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The Yale Endowment's Biggest ETF Investment And The Logic Behind It

TedTed
edited July 2014 in Fund Discussions
FYI: The ivory tower wizards running one of the U.S.'s largest university endowments have woefully lagged the stock market recently.
Regards,
Ted
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Comments

  • "SPY carries a P-E ratio of 17, price-book of 2.4 and a dividend yield of 2.29%."

    According to M*, SPY has a dividend yield of 1.83%
  • I thought endowments generally invested conservatively?
  • edited July 2014

    I thought endowments generally invested conservatively?

    Me too.
    I thought the old standard was a 60/40 allocation.
    60% stocks. 40% bonds.

    Now that has been replaced with a lot of alternative investments like private equity, hedge funds, merger arbitrage, etc, but still JohnChisum's point remains.

    And the person in charge of the Yale endowment is David Swensen. He's a big believer in multiple asset classes that don't correlate well with each other.

    FWIW, he wrote a book for the non-professional investor, and recommended the following asset allocation:

    20% REIT
    15% TIPS
    15% US Treasury bonds
    30% US stocks
    20% foreign stocks (including a dedicated emerging markets allocation)

    all passively invested, meaning with index funds.

  • Lecture by David Swenson to Robert Shiller's Financial Markets class where Swenson explains why he feels the 60/40 model is broken for endowments and other portfolios with an unlimited time horizon.
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