The original version of this article first appeared in The Business Times. ‍ From 1985 to 2021, Yale’s endowment achieved an annualised return of 13.7%, growing from USD1 billion to over USD40 billion after making withdrawals for the endowment’s liabilities.  To give you a sense of this 36 year achievement and the power of compounding, a good annualised return of 8% – what global public equities typically return over longer time frames – would have compounded to 16 times your money. Achieving 13.7% as Yale did would have compounded to 100 times your money.  The Yale portfolio was famously deployed not only into broad and professionally managed public equities and fixed income, but also across multiple asset classes, including hedge funds, private credit, private equity, real estate and other alternatives. The main source of incremental returns came from a combination of alpha, manager selection, the illiquidity premium, longer duration assets, and...