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.
How Climate Tech First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) Projects Get Financed
This white paper explores how 18 pioneering climate technology companies overcame the notorious “valley of death” – the funding gap between proven pilot projects and full-scale commercial deployment. It identifies a clear funding pattern for First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) facilities: a blend of early-stage venture capital, government grants or loans, and strategic corporate investments or offtake agreements.…
OpenMinds: Accelerating Energy & Climate Progress
The “Accelerating Energy and Climate Progress” document from OpenMinds addresses the dual challenge of meeting growing global energy demands while reducing emissions. It highlights that while energy consumption and access to it have improved global living standards, increasing CO2 concentrations are causing dangerous climate change. OpenMinds emphasises the need to change the current trajectory of…
Chart of the Month
We estimate that approximately $7.9 trillion of market value has been created in the last 30 years from energy transition companies, mostly in the EV, battery, solar and wind sectors. We further estimate that $5.9T of this has been grown inside publicly listed “brown” companies turning “green” such as Iberdrola ($118B), SSE ($28B), China Yangtze Power ($102B) and PG&E ($30B). $2.0T of value creation has been in wholly new companies created primarily over the last 30 years, with $1T in the form of Tesla, $161B in Chinese battery producer CATL and $141B in Chinese EV company BYD. The bulk of other large energy transition success stories have less than $20B in market cap today and only 10 of these with more than $10B (<$20B).
Institutional Investor Performance
This table shows our estimates of the alpha or outperformance of 12 of the largest US university endowments. Alpha is calculated against each endowment’s apparent risk-adjusted investible and non-investible benchmarks over 1, 3, 5 and 10-year periods ending 30 June 2024.
The attached downloadable whitepaper provides the detailed analysis for the 10 years ending 30 June 2023 (so one year out of date).
