When Salem Abraham would show up at his grandfather’s 10,000-acre ranch in Canadian, Texas, it was often bad news for the Hereford bulls: dehorning, branding, castration. These days, he has an equally uncomfortable message for the tassel-loafered endowment managers at Harvard, Princeton, and MIT: “Hope is a bad strategy.” It’s a warning Abraham — hedge fund manager, commodities trader, and Texas rancher — has been delivering for years to investors who figure they will be lucky enough to dodge the next stock-market calamity. Endowments, foundations, and their ilk today are wildly over-reliant on the stock market, Abraham says. Their managers are ignorant that bonds and other key asset classes are increasingly correlated to equities. And they naively believe that the pricey hedge funds they shovel their money into will provide safe haven in a selloff.