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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (65741)	6/30/2005 6:42:02 PM
From: energyplay	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Most of the big name university endowment funds have had a portion of the portfolio in hard assets from as long a 20 years ago or more. In the past 5-7 years, I think the mainstream has moved to international and real assets Havard has been heavily into timberland. I took a class from a former Goldman Sachs guy who also advises the Stanford endowment, he is well aware of paper money issues. Besides, Stanford has lots of Google stock to bail it out of any problems ;-) As a group of investment portfolios, I think the University endowments have done better than penison funds, most insurance companies, and the S&P indexes. This is based on some data provided by Forbes a while back, which was tilted to the larger endowments, and some later reports by Business Week. Even assuming some regression toward the S&P mean for the smaller schools, university funds as a group have done well, and I expect they have reasonable exposure to real assets. I suspect the reason the Universities have done so well is they are able to attract high level financial talent because of altruistic motivations. Keynes handled a portfolio for King's College, so there's a tradition of this.... As for Huffy - I wish the new owners the best of luck. The mass market bike business appears to be very tough. Some of the customers are from Hell, and then there's Wall Mart.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (65741)	6/30/2005 7:09:43 PM
From: energyplay	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Schools worth 50k ? "The boy of a friend just got into a not so name brand US school, and the cost appears to be USD 50k per annum. I am guessing the name brand schools are about the same." Almost any US college which is about 15% or more above the average will have many opportunties to learn from high level people, experienced people, people with really odd viewpoints (like gold bugs), and a pretty mixed student body. One of the keys is DELIBERATELY SEEK OUT good/interesting/useful professor, grad students, classes, etc. THIS SHOULD BE DONE WITH A WRITTEN plan each quarter - no joke. Most schools, even very good ones, have somewhat hit or miss academic couciling. To gather information, talk to graduate students, seniors in your major, and seniors not in your major. At least 7 different seniors and grad students in your major, so you don't get just one opinion. If you 're majoring in computers, and have to take a chemistry or English Lit course, go talk to other people. There will be 2-4 people teaching "Chemistry for Jocks", and one of them may be very good in terms of what you learn, and what you can retain and understand 5 and 10 years out. There will also be short courses, lectures, movies, parties, etc. Is this party the same eight guys getting drunk ? or are these the achievmnet oriented guys who want to see who can puke hte farthest ? Everybody knows about networking and making friends - just do some of it, instead of 100% of social time with the same comfortable groups. There are some books on doing this - they have titles like "how to get a first rate education at a second rate school" Sounds like the schools is very good, just not a big name. ******** You can sometimes get useful advice from other students who have had real world experience. I got some advice based on personal experince from a number of ex-military people when I was a freshman in the the late 60s. They were unamimous about this advice..... "Avoid going to Viet Nam"

To: TobagoJack who wrote (65741)	7/1/2005 3:39:07 PM
From: Seeker of Truth	Respond to of 74559

Hi Jay, Thanks for your reply and sorry my uninvested cash seems to be stuck in the silly California house bubble. As for the universities endowment funds, they are very conservatively managed. My alma mater, Harvard, owns 20% of the Brazil Fund. I doubt that they got stung in the tech bubble. Columbia, where my brother taught, has been stuffed with cash in the last 20 years or so, as various alumni made it big in this or that business. Columbia owns many apartment houses, as investments. Chugs. Malcolm