David Swensen: Successful Old Investors Should Think Young

The late David Swensen realized individual investors would gain nothing but trouble if they tried to imitate the strategies he applied to Yale’s endowment. Instead, he said, they should simply go passive and cut costs. “[T]he most sensible approach is to come up with specific asset allocation targets that you can implement with low-cost, passively managed index funds and rebalance regularly. You'll end up beating the overwhelming majority of participants in the financial markets.”

Swensen didn’t think much of paying investment advisers, and he questioned the conventional wisdom that investors must become more  conservative as they age. If elderly investors have ample funds, Swensen argued, they shouldn’t be investing for themselves. They should be investing, fairly boldly, for their young and middle-aged heirs. 

Kiplingers recently offered a  cautious version of the same advice.