Our Aim
The True North Institute was established to serve as a respected source of in-depth institutional investment insights. It builds upon the foundational investment principles and processes developed over Stan Miranda’s 24-year journey in creating Partners Capital, one of the leading outsourced investment offices.
Our Audience
True North Institute's audience includes Chief Investment Officers of large and small institutional pools of capital. This includes sovereign wealth funds, pensions, insurance companies, foundations, endowments and family offices.
Featured Research
Here we feature a selection of the True North Institute's most important and influential research. The current focus of True North Institute is the global energy transition, artificial intelligence and the futility of most active investment activities.
Institutional Investors Energy Transition Investment Policy Options
Guidelines for Institutional Investors Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing policy must be, in principle, a good idea for all investors to the extent that incorporating potential impacts into the evaluation of investment opportunities may have investors avoiding negative surprises dragging down asset values or have investors exploiting investment opportunities presented by this megatrend. But…
Clean Hydrogen Investment Framework
The most important things that all investors need to know about clean hydrogen There are few energy transition topics more controversial than clean hydrogen’s likely role, and it has huge investment implications, whether you are a public or private equity investor, and especially if you are a venture capital investor. For this reason, we spent…
Chart of the Month
Do investors in the energy transition have to accept concessionary returns? We all know about the disastrous investment performance of cleantech investments in the first round from 2005 to 2013, where approximately 50% of what was invested was never seen again. It seems, this time it is different if we take note of what the CREO Syndicate has just published called “Understanding the Climate Financing Gap.” Critically, they adjust Pitchbook data to include only those climate funds who invest primarily in energy transition sectors as many so-called “climate funds” invest in sectors outside the core ET sectors of power, transport, industry, materials and agriculture. In this report they state that “Analysis of net IRR returns delivered by climate funds over the period 2010 to 2023 shows general alignment with the broader market, with one notable exception: growth equity funds.
CREO analysis using PitchBook Data, Inc. (retrieved March 2024)
Institutional Investor Performance
This is our first report in a series that will rank and compare investment performance across institutional cohorts including endowments, foundations, sovereign wealth funds, pensions and family offices.
In this first report, for 12 of the leading US university endowment portfolios, we look at the declining trend of annual alpha from 1.2% over the last 10 years, falling to 0.1% over the three years ending June 2023.
