When I spoke with Jack Meyer, the former head of Harvard University’s endowment, at the offices of Goldman Sachs on Fleet Street in London back in 2009, he was thoroughly chastened by the recent 25%+ drop in the value of Harvard’s endowment. A month or two later, Stanford University’s President John Hennessy, reflecting his Silicon Valley roots, was more optimistic about Stanford’s similar collapse, telling me: “Look, Nick, it’s not the end of the world. It just puts us back to where we were in 2006.” Hennessy’s optimism notwithstanding, the crash of 2008 turned much of the global financial world on its head. This included much-vaunted “Yale model” that had made Harvard and Stanford tens of billions of extra dollars over the past two decades.
Despite the challenges of the market meltdown of 2008, the “Yale model” remains one of the most powerful investment strategies around. And thanks to exchange-traded funds (ETFs), today you can duplicate this investment strategy in your own personal investment portfolio. It is also an investment approach I have implemented with impressive success through the “Ivy Plus” Investment Program for my clients at my investment firm Global Guru Capital.
For a period of more than 20 years, the investment strategies of top university endowments seemed blessed by fairy dust. The top three U.S. university endowments — Harvard, Yale and Stanford — consistently had returned more than 15% per year over the last decade. And even after the onset of the credit crunch in the summer of 2007, the Harvard endowment gained 8.6%, Stanford rose 6.2% and Yale climbed 4.5% through June 30, 2008. That compared with a drop of 15% in the S&P 500 over the same time period.