A couple days ago, the Tribune reported that for the third straight quarter the church had lost billions of dollars on its investment portfolio. As it stands, on September 30, 2022, Ensign Peak Advisors, the church’s investment arm, had $40.3 billion of assets under management, down from a high of $52.3 billion on December 31, 2021.
Now frankly, that the church’s investment portfolio is down is no surprise to anybody who has made the mistake of looking at their retirement account over the last year or so; the markets in general are down. But I was curious how the church’s returns compared to the market in general. And it turns out that Ensign Peak Advisors is required to file a quarterly report listing the value of its assets under management (you can find the reports here). It’s been filing the reports for every quarter since the quarter ending December 31, 2019. So I took its quarterly reports, stuck them in an Excel spreadsheet, and graphed them.
And how has the church’s portfolio done over the last three years? Well, it’s up from three years ago, though down significantly from its peak.
Of course, while this tells us something, it doesn’t tell us much. More interesting is how the church’s portfolio has done compared to the market at large. To figure that out, I looked at the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 over the same time period. (The Dow Jones and the S&P 500 each reflect the weighted value of a basket of stocks. They aren’t the stock market, but they do give some indication of its value.)
Now, if I had used the actual values, the graph would be impossible to read. Ensign Peak Advisors’ assets are worth tens of billions of dollars; the Dow is in the tens of thousands, and the S&P 500 in the thousands. So I’ve divided each value by the appropriate amount that they’re all in the tens. If you want to see the actual value of EPA’s assets, multiply by 1 billion. For the Dow, multiply by 1,000. And for the S&P, multiply by 100.
So how does the church’s return compare to the market at large?
It reflects the broader markets almost perfectly. Like, the church would have almost the exact same return if it had just invested in a SPDR (or another similar ETF or mutual fund that reflected the value of either index).
To be clear, the church still has a lot of money; the losses largely represent paper losses and the three-year trend is still up. But in some ways, I think it’s important to see that the church’s investment return more or less matches the market. Because it undercuts any idea of the prosperity gospel. That is, the church isn’t wealthy because it is righteous. A growing portfolio doesn’t represent God’s approval. At the same time, losses don’t demonstrate divine disapproval.
Rather, they reflect the broader economic conditions. The church is subject to those conditions—the ups and downs—in the same way as any other investor. In the same way as my retirement fund and your kids’ college funds and basically every other pot of money out there.
Note: while there may be a way to embed a spreadsheet on the current version of WordPress, I don’t know off the top of my head. And I actually have to get work done so I don’t have time to figure it out. If you want to see the underlying data in the form I used it, you can view it here.
UPDATE 1/12/23: Per Chris’s suggestion and Dave’s explanation of how to do it, I have a normalized chart of the returns here. While ultimately EPA did a little better than the Dow and a little worse than the S&P, this chart emphasizes how much its returns since Q4 of 2019 have mirrored the broader market.
