Abstract

John Maynard Keynes was an active investor and can claim to be the father of equity investing. Yet, the existing literature has only cursorily examined this aspect of his life. By combining careful archival research with modern portfolio analysis, we evaluate Keynes’s investment philosophy, strategies and performance, principally in the context of the King’s College, Cambridge endowment. This period constitutes a major transition point in modern financial history when Britain moved from the weakly- regulated, retail investor and bond-centric world pre-1913 to the tightly-regulated, institutional investor and equity-centric financial system post-1945. This is therefore also a study of how one sophisticated investor confronted these challenges and one which continues to have relevance for modern day investors.

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