Bring Harvard and Yale Investing to the People
Give the great unwashed the same options as the endowment elite.
Bring the ivory tower down.
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Lots of people want to invest like elite university endowments, but securities laws don’t allow it. It’s time to remove those barriers.
But it’s worth asking whether investors should aspire to the so-called endowment model in the first place. According to numbers compiled by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, universities with the biggest endowments generated an average return of 9.7 percent annually over the last 30 years through June 2017 — the longest period for which annual returns are available — slightly edging out the S&P 500 Index’s return of 9.6 percent, including dividends.