Yale's chief investment manager David Swensen dies at 67

David Swensen, the head of Yale University’s endowment who helped reshape how institutions manage their money, has died from cancer aged 67.

After stints at Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers, Swensen returned to his alma mater in 1985 to lead its investment office. At the time, endowments were typically conservatively managed, but Swensen overhauled the model dramatically, taking advantage of their long-term focus to invest heavily in the nascent private equity and hedge fund industries.

His approach was so successful it revolutionised how endowments and many other institutional investors allocate their money, and the “Yale model” spread and helped change the wider investment industry.

“With his guidance, Yale’s endowment yielded returns that established him as a legend among institutional investors,” Peter Salovey, Yale’s president, said in a statement. “A natural teacher, he prepared a generation of institutional investors who have gone on to lead investment offices at other colleges and universities, further extending the scope of David’s influence.”

The Yale Investments Office managed $31.2bn as of June 2020, and says it has averaged annual returns of 12. 4 per cent a year over the past three decades. In the 2021 fiscal year its contributions accounted for over a third of the university’s overall revenues.

Almost a quarter of the endowment is invested in venture capital, and combined with private equity, hedge funds and real estate, so-called “alternative” investments account for nearly three quarters of its assets.

Early life and education

David F. Swensen was born inRiver Falls, Wisconsin. His father, Richard Swensen, was a chemistry professor and dean at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. His mother, Grace, after raising six children, became a Lutheran minister. After graduating from River Falls High School in 1971 Swensen elected to stay in his hometown of River Falls and receive hisB.A.andB.S.in 1975 from theUniversity of Wisconsin-River Fallswhere his father Richard Swensen was a professor. Swensen pursued a PhD ineconomicsat Yale, where he wrote hisdissertation,A Model for the Valuation ofCorporate Bonds.One of Swensen's dissertation advisers at Yale wasJames Tobin, a top economic adviser toJohn F. Kennedyadministration and a future Nobel Prize laureate in economics. According to Charles Ellis, founder of Greenwich Associates and former chair of Yale's investment committee, "When it snowed, David went to Jim's house to shovel the sidewalk". James Tobin's Nobel Prize, among other things, was for his contribution in creation of Modern Portfolio Theory. Swensen was fascinated by the idea of Modern Portfolio Theory. During his 2018 reunion speech Swensen said: "For a given level of return, if you diversify you can get that return at lower risk. For a given level of risk, if you diversify you can get a higher return. That's pretty cool! Free lunch!"

Investment career

Swensen began his investment career in the early 1980s, and has since advised theCarnegie Corporation, theNew York Stock Exchange, theHoward Hughes Medical Institute, theCourtauld Institute of Art, theYale-New Haven Hospital, The Investment Fund for Foundations (TIFF), theEdna McConnell Clark Foundation, and the States of Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Salomon Brothers

Following his academic interest in valuation of corporate bonds, Swensen joined Salomon Brothers in 1980. This career move was suggested by a Salomon Brothers investment banker and Yale alumni, Gene Dattel, who was deeply impressed by Swensen. In 1981 Swensen worked to structure the world's first swap agreement, a deal betweenIBMand theWorld Bankwhich allowed to hedge their exposure to Swiss francs and German marks.

Lehman Brothers

Prior to joining Yale in 1985, Swensen spent six years onWall Streetas senior vice president atLehman Brothers, specializing in the firm'sswapactivities, and as an associate incorporate financeforSalomon Brothers(here he worked for three years prior to joining Lehman Brothers), where his work focused on developing new financial technologies. Swensen engineered the first swap transaction according toWhen Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital ManagementbyRoger Lowenstein.

Yale University endowment

Swensen was tapped to serve as the Yale endowment manager at age 31 in 1985. This position was offered by Swensen's other dissertation adviser, Yale's provost,William Brainard. Swensen's candidacy was suggested by James Tobin, who, despite his former student's young age, believed he could be the right person. Swensen was hesitant about taking the job at first, since he did not know much about portfolio management aside from his studies in graduate school. Nevertheless, Brainard convinced him to take the position and Swensen started on April 1, 1985 by taking 80% pay cut. A year later, in 1986, he was joined by Yale College and School of Management graduate Dean Takahashi, who soon became Swensen's trusted deputy. In 1985, when Swensen started managing the endowment, it was worth $1 billion; in 2019 it was worth $29.4 billion.

As of 2005, the fund has managed annualized returns of 16.1%. He has been called "Yale's 8 billion dollar man" for his attainment of nearly $8 billion for the college endowment from 1985 to 2005. According to former Yale President, economistRichard Levin, Swensen's "contribution" to Yale is greater than the sum of all the donations made in more than two decades. "We've just done better," Levin says, because of Swensen's "uncanny ability" to pick the best outside money managers. Swensen's former staff members, who later became managers of other endowment funds - includingMIT,StanfordandPrinceton- also showed impressive results in multiplying fund wealth.

In September 2014, Swensen began to move the Yale endowment away from investment in companies that have a large greenhouse footprint, expressing Yale's preferences in a letter to the endowment's money managers. The letter asked them to consider the effect of their investments on climate change, and to refrain from investing in companies that do not make reasonable efforts to reduce carbon emissions. This method was characterized by Swensen as a more subtle and flexible approach, as opposed to outright divestment.

Swensen made headlines on March 5, 2018 for arguing with the undergraduate editor-in-chief of theYale Daily News. Swensen called the editor-in-chief a "coward" for deleting an inaccurate sentence and removing a footnote in an op-ed that he submitted to the paper; his column, which he required to be published unedited, responded to a student teach-in that criticized companies allegedly in the Yale portfolio.

Unconventional success

In 2005, Swensen wrote a book calledUnconventional Success,which is an investment guide for the individual investor. The general strategy that he presents can be boiled down to the following three main points of advice:

• The investor should construct a portfolio with money allocated to 6 core asset classes, diversifying among them and biasing toward the equity sections.
• The investor should rebalance the portfolio on a regular basis (rebalancingback to the original weightings of the asset classes in the portfolio).
• In the absence of confidence in a market-beating strategy, invest in low-costindex fundsandexchange-traded funds. The investor should be very watchful of costs as some indices are poorly constructed and some fund companies charge excessive fees (or generate large tax liabilities).

He slams manymutual fundcompanies for charging excessive fees and not living up to their fiduciary responsibility. He highlights the conflict of interest inherent in the mutual funds, claiming they want high fee, high turnover funds while investors want the opposite.