The Resilient Investor: Predicting the Economy
One outcome of the financial crisis is we have to “live with messiness.” Instead of a neat and tidy explanation for everything that happens in the markets, humans are sometimes irrational and, as emotional creatures, we occasionally let fear and greed cloud our financial decisions. After witnessing the current financial crisis, the tech stock bubble and burst from a decade ago, and numerous other financial storms over the past 20 years, it seems that when it comes to money, humans continue to make mistakes with their money and investments. In a very interesting September 2 New York Times Magazine article, Nobel Prize winner and liberal econo

The Resilient Investor: Ivy League Endowment Funds
Rarely do you see a headline in a mainstream newspaper containing the three words, “Yale,” “Harvard,” and “Losers,” but that’s exactly what happened last week in The Wall Street Journal. The Journal certainly wasn’t talking about the Universities’ academic prowess or even their athletic exploits; rather, it was the disappointing performance of their once invincible endowment funds. The value of their endowments each dropped by 30 % for the 12 months ending June 30, 2009. By comparison, a typical plain-vanilla endowment allocation of 60 % stocks and 40 % bonds lost only 13 % during that period, according to the Journal.