this year, contributing to a first-quarter loss at its largest hedge fund. The beta models, which help determine portfolio exposure at funds for outside investors, “in recent volatile markets have not performed as expected,” Renaissance said in a March 30 filing.

LAFAYETTE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Journal Of Investment Management (JOIM) and New Frontier Advisors LLC today announced the winners of the 2019 Harry M. Markowitz Award. The winners are finalized by a Special Selection Panel comprised of Nobel Prize Laureates.

The Markowitz Award is sponsored jointly by JOIM and New Frontier Advisors and recognizes the seminal and transcendent impact of Dr. Markowitz’s work as a financial economist and mathematician on both theoretical finance and the practice of asset management. The award was established to honor his legacy and to support future research and innovation in practical asset management. Candidates for the annual award are chosen from among papers published in JOIM in a calendar year. An honorarium of $10,000 is bestowed for the winning paper. Two additional finalist papers receive a Special Distinction Award along with a $5,000 honorarium.

2019 Markowitz Award Winners

This year’s top recognition was awarded to “Funding Long Shots,” by John Hull, Professor of Derivatives and Risk Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Andrew W. Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor of Finance and the Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Roger M. Stein, Adjunct Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

John Hull, Andrew W. Lo and Roger M. Stein were named winners of the $10,000 Harry M. Markowitz Award for their paper, "Funding Long Shots."

The award was announced Tuesday by the Journal of Investment Management and New Frontier Advisors in a joint statement.

The paper explores the increasing difficulty in funding long shots, which the authors call investment-related projects with "low probabilities of success, significant delays before cash flows are realized, large initial investments and large payoffs — relative to up-front payments — in the unlikely event of success," according to the statement.

The S&P 500 also closed at a new high, gaining 0.2% to end at 3,289, while the Nasdaq held steady at 9,258.

The gains came as the US and China signed a deal aimed at easing tensions between the two economic giants.

Shares have enjoyed weeks of steady rises, during which markets seemed impervious to bad news.

The three major US indexes rose about 30% in 2019, recording their best year since 2013 despite average earnings growth estimated at a far more modest 1%.

Most analysts are predicting further gains in 2020.

The markets and investing have been compared to Darwinian selection and evolution by a number of observers (e.g., Jonathan Burton, 2009; Chris Dillow, 2014; Andrew Lo, quoted by Peter Dizikes, 2017; Charles Munger, quoted by Lee Kuan Yew, 2017; Justin Kuepper, 2019). Andrew Lo of MIT's Sloan School of Management has written a thorough and illuminating book on the subject, laying out an argument for a behavioral investment theory that can serve as a better explanation of market behavior than mere random walk theory alone (Andrew Lo, 2017; Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought; Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 483 p.).

Listen to Part 1 of our latest sponsored Top Traders Round Table podcast featuring Andrew Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Sol Waksman, the President of the Backstop BarclayHedge Division. These guests have years of experience in the world of investing and have watched the finance industry as it has gone through many changes.

Vanguard Group founder Jack Bogle, who died on Jan. 16 at age 89, ushered in an era of low-cost investing for the many. He launched the first index mutual fund for individual investors at the end of 1975 for the purpose of passive investing: Skip the stockpicking, save on fees, and simply ride the ups and downs of the overall market. His fringe idea has become mainstream. Sometime this year, analysts at Morningstar Inc. say, assets in passively managed U.S. equity funds are likely to surpass assets in actively managed ones. By pushing down fees across the industry, Bogle may have saved American investors $1 trillion over his lifetime, calculates Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Eric Balchunas.