Book Report: Pioneering Portfolio Management by David Swensen

I just finished reading Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investing by David F. Swensen, the Chief Investment Officer of the Yale endowment. Although not a value investing book per se, it sheds a lot of light on the whole investing process. He takes a very top-down approach to investing with a lot of data to back up claims. Although he may disagree with Warren Buffet in approach, he shares a similar view that investors in equities should either invest in fairly inefficient illiquid opportunities selling at a discount to intrinsic value or invest passively through index funds.

The following are a few interesting points that I noted from the book:
1) The more liquid an asset class or security category, the less opportunities there are for active management to generate alpha.
2) Mutual funds that concentrate in a limited number of stocks often outperform very diverse index-like mutual funds.
3) Consistent high returns from private equity firms depends primarily on the amount of value that the firm adds to the process. Buyout firms that have expertise in improving operations can be expected to do much better than firms that perform buyouts just to liquidate. A lot of buyout transactions underperform the S&P if one leverages the S&P's returns by the same amount as the buyout transactions.
4) Not much diversifying value from corporate and foreign bonds. Corporate bonds tend to have features that favor shareholders rather than bondholders, e.g. callability of bonds. Fixed income allocations should be concentrated in Treasury bills of different duration as they serve as a ballast during times of crisis or times of deflation.
5) The majority of the portfolio returns will come from marketable equities and alternative asset classes like private equity, long/short funds, merger-arbitrage funds, and real estate.
6) For those aspiring to be quants, Swensen emphasizes the necessity to pair qualitative assessments of investments on top of pure quantitative approaches. Many times backwards-looking analysis can be misleading and soft analysis is necessary when evaluating companies and funds run by real people and entities.
7) He likes to foster contrarian thinking in his investment committees. He doesn't expect immediate positive feedback from contrarian ideas. Small controlled experimental failures are often precursors for eventual success.

Like many of the other authors whom I read, Swensen believes in the importance of asset allocation, intelligent diversification, and the futility of market timing. Unlike typical value investors, he believes that value investors face likely failure unless they have a significant edge over other market participants. He also doubts most investors have the intestinal fortitude to hold onto out-of-favor companies in their darkest hours. In other words, he believes in value investing, but doesn't think that most investors can practice it with success.

In the last chapter of the book discussing the investment process, Swensen tells readers that the most important decision one can make is in deciding an investment policy, i.e. an asset allocation. Once that is set then one can worry about execution and fine-tune particular strategies. As it applies to me, my asset allocation decision is relatively simple. I recently entered my mid-twenties with approximately ten months worth of expenses in an emergency fund. I have a stable income and may be looking to buy some real estate if the California real estate market can start toppling =). The majority of my money is invested in equities. Currently I have 90% in equities, 5% in fixed income, and the remaining 5% in cash. Because the 5% cash is actually earmarked for stocks and options strategies, I am slightly off my target of 90% equities and 10% fixed income. I'll try to rectify this by the end of this year.

Overall, I highly recommend this book. In particular, chapters 4 to 8, 10 and 11 are especially relevant for the individual investor. I have to admit that this book wasn't as easy a read as say Jim Cramer's books, but there are definitely a lot more gems.