Unconventional Success

As head of the Yale University endowment fund, the late David Swensen was one of the foremost innovators and most successful practitioners of institutional investing. Remarkably, he also wrote one of the best books ever for individual investors. Unconventional Success shows why on average, mutual fund investors significantly underperform the funds they own: They trade excessively, buying at the highs and selling at the lows, creating tax inefficiencies in the process. Swensen also valuably details hazards to avoid in fund selection. 

The greatly respected chief investment officer at Yale University for 36 years, David Swensen wrote: “Go back to basics. You can make money in stocks with a program of conservative investing through a successfully administered long-term portfolio. You should welcome the inevitable short-term declines by pursuing a “dollar cost averaging” strategy (investing the same number of dollars on the same exchange-traded fund that tracks the S&P 500 at the same time intervals). When you look at the results on an after-fee, after-tax basis, over reasonably long periods of time, there's almost no chance that you end up beating such a… show more.