Summary of Book on Foundation and Endowment Investing

Retirement Action has posted a useful summary of the book “Foundation & Endowment Investing” by Lawrence E. Kochard and Catheleen M. Rittereiser. University foundations and endowments provide ideas for investing strategy retired people since there are common characteristics and goals - a long time horizon, the need to pay expenses from income/gains/capital with possible yearly variations (increases for special events, painful decreases when capital suffers in bad markets to protect long-term viability), possibly no new capital.

Some points that I found interesting:

• a perception by the funds that asset classes are blurring or merging
• the significant proportion of equity / non-fixed income
• the importance of re-balancing
• a disbelief in market efficiency and totally passive index investing
• investment portfolio allocated to perform certain functions- e.g. real return bonds to protect against inflation, foreign equity for currency diversification and higher growth, rather than a simple division according to market value of non-correlated assets

Will be adding this book to my reading list. Reviews in Amazon seem to be very positive.