The Alternative Answer - The Nontraditional Investments That Drive the World's Best Performing Portfolios

CHAPTER 1

The Alternative Manifesto

Divide your portion to seven, or eight, for you do not know what misfortune may occur on earth.

       —KING SOLOMON, ECCLESIASTES 11:2

Yale’s endowment is up 100% over the past, extraordinarily difficult, decade. I won’t ask how you did.

So, what’s up? Using all that IQ to pick great stocks? Hardly. The trick, in fact, is that mostly they aren’t picking stocks at all: in 2012, only 6% of Yale’s portfolio was in U.S. equities. Instead, fully half resided in things called “absolute return,” “private equity,” and “real assets” strategies. Another big chunk was in emerging markets. Those are the secret ingredients of an investing formula that is now widely followed by most other endowments, foundations, and the ...