July 21, 2016

Like many investment vehicles, Harvard’s $36.9 billion endowment fund and its manager, Harvard Management Company (HMC), took a hard hit during and after the financial crisis of 2008, losing 22% within four months, according to the New York Times.

In response, the fund sought to increase the diversity of its holdings into alternative investments not highly correlated to general markets. And under the leadership of Head of Alternative Assets, Andrew Wiltshire, Harvard has done just that. As of 2014, Farmland Investor Center reports that Harvard’s portfolio has agricultural and timber holdings throughout the U.S., New Zealand, Romania, Latvia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Panama.

That same year, Bloomberg estimated that “forests, farms, and other natural resources” accounted for more than 10%, or $3.3 billion, of Harvard’s total endowment fund investments, reported The Harvard Crimson. Meanwhile, the natural resources portfolio grew to a value of $4 billion by 2015, according to Bloomberg.

After being with the fund and overseeing this expansion of its natural resources portfolio since 2001, and guiding the portfolio to an annualized return of 11.6% for the ten year period to June 30, 2014, Andrew Wiltshire retired from Harvard Management Co.

But that does not mean he is out of the business.

Partnering with former Harvard Management Co. colleagues, Oliver Grantham and Alvaro Aguirre, Bloomberg reports that Wiltshire is co-founding Folium Capital – a new Boston-based investment firm looking to raise $500 million to commit to agriculture and timber investments.

The firm will be seeking $250 million each to agriculture and timberland, according to unnamed sources. Investment geographies will range across North America, Latin America, Easter Europe, the Nordic regions, Oceania and the Iberian Peninsula according to an investor presentation seen by Bloomberg News.

Wiltshire, Grantham, and Aguirre are not the first to recently leave Harvard and begin new firms. In early 2016, it was announced that Satu Parikh and Marco Barrozo, both former senior managers with the endowment left to launch HSQ Capital, a hedge fund geared to leverage commodity pricing inefficiencies and fixed-income markets. Other funds that were created by former Harvard Management Co. executives include Adage Capital Management, Highfields Capital Management, and Convexity Capital Management.

—

Lynda Kiernan