Hello and welcome to this edition of WealthTrack. I'm Consuelo Mack. We are breaking precedent on WealthTrack this week and devoted the entire program to one guest and what a guest we have for you. It is a WealthTrack television exclusive with David Swenson, the truly legendary Chief Investment Officer of Yale's Endowment. Who you will discover in a moment pulls no punches in his approach to investment strategy, Wall Street, the mutual fund industry and just about every other topic you engage him in.
Swenson has literally transformed the way university endowments are managed all over the country. He has been so successful and influential that he has set a new standard for a wide array of institutional money managers from pension funds to foundations. And he was a recently named President Obama's new economic recovery advisory board.
Well, how do he do this? His track record tells the story. Under his leadership, Yale's Endowment generated 20 consecutive years of positive returns from 1988 until June of 2008, the end of its fiscal year. In the decade in the June of last year, the endowment had clocked in average annual returns of 16.3 percent versus 6.5 percent for the average college endowment and 2.9 percent for the S&P 500. That performance put Swenson in the top 1 percent of all institutional money managers and added an estimated $15 billion to Yale's endowment.
Yale did not escape last year's market wrath. As of December, the portfolio lost about $6 billion or 26 percent of its value. But how did he generate those long-term results? Well, Swenson radically altered what Yale's Endowment invests in. From the traditional mix of domestic stock, bonds, and cash, he and his team switched to alternative investments. Their stake in private equity increased from under 4 percent to over 20 percent.
In real assets like timber and real estate, the allocation increased from 8.5 percent to 29.3 percent and in hedge funds from 0 to 25.1 percent. Meanwhile, the investment in domestic stocks and bonds plunged from over 70 percent to under 15 percent. The Swenson has literally written the book on university endowment management.
His recently revised edition of pioneering portfolio management and unconventional approach to institutional investment is considered the Bible for institutional money managers. And luckily, he has brought his message to individual investors with his book unconventional success, a fundamental approach to personal investment. What should our investment approach be? We're going to ask David Swenson next on Consuelo Mack Wealth Track.
Well, we are delighted to welcome him in a Wealth Track television exclusive, the Chief Investment Officer of Yale's Endowment, David Swenson. David, it's great to have you here. Thanks for joining us. It's my pleasure. Thank you.
Let me ask you about what you've done at Yale. Because 24 years ago, you arrived at Yale, you were at the tender age of 31. Their endowment was then a billion dollars. As I just said, it went up to 22.9 billion and it's now down to around 17 billion. But you decided to make some really radical changes in the mix of the portfolio. What was wrong with the old mix? What was it when you got there? And why did you decide to make those changes?
So when I arrived at Yale, it was April 1st, 1985. You think there's an April Fool's joke there somewhere? Perhaps, yeah. I was totally unencumbered with formal investment management experience. And so the first thing I did was look around and see how it was other institutions invested their funds. I saw colleges and universities had, on average, 50% of their portfolio in US stocks, 40% in US bonds and cash, and 10% in the smattering of alternatives. And if you think about that, both from a common sense perspective and from a finance theoretical perspective, it doesn't make any sense.
And first of all, diversification is a great thing. And it was even known back then in 1985 that diversification was a great thing. Even in 1985. Right. And Harry Markowitz, who's probably the father of modern portfolio theories, says diversification is a free launch. We teach our students and introductory economics. There ain't no such thing as a free launch. But diversification is. For a given level of risk, you can generate higher returns if you diversify. And diversification means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
So in 1985 at Yale and a lot of other endowments, they thought they were diversified, right? Or maybe they didn't. Maybe they were diversified when you looked at their holdings of domestic equities. And maybe they were diversified if you took a look at their holdings of bonds. But there's no way that you can argue having 50% of your assets in a single asset class, US stocks, or having 90% of your assets in US marketable securities represents diversification. The portfolio has simply failed that test.
But so how did you get from what you just described to what I just described in my opening remarks, which is a radically different portfolio? And why did you go the direction that you went in where you're really vastly underweighting the domestic stocks and bonds that you just talked about?
Well, I mean, there's one other important element that underpins the strategy. And that's that if you have a long investment horizon. Which an endowment does. Which an endowment does. And which we do when we start our careers. And it becomes increasingly shorter as we as we get older. But this principle applies to a great many individual investors as well. With a long time horizon, you should have an equity orientation. And an equity orientation because because over longer periods of time, equities are going to deliver better results.
Right. If they don't, then capitalism isn't working. And we could well be at a point where investments and equities are going to produce returns going forward that are higher than what we've seen in the past five or ten years. And we could well be in a position where bonds are priced to produce lower returns. When you see treasuries with coupons of two or two and a half or three percent, that doesn't really bode well for prospective returns.
So a lot of people listening out there are going to say, so what does David Swinson think the returns we're going to get are going to be from equities? So what do you think? Do you do you think that what do you think equity returns? What should we expect in returns from equities in the next five, ten, twenty years? Those are the questions that are really impossible.
Okay. So what we're going to do is we're going to have to think about what we're going to get in the next five or ten years. So what do we do? We're going to have to think about when we're not facing the type of crisis that we've lived through in the past six or nine or a year. Is that what you're doing now? Are you looking at the process through a macro screen essentially? And if so, so take us, take us through that process.
I'm religiously bottom up in everything that we do. Bottom up, not top down. Yeah, bottom up, not top down, but the crisis forces you to think top down in ways that would, I think, be unproductive in normal circumstances, but are absolutely necessary in the midst of a crisis. You have to think about the functioning of the credit system. You have to think about the potential impact of monetary policy and fiscal policy on markets over the next five or ten or fifteen years.
And I guess this is kind of a long way of cycling back to your question about what kind of returns do we expect from equities and perhaps other asset classes going forward. And I would say with today as a starting point, you could expect over reasonable periods of time to be rewarded for equity exposure. It's certainly a better time to put money in the stock market than a year ago or three years ago or five years ago because you've got a much more attractive entry point.
So let me ask you about what we were talking about before as well. You looked at the endowment as it was invested in 1985 and you saw that it really wasn't well diversified and that all the studies are absolutely right so that broad diversification pays off over a long periods of time. So, and this is a question you've had many times, but a lot of people are saying now diversification didn't pay off. And in fact, the Yale endowment was down 25% from June to December of last year. So, and you have an answer for that and that answer is?
Well, I think in the first instance, diversification isn't going to help in the midst of a financial crisis or at least the type of diversification that you see in institutional portfolios like Yale's. Diversification failed in 1987. It failed in 1998 and it failed again in this in this current crisis because in these panics that we experienced in 87 and 98 and the one that we're experiencing currently, only two things matter. Risk and safety. And people move away from risk and they move toward the safety of holdings of treasury securities. And that causes the price of all risky assets to go down simultaneously. And also causes the price of treasuries to go up dramatically. I happen in 87, I happen in 98 and it's happening today in a way that's far more pervasive and far more profound. And you have to move beyond the time, the immediate time of the crisis to see the benefits of diversification.
So, were there any lessons that you learned in the financial crisis that we've just come through and we're still kind of clawing our way out of investment lessons that anything that you would now do differently in the future than you did in the past?
I'm not sure that the crisis has caused us to conclude that we would do things differently but it's certainly highlighted the importance of liquidity. Now, one of the things that I've said consistently and I still continue to believe to be true is that investors get paid unreasonable amounts for accepting illiquidity in their portfolios. So hedge funds, private equity funds, right? And even if you look in the government bond market, there are illiquid treasury securities where you get a substantial premium relative to treasuries that are liquid or on the run.
And then beyond that, there are full faith and credit instruments of the US government that aren't standard treasury securities that pay you even more. And it's solely a function of liquidity. So, almost everywhere in the investment world you can find illiquid alternatives that will pay a premium rate of return. But you've got to be able to manage the portfolio through a period of crisis and make sure that you generate the liquidity that you need to support in this case Yale University and you've got to be in a position to generate the liquidity that you need to support your portfolio management activities.
I want to bring this back to the individual as well because I know you're very interested in helping the rest of us. And in unconventional success, which is your book for individuals, you stress asset allocation, diversification, who I'm important that is. A couple of major principles. So, tell us a little bit about, you know, give us kind of your thumbnail sketch of why diversification for individuals is so important and how we can figure out the appropriate asset allocation as well, which starts me as difficult.
So, I think that the same basic principles apply to institutions and individuals in terms of the importance of asset allocation and having a diversified and an equity oriented portfolio. When I started writing unconventional success, what I wanted to do was take pioneering portfolio management and essentially translate it into a book for individuals that would follow the same type of strategy that we pursued at Yale. But I knew that there would have to be different investment tools that would be available to individuals because much of what we do at Yale is in vehicles that are only open to institutions.
And I was really disappointed to find that I couldn't translate what we do at Yale directly to the portfolios that individuals hold. And because you couldn't find the kind of active management available to individuals that you can find obviously at Yale. That's exactly it. You couldn't find high quality active management for all the various asset classes that we've got at Yale for the individual investor. And so I came to the conclusion that the individual has to have a radically different portfolio.
I actually came to the conclusion that in the investment world you need to be on either one end of the continuum or the other end of the continuum. You either need to be very, very active and we are at Yale. I've got 20 investment professionals in the investment office who are devoting their careers to finding these high quality active management opportunities or you should be on the other end of the spectrum and you should be completely passive. And that's where I, that's where much of us including myself, you think I belong.
But why can't I hire 20 terrific mutual fund managers? I mean just buy different mutual funds and allocate them among the different asset allocation classes. Why doesn't that work for me but it works for you? Well the problem is that the quality of the management and the mutual fund industry is not particularly high and you pay an extraordinarily high price for that not very good management. I cite a study by Robert Nod in my book and he looks at 20 years worth of mutual fund returns and comes to the conclusion that you've got about a 15% chance, 15% chance of beating the market after fees and after taxes.
And his study suffers from what all studies suffer from something called survivor bias. You only get to look at the funds that have been in business for 20 years. But the mortality rate is stunning. There's a center for research and security prices, survivorship free database that has 30,000 mutual funds in it. Well 20,000 of them are alive and kicking and 10,000 of them are dead. Why is it that in the investment world because you know I we try to unwelter, I try to interview the top investment managers and many of them are mutual fund managers that kind of the cremdle a crem. So you know why is it that I can't as an individual you know pick kind of the best mutual fund managers just like I would pick the best doctor or the best lawyer in the financial world.
So why doesn't it work? Well there are a number of ways that you can answer the question. So we say after fees, after taxes. Well fees are too high. Right so that's something that you see throughout the entire industry. And of course we're not talking about the index funds because the index funds are the more cost way of getting exposure to the market. But why are the tax bills so high? Because turnovers too high.
The mutual fund managers are trading the portfolios as if taxes don't matter and taxes do matter. And they're trading the portfolios as if transactions cost and market impact don't matter and they do matter. And as they trade the portfolios basically what's happening is the Wall Street is you know siphoning off its slice of the pie and I guess that's a mixed metaphor sorry about that. And you know that's at the expense of the investor.
But even if you end up finding that needle in a haystack that mutual fund that is going to outperform over a long period of time you as an investor and I'm not just talking about individuals this unfortunately is true of institutions as well are likely to be motivated not by kind of pure analytical rational calculus but by fear and by greed. Morning started a study which I think is absolutely fascinating.
Ten years worth of returns for everyone of the seventeen categories of equity funds that they've got. And they compared dollar-weighted returns to time-weighted returns. Time-weighted returns of the returns you see in the prospectus of the returns you see in the advertisements. Dollar-weighted returns taken to account investor cash flows. In every one of those seventeen categories dollar-weighted returns were less than the time-weighted returns. All right.
Which meant that individuals got in after good performance and got out after bad performance and so they were buying high and selling low. So they take this mutual fund industry which produces a bunch of products that are not great to start with and then they screw it up by chasing hot performance. Right. No, absolutely. After things turn cold. Yeah. It's definitely a problem with individuals. So your. An institution too.
Right. So your recommendation for individuals basically is to is to invest in index funds. And and and the your recommended asset allocation at this point would be for an equity oriented investor would be what. So thirty percent in US stocks. Fifteen percent in treasury bonds. Fifteen percent in treasury inflation protected securities. And then in in my book I talk about twenty percent in reeds. I've got a fifteen percent allocation to foreign developed equities and a and a five percent allocation to emerging markets.
Which I think you've up to ten percent. Right. And emerging markets at this point. So I think I probably would put some more in emerging markets. Maybe move that from five to ten and take the reeds and move it from twenty to fifteen. But that would be a basic kind of equity oriented growth oriented portfolio that that would you think would provide the kind of diversification that you need.
And you know and I guess another question is for a lot of our viewers are older. They're either in retirement or they're nearing retirement. So how does that change the equation? How defensive should we get as we get closer to retirement? Well so so I think that the best way to deal with getting older and moving from let's say the accumulation phase to the consumption phase is simply to keep that risky portfolio intact. But have a portfolio that's a blend of the risky portfolio and a riskless asset like cash or treasury inflation protected securities or something like that.
And so you know when you're in your 30s or 40s or 50s and you're saving for retirement it should probably be a hundred percent in the risky portfolio. But then as you grow older and get to the point where you're going to be actually consuming what it is that you've accumulated to move out of the risky portfolio gradually into a combination of the risky portfolio and cash or treasuries.
Alright that's very helpful. So David Swenson I'm going to have to ask you now for the one investment so the one thing that we should all own some of in a longer diversified portfolio what would it be?
So we talked earlier about the notion that this current crisis is causing us to think more top down. Yes. And this is an investment that addresses some of the concerns that I have coming out of this crisis. We've had this massive fiscal stimulus, massive monetary stimulus.
And it's hard to see how that doesn't translate into pretty substantial inflation or at least a pretty substantial risk of inflation. Down the road. So at some point. Down the road at some point. So treasury inflation protected securities would be the one investment that I would put on the table that should be in every investor's portfolio. And another portfolio diversifier as well which is what they do kind of double duty.