Idaho's permanent endowment fund gained 3 percent in April, endowment fund investment manager Larry Johnson reported to the state Land Board this morning, for a fiscal year-to-date gain of 26.8 percent. "April was a very good month," Johnson said. And year to date, "We have outperformed our benchmark." May so far hasn't been as good, showing a drop of about 2.1 percent, "so we've given back some of that gain that we earned in April. But all of our investment managers are performing as we would expect in this environment," Johnson said. "We have been outperforming vs. other public funds."

Meanwhile, receipts from endowment lands for the first nine months of the fiscal year show an increase of 5 percent from the same period in 2010, Johnson said, "about equal to where we were in 2009." Both the endowment lands and the fund benefit the beneficiaries of the permanent endowment, the largest of which is the state's public schools.