Lecture by Professor David Swensen

World’s leading higher education money manager to speak at the Institute for Philanthropy

12th June, 2006

Professor David Swensen, the Chief Investment Officer of Yale University, is in the words of Time Magazine “easily the best money manager in higher education. He may be the best, period.” On Wednesday 21 June 2006, he will deliver a lecture at the Institute for Philanthropy on the subject of “Managing the financial assets of not-for-profit organisations”.The event will be attended by guests from academia and the public, private and charity sectors.

Nick Ferguson, the Institute’s chairman, said that:

“David Swensen has brought a rigorous analytical approach to this area, and has introduced methods of asset management that both reduce volatility and improve returns for non-profit organisations.”

Noting the timeliness of the seminar, the Institute’s chief executive Dr. Salvatore LaSpada commented that:

“Whilst we in Britain are currently on a strong drive to increase the flow of new philanthropic money into the sector,we would be remiss if we did not also consider how to grow those assets already held by churches, charities, universities and other institutions. David Swensen is a visionary in this area and we are delighted to welcome him to London and to the Institute for Philanthropy.”

Having completed his doctorate in economics at Yale under the close guidance of the late James Tobin, a Nobel laureate, Professor Swensen worked on Wall Street for six years, during which time he was senior vice president of Lehman Brothers. In 1985 he then returned to Yale, where, aided by a small team of fellow former graduates, he devised an investment strategy that was without precedent. He developed a portfolio that was based primarily in private equity and real estate, steering largely clear of bonds, hedge funds and publicly traded equity markets even when they were at their sustained peak.As he has noted,“in dealing with the entire range of investment decisions…investment success requires sticking with positions made uncomfortable by their variance with popular opinion.” As a result, he now presides over an institutional fund that for over two decades has routinely and comfortably outperformed the index of America’s 500 largest companies.He is also the author of two critically acclaimed books, Pioneering Portfolio Management:An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment (The Free Press, 2000) and Unconventional Success:A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment (The Free Press, 2005).

During his twenty-one year tenure as Yale’s Chief Investment Officer, the university has seen its endowment grow more than ten times, with a compound return of 16% per annum over that period. Its value currently stands in excess of $15 billion, and it supplies one third of Yale’s annual budget.