David Swenson, or as many will call him, the “Warren Buffet of Yale”, is the investment guru that has been running the Yale Endowment Fund for over 33 years now.
Managing around $30 billion in assets under management, Swenson is famous for his wealth management abilities and his shrewdness when it comes to allocating the Ivy League’s endowment fund. Yale has been one of the most successful universities in the world when it comes to managing its own funds and generating a sufficient return for years to come.
Endowment funds are usually rather passive investment vehicles and rather conservative ones, given the nature of their purpose, i.e. preserving and, if possible, growing the university’s endowment.
Now, Yale is investing in the $400 million cryptocurrency hedge fund, Paradigm, which was founded by some quite prominent Silicon Valley investors such as Matt Huang, a Sequoia Capital partner.
David Swenson has reportedly invested in the prominent Andreessen Horowitz’s $300 million cryptocurrency fund.
Yale has been generating, on average, a whopping 7.5% return on its $30 billion endowment fund, whereas the “industry” average is less than 5%.
The amount of money that Yale invested in currently unknown. However, the important factor is that a major US institution is now putting a share of their alternative investment portion into cryptocurrencies. What is more, Swenson’s success in running the endowment fund at Yale is absolutely unprecedented, and his technique and allocation strategy has been mimicked by other US educational institutions such as MIT and Harvard.