Excellent Article on Harvard Endowment Manager

[Jeff W]

Mohamed El-Erian

Lots of good advice for long term, passive investors.

[DcifrThs]

thanks!! great article so far.

on this thought:

[ QUOTE ]
Second, within domestic equity exposures, we're looking for a handoff from small-cap and mid-cap to larger-cap companies. This has to do with the growing influence of the private equity. We believe that large cap companies will be next to benefit from the large influx of private equity capital buying up companies. Private equity companies are now targeting larger capitalization companies. As an example, think of the recent news on Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm, buying Chrysler for some $7 billion.

[/ QUOTE ]

the liquidity available to private equity managers is a major determinant of this i think. do they have long lock ups? (aka, could a sudden aversion to risk and pull back of demand for risky PE allocations allow current investors to take money out?)

a rise in global interest rates will start to pull some of this money out of PE firms, though currently they do have a TON to work with and long lock ups would allow this trend to continue to i like his thought of moving to large caps.

i'll keep reading and post other thoughts

Barron

[DcifrThs]

[ QUOTE ]
A: More people are replicating what we do. The endowment model is very much in vogue. There have been many articles in the press trumpeting how well endowments like Harvard's and Yale's have performed. And David Swensen, who brilliantly heads up Yale's endowment with impressive long-term performance, has written a great book showing how endowment management is done. So now lots of central banks and pension funds are trying to become more like endowments. The space is becoming more crowded.

[/ QUOTE ]

i ordered both swensen's book (on personal & instituational investments)

thanks,
Barron

[SMB]

5/13/07 Interview with The Financial Times

pretty sure login not required

[KDuff]

I heard him speak last year and he is as humble and approachable as the article describes. The most memorable thing he said was that a successful investing strategy (long term) should not be influenced by weekly and monthly data driven events such as unemployment statistics. The corollary to this statement was that a market would not take off if there was too much focus on the short term. This is why he mentions international and commodities exposure in the cnn piece.