Pages

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Morgan Creek Capital's Yusko on investing

"Alternative Thinking About Investments" was the topic addressed by Mark Yusko, CEO and chief investment officer, Morgan Creek Capital Management, when he spoke at the annual conference of the Financial Planning Association of Massachusetts on May 7. Yusko's wide-ranging talk was provocative and entertaining, with some great one-liners that became tweets that I quote below.


Alternatives deserve more attention


Yusko thinks investors should put more into alternative strategies. A small allocation simply cannot have a big enough impact.

This is a lesson that target date fund (TDF) managers should consider, suggested Ryan Alfred, co-founder and president of BrightScope, in response to my tweet. As he explained,





Going back to Yusko, he also suggested that your clients should have at least one-third of their assets in illiquid investments because such investments "win" after recessions. He's assuming that your clients have plenty of money that they plan to pass on to others in their wills. Yusko didn't specify which illiquid assets he was talking about.


Provocative 
Yusko isn't fond of mainstream media. "Cancel your subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. It's all wrong, it's all biased." He used the example of the war between Russia and Georgia to make his case, mentioning that Morgan Creek pays someone to read Russian newspapers for them. 

Yusko also spoke in favor of high fees. He seemed to suggest that fees rise along with the investment manager's ability to deliver performance.




Humorous Yusko 
In closing, here is some Yusko humor.







_______________________
Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.  
Copyright 2010 by Susan B. Weiner All rights reserved

1 comment:

  1. Going through my notes, I found more Yusko opinions on fees.

    "If you pay low fees, you have your money managed by the worst people."

    "The idea that you want to minimize costs makes no sense."

    People say they know that indexing beats hedge funds, but for a 20-year period, S&P 500 returned 6.5% vs. 13.2% for hedge funds.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.