I already talked about our guest today, but this is David Swenson, who, remember I said he was the inventor of the swap, which is a real claim to fame because Swaps total in the hundreds of millions. It's amazing. I thought this was going to be a polite introduction. I used to be proud of the swap thing, but that was before the crisis. Well, that's financial innovation. innovation. I think Swaps are very important in new We've been talking about that.
So anyway, just to remind you, David Swenson came to Yale in 1985 when the portfolio was worth less than a billion, less than one billion. And as of June 2010, it's 16.7 billion. And climbing. And climbing. Okay. This is a financial crisis, but between 2009 and 2010, the portfolio went up 1.4 billion. So there's no crisis out here. Well, there was a little hitch at one point, but that kind of thing happens.
And David Swenson also, I take pride in training young people and finance. David Swenson has done the same with many young people. And notably Andrew Golden, who heads the Princeton portfolio, is one of your trainees. And he's had a similarly almost as spectacular record as well. Well, with that introduction, I will turn it over to David Swenson. Thank you.
So I've been at Yale for, I guess, more than 25 years now. And for most of the 25 years, if there was any publicity, the publicity was pretty good. For the past couple of years, it's been a little bit mixed. And I liked it better before the publicity was mixed. I liked it when every article that you would read had something great to say about the Yale approach or the Swenson model.
But after the collapse of Lehman brothers and the onset of the financial crisis, it didn't take very long for the negative headlines to appear. In my back, I carry around this barren's article that appeared in November 2008. And the title was Crash Course. And it talked about college's cutting budgets, freezing hiring, scaling back building projects. And it blamed the Yale model and the Swenson approach for being too aggressive.
They said in barren's that university endowment should own more stocks and bonds, less than alternatives, because the alternatives provided too little diversification and too little liquidity. So I thought what we could do today is jumping off point is talk about what it is that barren's meant when they were talking about the Swenson approach or the Yale model. And I think when it was successful, it was the Yale model and when it failed, it was the Swenson approach, which I really don't like. There's an asymmetry there.
I keep thinking that I should name it after one of the guys in the office. And maybe it should be the Takahashi approach instead of the Swenson approach. It's time for him to have some glory, right? Talk about what it is that barren's meant by the Swenson approach or the Yale model and see whether indeed the criticisms that they lovey, that there's too little diversification and too little liquidity whether those criticisms are valid.
But to do that, let's go back to 1985 when I first arrived at Yale. It was April 1st, 1985 for those of you who care about April Fool's Day. I came from a six year stint on Wall Street and I had no significant portfolio management experience.
As Bob mentioned in his introduction, I'd been involved with structuring the first swap transaction in 1981 when I worked for Solomon Brothers. It was a swap between IBM and the World Bank and later Lehman Brothers hired me to set up their swap operations. So generally what I was doing on Wall Street was working with new financial technologies and being involved with the early days of swap transactions.
It was a much smaller market than it was hundreds of trillions. It was a much less efficient market then so the trades were incredibly profitable. Commodities swaps today, trade on razors, thin margins and tend not to be anywhere near as profitable as they were when the markets were less efficient.
How'd I end up at Yale? Well one of my dissertation advisors called me and said they needed somebody to manage the portfolio and after coming to New Haven and talking to them about the job I realized that my heart wasn't in Wall Street, my heart was in the world of education and at Yale in particular so I came up here amazed that I was responsible as chief investment officer for this portfolio. It was less than a billion but close to a billion.
And the first thing I did was I looked around to see what other people were doing. That seemed like a sensible way to approach the portfolio management problem. There must be some smart people at Harvard or Princeton or Stanford putting together portfolios that make sense for endowed institutions.
What I saw was that colleges and universities had on average 50% of their portfolio in US stocks, 40% of their portfolio in US bonds and cash and 10% in a smattering of alternatives. Even though I had no direct portfolio management experience, I had studied at Yale and Jim Tobin and Bill Brainerd were my dissertation advisors and I understood some of the basic principles of corporate finance.
And one of the first things that you learn when you study finance theory is that diversification is a great thing. Jim Tobin won the Nobel Prize in part for his work related to the subject of diversification in fact when a New York Times reporter asked Jim to explain in layman's terms what it was that he won the Nobel Prize for. Jim said, well I guess you could say don't put all your eggs in one basket.
I didn't know you got a Nobel Prize for that but that's. We've told our students that that's playing with those types of things. Okay so if it goes back 1802 Jim was just picking up on the vernacular and used it as a way to describe what it is that he did his work for. And Harry Markowitz who actually did a fair amount of his work on modern portfolio theory at Yale's Coles Foundation has said that diversification is a free lunch.
I mean didn't you learn and introduce economics and intermediate that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Economists are always talking about trade offs if you want more of this you have less of that. Well with diversification that's not true right. If you diversify your portfolio for a given level of return you can generate that return at lower risk. If you diversify for a given level of risk you can generate higher return. So diversification is this great thing. It's a free lunch. It's something that everybody should embrace.
Well if you look at the portfolios that I saw in the world of endowment investing in the mid 1980s they weren't diversified right. If you've got half of your assets in a single asset class US stocks and you have 90% of your assets in US marketable securities you're not diversified. Half your assets in a single asset class is way too much. And the 90% that are in stocks and bonds under many circumstances will respond to the same driver of returns interest rates in the same way right.
Lower interest rates mathematically are good for bonds and lower interest rates lower the discount rate that you use to discount future earnings streams so they're probably going to be good for stocks too. And vice versa. And the second thing I thought about was the notion that endowments have a longer time horizon than any investor that I know. And if you've got a long time horizon you should be rewarded by accepting equity risks because those equity risks even though they might not reward you in the short run will reward you in the long run.
So with a mission as a manager of an endowment to preserve the purchasing power of the portfolio and perpetuity I expected that other endowments would have substantial equity exposures to take advantage of the fact that in the long run that's where you're going to generate the greatest returns. And if you think about those endowment allocations that I saw in the mid 1980s 40% of the assets were in bonds and cash which are low expected return assets.
So the portfolios that I saw when I got to Yale failed the basic common sense tests of diversification and equity orientation and prompted me and my colleagues to go down a different path to put together a portfolio that had reasonable exposure to equities and put together a portfolio that was sensibly diversified.
So I'd like to talk about how it is that we got from where we were in the mid 80s to where we ended up in the early to mid 90s and where we remained today. And to do that I'd like to put it in the context of the basic tools that we have available to us as investors.
And these tools are the tools that you can employ if you're managing your portfolio as an individual or the tools that I have to employ when I'm managing Yale's portfolios and institutional investor. And they're basically three things that you can do to affect your returns.
First of all, you can decide what assets you're going to have in the portfolio and in which proportions you'll hold those assets. So that's the asset allocation decision. How much in domestic stocks, how much in foreign stocks, how much in real estate, if you're an institutional investor, how much in timber, how much in leverage buyouts, how much in venture capital.
Fundamental decision of how it is that the portfolio assets are allocated. The second thing that you can do is make a market timing decision. So if you've established targets for your portfolio, targets with respect to how much in domestic stocks, how much in domestic bonds, how much in foreign stocks.
And then, because in the short run, you think that let's say domestic stocks are expensive and foreign stocks are cheap, you decide to hold more foreign stocks and less in domestic stocks. That bet, that short term bet against your long term targets is a market timing decision. And the returns that are attributable to that deviation from your long term targets are the returns that would be attributable to market timing.
And the third source of returns has to do with security selection. So you've got your allocation to domestic equities. If you buy the market and the way that you buy the market is to buy an index fund that holds all of the securities in the market in the proportions that they exist in the market. If you buy the market, then your returns to security selection are zero, because your portfolio is going to perform in line with the market. But if you make security selection bets, if you decide that you want to try and beat the market, then that bet or that series of bets will define your returns attributable to security selection.
So if you decide that you think the prospects are a Ford, are superior to the prospects of GM, well you want to overweight Ford and underweight GM. And if that turns out to be a good bet and you're rewarded because Ford outperforms in GM underperforms, then you have a positive return to security selection. If the converse is true, then you have a negative return to security selection. But one of the really important facts about security selection is that if you play for free, it's a zero sum game. Because if you've overweighted Ford and underweighted GM, there has to be some other investor or group of investors that are underweight Ford and overweight GM because this is all relative to the market. And so if you're overweight Ford and underweight GM and somebody else's underweight Ford and overweight GM, about the end of the day, the amount by which the winner wins equals the amount by which the loser loses. And so it's a zero sum game.
But of course, if you take into account the fact that it costs money to play the game, it turns into a negative sum game. And the negative sum is the amount that's siphoned off by Wall Street. And Wall Street takes its pound of flesh in the form of market impact and in the form of commissions and the form of fees that are charged to manage the portfolio actively. And then sometimes they even fees to consultants to choose the managers. So there's an enormous drain from the system that causes the active investment activity to be a negative sum game for those investors that decide to play.
So let's take these in turn and start out with asset allocation. Fessed allocation is far and away the most important tool that we have available to us as investors. And when I first started thinking about this 25 years ago, I thought, well, maybe there is some financial law that says that asset allocation is the most important tool because it seemed pretty obvious that that was going to be the most powerful determinant of returns. But it turns out that it's not really a law of finance that asset allocation dominates returns. It's a behavioral result of how it is that we as individual investors or we as institutional investors manage our portfolios.
If I make it back to my office traversing these icy sidewalks, I could go back. I could take Yale's $17 or $18 billion and put it all on Google stock. Now if I did that, I'm not sure how long I'd keep my job. That might be fun for a while, but that would probably be damaging to my employment prospects. But if I did that, asset allocation would have almost nothing to say about Yale's returns. It would be the idiosyncratic return associated with Google that would determine whether the endowment would up or down or stayed flat. And so security selection would be the overwhelming, important determinant of returns for Yale's endowment.
And if it wasn't exciting enough to sell everything and put it all on Google stock, maybe I could go back to my office and start day trading bond futures. Well, if I took Yale's entire $17 or $18 billion and started trading bond futures with it, asset allocation would have very little to say about Yale's returns. Security selection would probably have very little to say about Yale's returns. It would all be about market timing ability. And if I'm great at following the trend, the trend is your friend, of course that's true until it's not.
Or if I've got some sort of marvelous scheme to outsmart all the other smart people who are trading in the bond market, that could generate some nice returns. But those returns would have nothing to do with asset allocation, nothing to do with security selection, everything to do with market timing. But of course, these sound like ridiculous things, right?
I mean, everybody in this room knows that I'm not going to go back and put Yale's entire endowment in one stock. And they also know that I'm not going to go back and day trade futures with the endowment. I'm going to go back and the portfolio is going to look a lot like it looked yesterday in the day before and the month before that and the year before that.
Because as investors, whether we're individual investors or institutional investors, we tend to have a sensible, stable approach to asset allocation. And within the asset allocation framework that we employ, we tend to hold well-diversified portfolios of securities within each of the asset classes. So that means that asset allocation is going to be the predominant determinant of returns.
Bob Schiller and I have a colleague at the School of Management, Roger Ibbitson, who's done a fair amount of work looking at the various sources of returns for investors. And a number of years ago, he came out with a finding that more than 90% of the variability of returns and institutional portfolios had to do with the asset allocation decision. And that was a very widely read and widely accepted conclusion.
Bob Schiller和我在管理学院有一个同事,名叫Roger Ibbitson,他已经做了大量的工作,研究了投资者获得回报的各种来源。几年前,他得出了一个发现,超过90%的机构投资组合回报变动是由于资产配置决策。这是一个非常广泛阅读和广泛接受的结论。
In that same study, I thought that there was a more interesting conclusion and that was that asset allocation actually determined more than 100% of investor returns. Now, how could that be? How could asset allocation determine more than 100% of returns? Well, it goes back to the discussion that we had about security selection and the fact that it's not free to play the game.
And the same thing is true of market timing. If somebody is over-weighting a particular asset class relative to the long-term targets that they've got, well, there's got to be an offsetting position in the market. Target timing is expensive in the same way that security selection is expensive. And so it too is a zero-sum game, even though the analysis that you apply to market timing isn't quite as clear and crisp as in the closed system that you've got with any individual securities market.
So if security selection and market timing are negative sum games, then asset allocation would explain more than 100% of the returns. And on average, for the community as a whole, because investors do engage in market timing, investors do engage in security selection. Those are going to be negative sum games, and you have to subtract the leakages occurring because of security selection and market timing in order to get down to the returns that you would get if you just took your asset allocation targets and implemented them passively.
So it turns out that asset allocation is the most important way that we express our basic tenets of investment philosophy. And I talked about the importance of having an equity bias. These are some of Roger Epitzon's data. He's got this publication called Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation. Although I think he might have sold it to Morningstar. So maybe it's Morningstar's publication now.
And it actually is an outgrowth of some academic research that he did decades ago. And the basic drill was starting in 1925, looking at a number of asset classes. The ones that I've got here are Treasury Bills, Treasury Bonds, large stocks, small stocks, and then as a benchmark inflation. Starting the investment at the end of 1925, taking whatever income was generated from that investment, reinvesting it, and seeing where you end up at the end of the period.
And what got here are the numbers from 1925 to 2009. And if you did that with Treasury Bills, which are short-term loans to the U.S. government, one of the least risky assets imaginable, you would have ended up with 21 times your money over the period. You think about that 21 times your money, that's pretty good.
But if you think about the fact that inflation consumed a multiple of 12, you didn't end up with a lot after inflation. And if you're an institution like Yale, and you only want to consume after inflation returns, you can maintain the purchasing power of the portfolio. Well, 21 times, but taking off 12 times for inflation, and that's so good.
One of the interesting things about the stockspons, bills, and inflation numbers over long periods, is that they correspond to our sense of the relationship between the riskiness of the asset and the notion that if you accept more risk, you should get higher returns. And so if you move out the risk spectrum, and instead of looking at Treasury Bills, you look at Treasury bonds, you end up with a multiple of 86 times. That's pretty good, 86 times.
I mean, it's a lot better than whatever 21 times for bills. It's still not a huge return for decades and decades of investing. So what happens if you move away from lending money, in this case, lending money to the government, to owning equities? The multiple over this period includes the crash in 1929, the market collapse in 1987, and the most recent financial crisis. In spite of those blips, you would have ended up with 2,592 times your money. That's stunning.
I mean, that's way more than 86 times and way more than 21 times. So over the long periods of time, you do end up being rewarded for accepting equity risk. And what would have happened if you would have put the money in small stocks and let her run 12,226 times your money? So the conclusion is pretty obvious. This notion that if you've got a long time horizon, you want to expose your portfolio to equities, makes an enormous amount of sense.
As a matter of fact, the first time I took a look at these numbers was back in 1986, when I was teaching probably a predecessor to the class, the Bob Schiller's teaching, it was a lecture class in finance. And I was preparing the lecture that had to do with long-term investment philosophy. And that's when I first saw these numbers. And I was a little bit disconcerted when I put them together because I thought, gee, 21 times for bills, 86 times for bonds, 12,226 times for small stocks. And the only thing to do is to just put the whole portfolio into small stocks and forget about it. And my first problem was if that were true, what was I going to say for the next 10 weeks of lectures? My longer-term problem was if the investment committee figured out that all we needed to do was put the whole portfolio into small stocks and that that was the way to investment success, I wouldn't have a job.
They wouldn't need me to do that. And I had a wife and young children. I like getting a paycheck and being able to feed in housing. So I took a look at the data more carefully. And there are a number of examples of what it is that I'm going to talk about. But the most profound example remains around the great crash in 1929. If you'd had your whole portfolio in small stocks at the peak, by the end of 1929, you would have lost 54% of your money. By the end of 1930, you would have lost 38% of your money. Another 38% that is.
By the end of 1931, you would have lost another 50%. And by June of 1932, for good measure, you would have lost another 32%. So for every dollar that you had at the peak, at the trough, you would have had 10 cents left. And it doesn't matter whether you're an investor with the strongest, stomach-known demand kind, or you're an institutional investor with the longest investment rise and imaginable. At some point, when the dollars are turning into dimes, you're going to say, this is a completely ridiculous thing to accept this much risk in the portfolio. I can't stand it. I'm selling all my small stocks and going to buy treasury bonds or treasury bills, right? And that's exactly what people did.
And there was this sense in the 1930s, 1940s, even into the 50s and 60s that heavy equity exposures weren't a responsible thing for a fiduciary. When I was writing my book, I was at a fooling around looking at articles from the Saturday Evening Post. And I know everybody here is too young to see in the Saturday Evening Post when it was still publishing. But you've all seen Norman Rockwell, Prince, right? Well, he was famous for doing covers for the Saturday Evening Post. And there was this article in the 1930s that's actually before my time. So I was looking at things in the library, not things that actually had been delivered to my doorstep. And the commentators said that it was ridiculous that stocks were called securities, that they were so risky that we should call stocks in securities.
There was just this visceral dislike for the risks that were associated with the stock market because it had caused so many investors so much pain. So yes, stocks are a great thing for investors with long time horizons, but you need to diversify because you've got to be able to live through those inevitable periods where risky assets produce results that are sometimes so bad as to be frightening.
Second source of return, market timing. A few years ago, a group of former colleagues of mine gave me a party at the Yale Club and they presented me with a copy of Cain's general theory because back when I used to teach a big finance class like this, the last class always involved reading from Cain's and I think Cain's one of the best authors about investing in financial markets. Bar none.
I remember one of my students telling me afterwards that I was reading from Cain's as if I were reading from the Bible and I had this paperback copy that was falling apart and my former students remembered this and they gave me this beautiful first edition of Cain's and I was on the train back from New York where the party had occurred to New Haven and I found this quote.
The idea of wholesale shifts is for various reasons impracticable and indeed undesirable.Most of those who attempt to sell too late and buy too late and do both too often in Korean heavy expenses, there's that negative sum game thing and developing too unsettled and speculative as state of mind.
And as in most things, the data support Cain's conclusions. Morning started a study of all of the mutual funds in the U.S. domestic equity market and there were 17 categories of funds and what they did with this study is that like the ten years of returns and compared dollar weighted returns to time weighted returns.
The time weighted returns are simply the returns that are generated urine and urine out. If you get an offering memorandum or a prospectus they'll show you the time weighted return. If you look at the advertisements where fidelity is touting its latest greatest funds, the returns that you see are time weighted returns.
Dollar weighted returns taken to account cash flows. So in a dollar weighted return if investors put more money into the fund in a particular year, that year's return will have a greater weight in the calculation. So here we have all the mutual funds in the U.S., 17 categories, time weighted versus dollar weighted in every one of those categories.
The dollar weighted returns were less than the time weighted returns. What does that mean? That means that investors systematically made perverse decisions as to when to invest and when to disinvest from mutual funds. When investors were doing, they were fine in after a fund had showed strong relative performance and selling after a fund had shown poor relative performance. So they were systematically buying high and selling low. And it doesn't matter whether you do that with great enthusiasm and in great volume, it's a really, really bad way to make money. Very difficult.
So the conclusion for these individuals that operate in the mutual fund market is that their market timing decisions were systematically perverse. I also took a look at the top 10 internet funds during the tech bubble. This is something I published in my book for individual investors.
And if you looked at the top 10 internet funds three years before and three years after the bubble, the time weighted return was 1.5% per year. To look at that, you can say 1.5% per year, well, the market went way up and way down, but 1.5% per year, that's not so bad. No harm, no foul. Investors invested 13.7 billion and lost 9.9 billion.
So they lost 72% of what they invested. How could it be that they lost 72% of the money that they invested when the time weighted return was 1.5% per year for six years? Well, they weren't invested in the internet funds in 97 and they weren't invested in 98 and they weren't invested in early 99. It was in late 99 and early 2000 that all the money piled in at the very top and then in 2001 and 2002, bitterly disappointed they sold.
So they lost 72% of what they put in even though the time weighted returns were 1.5% per year positive. So institutions don't get a free pass either. If you look at the crash in October 1987, which was an extraordinary event, I think the calculation I did put it at a 25 standard deviation event which is essentially an impossibility. But however you measure it was an extraordinary event and what happened on October 19, 1987 and stock markets the world around went down by more than 20% when people forget is along with the stock markets going down there was a huge rally in government bonds like the safety.
So stocks were cheaper bonds were more expensive. What did institutional investors do? Well, they got scared and they sold stocks and bought bonds. Same thing, buying high, selling low. As a matter of fact, endowments took six years to get their post-crash equity allocations back up to where they were before the crash, arguably underweighted inequities in the heart of one of the greatest full markets of all time.
So it seems that investors, whether they're individual or institutional, have this perverse predilection to chasing performance, buying something after it's gone up, selling something after it's gone down and using market timing to damage portfolio returns.
The final tool that we have available to us as investors is security selection. I cite a study in my book, Unconventional Success, conducted by Rob Arnot that does a very good job at looking at 20 years worth of mutual fund returns.
He says that there's about a 14% chance that, or historically there was a 14% chance of beating the market after adjusting for fees and taxes. So you'd think zero sum game would be a coin flip 50-50, but because of the leakages from the system and because of taxes, the probability of winning goes down to 14%.
But all by the way, that 14% ignores two very important things. One is that a huge percentage of mutual funds have front-end loads, if you call your friendly broker to buy a mutual fund, they'll extract a payment of two or three or four or five or six percent.
Those numbers aren't included, so if you included the loads that would make the likelihood of winning substantially less than 14%, but even more important is a concept of survivorship bias. If you look at 20 years worth of returns, the only returns that you can look at are the returns of the funds that survive for 20 years.
Well, which funds didn't survive? Almost always the funds that don't survive are the failures. So you're only looking at the winners. If you look at the winners and you only have a 14% chance, if you take into account the losers, that 14% chance has to go to essentially zero.
The survivorship bias is an important phenomenon. It is the Center for Research and Securities prices. Has the survivorship bias free US mutual fund database, meaning that it tracks the funds that fail? There were 30,361 funds in the database. Almost more than a third of the funds in this survivorship bias free database were ones that had died.
They died mostly because they failed, and that's kind of an honorable way to die. There are other ways to die. If you're a big mutual fund complex like Fidelity, and you've got an underperforming fund, what you tend to do is something like, well, let's merge that into this fund that has good performance.
And guess what happens? Fidelity loses a fund that has bad performance, and the one that has good performance has more assets because they merge the underperforming fund into it and makes them look like they're a more successful fund management firm.
There's one aspect of security selection that's important and aspect other than the fact that it's a negative sum game, very tough for practitioners to win. And that has to do with the degree of opportunity that you've gotten various asset classes.
A number of years ago, I wanted to come up with a way of identifying in an analytical manner where it is that we could find the most attractive investment opportunities. And as far as I know, financial economists haven't determined a way to directly measure how efficient individual markets are. So, I took a look at distributions of returns for various asset classes, and I had this notion that if a market priced assets efficiently, the distribution of returns around the market return would be very tight.
Now, why would that be? Well, if somebody makes a big bet in an efficient market by definition, whether that succeeds or fails has to do with more luck than sense, right? Because the premise is that these assets are efficiently priced, and you don't make a big win on a big bet unless there's an inefficiency that you're exploiting.
So, if you're making big bets in an efficiently priced market, you might win one year and gather more assets, and you might win another year and gather more assets, but ultimately your luck is going to run out and you're going to fail and then people will fire you and you lose your assets and lose your income stream.
The right thing to do in an efficiently priced market is to hug the benchmark. People call it closet indexing. Look like everybody else and we're human beings. We don't like firing people, we don't like admitting we're wrong. And so, if somebody has kind of market-like performance and maybe it's not all that outstanding, so okay fine, we'll just continue with this particular investment strategy, even though it's not doing great things, at least it's not doing terrible things.
On the other end of the spectrum, maybe there's not even a market that you can match with your investment strategy. I mean, think about venture capital, right? I mean, how is it that you could index venture capital? You can't. It's a bunch of private partnerships and a bunch of it is in credit, enterprises and even if you wanted to, you couldn't match the market. You're forced to go out and forge your path and live and die by the decisions that you make.
So, how does this kind of thought piece translate into real numbers? So, again, we're looking at 10 years worth of returns for various asset classes. I look at the difference between the top quartile manager and the bottom quartile, you know, difference between first and third quartile. You could use any measure of distribution that you want.
And in the bond market, which is probably the most efficiently priced of all markets, and the reason it's most efficiently priced is because bonds are just math, right? You've got coupons, you've got principle, you've got probabilities of default. It's the most easily analyzed of all the assets in which we invest.
The difference between top quartile and bottom quartile is a half a percent per annum, almost nothing. All bond managers are jammed together right in the heart of the distribution because, you know, if they were out there making crazy bets and generating returns that were fundamentally different from the market, they'd be in that category of, yeah, sure, it's great when it works, but when it doesn't, you're dead.
Large cap stocks less efficiently priced than bonds, but still pretty efficiently priced. Two percentage points per annum difference first to third quartile over 10 years. Foreign stocks less efficiently priced than those in the domestic markets, four points per year.
Then you move into the hedge fund world, the part of the hedge fund world that we call absolute return at Yale, seven point one percentage points first to third quartile. Real estate, much less efficiently priced than marketable securities, nine point three percentage points, top to bottom quartile. Large buyouts, 13.7 percent difference top quartile to bottom quartile in the venture capital, 43.2 percentage points difference top to bottom quartile.
The measure that we have here of market inefficiency points us toward spending our time and energy, trying to find the best venture capital managers, trying to find the best leverage buyout managers, and spending far less of our time and energy, trying to beat the bond market or beat the stock market, because even if you win there, and even if you end up in the top quartile, you're not adding an enormous amount of value relative to what you would have had if you just would have bought the market.
With that background, let's revisit the criticisms that barren's level that the Yale model and the Swenson approach. First of all, they talk about diversification failing. The fact is that in a panic, only two things matter, risk and safety. I saw this in 1987, saw it in 1998 with the collapse of long-term capital, and saw it in 2008 in a way that was even more profound than in 1987 and 98, investors sold everything that had risk associated with it to buy US treasuries. Safety was all that mattered.
Of course, in that narrow window of time, diversification does fail. The only diversification that would matter in that instance is owning US treasuries, but if you own the substantial amount of US treasury bonds, and what's the substantial amount, 25, 30, 35% of your portfolio, then under normal circumstances, under the circumstances in which we live most of our lives, you're paying a huge opportunity cost.
You could have a portfolio with 30% in US treasuries, and you're in and you're out, you would pay this opportunity cost, and then when the crisis comes, you can be happy for six or 12 or 18 months, and then you go back to paying the opportunity cost. I would argue that if you expand your time horizon to a sensible length of time, that the strategy where you hold relatively little in the high opportunity cost US treasuries is the best strategy for a long-term investor.
And there are those who say that, well, diversification doesn't protect you in times of crisis, what does it matter? Why would you want to diversify? Well, think about Japan. If you were a local Japanese investor, you wanted to have an equity bias in your portfolio, so you owned lots of Japanese stocks, in 1989, at the end of the year, the Nique closed at about 38,000. At the end of 2009, 20 years later, the Nique closed at 10,500. So with your long-time horizon and equity bias in your portfolio over two decades, you would have lost 73%.
So diversification makes an enormous amount of sense in the long run, even if there are occasional panics where you're disappointed that the diversified approach that you had to managing the portfolio didn't produce results. The second criticism over emphasis on alternatives, let's just look at the last decade when Nail's portfolio, over the 10 years and the June 30, 2010 domestic equity has produced returns of negative 0.7% per year, bonds produced returns of 5.9% per year.
Let's look at the alternatives as opposed to domestic marketable securities. Private equity is 6.2% per year, real estate is 6.9% per year, absolute return is 11.1% per year, timber is 12.1% per year, and oil and gas is 24.7% per year. I think the numbers speak for themselves.
If you have a sensibly long-time horizon, these basic principles of equity orientation and diversification make an enormous amount of sense. And if you look at the bottom line, which is performance, when I began managing yields in the $1,000,000 in 1985, it was less than a billion dollars. The amount that we distributed to support yield's operations, that year was $45 million. For the year end of June 30, 2010, the endowment stood at about $16 billion in the amount that we distributed to the yield's operations was $1.1 billion. It's an enormous change over, enormous positive change over 25 years.
If you look at yield's performance over the last 10 years, it's still better than that of any other institutional investor, 8.9% per annum, and that compares to an average for colleges and universities with about 4.0% per annum. And that translates into $7.9 billion of added value relative to where we would have been had we had average returns over the past 10 years. And the comparable numbers for 20 years are yielded 13.1% per annum. Again, the best record of any institutional investor in the United States relative to an average for colleges and universities of 8.8% per annum and $12.1 billion of value added. So the swings and arrows about Rageous Fortune, so I would suggest that the Barren's articles really took far too short of time horizon in looking at Yael's performance and in looking at the Yael model, which emphasizes a portfolio that's well diversified and has a strong equity bias.
And I think if we're back in the room five years or 10 years from now, we'll see that the portfolio will continue to produce the same kind of strong, long run results as it has for the past 10 and 20 years. I think that I'd love to answer any questions that you might have.
So the fundamental difference between what we would be doing at Yael as opposed to a hedge fund manager or a domestic stock manager or a bi-out manager is that we're essentially one step removed from the security selection process. So our job is to find the best hedge fund managers, find the best domestic equity managers, find the best bi-out managers and put together partnerships that work for them and work for the university.
That's a tricky thing to do because in the funds management world, there are all sorts of issues with respect to what economists call the principal agent problem. We're principles for the university, engaging agents, the hedge fund managers or the bi-out managers and trying to find ways to get those agents to act primarily in the university's interests to get rid of those agency issues. It's a challenge, but a fascinating challenge because in doing this, you end up meeting an enormous number of incredibly intelligent, engaged, thoughtful individuals that are involved in the funds management business.
It's a fabulous career, at least from my perspective, because I get to do this and do it to benefit one of the world's great institutions, Yael. In terms of differences between individuals and institutions, there are some structural differences. We don't pay taxes. Taxes are an enormously important determinant of investment outcomes for individuals. As an individual, you want to avoid paying taxes or defer paying taxes because taxes are just a huge drag on investment returns. We don't have to worry about that by and large in managing Yael's portfolio.
Another very fundamental difference has to do with the resources that we can bring to the investment management problem. Most individuals and many institutions just don't have the wherewithal either the background or the time to make high quality, active management decisions. Markets are incredibly tough. Beating those markets is an incredibly difficult challenge. Doing it by spending a couple hours on a weekend once a month isn't going to cut it. We've got 2021-22 investment professionals who are dedicating their careers to trying to make these high quality, active management decisions.
We can go out and have a decent shot at beating the domestic stock market and the foreign stock market and putting together a superior portfolio of venture capital partnerships and hedge fund managers over the past five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. We produce market-beating results. In contrast, an individual has almost no chance of beating the market.
I've written two books, one pioneering portfolio management that talks about how it is that I think institutions should manage their portfolio and if they've got the resources and it's not just dollars, it's the human resources to make those high quality decisions, they can follow what Barrens referred to as the Yale model or this one-cent approach.
But the book that I've written for, ostensibly for individuals, but it's really individuals and institutions that don't have the same resources that Yale does to make these high quality active decisions. That book says basically what you should do is come up with a sensible asset allocation policy and then implement it using index funds which are low-cost ways of mimicking the market and by the way, because they have very low turnover, generate very little in terms of tax consequences for the holders of those funds.
So it's kind of an interesting world where the right solution, I think, is either one extreme or the other extreme. You're either completely passive or you're aggressively active. But as in most things, most people are kind of in the middle, they're neither aggressively active nor completely passive, but in the middle you lose because you end up paying high fees for mediocre active results and that's where most people end up in most institutions.
So one of the great things about having a diversified portfolio is that you're not going to worry less about the relative level of valuation of the various assets in which you invest. So if you go back to the mid-80s and you've got a portfolio that's 50% in domestic stocks, you have to worry a lot about the valuation of that portfolio because half of your assets are in that single asset class. But if you've got a well-diversified portfolio with, let's say, minimum allocation of 5% to 10% and maximum allocation of 25% to 30% in individual asset class, the relative valuation of each of those asset classes matters less.
And there's another kind of nice aspect to a rebalancing policy. If you set up your targets and you faithfully adhere to those targets, suppose that domestic equities have poor relative performance, then you're going to buy domestic equities to get them back up to target, selling whatever it is that had superior relative performance to fund those purchases and vice versa. If domestic equities have great relative performance, you'll be selling to get back to your long-term target and buying other assets that have shown poor relative performance.
So if you're in a circumstance where domestic stocks are expensive, where you're selling into this superior relative performance that the domestic equities are exhibiting, thereby maintaining your risk exposure at a level that's consistent with what's implicit in your policy asset allocation. So that's kind of a long way of saying that if somebody asked me whether stocks are expensive or cheap, my first line of defense, it doesn't really matter all that much to me because we're well diversified and because we do a great job of rebalancing. But the reality is that those questions are just incredibly tough to answer. If they were easier to answer, I guess I'd be much more excited about market timing as a way to generate returns.
In terms of the second question with respect to technology, Yels had a longstanding commitment to venture capital and over the decades it's produced extraordinary returns for the university. We continue to have a world class group of venture capitalists, we've got exposure to companies like LinkedIn and Facebook and Groupon.
I hope that this wave of IPOs that people are writing about and the press actually occurs because that would be very good for the university's portfolio. It's been a long time. I mean, we've benefited enormously in the internet bubble in the late 90s and the last decades been a bit far low. We also find, on the marketable security side, that technology stocks tend to be less efficiently priced than many other securities. So we have a manager that is heavily focused on information technology stocks and another manager that's very heavily focused on biotechnology stocks and both those managers have produced very handsome, absolute and relative returns and that's an important part of our domestic equity strategy.
So that's a really good question. I think the most fundamental issue with the explosion of hedge funds and the explosion of private equity funds has to do with this negative something that we were talking about. If you go back to the 1950s, the most common way that institutional assets were managed would be for an institution like Yale to go to a bank like Chemical Bank or JP Morgan and they would pay a small fraction of 1% for a reasonably diversified portfolio stock bonds and probably some foreign stocks and some domestic stocks.
But the leakage from the system was very small. You look at hedge funds and private equity funds, they're essentially dealing with the same set of securities that an institution used to pay a 3% or 3% of a year for admittedly sleepy bank management. It's the same set of securities. Now those securities are traded in a hedge fund format or taken private equity fund format and the fees that your paying are a point, a point and a half, two points, the typical two and 20, and your paying a significant percentage of the profits, the 20 and the two and 20.
Think about that. The leakage from the system that goes to Wall Street is enormous compared to what it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago. So there's that much left for us as investors. I think that that has huge consequences for Endowance Foundations, pension plans, institutions of all stripes and to the extent that individuals get exposure to these types of assets and they're largely wealthy individuals that end up getting the exposure. They're going to suffer the same consequences of this huge leakage of higher fees and the profits interest to Wall Street.
The question as to whether or not the money flowing to hedge funds is going to make markets more efficient and take away opportunities, I don't worry too much about that. I think that the best talent is going to hedge funds because if they're in a long only domestic equity environment, maybe they can charge 3-quarters of a percent or a percent or if they're in the mutual fund world, maybe they charge a percent and a half or something like that. Well, you'd rather have two and 20 than 0.75, right? That's easy.
So there's a huge migration of talent to the hedge fund world. But what I care about when I look at the degree of investment opportunity is this dispersion that we talked about. And I haven't seen the dispersion of results, top-portile, the bottom-portile, compress it all. So I don't think that we're increasing the efficiency of the pricing of assets. I still need to go out there and be able to identify people in the top-portile or top desial so that we can win relative to the markets after adjustment for the risks that we take. So as long as we have plenty of dispersion in the results, it's still an interesting activity for us to pursue.
Okay. Man, it better be good. It's last question. Okay. So I have a question that is referring to the other bulletins and we heard that it's referred to that in January 2017 when we knew that we deal with Ethiopia and they actually knew about everything was going to decide the teste in the middle of the day.
So I think that one of the things that needs to happen in the funds management world is that we need to have better measures of risk. And so one of the reasons why I don't talk about the sharp ratio is that just looking at standard deviation of returns doesn't capture risk in a way that is meaningful. I mean I've seen other people do an analysis of the L portfolio and show relative sharp ratios and obviously because our returns have been so good and if you just look at the pattern of those returns we end up scoring high when looking at sharp ratios across different institutional portfolios but the risks that exist in the portfolio aren't really captured by standard deviation of the returns just a quick example.
If you look at real estate or timber or even any of our illiquid assets they're appraised relatively infrequently. There tends to be a huge stability basis by us in the appraisals. If somebody looks at a piece of real estate 12 months ago, 6 months ago and today they're likely to see pretty much the same thing that they saw over that period. You compare and contrast that to the volatility that you've got in the stock market. I think Bob Schiller deserves credit for the coin in the term excess volatility.
There's no question that stock prices are way more variable than they need to be to adjust for changes in the underlying fundamentals. So if you've got a portfolio that's largely marketable securities you're going to see a lot more standard deviation of returns than if you've got one of illiquid assets where you've got this kind of stability built in because of the appraisal nature of the valuation process. If you end up comparing those two portfolios, one dominated by marketable securities, one dominated by private assets, you're going to end up with measures that are apples and oranges.