Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

Wayne Wicker is the Senior VP and CIO of ICMA Retirement Corporation, an asset manager that oversees $50B across more than a million retirement accounts of City and County public sector employees throughout the country. Before joining ICMA-RC in 2004, Wayne had a distinguished career as an allocator and manager, starting as an allocator at the corporate pension fund of Dayton Hudson (now Target Corporation) in the 1980s and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute endowment in the mid-1990s, after which he moved to direct investing in large cap growth equities for seven years at Cadence Capital Management in 1998. Our conversation covers Wayne's career path, multi-asset investing, and the ins and outs of managing defined contribution plans as a fiduciary and as a business. We discuss asset allocation strategies, regulatory limitations, stable value products, retirement shortfall risks, active vs. passive on large pools of capital, and managing internal and external teams. This episode took place at a recent Institutional Investor conference for Corporate Funds and Insurance Portfolios, with the core discussion about ICMA-RC occurring in front of a live audience. Learn More Join Ted's mailing list at CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com Write a review on iTunes Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides For more episodes go to CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com/Podcast Show Notes 2:01 – How Wayne first got into the investment business 3:58 – What he did after getting his MBA 7:25 – How he learned about the pension business as a staff of one 9:18 – Key investment lessons from his early career 11:08 – Decision to move on from Target/Dayton Hudson 12:44 – Key differences between overseeing a corporate pension vs a hospital endowment structure 14:25 – How much did the difference in the investing strategy come from the mission of the funds vs the boards overseeing them 15:50 – What could Wayne do on the margin at Howard Hughes 17:28 – Transition to CIO 22:40 – Live Show Begins 23:00 – Defining ICMA-RC 23:32 – How does Wayne think about setting investment objectives with such a diverse group of clients 25:02 – Is it frustrating to have a more finite universe of investing options compared to previous work at Howard Hughes and Dayton Hudson 26:08 – Views on active vs passive 27:50 – The manager selection process 28:49 – Managing risks with external managers vs an internal team 30:34 – How does the team at ICMA-RC put their best ideas forward without governance getting in the way 31:34 – What constraints are imposed on investment decisions by the various regulatory bodies that ICMA-RC faces 32:40 – Their outlook on the market 34:08 – How does ICMA-RC's constituents respond to market performance 35:32 – Closer examination using 2008 stock performance 36:23 – How does Wayne educate investors 38:00 – Next steps for ICMA-RC 38:51 – Most challenging aspect of Wayne's work life 39:41 – Is there a looming pension crisis 40:53 – How do the Financial Planners help the employees if things don't work out 42:10 – How do they think about financial planning for clients when there's a chance defined benefit plans could come up short in the future 45:06 – How does Wayne address manager selection differently today given some of the constraints that he faces 47:19 – What has led Wayne to want to exit manager relationships 49:46 – Is there a point where Wayne would decide the optimal strategy is to go passive 51:28 – How does Wayne think about technology and the way it will be disrupt the industry 52:58 – Balancing the internal/external dynamic when hiring people 54:30 – Wayne's greatest success and failure over the last 14 years 55:50 – Where will the move into emerging markets come from 56:27 – What does Wayne think of the new products that can help younger constituents meet their retirement objectives 57:41 – Live Show Ends/Closing questions

Our exploration of the use of modern data analytics to enhance investment results continues this week with two of the leading providers of tools for portfolio managers. My guests on today's show are Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight, both former investment managers who became entrepreneurs seeking to improve outcomes for other managers. Clare is the founder and CEO of Essentia Analytics, a behavioral data analytics service that enables fund managers to capture rich data about their own behavior and its context. Essentia analyzes trading history to help managers overcome common behavioral biases and optimize their trade entry and exit on positions. Cameron is the Founder and CEO of Alpha Theory, a fintech company that helps investment managers optimize their position sizing process. By creating a disciplined, real-time process based on a decision algorithm with roots in actuarial science, physics, and poker, Alpha Theory takes the guessing out of position sizing and allows managers to focus on what they do best - picking stocks. Our conversations cover the founding of their respective businesses, the mistakes portfolio managers commonly make, the tools they employ to help managers improve, and the challenges they face in broader adoption of these modern tools. The good news is the clients of Essentia and Alpha Theory have demonstrated improvement in their results after employing these techniques. If you ask Clare and Cameron, you may come a whole new appreciation about the potential for active management going forward. You can learn more about these two innovative companies at essentia-analytics.com and alphatheory.com. Learn More Join Ted's mailing list at CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com Write a review on iTunes Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides For more episodes go to CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com/Podcast Show Notes Clare (2:26) 2:29 – Clare's path to founding Essentia 5:42 – What makes data science of investing revolutionary in the past five years 6:25 – The pitch for Essentia's tools 7:57 – How do you use data to get into the behaviors that work and the ones that don't 8:06 – Michael Mauboussin podcast episode 8:10 – Annie Duke podcast episode 11:03 – Specific tenants of behavioral finance 12:39 – Parts of the portfolio process that they explore 14:20 – How do you actually convince people to change behavior 16:17 – The nudges built into the system 21:26 – How much data is needed to be able to help improve performance 22:16 – Most interesting data set that a portfolio manager has tried to get to improve their performance 24:21 – Is there consistency in people's patterns 27:08 - The hardest part of convincing someone to become a client 29:16 – What other places does Essentia plan on expanding 30:42 – Given all of the data that Clare has seen, what's her outlook on active management 32:39 - Closing questions for Clare Cameron (37:58) 38:02 – Cameron's background and the founding of Alpha Theory 38:35 – What problems does Alpha Theory looks to solve 38:49 – Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (Richard Shure) 40:13 – The mistakes he sees portfolio managers make 42:29 – What tool does Alpha theory is provide to portfolio managers 44:17 – What changes in the portfolio manager's implementation 47:27 – What have been the outcomes when people implement Alpha Theory 51:58 - Are there different firms or type of firms that are better at picking stocks 56:36 - The Concentration Manifesto 1:00:25 – How they calculate batting average of allocators 1:01:41 – Where else could this tool be applied 1:03:31 – What questions should allocators be asking of managers 1:05:09 – How much does the input of information impact the outcome 1:06:42 – What other research has Cameron been able to do based on this data 1:08:56 – Biggest challenge in running this business 1:11:23 – Closing questions for Cameron

Increased sophistication in manager assessment is an important trend in the search for alpha. My conversations with Michael Mauboussin and Annie Duke suggested frameworks to think about enhanced decision-making processes and prompted a deeper dive into the ways allocators and managers can improve their craft. This week and next explores some of the tools available to help make it happen. Basil Qunibi is the CEO of Novus Partners, a data analytics company whose mission is to help the world's top investors generate higher returns. As big data pervades commerce across industries, Novus is the most well-known provider of tools to analyze investment manager performance, allowing allocators to play Moneyball by breaking down the attributes of manager skill. Novus' 200 clients are split between allocators and hedge fund managers who collectively oversee approximately $3.5 trillion of assets. You can learn more about the company and its service at novus.com Our conversation starts with Basil's path to creating Novus and dives into the tools an allocator can use to improve their understanding of a manager's skill, including the data sets available to allocators, the levers a manager employs in driving returns, the relationship between data and a manager's process, a framework to analyze crowded names, and future horizons for data-driven assessments of managers. DONATE TO CYCLE FOR SURVIVAL, http://mskcc.convio.net/goto/ted. Learn More Join Ted's mailing list at CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com Write a review on iTunes Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides For more episodes go to CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com/Podcast Show Notes DONATE TO CYCLE FOR SURVIVAL, http://mskcc.convio.net/goto/ted. 2:46 – The founding of Novus 5:45 – What did the qualitative assessment of managers look like at first for Basil 6:50 – How did he start to quantify managers 09:47 – What he saw in the initial data 13:24 – The early days of Novus, going all the way back to the concept 14:05 – Direct from Dell: Strategies that Revolutionized an Industry 14:07 – Sam Walton: Made In America 16:27 – Novus' first product 19:13 – Core components of measuring the skill of a manager 19:54 – Exposure management 22:10 – Capital allocation 23:27 – Idea selection 24:10 – Position sizing 25:11 – Tactical trading 25:45 – How should this data be used 28:08 – Why this data is useful for capital allocators 30:48 – How efficient is the market for talent 31:54 – What has happened to stocks that are crowded compared to those that aren't 35:15 – How does Novus use conviction in their metrics 36:43 – Consensus and concentration 40:02 – How Novus went from servicing allocators to also helping managers themselves 42:22 – Overview of Novus' clients and what they've been able to learn from all of this data 46:45 – What other markets could Novus be applicable to 48:56 – Most creative application of this data by a client 49:53 – Closing questions

Rick Selvala is the co-founder and CEO of Harvest Volatility, a ten-year old manager of a variety of volatility strategies that oversees $13 billion in assets. After starting his career in the Treasury department at General Motors in the mid 1980s, Rick has spent nearly three decades trading derivatives on the sell side and buy side. Rick has an uncanny ability to break down this complicated investment area and make it sound simple. Our conversation discusses the world of volatility, including intelligent uses of derivatives, overcoming headline risk, characteristics of successful traders, assessment of alpha, the current volatility environment, and strategies that capture returns. His insights left me thinking twice about some of the assumptions my System 1 brain had formed about volatility. Time for System 2 to go to work. DONATE TO CYCLE FOR SURVIVAL, http://mskcc.convio.net/goto/ted. Learn More Join Ted's mailing list at CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com Write a review on iTunes Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides For more episodes go to CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com/Podcast Show Notes DONATE TO CYCLE FOR SURVIVAL, http://mskcc.convio.net/goto/ted. 3:03 – Rick's path to Harvest 5:17 – How should one think about volatility as an asset class 7:56 – Volatility as a path to enhance yield 11:07 – Is there a programmatic way to implement 12:55 – Volatility as a path for insurance 15:45 – Where do people go wrong with leverage 18:28 – What level of understanding of this space do clients really have 21:58 – How would someone express the idea that volatility is cheap in the market 22:04 – Bill Spitz podcast episode 24:24 – What strategies could managers take advantage of in a low volatility environment 26:01 – How does Rick asses if someone is a good trader 27:32 – How do you identify firms that are too bold 29:26 – Does the community have a good sense of whether traders are acting responsibly 30:08 – How do you determine if a manager is outperforming 32:11 – Is there a structural return from selling insurance to the market 34:13 – Have computer systems changed trading in the derivatives market 35:14 – Taking a look at the current environment 38:43 – Recent market turmoil 39:58 – Are quants impacting market volatility 41:26 – What's next on the frontier for Harvest 45:02 – Closing questions

Ali Hamed is the co-founder of CoVenture and Managing Partner of the CoVenture VC Fund. CoVenture is an innovative company that identifies and invests in novel assets formed by the intersection of technology and finance. The firm manages an early stage venture capital fund, direct lending fund, and crypto asset index fund, with each taking a creative twist on its market. Our conversation starts with Ali's entrepreneurial path to the creation of CoVenture, and covers examples of previously unpriced investment opportunities, including produce receivables, employee payroll loans, AirBnB accounts, and loans against employee stock options. We walk through the world of crypto assets and the state of the venture capital industry. Ali's fresh lens on the world offers a fascinating perspective on every aspect of early stage investing. If I didn't say it in advance, you'll be astounded to hear that Ali is only 26 years old. He's one to watch for the long-term. Learn More Join Ted's mailing list at CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com Write a review on iTunes Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides For more episodes go to CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com/Podcast Show Notes 2:22 – Ali's background 3:09 – How Ali got the bug for startups 4:06 – His time in NY without a home and where he gained the confidence to start in the entrepreneurial space 7:35 – Why their venture business is different from so many others in the space 9:12 – How Ali turned an idea into a business 11:33 – How does Ali describe CoVenture 12:10 – An example of an ideal CoVenture investment 14:53 – The transition into a specialty lending business 19:25 – How many niche opportunities has Ali identified as a place where he could create loans 22:04 – Examples of unpriced assets 24:23 – How does Ali find unique opportunities 27:40 – What's next on the horizon for Ali and CoVenture 28:28 – Looking at cryptocurrency and the business that Ali has built for the space 29:33 – Why did they create a cryptoasset index that was cap weighted 30:39 – Why should someone have exposure to a cryptoasset 35:23 – How does someone in the financial world get comfortable with the idea of cryptoassets 38:59 – Why Ali doesn't invest in ICO's 40:42 – What would an institutional cryptoasset fund look like 45:50 – How should an allocator try to address the idea of first in money in the cryptospace 50:32 – Where can someone play in the spectrum of venture investing 52:30 – What is the time horizon for venture investments 56:24 – Closing questions

Annie Duke is a renown public speaker and decision strategist. For two decades, she was one of the top poker players in the world, including winning a World Series of Poker bracelet and the $2 million winner-take-all WSOP Tournament of Champions. Her study of the science of smart decision-making began with a National Science Foundation Fellowship, which she used study Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Among her charity work and television appearances, Annie was a runner-up to Joan Rivers on Celebrity Apprentice, during which she raised $700,000 for Refugees International. She is a natural teacher and storyteller with an active mind that constantly searches for accurate truth. I highly recommend Annie's new book, Thinking in Bets, which comes out this week. In her life after poker, she is a featured speaker, writes a newsletter and a blog, and advises companies on improving their decision-making process. Have a look at her website, annieduke.com, for more information. Our conversation discusses Annie's path from an Ivy League education to professional poker, the nature of a bet, how we form beliefs, why we make bad decisions, and what we can do to improve our decision-making process. Towards the end, we also talk about bankroll management, poker faces, and advice she would give the President on how to make better decisions. For more episodes go to CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com/Podcast Write a review on iTunes Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides Join Ted's mailing list at CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com Show Notes 2:30 – Annie's path through the poker world 6:05 – Her transition into teaching and the lesson of tilt 11:57 – How do you apply the concepts of betting and gambling broadly to decision making 13:35 – What is it about the science of the brain that prevents us from making good decisions 14:17 – Stumbling on Happiness 14:19 – Dan Gilbert Ted Talk 15:44 – Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind 18:50 – Motivated reasoning 21:10 – Is there anything we can do to fix our decision-making biases (wanna bet) 28:05 – Other devices to improve our decision-making 32:29 – Value of a decision group 33:16 – Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction 34:00 – Mertonian Norms, CUDOS 40:27 – Mental time travel (Marty McFly from Back to the Future) 42:55 – Jerry Seinfeld – Night Guy vs Morning Guy 44:55 – Applying these tools and the parallels between poker and investing 48:59 – Reading poker faces 49:21 – Joe Navarro books 49:34 – Joe Navarro Psychology Today 52:50 – What advice would Annie give President Trump in terms of improving his decision-making process 53:52 – Favorite sports moment 55:45 – What teaching from Annie's parents has most stayed with her 56:08 – What information does Annie read that a lot of people might not know about that is valuable 56:18 – The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution 56:19 – Why Evolution Is True 56:58 – What life lesson does Annie wish she knew earlier in life 58:28 – Looking ahead, what advice would Annie give herself today from a ripe old age

Seth Masters recently retired from Alliance Bernstein, where he spent 26 years across six different careers. He started as an analyst in emerging market equities and over the last decade and a half served separately as the Chief Investment Officer of Blend Strategies, Asset Allocation, Defined Contribution Strategies, and the Private Wealth Business. Seth is true polymath – articulate, thoughtful and wise on a wide range of topics. Our conversation starts with a fascinating discussion of China 30 years ago and today and later covers contrarian career paths, the critical flaw of benchmark-based investing, structural issues with Investment Committees, potential causes of the next crisis, and his most recent project - angel investing in fintech. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Bill Spitz was the longtime head of Vanderbilt University's endowment before retiring, for the first time, in 2007. He has received numerous lifetime achievement awards for his work and is one of the legends in the business. After failing in his retirement, he joined Diversified Trust Company, a wealth manager with $6.5 billion in assets under management that he co-founded back in 1994. Our conversation discusses managing an endowment in the early years, implementing unconventional investments, creating an edge as an allocator, selecting managers and conducting due diligence, exiting managers, challenging current landscape, and working with families. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides Show Notes 1:21 - (INTERVIEW STARTS) 1:30 – Early days at Vanderbilt and the landscape for university investment offices 3:17 – Career before working at Vanderbilt 3:59 – Transition from Wall Street to going back to his alma mater 4:48 – Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment 5:23 – Out of the box ideas when he first got started 6:25 – Convincing the board to approve unconventional ideas 8:28 – Why Bill retired 9:28 – Diversified Trust White Papers 9:31 – What is the edge that allocators have when it comes to investing 9:33 – Paul Johnson and Paul Sonkin podcast episode 9:35 – Pitch the Perfect Investment: The Essential Guide to Winning on Wall Street 10:05 – Gaining an Edge in Investing 12:30 – Where can skill from an allocator perspective be applied 14:32 – Judging the skill of managers as an allocator 15:16 – Looking out to the future, how will the endowment model stack up against the traditional 60/40 portfolio 17: 47 - How do you manage clients when your strategy may not be keeping up with the S&P 500 in the short term 19:15 – Thoughts on bitcoin 20:00 – How Bill was able to get involved with Diversified Trust while working at Vanderbilt 21:47 – Differences in managing endowments vs taxable pools of capital 23:22 – Stories that either derail an investment process or educate someone to stay the course 24:23 – Manager selection process and what Bill looks for when choosing the right one 28:01 – Bill's view on exiting managers 29:55 – How do you measure the evolution of a manager's investing strategy, especially as the market changes 31:41 – What is different today about investing vs when Bill first started 33:56 – Do alternative and emerging investment streams deliver the returns that many hope for 35:13 – Why don't endowments, foundations, or pension funds feel comfortable with moving chunks of their portfolio to cash 37:00 – How does Bill think about the balance of investments with higher return potentials against their higher costs 38:13 – Any categories that really pique Bill's interest 39:22 – What does the asset management industry look like in 10-20 years from now 41:56 – What should aspiring money managers think about as they move forward in this business 43:09 – What Bill is most proud of in his career 43:54 – Favorite sports moment 45:01 – What teaching from Bill's parents has most stayed with him 45:14 – Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother 45:18 – The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America 46:10 – What information does Bill read that he gets a lot out of 46:20 – The Economist 46:33 – Wall Street Journal 46:34 – Bloomberg 46:45 – Life lesson that he wished he knew a lot earlier 47:29 – In his waning days, what advice would Bill give himself today

Michael Mauboussin currently is the Director of Research at BlueMountain Capital, a multi-billion dollar hedge fund and asset manager. He spent the majority of his professional career thinking and writing about decision making, behavior and complex systems, with long stints at Credit Suisse and nearly a decade alongside Bill Miller at Legg Mason. Michael has been an Adjust Professor at Columbia Business School for 24 years. Our conversation covers Michael's early career, the paradox of skill, academic research more favorable to active management, decision-making, optimal size and composition of teams, unsettling features in the market, data analysis in sports, career risk, the Santa Fe Institute, and Michael's new research on the horizon. Every time I speak to Michael I come away thinking better and feeling smarter, and this time was no exception. For more episodes go to CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com/Podcast Write a review on iTunes Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides Join Ted's mailing list at CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com Show Notes 1:48 - What was Michael like as a kid 2:26 – How Michael found his way to Wall Street 6:18 – His start as an analyst in consumer and packaged goods 7:52 – Why there are no .400 hitters in active management and the paradox of skill 8:15 – Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin 14:26 – Why have there been massive flows into index funds over the last 3-4 years 15:44 – Academic research supporting active management 16:09 – Mutual Fund Flows and Performance in Rational Markets 16:25 - On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets 22:52 - Indexing and Active Fund Management: International Evidence 23:12 – Do these trends also apply in global markets 24:01 - The Mutual Fund Industry Worldwide: Explicit and Closet Indexing, Fees, and Performance 25:22 – What has Michael discovered in his new role at Blue Mountain through his new credit lens 27:49 – Amazon, the world's most remarkable firm, is just getting started 30:02 – What are some of the lenses that Michael uses when dealing with allocators 35:02 – How does Michael go about interviewing for a team while taking into account their biases 36:19 – The Rationality Quotient: Toward a Test of Rational Thinking 36:37 – Biggest risks in the markets today 37:31 – Banks to Funds: Have Some Leverage With That Deal 39:45 – Liquidity in the markets 41:26 – What's most interesting to Michael about the merging of data and sports 41:34 – The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing 43:42 – Big Data Baseball: Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak 44:32 – Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won 45:57 – Psychological bias in sports 46:16 - Malcom Gladwell Podcast: The Big Man Can't Shoot 47:23 – Psychological bias in investment management 47:40 – Scott Malpass on Capital Allocators 48:44 – Michael's work with the Santa Fe institute 53:08 – Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies 54:40 – Next big piece of research Michael is working on 57:53 – The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction 57:59 – Should Michael be using his skills elsewhere in the context of a world where so many advocate for just indexing 1:01:36 – Charley Ellis on Capital Allocators 1:02:31 – CLOSING QUESTIONS

Margaret Chen is the Head of CA Capital Management, Cambridge Associates' $20 billion Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO) business. She has spent twenty years at Cambridge Associates, which was her first and only stop in the investment business after getting started in the working world as a management consultant at Coopers & Lybrand Consulting. Our conversation covers Margaret's career path, her evolution from a consultant to a principal, the value proposition of an OCIO, measuring performance, and the tension between being the same and being different for clients. Margaret has the ear of almost everyone in our field, and brings incredible perspective to addressing the key issues allocators face. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

I've received several emails over the last bunch of months asking for my take on the investing world and the topics we cover on the show. Fortunately, I've had a chance to appear as a guest on a few other podcasts, and thought I would share some of those conversations from time to time. About a year and a half ago, Patrick O'Shaughnessy interviewed me to discuss the book I wrote on his amazing podcast, Invest Like the Best. The discussion quickly turned to a deep dive on hedge funds - past, present and future. We subsequently recorded two other conversations. For the first, I asked him to interview me about the Buffett Bet. You can find that conversation on Episode 5. In the second, Patrick interviewed me alongside our friend and star micro private equity investor, Brent Beshore. You can find that entertaining conversation at Invest Like the Best, Episode 30. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Chris Acito is the CEO and CIO of Gapstow Capital Partners, a credit-focused investment organization. Chris started his career as a management consultant and traversed to focus on asset management consulting around the founding of Casey, Quirk, and Acito. He switched to the buy side focusing on hedge funds in the years leading up to the financial crisis and started Gapstow in 2009. Our wide-ranging conversation starts with Chris' background and moves to the formation of a credit focused firm in the thick of the financial crisis. We discuss the credit landscape today, shift from legacy to new issue opportunities, existential crisis in investment grade paper, liquidity, ETFs, credit as an asset class, credit-specific due diligence, and the next distressed cycle. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Paul Sonkin and Paul Johnson are investors, professors, and co-authors of Pitch the Perfect Investment. Paul Sonkin is an analyst and portfolio manager at GAMCO Investors and has researched small, micro, and nanocap companies for a quarter century. He taught for 16 years at Columbia Business School. Paul Johnson runs advisory firm Nicusa Investment Advisors, and previously was a top-ranked sell side analyst, hedge fund manager, and an investment banker across 35 years. He also taught 2,000 students across 40 classes at Columbia Business School and Fordham University, and has received a host of awards for his prowess in the classroom. Their recently released book is the first I've come across that reverse engineers a portfolio manager's thought process. It starts with crystal clear first principles of business analysis and covers everything an analyst needs to know to identify a great stock. Then, Paul and Paul describe how portfolio managers assess ideas. Their framework is targeted for analysts starting their careers in the field, but seasoned portfolio managers and allocators both will also learn a lot about communication with their teams from the clear descriptions and colorful examples in the book. Our conversation covers the concept of the book, the wisdom of crowds, getting an 'edge', the four questions every portfolio manager needs to answer, and the role of creativity in investing. These gifted professors offer clear terminology for investment first principals and along the way offer a renewed appreciation for how difficult it is to beat the markets. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Meredith Jenkins is the Chief Investment Officer of Trinity Wall Street, where she oversees $5.5 billion of the church's endowment and real estate assets. Before taking the helm as Trinity's first CIO, she was the co-CIO of Carnegie Corporation of New York, Andrew Carnegie's foundation, from 2011 to 2016. She joined Carnegie in 1999 as its first investment associate and was an integral part of the build-out of the Corporation's investment capability under its first CIO. During the period, Meredith spent four years in Asia as the Corporation's special representative focusing on opportunities in China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Meredith started her career at Goldman Sachs in investment banking, Sanford Bernstein in research, and Cambridge Associates in consulting before attending Harvard Business School. She currently sits on the Investment Committee of the Wenner Gren Foundation and the Board of Directors of the University of Virginia Investment Management Company. Our conversation starts with Meredith's early career lessons and discusses alignment of interest, standing by managers in difficult times, markers of success, manager research in Asia, the co-CIO structure at Carnegie, and governance in her new challenge of starting an investment office from scratch. Fun loving and smart as a tack, Meredith offers pearls of wisdom through our conversation. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Larry Mestel is the Founder and Co-CEO of Primary Wave, one of the largest independent full-service entertainment companies. Primary Wave Publishing, the music division Larry oversees, acquires and develops the rights to iconic song titles and works with iconic artists. He has bought assets that include big name hits from Kurt Cobain, Smokey Robinson, Steven Tyler, John Lennon, Def Leppard, Hall & Oates and CeeLo Green. Prior to founding Primary Wave in 2006, Larry spent twenty years in the music industry, serving as COO and GM of Virgin Records, EVP and GM at Arista Records, and COO of Island Entertainment Group. Our conversation discusses the business of investing in music publishing rights, including Primary Wave's target market, due diligence practices, unique approach to growing revenue streams, and transactions. As you might imagine, the music business has plenty of great stories, and Larry shares a few of his gems. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Dr. Ashby Monk is the Executive and Research Director of the Stanford University Global Projects Center. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the University of Oxford, a Senior Advisor to the Chief Investment Officer of the University of California, and the co-founder of Long Game. Ashby advises sovereign wealth funds and large pension funds, and is involved with a bunch of fin tech companies, all of which attempt to create innovative solutions to fixing the financial future for individuals, pensions and countries in the years ahead. Our conversation starts with Ashby's early work experience and path through academia, and flows into an exploration of next generation, lower cost approaches to active management for large asset owners. We touch on investing in public equity, private equity, venture capital, and hedge funds using examples from the Canadian and Australian pensions, New Zealand Super Fund, and University of California endowment. Lastly, we discuss Long Game, an innovative company seeking to improve personal savings in the U.S. Ashby is a passion-driven, creative thinker who rightfully has the ear of some of the most important pools of capital in the world. His ideas will change the way you think about allocating capital. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Jason Klein is the Senior Vice President and CIO at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where he oversees the hospital's $4.5 billion in long-term investment assets. Jason has spent the last decade and a half overseeing endowment pools – 9 at MSKCC and 5 at the Museum of Modern Art. Jason got his start in the investment business learning the tools of private equity, and had training as an investment banker, management consultant, and lawyer. Our conversation starts with the distinctive features that drive the investment structure for Memorial Sloan Kettering and flows through core beliefs, asset allocation frameworks and manager selection. Aspects of his due diligence process, including 30 questions and pre-mortem analysis, offer new arrows to an allocator's quiver to those in previous conversations. Jason's curiosity and eagerness to ask questions provides a terrific structure for applying capital allocation to a distinctive pool of capital. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Ellen Ellison is the Chief Investment Officer of the University of Illinois Foundation, which she joined in 2013 as its first leader of the now $1.7 billion pool of assets. Ellen restarted a program and a portfolio from scratch at a time when longer-established University investment offices already had their chips carefully placed in the markets. Yet with a small team, she built a clever portfolio and is starting to reap its rewards. Prior to joining Illinois, Ellen was the Executive Director of Investments at the University of Miami for five years, the leader of a small family office for a year, and a thirteen-year veteran of Fiduciary Trust Company. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Columbia University Business School, and currently sits on the Investment Committee for Mount Holyoke. Our conversation starts with Ellen's career path and dives into the challenge of starting an endowment investment program from the ground up, including establishing governance practices and figuring out when to put cash to work when markets feel pricey. Her favorite opportunities in the market, including a long discussion of agriculture investing, offers a very different take on the world today. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

David Barrett is the founder of David Barrett Partners, a leading executive search firm focused exclusively on buy-side asset management. Prior to founding DBP in 2005, he spent 19 years in the search business, including long stints at Russell Reynolds Associates and Heidrick and Struggles. He began his career as a self-professed failed equity research analyst in the early 1980s. David is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University Business School. In just the last two years, David's firm has completed searches for the Chief Investment Officer positions at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, University of Texas Investment Management Company, TIFF, and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, each a multi-billion dollar pool of assets. Our conversation explores the search process for senior asset allocators, including the business of search, the interview process, governance structures, and trends. Anyone with a thought to navigating their career will pick up nuggets of insight throughout the conversation. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Scott Malpass is the esteemed Vice President and CIO of Notre Dame, where he oversees the University's $12 billion endowment. Scott earned his B.A. and M.B.A. degrees at Notre Dame, and returned to South Bend at the ripe age of 26 following a brief stint on Wall Street. His track record for almost 30 years, as defined by both performance and impact, place him indisputably in rare company at the very top of the field. Among his many accolades, Scott received Institutional Investor's Endowment Manager of the Year award, NACUBO's Rodney H. Adams Award, and CIO Magazine's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has taught students at Notre Dame since 1995 and among other directorships and advisory councils, he serves on the Boards of the Vatican Bank, Vanguard, and TIFF, and previously served on the Investment Advisory Committee for Major League Baseball. In 2014, Scott became part of the founding group for Catholic Investment Services, Inc., a not-for-profit offering top tier investment solutions to Catholic organizations nationally. Our conversation is a full-blown master class on endowment management, including the benefits of a long tenured team, asset allocation frameworks, passive management, preparing for dislocations, the state of venture capital, sourcing, monitoring and exiting managers, incremental process improvements, professional and personal development, and education and alignment across constituencies. It's hard not to be in awe of Scott's combination of humility, experience, and success. For more episodes go to CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com/Podcast Write a review on iTunes Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides Join Ted's mailing list at CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com Show Notes 3:26 – How Scott got started at Notre Dame 6:22 – Why tenure of the staff is so long on Scott's team 8:26 – How did he handle bad hires among such a tight knit team 9:37 – Committee makeup 11:18 – How the continuity and depth of institutional knowledge allowed them to make better decisions 12:51 – Their first single asset real estate investment 14:21 – What is the best use of time for the investment team, managing a direct investment or researching new managers 15:07 – Core investment beliefs from Scott's past that drive the portfolio 17:28 – Core investment beliefs that drive the portfolio today 20:43 – How does Scott think about portfolio construction techniques 22:49 – Factors they like to tilt towards 23:36 – Any concerns about the focus on active managers in a world that is moving towards passive 26:02 – How much of the US investing market should be indexed-based 27:37 – The baseline that Scott has to consider when making investment decisions 29:43 – Their focus on emerging and middle markets, particularly Europe 34:01 – Pricing in the venture capital markets today 36:31 – Implications of all of this new money moving into private market investing 37:40 – Do private equity owners make better decisions for businesses 39:52 – Scott's manager selection process 41:44 – How much time does Scott spend with managers before making a decision to invest with them 43:14 – Jim Dunn podcast episode 44:04 – What has Scott learned about the behaviors of making that final decision on a manager 45:39 – Mistakes that Scott has learned from and corrected over the years 49:36 – Creative ways to monitor managers in the portfolio 52:08 – Scott sharing how special the managers in the portfolio are to them 54:49 – How would Scott think about an investment portfolio of $1,000,000,000 of cash 56:57 – Benefits and drawbacks of direct vs co-investments 59:43 – Biggest current subject of debate on an investment topic in the office 1:01:47 – Lessons from their annual offsite meetings 1:04:31 – Biggest concerns about the markets today and over the next 10 years 1:07:52 – Closing Questions

Jim Dunn is the CEO and CIO of Verger Capital Management, an Outsourced CIO business whose anchor client is Wake Forest University. Prior to forming Verger, he served as CIO of Wake Forest for five years. That transition from a sole client to an OCIO business, is a fascinating part of our conversation. Before joining Wake, Jim traveled the world as CIO of Wilshire Associates, where among other things he experienced the best story of a manager getting their foot in the door that I've ever heard. He got his start in the business trading death spiral convertible bonds at a now defunct hedge fund and got introduced to manager selection at Investorforce. Our conversation starts with Jim's career path, and covers a full range issues in allocating capital. We discuss defining risk tolerance, a factor-based approach to asset allocation, separating talent from luck in manager selection, the politics of endowment management, challenges using internal management, and culture. If you listen carefully, you'll hear a few one-liners. Jim is chock full of gems and life lessons. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Dan Egan is the Director of Behavioral Finance and Investing at Betterment, the market leading robo-advisor overseeing $10 billion in assets. Dan has spent his career applying behavioral finance principals to help individuals make better financial and investment decisions. Prior to joining Betterment in its early years, Dan spent six years as a Behavioral Finance Specialist for Barclays Wealth Management. He is a graduate of Boston University and the London School of Economics and lectures at New York University, the London Business School, and the London School of Economics. Our conversation discusses how Dan has created evidence-based tools that improve outcomes for individual investors, ranging across tax-loss harvesting, rebalancing, client reporting, mental accounting, commitment mechanisms, and communication during turbulent market times. As he spoke, Dan had head my head spinning thinking about how institutions and individuals alike could implement quantitative tools in their investment processes to avoid known behavioral pitfalls during critical market moments. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Chatri Sityodtong is the Founder and Chairman of ONE Championship, Asia's largest sports media property. Chatri started his career as many listening to this show have: he graduated from Tufts University, worked at Fidelity Investments and Bain Consulting, attended Harvard Business School, took a run at a technology start-up, and then spent a decade working at hedge funds, culminating in launching his own fund, Izara Capital, that grew to $500 million in assets. But Chatri's story is vastly different from any stereotype he may appear on paper. Despite a comfortable life growing up, his family lost everything in the Asian financial crisis. A decade later, despite his financial success, Chatri felt an emptiness and loneliness at the top that he couldn't shake. Instead of pushing on, he returned investor capital and moved back to Asia. From there, he followed his passion for Muay Thai fighting and began building a budding sports empire. Our conversation tells Chatri's story, replete with lessons about entrepreneurship, investing, hard work, and the warrior spirit. For those who wonder if a career in the financial markets is the only thing they know, Chatri's path suggests a different and fulfilling way forward. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Richard Lawrence is the Chairman and Executive Director of The Overlook Group, a $5 billion investment organization focused on Asian equities that Richard founded in 1991. Over the past quarter-century, Overlook developed and implemented disciplined investment and business philosophies that interconnected to drive extraordinary results for its partners. Overlook has compounded capital at an annualized 14.5%, outperforming its benchmark by an insane 9% per annum. But that's not all, as Richard would proudly tell you himself, the capital weighted return of the average investor in Overlook is nearly identical to the time weighted return over any period of time – a rare feat in the money management industry. Indeed, today's asset base is the result of $4 billion of investment gains on top of $1 billion in contributed capital. Our conversation starts with a look at investing in Asia in Overlook's early days and walks through the particulars of the approach Richard takes to investing and running his business, including attractive investment attributes, management integrity, portfolio construction, selling discipline, and China Yangtze Power - the only stock the firm supersized in an SPV in its history. We discuss Overlook's long-held cap on subscriptions and periodic reductions in its management fee, two business philosophies that Richard believes have been key drivers of Overlook's success. If you enjoyed my conversation with Tom Russo, you won't want to miss this one with Richard. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Kip McDaniel is the Chief Content Officer and Editorial Director at Institutional Investor. Prior to joining II a year ago, Kip spent seven years as the Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief of CIO Magazine, a media platform that led him to interview 2,000 Chief Investment Officers across every type of asset base around the world. Kip is a graduate of Harvard College, received a Master's at Cambridge University, and was an elite crew rower, culminating in bringing home bronze medals for Team Canada in two World Championships. Kip is inordinately well-liked in the community, and I had a hunch I would learn a lot from getting his perspective on the people who make capital allocation happen. Suffice it to say, I wasn't disappointed. Our conversation starts with an inside look at Chief Investment Officers – how Kip finds them, ranks them, and discovers what makes them tick. Over the back half of the discussion, we turn to the lessons he's learned about investment success, incentives, fads, and issues that permeate capital allocation. Kip's modus operandi is story-telling, and this conversation is chock full of good ones. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Dan Schorr is the founder of Vice Cream, an early stage company that is bringing back unapologetic indulgence to the ice cream industry. After graduating from Tufts University, Dan turned his passion for running into a career working with consumer brands, including Power Bar, Saucony, and PepsiCo. Following two unexpected life events, he turned his focus towards developing a brand of his own. Our conversation tracks Dan's path and walks through his start-up story. His energy is infectious and his road traveled has great parallels with investing and lessons for managing a business. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Tom DeLong is a renown expert in organizational behavior, leadership, and human development of high performance professionals, the so called "soft skills" often dismissed in the asset management business. After starting an academic career under the wing of Stephen Covey, Tom found himself recruited by John Mack to work alongside him to develop a positive culture at Morgan Stanley. After eight years in the trenches, he returned to academia as a professor at Harvard Business School, where he has remained the past twenty years. Unlike most of us, Tom's resume and achievements are unusually difficult to locate online or elsewhere. It was a sign of things to come in our fascinating conversation, which is simultaneously a master class in authentic leadership and a live case study in self-exploration with Tom as his own protagonist. Tom is exactly the type of person he has studied, and strives to be the type of leader he promotes. We discuss the meaning of work, the importance of feedback, the ways high performing professionals derail themselves, the difference between your image and your essence, the omnipresence of insecurity in high achievers, and some techniques to foster deeper conversation in relationships. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Adam Blitz is the CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Evanston Capital Management, a $4.5 billion hedge fund of funds manager with a decade and a half of experience managing hedge fund portfolios. Adam joined Evanston at its inception in 2002 and leads investment research and portfolio management. Previously, he worked in the Prime Brokerage area and Asset Management Division of Goldman Sachs and served as head trader at AQR. Adam earned a B.S. in Economics at the Wharton School. Our conversation dives in the hedge fund category of investing, covering how a leading allocator in the space thinks about strategic asset allocation, portfolio construction, risk management, manager research, decision making, and monitoring managers. Adam's perspective on the evolution in how allocators perceive hedge funds and the resulting unattractiveness of the "average hedge fund" today resonate strongly with how I've viewed this widely discussed and recently scrutinized corner of the markets. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Tom Russo is the Managing Member of Gardner Russo & Gardner, where he manages $11 billion in a long only, global value strategy. Tom buys the stock of global consumer businesses with great brands and holds them for a really long time. He looks for businesses with a capacity to reinvest free cash flow and a capacity to suffer through short-term pain in order to achieve long-term gain. Tom started his investment career at the Sequoia Fund in New York, where he worked from 1984 to 1988. His first partnership, Semper Vic Partners, has compounded at 14.6% per year for 33 years, besting the S&P 500 by 3.6% per annum. Tom is a graduate of Dartmouth College (B.A., 1977), and Stanford Business and Law Schools (JD/MBA, 1984). He has served on Dean's Advisory Council for Stanford Law School, Dartmouth College's President's Leadership Council, and the Advisory Board for the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing at Columbia Business School, as well as on the boards of the Winston Churchill Foundation of the U.S., Facing History and Ourselves, and Storm King Art Center. Our conversation covers how Tom created an investment strategy by personalizing early lessons from Warren Buffett, the capacity to re-invest, the capacity to suffer, and what it takes to own a stock for decades. Tom's time horizon and fortitude as an investor parallels those of institutions with permanent capital. Listeners will get a fresh perspective on what it means to be a long-term investor For more episodes go to CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com/Podcast Write a review on iTunes Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides Join Ted's mailing list at CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com Show Notes 3:20 – How the spark got lit for Tom to become a value investor 3:54 – The Sharpe Ratio 6:26 – Family and personal background 8:03 – Move to consumer brands 12:06 – Key tenants to investing in consumer brands 12:26 – Family controlled 14:04 - Capacity to reinvest 15:17 - Capacity to suffer 19:10 – Portfolio turnover and the investment in Heineken 22:46 – Position sizing when portfolio turnover is so low 25:08 – Opportunity costs and behavioral finance 28:58 – Benefits of insider insights 31:02 – The capacity of Tom's investors to suffer 34:00 – What is happening today with the investor base and their capacity to suffer 36:07 – The structure of Tom's strategy vs. a more a diversified portfolio 37:28 – Sitting on investment committees 38:02 – Comparing Tom's decision-making process to Warren Buffett's 40:29 – Case study of Wells Fargo 44:21 – Does reputational damage impact the ability to reinvest 47:04 – Tom's research process and the importance of listening 49:46 – How Tom keeps track of nuggets in everyday conversations 51:00 – Closing questions

A few months ago an idea came to me to share some conversations with great capital allocators that I've been fortunate to know from my time in the business. I lined up my first three guests, and didn't know what would happen from there. Taking this journey without goals or expectations was new for me, and it's been a ton of fun. My first unexpected surprise in podcasting came from the answers to one of my closing questions. That question is : what is your favorite thing to do that's a complete waste of time. My own time consuming vice is pretty harmless, but I was curious what others would reveal in answer to the same question. As you'll hear, some of my guests followed my lead, but most quickly came upon an important life lesson. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Chris Douvos is Managing Director at Venture Investment Associates, a fund that invests $1B in commitments to venture capital funds. Chris is responsible for the management of relationships with the funds' managers and the identification and development of new manager relationships. He is the author of an entertaining blog about venture capital entitled SuperLP – Adventures in Investing, available at SuperLP.com. Prior to joining VIA, Chris spent seven years co-heading the private equity program at The Investment Fund For Foundations, or TIFF. In this role, he was responsible for another $1 billion in new capital commitments. Before joining TIFF, Chris worked on Princeton University's endowment team. He started his career as a strategy consultant at Monitor Company. He is a graduate of Yale University and the Yale School of Management. Our conversation starts with Chris' path to venture capital, through strategy consulting, investment banking and an endowment investment office. We talk about perception and reality in venture investing, exciting areas of future innovation, and the nuts and bolts of research, portfolio construction and decision making when running a portfolio of venture funds. When Chris pulls off his suit, the red undershirt of the Super LP remains. He's a charismatic guy with great insight into how the venture capital game is played and draws many parallels from venture to investing in general. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Andy Golden is the President of Princeton University's Investment Management Company (PRINCO). Having grown from $3B at the time of his arrival in 1995 to $22.5B today, PRINCO has been among the highest performing endowments in the world. Andy came to PRINCO from Duke Management Company, where he was an Investment Director, and received his formative training in the business working for David Swensen at the Yale University Investments Office. Andy currently serves on the fund Advisory Boards of several well-known private equity and venture capital managers, including Bain Capital, General Catalyst Partners, and Greylock Partners. He was a founding member of the Investors' Committee of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets and serves as a Trustee of the Princeton Area Community Foundation and Rutgers Preparatory School. Andy holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Duke University and an M.P.P.M. from the Yale School of Management. Our conversation discusses Princeton's endowment two decades ago and today, including its strategic advantages as an institution, shifts in thinking about asset allocation, decision making, team development, and partnership with managers. Andy's long tenure in his seat, insight, and wisdom provides a treasure trove of information about how a top endowment manager practices his craft, and his subtle wit always keeps things light. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Mario Therrien is Senior Vice President of External Portfolio Management at Canadian asset manager Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDP). CDP oversees $270 billion Canadian ($200B in USD) for the pension funds in the province of Quebec. Mario joined CDP in the early 1990s after completing his Masters degree in Finance and has worked there ever since. Mario started out at CDP managing a tactical asset allocation strategy, created an internal global macro hedge fund, and later built and managed the team responsible for investments in external public market funds. Starting from scratch, CDP oversees $20B of external manager allocations today. Mario's team serves as CDP's 'window to the world' of markets, strategies, and managers across the globe. Our conversation dives into the 'Canadian pension model' which has gained prominence in recent years for the strong performance by funds north of the U.S. border. The model incorporates internal management, risk control, partnership, and collaboration. Drawing on a quarter century of experience, Mario shares his window into this little-known world of investment success. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Larry Kochard is the CEO and CIO of the University of Virginia Investment Management Company (UVIMCO), where he provides leadership, connectivity to the University, and responsibility for the University's $8.5 billion long-term investment pool. Before joining UVIMCO in 2011, he served as Georgetown University's first in-house CIO. Prior to that, he was Managing Director of Equity and Hedge Fund investments for the Virginia Retirement System. From 1997-2004, Larry was an adjunct, and later full-time, professor at Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce. He spent his formative professional years in debt capital markets at Goldman Sachs, and corporate finance at Fannie Mae and DuPont. Larry received his B.A. in Economics from William & Mary, an MBA from the University of Rochester, and an MA and PhD in Economics from the University of Virginia. Our conversation covers tricky issues involving the internal management of portfolios alongside external manager allocations, UVIMCO's five core principals, and the consideration of absolute and relative metrics in asset allocation and performance. Our deep dive on UVIMCO's core principals and asset allocation provides an inside look at the subtleties required to maintain seemingly simple tenants. I'm quite sure everyone that touches the University of Virginia will come away thrilled that Larry is the steward of their capital. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

David Gurfein is a decorated Marine Corps Combat veteran whose nickname "Bull" fits the bill. Enlisting at age 17, Bull drove tanks and was an honor graduate from Officer Candidate School while attending Syracuse University. Upon graduation from college, he accepted a commission as a Marine 2nd Lieutenant. Over the subsequent eleven years, Bull served as a combat Infantry Officer, leading Marines in the jungles of Panama, the deserts of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and on the fence-line at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He left active duty to earn his MBA at Harvard in 2000, where he was Co-President of his class. Bull started a business career after graduate school; however, when the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, Bull voluntarily returned to active duty. He saw combat action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and served as a Congressional Liaison for the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, and the Special Operations Command. With a daughter on the way and 25 years of service under his belt, Bull retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. Since then, he has applied his leadership and management experience to the business world, focusing on organizational design and business development. His leadership training program, entitled WHOOPASS, has positively impacted start-ups and Fortune 500 companies alike. Oh, and he took a break from that in 2016 to run for U.S. Congress. Our conversation discusses principles of leadership, management, and resource allocation, alongside colorful stories of success and failure. Bull's frameworks have clear applicability to anyone overseeing an investment process. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Jeffrey Solomon is the President of publicly listed Cowen Group (TK: COWN), a financial services company focused on supporting and providing active management to the marketplace. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, Jeff deferred an acting career with a brief respite on Wall Street, but he hasn't looked back since. In 1994, he joined Peter Cohen, then the former head of investment bank Shearson Lehman Brothers, to form money management firm Ramius Advisors. Ramius grew to become one of the largest hedge funds in the world, and in 2009 merged with boutique investment bank Cowen Group. Following the merger, Jeff switched over to the investment bank side of the business and today serves as its Chief Executive Officer, where he embodies the firm's core values of vision, tenacity and empathy. Our conversation starts with a passionate description of Pittsburgh sports, and flows to how active managers succeed in the 1990s and need to evolve to succeed today. We discuss the importance of empathy in the investment business, and touch on how Jeff's summer camp experience as a kid informs how he manages people today. His answers to my closing questions are just amazing. If you're short on time, fast forward to the 51stminute of the show. You'll miss plenty along the way, but you don't want to miss these. Please enjoy my conversation with Jeff Solomon. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Charley Ellis is one of the most highly regarded experts in the investment business. After spending nearly a decade as an equity research analyst in the 1960s, Charley founded financial services consulting firm Greenwich Associates in 1972 to help institutions understand what their clients think of them. Over 50 years, Charley has worked hand in hand with nearly every major financial institution in the world and has published sixteen books on investing, including his most recent "The Index Revolution: Why Investors Should Join It Now." Charley is not just another preacher for index fund investing. He extols the virtues of indexing after having looked both broadly and deeply under the covers of some of the most successful active managers in the world. Our conversation begins with a glimpse at what equity research and the structure of the markets looked like in the 1960s and the monumentally different way research is conducted and markets function today. Charley describes elegantly why indexing is a winner's game for many, and then walks through very special and rare qualities of three of the most successful active managers over the last few decades – Vanguard, Capital Group, and Yale University. Charley is a brilliant communicator and masterful storyteller. I hope you enjoy the show as much as I enjoyed the conversation. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Jenny Heller is the President and Chief Investment Officer of Brandywine Trust Group. Brandywine formed 25 years ago to manage the capital for a small group of families that all share a long-term, multi-generational time horizon. Today, it oversees almost $9B for those same families, much of it from compounding over a quarter century. The Group invests flexibly across asset classes, with a focus on partnering with people who they believe have sustainable competitive advantages, share their long-term vision, and have highly aligned interests. These elite managers often start with great ideas, but limited capital. Before taking the helm at Brandywine five years ago, Jenny worked at the Sloan Foundation, Stanford University Management Company, and Merrill Lynch in its investment banking program. She is a graduate of Williams College, where she serves on its Investment Advisory Committee, and Stanford Business School. Our conversation starts with Jenny's frustrating experiences with a non-profit micro finance in India and South Africa and turns to her career allocating money on behalf of non-profits and families. We touch on subtleties in picking managers for taxable investors, challenges in executing a long-term strategy, learning from mistakes, and mentorship. Jenny's clear and deep thought process provides pearls of wisdom throughout our conversation. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Josh Brown is the CEO of Ritholz Wealth Management, a NYC based financial advisor that helps people align their investments with their financial goals. He is well known in social media financial circles for his decade-long, insightful blog, The Reformed Broker, his Twitter handle, Downtown Josh Brown, and his regular appearances on CNBC's Halftime Report. Josh has written two books on personal finance and has been published in every major financial newspaper and periodical. Josh's personal story is one for the ages, rising from a start learning all the wrong lessons in a boiler room-style brokerage to embodying the moniker of the reformed broker. We spend some time hearing his story and then turn to how he applies the lessons he has learned to managing portfolios for individuals. The principles Josh employs at Ritholz are simple to say and hard to deliver. Don't be fooled by Josh's casual speaking style and occasional, entertaining slip of the tongue; he has one of the sharpest minds in the business and is chock full of deep insights. Please enjoy my conversation with Josh Brown. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Today's show is a little different from my ongoing series of conversations with Capital Allocators. As you probably know, about 9½ years ago I made a bet with a certain Oracle, in Omaha, that pitted the performance of a group of five hedge fund of funds against the S&P 500. In this year's annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Warren wrote extensively about his views. You can find that letter at www.berkshirehathway.com/letters. Now I haven't said a lot about the bet, although fairly often I'm asked how it came about, why I made the bet, what I really think about hedge funds and the market, and of course, who's winning. I thought long and hard about whether to share my views publicly, and had been leaning towards staying out of the limelight. But my guest on Episode 2 of this podcast, André Perold, convinced me that I should share the many other investment lessons the public can learn from this exercise. I thought a podcast would be a perfect venue to discuss my thoughts, so I asked my friend Patrick O'Shaughnessy to discuss the bet with me, and that conversation follows. Before we dive in, I thought it might help to let you know where to find answers to some of those common questions I'm asked. For starters, Carol Loomis, the legendary and recently retired Fortune columnist, wrote a wonderful piece called "Buffett's Big Bet" back in 2008 that described in detail how the bet came to pass. You can find her piece at www.capitalallocatorspodcast.com/bet. On that same page, you can find links to some of my written thoughts – both at the time of the bet's inception and two years ago. Next week, I'll add another link with some concluding thoughts. For more episodes go to CapitalAllocatorsPodcast.com/Podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Tom Lenehan is the Deputy Chief Investment Officer of The Rockefeller University, where he helps lead the management of the University's $2B endowment. Rockefeller University is a unique duck – with a focused mission of improving the understanding of life for the benefit of humanity. Founded in 1901, it was the first institution in the country devoted exclusively to biomedical research. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Brett Barth is a founder and the CIO of BBR Partners. BBR manages north of $12.5B on behalf of 125 families in its multi-family office. In this episode, we start talking about raising twins, a family issue close to both of our hearts. From there we learn about how Brett came to form BBR. We spend a lot of time going into depth on his firm's asset allocation process and on the decision-making process of manager selection. Along the way we touch on inefficiencies in Asia in the early days and in music royalties today. Brett offers nuggets of practical substance for allocators of all types – from financial advisors to large institutional managers. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

André Perold is the Chief Investment Officer and Co-Managing Partner at HighVista Strategies, where for the last dozen years he has sat at the helm of a now $3 billion fund that takes a multi-asset class, endowment-like approach emphasizing broad diversification and risk management. Over this period, André has definitively rebuffed the cliché that those who can't do, teach. In his prior career, he spent over 30 years teaching at the HBS, where he is the George Gund Professor of Finance and Banking, Emeritus. André had a distinguished career teaching investment management at Harvard and is a legendary master of the case study classroom. Just about everyone in the investment profession with Harvard Business School on their resume took a seat in his classroom at one point in time. André received numerous awards for teaching excellence, including being voted the School's most outstanding professor in a Business Week student survey. While at Harvard, André authored and co-authored 27 articles in financial journals, two books, and over 100 case studies, all relating to investment management, capital markets, and the financial system. He literally chronicled the development of modern finance as it occurred through is work at HBS. Among his directorships and trustee roles over the years, André currently is a Board member at The Vanguard Group. In this episode, we spend the first 11:30 talking about teaching at Harvard, and then turn to the practice of investing: the active vs. passive debate, a risk-based approach to asset allocation, and what makes investing so hard. I found it fascinating hearing how André takes all of his academic experience and knowledge and applies it the practice of investing at HighVista. His wisdom and clarity of thought are second to none, and his soothing South African accent only adds to the allure. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

My first guest on Capital Allocators is Steve Galbraith, an investment manager, brilliant writer, engaging thinker and one of the most well-liked men on Wall Street. Steve's career has touched every aspect of investment management – he has worked as a research analyst, portfolio manager, investment strategist, business leader, entrepreneur, and Board member at an endowment and a large family office. After getting started as an equity and credit analyst, Steve was recruited by Morgan Stanley to succeed the legendary duo of Barton Biggs and Byron Wien as Chief Investment Strategist. He left a few years later to try his hand in the hedge fund world, and today he manages his own family office in true family style – as you'll hear later in the show. We discuss Steve's journey, incorporating his broad insights in the investing world alongside colorful anecdotes of market inefficiencies in European football, college sports gambling, local breweries, and Charter Schools. For more episodes, go to capitalallocatorspodcast.com/podcast Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides

Welcome to the Capital Allocators Podcast Learn More Read the Transcript Subscribe to the Capital Allocators Blog or Monthly Mailing List Don't Subscribe, but Let Us Know Who You Are Write a review on iTunes Follow Ted on twitter at @tseides Review past episodes of the Podcast