David Swensen (head of Yale endowment management)
Individual should be responsible to educate themselves if they actively manage their portfolio or just go passive: investing in index fund (this is echo to Buffett, Bogle). There is nothing in between (in other words, he thinks doing something in between can not bring good performance).
David is not a big fan of mutual fund because: 1) Only 15% of mutual fund outperform the market; 2) Survival-ship bias (10,000 out of 30,000 mutual funds fold in 20 years); 3) Even if individual investors luckily find the 15% good mutual fund, many buy “high” and sell “low” on the funds.
Another interesting point David made was we went from an ownership (everyone being shareholder) society to an agent(let someone else to manage asset) society, and now to fiduciary society. The following is an excerpt of his talk on Apr 23 at Youtube. Both his Apr. 23 and July 24 talk are available at wealthtrack web site.
A thousand words 