Money-Rx Blog

David Swensen, Chief Investment Officer for Yale University's endowment fund outpaced all the other big endowments, with a 28% gain for the fiscal year ended on June 30, with the endowment's size going up from 418 billion to $22.5 billion.

Source: Wall Street Journal
Data - Wilshire TUCS

The article goes on to state that he gets the credit for shaking up the industry and concentrating on alternative investments. While it would have been nice to know how his investments have performed since the subprime fallout, the achievement is nevertheless noteworthy, given the size of the endowment and the fact that he beat Harvard in earnings by 5 percentage points, and A&M, whose endowment is closest to Yale's in terms of size, by 10 points - That's huge.

Note to prospective fund managers with their noses still buried inside textbooks - Study how your Professors are investing their (and your) money. And if you want to take it even further, and do comprehensive comparisons of the performance of institutional assets, you can make use of Wilshire's Analytics' Trust Universe Comparison Service (TUCS) .

And another absolutely moronic idea from Capitol Hill, where the U.S. Senate finance committee is hatching a plan to force Universities to increase aid as endowments grow, which essentially means that you get punished for better asset performance....