What does wealth mean to you?

Previous blogs have mentioned his success. yet there have been one or two falls from grace in the last 12 months as performance has suffered much more than one would have expected. That said, its Yale money not your money. But he does have certain opinions to help private investors…

In the FT in an interview with Chrystia Freeland, she says “Then, as we sip cups of tea, we return to Swensen’s favourite themes of money and markets. He says the crisis has reinforced his view that the most important investing advice is “you should invest only in things that you understand. That should be the starting point and the finishing point.”

For most investors the practical application of this axiom is to invest in index funds (low-fee investments that aim to mirror the performance of a particular stock market index). “The overwhelming number of investors, individual and institutional, should be completely in low-cost index funds because that’s easy to understand.”

His advice, keep it simple and use index funds. Take a look at your investments and unless you happen to be one our clients, I would predict you have little or zero exposure to index funds, let alone an effective asset allocation strategy.

So if you do not want to believe me, believe what David Swensen believes…its your future at stake.