Our investment model and philosophy reflect the perpetual horizons of the institutions we serve.
We invest to generate long-term, real returns that support our client investors' spending needs today and create additional value for future generations. To achieve these goals we must carefully mitigate risk and avoid significant investment loss. As investors behind the investors, the GEM team brings hands-on, time-tested endowment management skills, giving us an advantage in identifying talented managers and understanding the likely drivers of their performance.
Diversifying appropriately and patiently investing at a discount to intrinsic value are foundational tenets of endowment investing. While these objectives are necessary, they are not sufficient for success. Generating compelling returns also requires independent thinking, ingenuity, and intelligent risk taking. We encourage these behaviors by cultivating a creative, adaptive approach within a structured process.
Short term, we have little control over the outcomes of our decisions. What we can control, however, is how we make those decisions. Consequently, we continually scrutinize our investment beliefs and approach to ensure a robust, repeatable process that we believe will provide the highest likelihood of long-term success.
Within our program, we emphasize idea generation, investment sourcing, and astute structuring. We believe that finding quality ideas requires investigating a large quantity of prospective investments, and we depend on our sourcing methods, many proprietary, to uncover opportunities not readily found by others.
Successfully executing our investment approach requires the discretion that our structure affords, allowing for real-time decision-making within an agreed policy framework. In our model, there is no ambiguity; we are accountable for our results.