The Investment Management Business Is Really Quite Simple

(The title of today’s post comes from the first minute of a lecture provided by David Swensen, Chief Investment Officer of Yale’s endowment fund.)

Man it would be great if someone paid me to learn. Since I’ve been enjoying a bit of a sabbatical since the end of June when I quit my day job, I’ve found I have more time to read and learn. I can’t stop.

I’ve been really enjoying the various open learning initiatives offered by various universities and colleges. You can essentially sit in on an entire course’s lectures and exams from Harvard, Yale, MIT and other schools. You don’t pay, but you don’t get credit either. Seems like a fine tradeoff to me. The only cost is your time.

I’ve been leaning towards history courses and American civics myself, the latter mostly due to the recent highlighting of political brinksmanship seemingly interfering with the ability to get things done.

However, I was going through the list of all courses and lectures available and I thought one was worth sharing with readers of this blog.

If you don’t know who David Swensen is, you may want to read a bit about him here. In a nutshell, he took over Yale’s endowment fund and is credited with revolutionizing the endowment investing model for all his peers. Regardless of whether you agree with The Yale Model of investing, he guest lectured one session for Professor Robert Shiller’s course on Financial Markets (ECON252) at Yale University and it is chock-full of interesting information.

He talks about many fundamental concepts which would do the average investor very well to understand. It is highly digestible, although there are no charts, slides or other materials. Just David walking to and fro in front of the class.

It runs for about 70 minutes, but I highly recommend it. Grab a coffee a click here to watch the lecture.