Swiss funds-of-funds firm Gottex Fund Management is launching a fund that will emulate the investment principles of U.S. “super endowments.”

The new fund will emulate the investment principles of successful U.S. university endowment funds, such as Harvard and Princeton. It will allocate about 65% to alternative investments. The alternative part of the portfolio will cut across all asset classes: hedge funds, private equity, commodities, long-only equity, fixed income, real estate and other real assets.

Harvard Management, long the model for university endowment funds currently with about $35 billion in assets, increased more than 20% year over year in 2007.

William Landes is helming the new fund. Landes joined Gottex from Boston-based 2100 Capital, his hedge fund specialty firm that Old Mutual Asset Management bought in 2005. Before that Landes was a money manager at Putnam Investments, which helped incubate 2100 Capital.

Landes’ experience with broad-based funds was part of what led him to Gottex, he told HedgeFund.net.

“This is something I’ve been doing for over 15 years,” Landes said. “So when Joe Gottschalk [CEO of Gottex] and I began talking about the possibility of me coming over, we started talking about ways to provide sophisticated investment for high net worth individuals.”

In preparation for the new fund launch, Landes said his team determined that a 65% exposure to alternative investments combined with traditional investments did the best in the long term.

For the short-term, Landes said, the challenging environment for alternative products like private equity and hedge funds was where the opportunities lie.

“If I put my investor hat on,” he said, “I would say that if I have a six to nine-month tactical horizon, global equity markets and some alternative markets are actually where I want to be.”

Gottex had about $15.6 billion in assets under management as of June 30.