How To Really Ruin Your Financial Life and Portfolio

Chapter 11Use the Strategies That University Endowments and the Giant Players Use

Yes, again, old fuddy-duddies like Bogle and Buffett have told you that you should stick to the simple stuff and just buy broad indexes, especially when the prices are low by historical metrics, and hold onto them as long as you can. Yes, that has proved to be a fairly decent strategy.

But is it good enough for Yale? Is it good enough for Harvard? Is it good enough for the many billionaire families in this world? No. That means it’s not good enough for you, bro.

How do the Ivies and Stanford endowments and the Rockefellers invest? They don’t just go to Vanguard or Fidelity and buy the indexes. That is for sure. They don’t just go to Merrill Lynch and buy an ETF of all Taiwanese stocks above a certain size.

No. They have far more sophisticated strategies. They buy immense plots of forestland and wait for the value of the land to rise as forest resources and property gets more valuable. Land! After all, they’re not making any more of it. In fact, with global warming raising the level of the oceans and swamping some low-lying areas, land is becoming ever scarcer. Scarcity means an increase in price.

Plus, everyone wants wood. You can build homes with it. You can build boats with it. You can lay railroad ties with it or put up telephone poles. So that’s why you should own forests. Forests. It is almost too basic. That’s what you should do. Go buy a few acres of forestland near your home, sit on it, ...