Top Reads, Listens, Follows & Takeaways of the week
Frances Tiafoe, the world’s best-performing equity market, and Princeton’s endowment
Takeaways:
-If you haven’t heard Frances Tiafoe’s story (maybe you watched him in the US Open this summer), get HBO Max and watch the latest episode of Real Sports now. Frances' parents came to the U.S. after fleeing the civil war in Sierra Leone. Needing work, his father became the grounds maintenance manager at a national tennis center in Maryland where the family lived for the first few years after their arrival - the rest was history. It’s truly the American dream.
-What was the world’s best-performing equity market from 1900-2020? The answer: Australia, with an annualized real return of 6.8% per year, out-performing the second ranked United States at 6.6%. Another interesting fact from the Credit Suisse 2021 Global Investment Returns Yearbook - the annualized real return of emerging markets from 1971-2020 was 6.6% just below the U.S. during that time frame (6.7%). From 2001-2020 the EM annualized real return was 8.1%, well outperforming the U.S. at 5.7%, and providing nice diversification. The case for investing globally is clear.
-Princeton’s endowment (PRINCO), led by Andrew Golden, is unique amongst the endowment crowd. With a goal of stewarding capital for the long haul, they have a FY22 target of a 94% allocation to equities at the portfolio level, significantly more than their peer group. More intriguing - only 13% of the portfolio is allocated to traditional developed market equities. Outperformance requires a differentiated approach.
Reads:
It was the best of times, it was the best of times (here)
Opinion: It's time to mandate treatment of the dangerously mentally ill (here)
Princeton Endowment (PRINCO) 2021 investment report, pages 28-35 (here)
Why Russia Lacks ‘Smart’ Weapons (here)
How wealthy individuals are leveraging foundations and donor advised funds (here)
The contrarian bet - international stocks (here)
Credit Suisse 2021 Global Investing Yearbook (here)
Britain’s Financial Disaster Is a Warning to the World (here)
Frontier venture capital (here)
Kyla Scanlon on the economic dominos falling (here)
Listens:
Malcolm Gladwell on revisionist history, revisited (here)
Scott Wilson - Non-Traditional Endowment Investing (here)
How I Built This: ButcherBox, M.Salguero [does $500mm annually in revenue] (here)
Famed short seller Carson Block on his process (here)
Politics and the transformation of American evangelicalism (here)
Marc Andreesen covering a bunch of things (here)
Nick Colas on markets and a Hitchcock Horror (here)
Follow, Watch & Other great content:
Frances Tiafoe profile on HBO Real Sports (watch on HBO Max)
Dan Rasmussen’s investment research
Behind the scenes at the French Laundry, one of the best restaurants in the world (here)