How Harvard and Yale Beat the Market E-Book

Matthew Tuttle

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 372

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Praise for How Harvard and Yale Beat the Market "How Harvard and Yale Beat the Market is a must-read for anyone managing his own or other people's money. It demystifies new investments such as hedge funds and principal-protected products. This engaging handbook belongs in every investor's library." --Deborah Weir, Parker Global Strategies, author of Timing the Market: How to Profit in the Stock Market Using the Yield Curve, Technical Analysis, and Cultural Indicators In today's volatile market, investors are looking for new ways to lower their risk profile. For author Matthew Tuttle, the best means of achieving this goal is to look towards large university endowments--which attempt to capture consistent returns while maintaining a low level of risk. How Harvard and Yale Beat the Market explores the benefits of endowment investing and shows you how to structure your individual investment endeavors around an endowment-type portfolio. While the average investor doesn't have access to many of the money managers and vehicles that high-profile endowments use, you can still learn from the investment strategies outlined here and implement them in your own investment activities. Filled with timely tips and practical advice from an expert who designs portfolios based on endowment investment strategies, How Harvard and Yale Beat the Market will put you in a better position to achieve investment success.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART I - INVESTMENT 101

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENDOWMENT PHILOSOPHY OF INVESTING

CHAPTER 1 - The Current Environment and the Need for New Thinking

Bernie Madoff

The Consequences of Our Actions

How to Make Money Whether in a Bear or Bull Market

The Old Way

Time for a Change

CHAPTER 2 - Common Investment Mistakes

Buying What’s Hot

Trying to Blindly Beat the Market

Believing Some Guru Can Predict the Market

Letting Their Emotions Get Involved

Being Chrono-Centric

Having a Short Financial Memory

The Solution: A Well-Thought-Out Investment Methodology

Don’t Make Mistakes

CHAPTER 3 - Diversification THE BEST INVESTMENT STRATEGY

Correlation

Correlation Rules

Diversification Is the Key

CHAPTER 4 - Skill-Based Money Managers versus Style Box-Based Money Managers

Alpha and Beta

Skill-Based versus Style Box-Based

The Changing Investment Environment

Style Box-Based versus Skill-Based

Telling the Difference

Getting Rid of the Long Only Constraint

Long/Short Advantages

Skill-Based Managers Are the Key

CHAPTER 5 - Introduction to the Endowment Philosophy

The Large Endowments

Large Endowments Invest Differently Than Small Endowments

Endowment Investment Rules

Creating an Investment Portfolio

Success Leaves Clues

CHAPTER 6 - Why Large Endowments Outperform the Market and How You Can, Too!

The Formula to Beating the Market

Some Keys to Adopting the Endowment Investment Philosophy

Endowment Investment Success

PART II - INVESTMENT VEHICLES

CHAPTER 7 - Mutual Funds, Separately Managed Accounts, Exchange-Traded Funds, ...

Mutual Funds

Separately Managed Accounts

Exchange-Traded Funds and Exchange-Traded Notes

So Many Different Financial Products

CHAPTER 8 - Structured Products

Structured Products

How Structured Products Work

How to Fit Structured Products into an Endowment Type of Portfolio

What’s Next

CHAPTER 9 - Hedge Funds and Funds of Funds

Availability

Hedge Fund Risks and Disadvantages

Hedge Fund Advantages

Hedge Fund Investing Styles

Evaluating Hedge Funds

How Do Investors Access Hedge Funds?

Hedge Funds of Funds

Mutual Funds That Follow Hedge Fund Strategies

Moving On to Asset Classes

PART III - ENDOWMENT ASSET CLASSES AND INVESTING STRATEGIES

CHAPTER 10 - Absolute Return

Absolute Return Mutual Funds

Objectives of Absolute Return Investments

Types of Absolute Return Investments

Mutual Funds That Have an Absolute Return Focus

Market Neutral Mutual Funds

The Anchor of Your Portfolio

CHAPTER 11 - Stocks

Investing Globally

Long/Short Investments

Stocks Are the Growth Engine of Your Portfolio

CHAPTER 12 - Bonds

The Destructive Power of Inflation

Bond Basics

Think Globally

Types of Bond Funds and Managers

Endowments Don’t Like Bonds but You Should Still Have Some

CHAPTER 13 - Real Assets and Commodities

Real Assets

Hot Commodities

Real Estate

Protecting from Inflation

CHAPTER 14 - Managed Futures

How Futures Work

They Don’t Have to Be Risky

Managed Futures

Benefits of Managed Futures

Investing in Managed Futures

TWM Global Diversified Fund

The Future Is Now

CHAPTER 15 - Private Equity

What Is Private Equity?

Private Equity Exit Strategies

Why Private Equity?

Private Equity Investment Considerations

Investing in Private Equity

The Allure of Private Equity

CHAPTER 16 - Managing Some of Your Money In-House

ETF Strategies and Advantages

Other ETF Strategies: The Trend Is Your Friend

Managing Some Money Yourself

CHAPTER 17 - Portable Alpha

A Step-by-Step Process

Alpha-Generating Vehicles

Portable Alpha

Future of Money Management

PART IV - DESIGNING YOUR PORTFOLIO

CHAPTER 18 - Suggested Allocations

Step 1: Determine Your Risk Tolerance

Step 2: Allocate Your Assets

Step 3: Monitor Asset Allocation—It Is Not Static

Step 4: Rebalance Your Asset Classes

Half the Battle

CHAPTER 19 - Choosing and Managing Money Managers

Looking at Qualitative Criteria

The Numbers

Look Beyond the Performance Numbers

Time to Monitor

How Much to Allocate to Each Manager

You Are Almost Ready to Go

CHAPTER 20 - Putting It All Together

Changing Your Views about Investing

Goals-Based Investing

Constructing Goal-Based Portfolios

Do You Need Help?

Almost Done

CHAPTER 21 - Putting It in Writing

I. Investment Policy Summary

II. Asset Allocation

III. Review Frequency

IV. Investment Philosophy

V. Introduction

VI. Investment Management

VII. Guidelines and Investment Policy

VIII. Guidelines and Investment Policy

IX. Portfolio Review and Analysis

X. Monitoring of Money Managers

XI. Monitoring of Portfolio

Final Thoughts

Appendix - KEY TERMS

About the Author

Index

Copyright © 2009 by Matthew Tuttle. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Tuttle, Matthew, 1968- How Harvard and Yale beat the market : what individual investors can learn from university endowments to help them prosper in an uncertain market/ Matthew Tuttle. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-47375-7

1. Investments—United States. 2. Harvard University—Endowments. 3. Yale University—Endowments. 4. Institutional investments—United States. 5. Portfolio management—United States. I. Title. HG4910.T88 2009 332.6—dc22 2008047056

Acknowledgments

I want to sincerely thank the following people who made enormous contributions to this book:

• My agent, Carole Jelen McClendon, for making this project a reality

• My mother, Cheryl Tuttle, and Adam Bluestein who helped me edit the book

• Sherry Carnahan who helped with graphics

• All of the mutual fund companies that provided me facts and figures, including Ivy Funds, DWS-Scudder, and Riversource

Most importantly I want to thank my daughter Cameron, and my sons, Jared and Braden, for tolerating the late nights and weekends that I spent working on this book.

Introduction

WHY YOU SHOULD INVEST LIKE AN ENDOWMENT

Why should you read this book instead of the millions of other books out there that teach you how to invest? Because this book is different from the other investment books I have seen. It will not teach you how to find the next great stock. It will not teach you how to tell when we are in a bull or bear market. It will not predict that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is going to 50,000, nor will it predict that it is going down to 5,000. What it will do is teach you the strategies that large college endowments have used to beat the market with less risk. You can choose to apply these strategies to your portfolio as a whole or as a part of your portfolio, whatever makes the most sense for your situation.

2008 was a difficult year for investors, college endowments included. As an investor, you can choose to put your head in the sand and your money under a mattress, or you can learn the lessons of 2008 and choose to adopt an investment strategy that gives you the best possible chance of achieving your goals. What happened in 2008 does not wipe out years and years of outperformance by large endowments. If anything, it stresses the need for abandoning buy and hold, traditional asset allocation, and indexing in favor of the investment strategies that have made the large endowments successful for years.

Regardless of what some might say, there is no right answer when it comes to investing. If there were, then there would only be one book and you wouldn’t need financial advisors like me. If you are looking for a strategy that will grow your portfolio by 80% per year, then this book is not for you. If you are looking for a way to invest for absolute returns regardless of the market environment, then read on.

The vast majority of investors have no strategy; they are buying and selling investments based on their emotions. As I will show you later in this book, your emotions cause you to do stupid things with your money. A well-thought-out philosophy will keep you on track and hopefully keep you from making the mistakes that most investors make. The endowment approach is a philosophy that can keep you on track and can help take your emotions out of the equation.

I do warn you. There is no easy way when it comes to investing. If you want great results, you need to put in the work or you have to be willing to hire someone and delegate the work. There are a lot of people who are tempted to take the easy way out and put all of their money in an index fund. As of this writing, index funds that track the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index are down 14.26% year to date and have averaged 2.31% per year over the past three years. My guess is that if you believed that putting all your money into an index fund is the smart way to go, then you probably would not be reading this book.

These days, it is more important than ever to make smart choices about your investments. More and more, individuals will be responsible for a larger part of their retirement and financial security. Years ago, companies offered defined benefit pension plans that paid workers a large percent of their salary when they retired. Now, your company has a 401(k) plan into which you put your own money, and if you are lucky, your company will match part of it. Companies also used to offer postretirement health care to their retirees. We do not see that being offered to current workers anymore, and from time to time we hear about companies trying to wriggle out of their responsibilities to retired workers. I am not going to take on the argument of whether Social Security and Medicare should be overhauled in this book, but I do not believe that what I will get when I turn 65 (as of the release date of this book I will be 40) will bear any resemblance to what my grandparents got and what my mother will get. Retirement used to be a three-legged stool. One leg was your employer, one leg was the government, and your savings was the third leg. Now you need to plan on retirement being a unicycle. The only thing you can really count on is your savings. If the government and/or your employer kick in a large chunk, then that’s great. You will have more than you need; that’s a good problem to have. If they don’t, then you need to be prepared.

I have been involved with the markets in one way or another for almost two decades. This is my second book, and I have contributed to a few others. I am a frequent guest on Fox Business News and BusinessWeek TV and have been on CNBC, Fox News, and CNNfn. I am also frequently quoted in the Wall Street Journal, SmartMoney, Kiplinger’s, and many other financial publications. I also manage money for individual and institutional investors through my own registered investment advisor, Tuttle Wealth Management, LLC, and through a second registered investment advisor, PCG Wealth Advisory, LLC. I have long been interested in how institutional investors, large college endowments in particular, have always been way ahead of individual investors. They tend to adopt investment strategies years before individual investors do. By the time individuals catch on, the institutions have already found something better. When institutions were embracing multiasset class allocation, individual investors were trying to pick stocks. Years later, individual investors have finally grasped the importance of traditional asset allocation while the large institutions have realized that it doesn’t work well and are now on to bigger and better things.

I have also always hated losing money, so I am constantly looking for investment strategies that give me the highest chance possible of preserving money in any market environment. Part of this is self-preservation and the other part is common sense. During the start of the technology bubble in the late 1990s, I worked for a major Wall Street firm. Although I never got involved in recommending Internet stocks to my clients, many of my colleagues did. For a while things were great for them and their clients, until 2000 when they blew their clients up. To “blow a client up” is a Wall Street term that means lose most or all of your client’s money in a bad investment. Blowing a client up is obviously not a good thing. If you blow up all your clients, you basically blow up your own practice as well.

Pearls of Stockbrokerage Wisdom

When I started out at my brokerage firm, one of the grizzled veterans came over to talk to me about the wisdom of surviving as a stockbroker. He told me to cold call like crazy to try to get new clients. Once I got a client, I was supposed to make lots of trades in his or her account (this isn’t really legal; the industry calls it “churning”). He said I would probably blow up half my clients; of those who I blew up, half would leave and half would stay, until I blew them up again. I would continually be adding new clients and blowing up my existing clients, but he assured me if I followed this formula I was guaranteed to make a six-figure salary (it might even be enough to pay for bail). Now you know why I needed to find a better way.

Not losing money also makes financial sense. First it keeps you invested while other people are selling and putting money under the mattress. Second, if you don’t lose a lot when the market goes down, you don’t need to gain a lot when it goes up and you can still end up ahead.

The large college endowments have always had to be more innovative than most institutional investors as they have an almost impossible investment mandate. Not only do they need to generate a large enough real return (return after inflation) so the endowment can spend money, but they also are not expected to take a lot of risk and subject the endowment to losses.

Real Returns

In many parts of this book we will refer to real returns. These are the returns you have after inflation. If I put $50 into a mutual fund and at the end of the year it is worth $100, then I have an actual return of 100%. That’s great! However, if inflation is so bad that at the end of the year it takes me $100 to buy what I used to pay $50 for, then in real life I didn’t make anything. That is why real returns are so important.

If I am the chief investment officer of some institution and my benchmark is down 20% and I am down only 10%, then my boss is happy. If I was the chief investment officer of a large college endowment, then I would be in danger of losing my job.

There is no reason that there needs to be a gap in what institutions and individuals are doing. Endowments and institutional investors don’t keep what they are doing a secret. Harvard, Yale, and the other large endowments publish annual reports where they divulge their asset allocation and their investment thinking. Go to the web site of just about any university, and you should be able to find the annual report of their endowment. You can also type portable alpha into any search engine, and you will see what the institutional investors are talking about and where the future of investment management is headed (or read my chapter on portable alpha).

Unfortunately, many investment advisors that serve individual clients do not take the time to figure out how these strategies can be adapted to individuals. Most prefer to stay with the tried-and-true strategies even though they are no longer working. When I started out as a stockbroker in the 1990s, I enthusiastically embraced the asset allocation theory that the large institutions were using. I was not afraid to be on the cutting edge. However, most of the old-line stockbrokers still stuck by their traditional stock picking. It took them years (and tons of losses during the technology stock bubble bursting) to embrace a traditional asset allocation approach. Of course, just as they were embracing asset allocation, the endowments and institutions had already moved on as they realized that asset allocation doesn’t protect your principal in a big down market like they had hoped it would.

Some of the concepts in this book are more complicated than a traditional asset allocation approach. However, more and more investment products are hitting the market that are geared toward an endowment philosophy of investing. Advisors and individual investors are also coming around to endowment types of investment strategies. Nearly every day I read an article in one of my industry publications about the benefits of adding “alternative investments” to a traditional portfolio to be able to invest like Harvard and Yale. Investment conferences focus more and more on these types of investments and how to integrate them into a portfolio. More and more advisors talk about how they are starting to hear from their clients who are interested in these types of strategies. Hopefully, this book can hasten the development of new ideas and products that allow individual investors to invest like the large endowments. Of course, some of my motives are selfish. In developing these types of portfolios for my clients, I often wish there were more products to choose from. Many of the mutual funds that can fit into an endowment type of portfolio are poor. There aren’t a lot of separately managed accounts that fit these types of portfolios. There is no way to replicate the returns of private equity without high minimum investments and long lockups. As these types of strategies become more and more accepted, product sponsors will be forced to develop products to meet the demand, including mine.

How Harvard and Yale Beat the Market will provide you with the tools you need to make sure your savings are there when you need it. This book will tell you why it is important for you to invest like the endowments do and how the current financial environment will actually enable you to make substantial profits. Part I of the book will talk about the mistakes investors make and why large endowments outperform. Part II will give an introduction to the different investment vehicles investors can use that will allow you to create an endowment type of investment portfolio. Part III will talk in depth about the different asset classes you may want to consider for your portfolio. Part IV will then take what you have learned and show you how to apply it when designing your own portfolio.

Author’s Note

Throughout this text you will see the terms fund or money manager. There are a number of ways in which people can invest. They can buy stocks and bonds directly, but that isn’t really what this book is about. They can also hire money managers, either through mutual funds, ETFs, separate account managers, hedge funds, hedge fund of funds, private equity, and private equity fund of funds. Since different investment vehicles will be appropriate for different investors, the terms fund and money manager are used to apply to all of the different options. I have also used a number of mutual funds as examples throughout the text. These are just that—examples. They are in no way recommendations to buy or sell any of the funds mentioned.

The large endowments like Harvard and Yale have revolutionized the investment landscape. How Harvard and Yale Beat the Market will give you the tools you need to create portfolios like the large endowments do.

PART I

INVESTMENT 101

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ENDOWMENT PHILOSOPHY OF INVESTING

Before we talk about how individuals can invest like endowments, in Part I we need to discuss the current financial environment and its implications for investors (see Chapter 1). In Chapter 2 we will explore why investors make the mistakes they do and how they can avoid them. Chapter 3 will then start to lay the groundwork for thinking about your portfolio the same way endowments do. In Chapter 4 we will discuss the two types of money managers that endowments use. In Chapter 5 we will introduce you to the endowment portfolio theory, and in Chapter 6 we will show you how endowments outperform the market.

CHAPTER 1

The Current Environment and the Need for New Thinking