The two prominent universities in the Ivy League are Havard and Yale. Besides being famous for their academia, they have large and profitable endowment funds that pay for a large part of the universities’ expenses. How well? From 1985-2008, S&P 500 returned 11.98% and while most fund managers could not beat the market, Yale and Harvard endowments returned 16.62% and 15% respectively. What did they do right that retail investors like you and me can follow? In this book, the authors dissected the portfolio of these Ivy League schools and analysed the sources of excess returns.

The challenge of these endowments is that besides having to focus on long term growth of the capital (to outpace inflation at 3%), they must afford to spend on the universities in the short term (to outpace expenditures of 4-5%).

Similarly to the mutual fund industry, for the few endowments that succeed, ...