TY - JOUR T1 - Yale’s Endowment Returns: <em>Case Study in GIPS Interpretation Difficulties</em> JF - The Journal of Alternative Investments SP - 97 LP - 103 DO - 10.3905/jai.2013.15.4.097 VL - 15 IS - 4 AU - Ludovic Phalippou Y1 - 2013/03/31 UR - https://pm-research.com/content/15/4/97.abstract N2 - For nonpublic companies, the Global Investment Performance Standard recommends using a since-inception IRR to report performance. This article shows that such a figure can be misleading. The return of the Yale Endowment in private equity is taken as a case study. It is shown that an investor with a long and “average” track record in venture capital computing its return following the GIPS recommendations would display a 30% return over a long horizon and that this number would hardly change in any year from 2000 to 2010, which is similar to what is shown in the annual reports of Yale Endowment. The results imply that it may be worth reconsidering the performance metric advocated by GIPS.TOPICS: Real assets/alternative investments/private equity, information providers/credit ratings, performance measurement ER -