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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity Podcast. Today's discussion is private equity funds, the S and P and the Ivy League. So here's the discussion today. The Ivy League endowments have been some of the biggest investors in private equity funds. In fact, three of the biggest endowments hold about 35 to 40% of their holdings in private equity funds and alternative assets. And for the last 20 years, years, this has been a great strategy. This is a strategy that was well documented in discussions in a book written by David Swenson who is the long term manager of the Yale Endowment Fund. He had just done a terrific job and outperformed most endowment funds over a long period of time. And he was one of the first big investors in the Ivy League to really introduce private equity funds and alternative investments into their investment portfolios and thereby ultimately outperformed the rest of the Ivies and most endowment funds, but by a great deal became sort of a case study in great management of endowment funds. David Swensen and wrote a great book on the subject which is also great reading. I don't recall the names, I've not read it in some time. But it was a great, great book on investing. So here's what's going on now. Now what's happened the last three years is private equity funds are getting crushed by the S and P. When you look at the past three years, the S&P index, the five hundreds up by about 19.7% a year per annum. The private equity fund universe is up by 7.4% a year per annum. And not only is it only up 7.4% compared to 19.7, that 7.4 is very illiquid. It's not really turned into distributions of cash. And of course there's all kinds of questions as to whether that's a real number or not because you can't really take the money out to really prove up the case that you're also sitting in the private Equity World on 30,000 plus exits that people want to happen and have not been able to happen because we've not been in the in a time period where valuations are going up. Rather multiples have been softening versus going up, interest rates have been pretty high versus low. And so you've been in tough environment for private equity funds and investing. So this is leading Ivy League universities who were the biggest users of private equity funds for their, their endowments, their portfolios, to now question what allocation they should have in private equity funds. Again, for people like me who didn't come into real money until the last five to 10 years plus or so and finally were able to invest in private equity funds and venture capital funds. We have found this to be a rude awakening in terms of timing, but a great lesson in investing that what seemed great for the past is not so great going forward. The other thing that's happened is there's been an absolute explosion in private equity funds. So the are not equal across the board. Some are great, some are horrible. But it really comes back to at the end of the day, the index funds, the S and P, even when private equity is outperforming, only get outperformed by a certain amount and you get much lower fees when you invest in index funds in the S and P. One other footnote on private equity, Blackstone, the largest of the private equity fund managers, is down 20% over the last year and continues to struggle as again they can't seem to find exits. That's today's discussion. Private equity, the Ivy Leagues and the S and P. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity Podcast. It is what it is. Thank you so much for listening.