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David F. Swensen

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment Hardcover – August 9, 2005

by David F. Swensen (Author)

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The bestselling author of Pioneering Portfolio Management, the definitive template for institutional fund management, returns with a book that shows individual investors how to manage their financial assets.

In Unconventional Success, investment legend David F. Swensen offers incontrovertible evidence that the for-profit mutual fund industry consistently fails the average investor. From excessive management fees to the frequent "churning" of portfolios, the relentless pursuit of profits by mutual fund management companies harms individual clients. Perhaps most destructive of all are the hidden schemes that limit investor choice and reduce returns, including "pay-to-play" product-placement fees, stale-price trading scams, soft-dollar kickbacks, and 12b-1 distribution charges.

Even if investors manage to emerge unscathed from an encounter with the profit-seeking mutual fund industry, individuals face the likelihood of self-inflicted pain. The common practice of selling losers and buying winners (and doing both too often) damages portfolio returns and increases tax liabilities, delivering a one-two punch to investor aspirations.

In short: Nearly insurmountable hurdles confront ordinary investors.

Swensen's solution? A contrarian investment alternative that promotes well-diversified, equity-oriented, "market-mimicking" portfolios that reward investors who exhibit the courage to stay the course. Swensen suggests implementing his nonconformist proposal with investor-friendly, not-for-profit investment companies such as Vanguard and TIAA-CREF. By avoiding actively managed funds and employing client-oriented mutual fund managers, investors create the preconditions for investment success.

Bottom line? Unconventional Success provides the guidance and financial know-how for improving the personal investor's financial future.

Print length

403 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Free Press
Publication date

August 9, 2005
Dimensions

6.13 x 1.2 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

0743228383
ISBN-13

978-0743228381
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Popular Highlights in this book

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Capital markets provide three tools for investors to employ in generating investment returns: asset allocation, market timing, and security selection.
Highlighted by 622 Kindle readers
Sensible investors pursue diversification as a policy to reduce risk, not as a tactic to chase performance.
Highlighted by 595 Kindle readers
Market timing refers to deviations from the long-term asset-allocation targets. Active market timing represents a purposeful attempt to generate short-term, superior returns based on insights regarding relative asset class valuations.
Highlighted by 399 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Swensen, CIO of Yale University and the author of Pioneering Portfolio Management, reveals why the mutual fund industry as a whole does a disservice to the individual investor. Soft money, 12b-1 fees, overtrading, market timing, and other management practices lower performance and virtually guarantee that most mutual fund returns will fall short of their benchmark, such as the S&P 500. Furthermore, for-profit mutual fund companies have a fiduciary obligation to their stockholders, not to their investors, and this relationship "inevitably resolves in favor of the bottom line." Swensen is also highly critical of the Morningstar rating system, which only causes investors to chase hot performing funds and managers. He advises considering alternatives to the for-profit mutual fund industry, including Exchange Traded Funds and not-for-profit financial institutions such as Vanguard and TIAA-CREF. He highly recommends that as an individual, you should play a more active role in your financial future. This includes periodic portfolio evaluation and rebalancing, to ensure that your asset allocation remains diversified and suits your investment time line. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"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."
-- John C. Bogle, founder and former CEO, The Vanguard Group

"Swensen is the best. Always a pioneer, his new book presents an approach to investing that is both brilliant and practical."
-- Barton Biggs, former Chief Global Strategist, Morgan Stanley

"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."
-- Burton G. Malkiel, author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street

"David Swensen is one of today's best endowment managers, if not the best. Unconventional Success is a perfect summary of what is wrong with a very important industry. This book should lead the reader to better investment decisions."
-- Michael F. Price, Managing Partner, MFP Investors

"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."
-- Jeremy Grantham, Chairman of GMO

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Free Press; Annotated edition (August 9, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 403 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743228383
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743228381
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.34 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.2 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #51,442 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17 in Personal Taxes (Books)
- #75 in Retirement Planning (Books)
- #185 in Introduction to Investing

Customer Reviews:
438 ratings

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David F. Swensen

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David F. Swensen is the chief investment officer of Yale University and the bestselling author of Pioneering Portfolio Management. He serves on the boards of TIAA, The Brookings Institution, Carnegie Institution, and Hopkins School. At Yale, where he produced an unparalleled two-decade investment record of 16.1 percent-per-annum returns, he teaches economics classes at Yale College and finance classes at Yale¹s School of Management. Mr. Swensen lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

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2 star		2%
1 star		4%

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K. Johnson

Mutual Funds: Poor Quality, High Fees.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 25, 2005

Verified Purchase

"Unconventional success" should be convential. The concepts of it, that is. But, with greedy mutual fund companies soaking millions of dollars out of millions of pockets, it isn't the case, and it won't be the case in the future.

I do agree that the far majority of mutual funds are not good.

This book will be most helpful to folks who understand the basics of mutual funds already. David Swenson has beaten the market consistently over the long-term. This gives him credibility that many others in finance lack. Also applicable is his lack of conflicting interests. This said, I still read everything with extreme caution. The Layman Effect.

Today there are over 12,000 mutual funds. Many cannot even beat the S & P 500. David Swenson has beaten it for twenty years. Swenson notes the mutual fund industry and its false advertising, hidden fees, and skewed statistics on past performance, which is often the primary pitch for present buyers.

Some points Swenson noted was that mutual fund companies are accountable - surprise - to shareholders. It's also a fact that funds with higher costs are highly correlated to poorer performance.

Mutual funds run by managers charge high fees. The Funds sold by stockbrokers charge even more. Add managers buying and selling stocks at a rapid turnover, which runs up the fund's brokerage expenses, and cost to investors. The median cost to investors in 2002 was 2.35 percent. What is forgotten? The upfront commission a broker may charge. These costs significantly eat into investment returns.

Sticking to the ole' fundamentals, the most important and easiest step, is to obtain info. and stats compared to a fund's index.

Swenson's major point of advice is to invest through non-profit companies. He mentions a well-known and consistent one.

These funds that are non-profit companies that focus on index funds consistently beat out other funds. This is obvious for tax reasons also, but Swenson also advises to put deferred (retirement) investments into these funds, allocating a particular percentage to U.S. stock, total international, real estate

and Treasury Bonds.

Important to note is that Swenson has so much experience and knowledge that us "laymen" can just cover the basics of his advice, especially when looking at the ways to hedge, yet also gain. The concept of "rebalancing" may make many laymen nervous.

This book can help people. With so many people in mutuals and 401Ks, people need all the help and education they can get.

96 people found this helpful

Helpful

GEORGE R. FISHER

Advise and Expose

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 9, 2006

Verified Purchase

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.

39 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

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N. Weeds

A damning critique of the financial services industry

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 22, 2012

Verified Purchase

This book is really two books in one. It offers strong advice on personal investing, and it is a damning critique of the financial services industry.

Swensen has an outstanding record as chief investment officer for the Yale endowment, which has shown strong returns from sophisticated investments. However, Swensen strongly advises that private investors take a very different approach, concentrating on core asset classes and using low cost passive funds. It's a convincing case, but one which is put much better in Tim Hale's book "Smarter Investing".

Swensen puts strong emphasis on alignment of interests between investors and those who sell or manage investments. It's an important point, and one that does apply to private investors as well as to sophisticated institutional investors.

The second half of the book is really a damning critique of the financial services industry. It's an eye-opener for the private investor. The abuses are pervasive and deeply embedded, and Swensen clearly believes that the financial services industry will always have the upper hand when it comes to exploiting private investors. Whilst the book focuses on the US, and the abuses might be different in the UK, it seems naive to think that the UK is really substantially better.

Overall this is not an easy read, though Swensen's mounting derision of the financial services industry does become amusing towards the end.

If you're after a guide to investing read Tim Hale's book instead - it's covers the same investment principles, and much more besides, in a much more readable style. If you know the basics and you want to go into investing with your eyes open to the exploitation you will face, read this.

9 people found this helpful

kareemsid

Brilliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 9, 2018

Verified Purchase

Quite possibly one of the finest books written on Personal Investing. As someone who has worked in professional/institutional investment management for 2 decades and read the vast majority of books on personal investing this has to be up there as a must-read for those with a basic knowledge of finance. Lucid, cogent, hard-hitting and realistic this book lays out the foundations for creating a robust, all-weather type of PA portfolio.

4 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 1, 2016

Verified Purchase

Perfect, thank you. No Issues to report

Cliente de Kindle

Debe ser leído por personas que buscan invertir a largo plazo

Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on September 11, 2020

Verified Purchase

Este libro contiene importantes consejos sobre estrategias de inversión a largo plazo. Por lo tanto recomendable para aquellas personas que buscan invertir para su retiro. Existen muchos términos técnicos que pueden ser entendidos mejor para personas que se dedican profesionalmente a finanzas. Para aquellos que no al final de cada capítulo existe un resumen explicado en palabras sencillas. Excelente libro y un gran trabajo del autor que busca alejar a los inversores comunes de prácticas establecidas por grandes empresas y fondos de inversión que dañan sus intereses.

3 people found this helpful

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arup guha

Hats off to David Swanson

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on January 6, 2019

Verified Purchase

It takes a lot to impress me now with a book on investing. Both the number of books I have read and portfolio size have grown substantially. But this possibly is the best book on practical investing I have read so far. Every page has some insight, no part of the book is just coasting. Anyone who wants to invest his hard earned cash should read this book if its the only book on investing he reads. If he reads another one he should read Guy Pearse’s autobiography. But this should be the first. What a valuable contribution David swanson has made, deeply grateful to him

One person found this helpful

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