The Williams College Investment Office is the subsidiary office of

Williams College Williams College is a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was established as a men's college in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams, a colonist from the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was kill ...

responsible for managing the College's endowment of over US $4.2 billion. The Office is located in

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

, Massachusetts. Its Chief Investment Officer is Collette Chilton.

Founding

In 2006,

established the Investment Office to manage the endowment. In the early 2000s, the endowment had exceeded US $1 billion and the College decided more complex investment management was required to continue to grow the fund. The College hired Collette Chilton as Chief Investment Officer and set up an office in Boston, Massachusetts.

Organization and structure

The Investment Office has a staff of nine people who directly oversee the management of the College's portfolio. Advising the staff are three Advisory Committees, made up of Williams alumni or parents with financial expertise. Overseeing all is the Investment Committee, consisting of eight members, who is finally responsible for the Investment Pool. On the staff level, the Chief Investment Officer remains Collette Chilton. The Co-Chairs of the Marketable Assets Advisory Committee are

Ole Andreas Halvorsen Ole Andreas Halvorsen (born 1961) is a Norwegian billionaire hedge fund manager. He is the CEO and a co-founder of the Connecticut-based hedge fund, Viking Global Investors.

and Elizabeth Robinson. The Co-Chairs of the Non-Marketable Assets Advisory Committee are Timothy Barrows and Jonathan Sokoloff. The Co-Chairs of the Real Assets Advisory Committee are John Foster and Robert Pinkard. The Chair of the Investment Committee is

Jonathan Kraft Jonathan A. Kraft (born March 4, 1964) is an American businessman. He is president of The Kraft Group, the holding company of the Kraft family's business interests. He is also the president of the New England Patriots and investor-operator of the ...

Investment strategy

The Investment Office does not directly invest in any stocks. Rather, the staff hires managers to invest the different assets in the portfolio. There are ten asset classes: global long equity, global long/short equity, absolute return,

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

, buyouts, real assets,

real estate Real estate is property consisting of land and the buildings on it, along with its natural resources such as crops, minerals or water; immovable property of this nature; an interest vested in this (also) an item of real property, (more general ...

, investment grade fixed income, non-investment grade fixed income, and

cash In economics, cash is money in the physical form of currency, such as banknotes and coins. In bookkeeping and financial accounting, cash is current assets comprising currency or currency equivalents that can be accessed immediately or near-im ...

. The Office has a long-term return objective of 5% plus inflation. Overall, the Investment Office had a

rate of return In finance, return is a profit on an investment. It comprises any change in value of the investment, and/or cash flows (or securities, or other investments) which the investor receives from that investment, such as interest payments, coupons, cas ...

of -1.5% in the 2016 fiscal year, and an overall annual return of 7.3% for the ten years since the office was established.

References

{{reflist * * * * Williams College Financial endowments