David Swenson

“If you don't have that allocator's edge, and you don't think you should have it, you probably shouldn't play the game.”

“The first derivative ever done was done by David Swenson when he was working at Salomon Brothers. It was an interest rate swap between IBM and the World Bank”

“When David first arrived, they had one billion dollars, and now they got roughly 25 times that, and they've spewed money out to the university year after year after year after year after year.”

“You take all the different comparative advantages that Yale has in David Swenson as their chief investment officer, and it's virtually impossible to replicate.”

“Underlying that all is the people who are going to be successful going back are the people who, Are actually thinking long-term, are actually trying to use their size to almost bully the asset manager into giving them what they want, a true solution. Those are…”

“Growth of endowments, educational endowments in this country at private colleges and universities is not so much related to investment performance, but it's related to compounding of new money. And David Swenson has pointed this out in one of his books, but it…”

“David Swenson first articulated, particularly for institutions, this idea that, that successful investing for institutions demands non-institutional behavior.”

“Investors following David Swenson too often miss the mark in their interpretation of his theory. Like children playing the game telephone, they listen to other voices and echo beliefs with shakier foundations than Yale's.”

“David Swenson was a first principles investor, and he looked at the real estate business in the eighties and said, this doesn't make any sense. And he thought that the fee-based nature of the business, there was no alignment of interest. There was lots of sepa…”

“When David Swenson got the job in 1985, there were no articles in the Wall Street Journal about him getting a job at Yale Endowment.”

“It was a magnificent, exciting, terrifying period of time where I had the opportunity to work with David Swenson, Julian Robertson, and Andrew Golden, who were investors in our fund at the time”