Invest like an Ivy League School

Ivy League schools aren't just best on college ranking lists—they’ve typically been the best in the stockmarket, as well (at least until Harvard and Yale each lost a quarter of its endowment in the last year). It may not seem like the best time to look to them for financial advice, but a new book, How Harvard and Yale Beat the Market, by Matthew Tuttle, shows what we can learn from the universities. How do they do it? Through a two-fold strategy aimed both at not losing money, and spending only the return of their investments—which they achieve through diversifying their assets. Tuttle rails against mutual fund investments in the book, and says individual investors should write their own investment-policy statements. Writes the Wall Street Journal: “More generally, the recent travails of Harvard and Yale underscore an uncomfortable reality—that even good strategies can fail and that truly terrible markets provide few places to hide.”