Yale Endowment

In October my wife, Joellyn, and I are going to New Zealand for ten or eleven days (its tough to say for sure because we arrive two days after we leave and we land back in the states before the plane takes off).

I have 14 hours of flight time, each way, in front of me and I have been trying to figure out what to do to pass the time. I can't watch DVDs that long and I can't read that long either.

I have been holding out on reading Freakonomics because I figure I will have to read it twice, and a 14 hour plane ride might be a good time to do that, but thanks to CNBC's segment with Yale Endowment Fund CIO Dave Swenson I am going to read Unconventional Success : A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment by Mr Swenson.

In the interview he laid out the current asset allocation for the Yale fund as follows;

• Absolute Return 25%

• Real Assets 25%

• Private Equity 17%

• Foreign Equity 14%

• Domestic Equity 14%

• Domestic Bonds 5%

He also landed a couple of shots at the mutual fund industry and offered these nuggets of advice;

• Don't try to outsmart the market

• Buy index funds but shop carefully

• Rebalance

Good stuff.