Ivy League Lessons

April 22, 2009, The Wall Street Journal — For many years, the Harvard and Yale endowments performed brilliantly, far outpacing the major stock market averages. They grew and grew, and their strategies became widely popular among professional investors. Yale's lead money manager, David Swensen, became a kind of guru for endowment investing and published "Pioneering Portfolio Management" in 2000 to codify his insights. In 2005, he brought out "Unconventional Success," a popular book that tried to explain to individual investors how they could mimic aspects of his approach to managing Yale's money.