How does this tiny school do it?

Market Watch reports.

How tiny Grinnell College’s endowment outperformed the Ivy League

Grinnell College, a small liberal-arts school in the middle of Iowa, is giving much larger colleges a run for their money, literally.

In 2014, the school’s $1.8 billion endowment posted a 20.4% return — tying it with the University of Minnesota for the best one-year performance among the largest 100 U.S. colleges, according to Bloomberg calculations. That put tiny, but well-regarded, Grinnell ahead of Ivy League powerhouses like Harvard and Yale.

The performance of Grinnell’s endowment fund, which finances about 55% of the school’s operating budget each year, is a testimony to high-conviction investing, the hands-on approach that focuses on a handful of investments and sometimes runs against the grain of typical benchmarks or managers.

Scott Wilson, Grinnell’s 38-year-old chief investment officer, told MarketWatch that his small team is focused on finding one or two great investment ideas a year. “That’s a very doable strategy,” he said. “If they’re trying to find 100 great investments a year, that’s impossible.”