“Head of Harvard’s Endowment Tells Board He Plans to Retire” (Wall Street Journal), regarding a manager paid over $6 million per year:
N.P. “Narv” Narvekar, the head of Harvard University’s nearly $57 billion endowment, recently told the endowment’s board he plans to retire, according to people familiar with the discussions. He has served nearly a decade in the post.
In the past three years, Harvard earned an annualized return of 8.1%, a rate that topped that of Ivy League rivals Yale and Princeton and which placed it in a tie for fourth among a group of 12 top schools, according to financial technology company Markov Processes International.
The Wall Street Journal doesn’t bother to ask Edward Tufte’s question, “Compared to What?” But ChatGPT can come to the rescue:
In other words, one can get paid $6 million per year for dramatic underperformance relative to the simplest imaginable investment strategy, dumping everything into the S&P 500 (a 23% annual return vs. the 8% achieved by Mr. Narvekar and subordinates. That’s a career almost as good as “receptionist in NVIDIA branch office”!
It’s actually worse than that, how much did Harvard spend to achieve that unimpressive rate of return? The financial services industry has to be one of the greatest scams in the world, parasitically siphoning money off from trusts, pension funds, and retirement accounts in order to label themselves geniuses and deliver worse rates of return than blind monkeys throwing darts.