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Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment (Hardcover) (精装)
by David F. Swensen
| Category:
Mutual fund, Investing, Personal wealth, Investment guide |
| Market price: ¥ 308.00
MSL price:
¥ 278.00
[ Shop incentives ]
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Excellent and important personal finance review for serious investors though a little difficult and dry. |
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 12 items |
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John C. Bogle (Founder and former CEO, The Vanguard Group) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
Mutual fund managers and marketers are not going to like David Swensen's thoughtful and intelligently opinionated analysis of their 'colossal failure' resulting from the fund industry's 'systemic exploitation of investors.' Coming from the mind and heart of one of America's most successful and integrity-laden money managers, this is a book that will change the way you think about mutual funds. It's high time for you to follow the elegantly simple advice he presents in this wonderful book. |
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Barton Biggs (Former Chief Global Strategist, Morgan Stanley) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
Swensen is the best. Always a pioneer, his new book presents an approach to investing that is both brilliant and practical. |
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Burton G. Malkiel (Author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
A legendary institutional investor reveals the conflicts of interest that induce most financial services companies to provide inadequate products for the individual investor. Swensen's wise solution: Low cost, tax efficient, market-mimicking funds available either through Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) or from not-for-profit mutual fund companies. Unconventional Success does for the individual investor what Swensen's Pioneering Portfolio Management did for the institutional investor. |
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Jeremy Grantham (Chairman of GMO) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
Unfortunately, at the bottom of our industry - money management - there is a rather thick layer of muck, and Swensen's Unconventional Success rakes through this muck in spectacular fashion and great detail. It is the truth, the whole truth, and the very ugly truth. If you want to avoid the snares that lurk in money management, and save yourself lots of money, you must read it." |
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Willis (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
Unconventional Success is a good primer for those looking to invest their retirement funds prudently, but it doesn't go far enough. Similar advice can be found for free, summarized in two pages, by reading Paul Farrell's Lazy Portfolio columns on the CBS Marketwatch site. The object lesson is simple - diversify and invest with index funds.
I'm disappointed that the book doesn't delve further into the potential returns realizable by following Swensen's allocation over time. Why 30% total in bonds? What happens if that is 20, or 25%? or 10%? A chapter detailing the impact of potential returns would be highly useful for those of us managing our own IRA's over the long term.
I take issue with his 30% allocation, only because he does not well define how this impacts long term returns. In fact, the rationale for this is poorly described. I say this because before I read his book, I reviewed Yale's Endowment fund allocations, which are publically available. Yale's target allocation is 7.5% bonds, because "Yale is not particularly attracted to fixed income assets, as they have the lowest historical and expected returns of the six asset classes that make up the Endowment." So what am I supposed to take from this? 30% is good for me as an individual investor, but not for Yale? If anyone knows of websites that can backtest returns of portfolios that conform to specific asset allocations, please post. Thanks. |
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George Fisher (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
This is an extraordinary book written by an extraordinary fund manager that contains information that is of great interest to every investor. As more and more people take more and more responsibility for their own financial future (as more and more companies decline to provide pensions or health care), this information takes on critical importance.
There are two parts to this book:
1. An analysis of how individual investors should structure and manage their own portfolios.
2. An analysis of which securities to use to create these portfolios.
The portfolio suggested is the following:
Wilshire 5000 30%
EAFE 15%
Emerging Mkts 5%
US REITs 20%
US Govt Bonds 15%
TIPS 15%
The security choice boils down to Vanguard and the Federal Reserve with ETFs bought through AmeriTrade for a tax-efficient alternative to index funds.
In both parts of the book, analysis becomes expose.
Portfolio construction and management should follow well-known precepts such as (a) equity bias (b) diversification and (c) rebalancing. The expose is of the bad advice given by financial advisors and investors' propensity to ignore their portfolios until either greed or fear drive them to self-destructive behavior.
Active management is shown to be a failure in the long run, if not a fraud: data is presented that shows that in the 15 years from 1983 - 1998, during the greatest bull market in history - a period ending before the great dot.com collapse - 96% of actively-managed funds failed to beat the Vanguard S&P 500 Index Fund ... failing by an average of -4.8% per year. And the 4% who beat the index did so by a measly 0.6% per year.
The security selection expose details the extraordinarily self-serving and client-damaging behavior of the majority of the mutual funds pushed by financial advisors and brokerage companies. Vanguard, Longleaf, TIAA/CREF, AmeriTrade, State Street and Barklays stand alone among thousands of firms as being worthy of their clients' trust. Echos of Warren Buffett abound ("we eat our own cooking") but he is not explicitly mentioned.
The downside to this book is that it is hard to read. Both from the standpoint of a college writing course and because a good deal of financial-industry knowledge is assumed.
Notwithstanding the writer's style, this book represents a seminal event in the area of investor advice and should sit, dog-eared and well-thumbed, on every investor's, policy-maker's and regulator's bookshelf. |
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Dale Maley (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
I was fairly impressed with this book. I would give it an A, but the style of writing was painful to read, so I give it a B.
I recently saw several articles about Harvard's endowment manager leaving Harvard to set up his own firm. I was amazed to see how diversified the Harvard fund was in that it included not just stocks and bonds, but many other asset classes:
U.S. equities 15%
Commodities 13%
Private Equity 13%
Hedge Funds 12%
U.S. Bonds 11%
Foreign Equities 10%
Real Estate 10%
Inflation-Indexed Bonds 6%
Emerging Markets 5%
High-Yield 5%
Foreign Bonds 5%
Borrowed Money 5%
This info came from 12/27/04 Business Week article. The same article said Harvard's endowment fund grew from $4.7B in 1990 to $22.6B in 2005. This sounds impressive until you calculate the compounded return, which is 11.04%. Simply investing in an S&P 500 index fund over the same time period would have given roughly a 10.91% compounded rate of return.
Swensen seems to have followed a similar very diversified approach at Yale.
I really enjoyed the explanation of why certain asset classes should not be included in investor's portfolios.....specifically foreign bonds.
Since I am an avid Index Fund investor, Swensen was preaching to the choir with regards to blasting the "for profit" mutual fund companies. Being a Vanguard investor, I was disappointed to see Vanguard take one hit for following one type of unsavory practice. Compared to the "for profit" mutual fund companies, Vanguard is a shining angel.
The successes of Harvard's and Yale's endowment fund investments are spreading the gospel of the advantages of asset allocation. Gary Brinson's 1986 famous study can be defined as the birth of asset allocation. He found that over 90% of a portfolio's return can be determined by the asset classes used, not what the individual investments were. Brinson's findings have been relatively slow to flow through the investment community and to individual investors. Dial the time clock ahead from 1986 to 2006, and one of Business Week's cover stories seeks to explain why the S&P 500's profits have increased dramatically over the last 5 years, yet the S&P 500 companies have had very little stock price appreciation. One explanation offered is that more and more investors practice asset allocation and choose other investments besides the S&P 500 for their portfolios. The increased demand for other asset classes like foreign stocks, commodities, and gold has subsequently less to a decrease in demand for large cap stocks in the S&P 500.
This book contains excellent information and guidelines for serious investors. It is very dry and boring to read.
All-in-all, a good book for serious investors. I would suggest companion books to supplement this book including The Richest Man in Babylon, Bogle on Mutual Funds, The Millionaire Next Door, The 4 Pillars of Investing, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Index Mutual Funds: How to Simplify Your Life and Beat the Pros, and the Coffeehouse Investor. |
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S. Woit (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
This is the best primer on personal investment strategy that I have read in the last ten years. Could only have been written by someone with Swensen's credentials who is totally unbeholden to the mutual fund companies and other financial services players who are systematically bilking small investors through high fee, high risk investment strategies that do not pay off for the investor in the long term.
Swensen's advice is sound, based on proven portfolio management principles, battle-tested via Yale's global endowment, one of the largest and most sophisticated investors of our time. The chapters on the proper use of ETFs- exchange traded funds- in a personal investment portfolio are worth the purchase price alone.
Of course, most investors will never take the time to read and reflect on a book like this - but you should! Just don't count on your mutual fund company to tell you about it! |
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
I used to read many investment books. There are many valid approaches to investing. One way, recommended by Peter Lynch and others, is to choose a diversified portfolio of individual stocks. Another way is to choose professional managers, and the easiest way to do this is through mutual funds. I chose a diversified portfolio of mutual funds. It has been a success.
However, there have always been aspects that have made me uncomfortable, and this book has forced me to realize that I have been paying a high price for my active management. And this book has forced me to face the hard question: the people who run my funds are without doubt winners in the game of finance, but I am not at all sure that they are making the 1 or 2 percent above market returns every year that justify that expense.
Some of the excellent points that are made: mutual funds often have hidden fees, such as kickbacks to brokers. And it is the shareholders who pay these fees (of course). Asset backed securities such as GNMAs may seem like conservative income choices, but how will they behave in extreme markets? As a product of complex financial engineering, nobody really knows.
He strongly embraces simplicity and low cost. He recommends the common sense solution of finding a money manager who is working for the client's interest instead of his own interest (which is often completely opposite the client's.) His basic recommendation is plain vanilla market index funds fun by non-profit institutions. It is awfully hard to argue with this reasoning.
At the very least, this book has prompted a look back at how my own funds have done versus how his recommended choices would have done.
No investment approach is right for everyone. But this approach deserves to be considered seriously.
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M. Shields (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
This is a great book that goes through some fundamental investment choices that all individual investors should know. Swensen has much data to bolster his assertions, though people in the investment industry (other than low cost, investor-friendly firms like TIAA-CREF and Vanguard) would certainly bristle against his overt assertions of greed in the industry. I for one agree with him wholeheartedly, coming to it from years of my own independent, though not necessarily scientific, informal research. Very very worth a read. However, it is not the most exciting read and is a bit dry, unless you are fairly antiestablishment. For those who care enough to spend the time to not get fleeced, it is an important read. There are some new ideas (at least to me) about certain bonds/bond funds, and other "investments" being wholly unsuitable for individual investors that I had not previously appreciated. Swensen knows his stuff and seems to have serious ethics as well as no desire to run for elected office. Good for him. He seems to have the highest intellectiual and ethical standards and cares not for the majority of the financial services industry, which by my interpretation is largely parasitic. |
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1 2 | Total 2 pages 12 items |
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