“Diversify the portfolio to reduce risk.” This financial adage is known to asset managers worldwide, who use its mathematical equivalent to maximize investment returns every day. It is also generally practiced by Stanford Student Enterprises (SSE), the financial branch of the ASSU, which manages the ASSU’s $18 million endowment.

All Stanford students benefit from a healthy ASSU endowment, which indirectly funds many aspects of student life. Unfortunately, SSE has been managing this endowment without a CEO for several weeks and still lacks permanent leadership in its most important position. Without a long-term, committed CEO of SSE, our endowment’s continued growth is at risk.

Hiring a new CEO would clearly remove this risk, but that solution is currently infeasible. Alternatively, this risk could be reduced by additional student oversight, just as a portfolio of large-cap stocks can have its risk diversified away with the addition of a small-cap allocation. Ideally, this student oversight would be a team of trained undergraduates serving under an appropriate organizational structure.

Fortunately, there is such a team on campus: the Cardinal Fund, an academic class in which students manage a portion of the ASSU’s endowment. And since the risk of a declining endowment hurts all students, I urge students of all majors to join the Cardinal Fund and play their part in ensuring the continued growth of our endowment.

Managing our endowment is a serious endeavor, so membership in the Cardinal Fund is a two-year commitment. As a result, the application is targeted at sophomores, but any undergraduate willing to fulfill the two-year commitment can apply to join at cardinalfund.org. The application is due May 20 and there are no prerequisites to apply.

To be clear, the Cardinal Fund does not remove SSE’s need for a permanent CEO, since the Fund manages only the small-cap allocation of the endowment. This allocation is 6 percent of the total portfolio — a seemingly small portion, but in absolute terms, this is roughly $1 million.

With this allocation, our first year of investment management has largely been successful. From April 20, 2015 (our inception date) to April 20, 2016, our Fund has generated returns that are not significantly different from the analogous small-cap funds trading under the tickers IWM and VRTIX. In fact, our Fund has had a marginally better return than these two benchmarks.

To reiterate: Unpaid Stanford undergraduates, under the guidance of Graduate School of Business faculty Jonathan Berk and Kevin Mak, generated the same returns as professionals working at BlackRock and Vanguard. At the same time, we have learned the principles of corporate finance while serving as overseers of part of our student endowment. This class is an incredible learning opportunity, especially when considering that GSB professors rarely teach undergraduate classes.

I have highly enjoyed the past two years serving as a member of the Cardinal Fund, and I strongly encourage anyone interested to apply.

— Matthew Chen

Matthew Chen is a senior at Stanford University. The above remarks are entirely his own and do not reflect any official position of the Cardinal Fund.