Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

My guest on today's show is Tracy Britt Cool, co-founder of Kanbrick, a long-term investment partnership that provides owners of family-owned, midsized businesses with a differentiated option from traditional private equity.     Tracy launched the business after spending ten years at Berkshire Hathaway as one of Warren Buffett's few deputies. She started out of business school as a financial assis...

Our next guest on the Senior Decision Makers series is Erlina Yeo Terwelp, a Managing Director at Columbia Investment Management Company, where she oversees the endowment's private markets portfolio.   Erlina's path spans investment banking, private equity, growth equity, and family office investing before she joined Columbia nearly a decade ago. Our conversation covers her evolution as an allocat...

Charlie Rose is the Global Head of Real Estate Credit at Invesco, where he oversees an $85 billion global platform. Before joining Invesco, Charlie worked in real estate as an academic researcher, jack-of-all-trades through the financial crisis, and investor up and down the capital stack for eight years at Canyon Partners.   Our conversation covers Invesco's "credit over yield" approach, property-...

Stephen McLennan is the Co-Chief Investment Officer of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, where he oversees asset allocation for the $300 billion fund responsible for the retirement security of 346,000 teachers. Stephen joined OTPP in 2003 and worked across credit, natural resources, infrastructure, and Total Fund Management, before splitting the CIO seat with Gillian Brown in 2024 — a dual-CIO s...

Nancy Zimmerman is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Bracebridge Capital, a $13 billion alternative asset manager specializing in fixed income arbitrage that she founded over 30 years ago, in 1994, alongside Gabe Sunshine with capital from David Swensen at Yale.  Our conversation traces Nancy's evolution from pricing securities to investing and the enduring sources of inefficiency in fixed in...

André Perold is the co-founder and CIO of HighVista Strategies, an alternative asset manager overseeing $14 billion that searches for alpha opportunities in structurally inefficient markets. André has twice been a past guest on the show, starting way back with episode #2 and both conversations are replayed on the feed.    This conversation starts with André's assessment of the most exciting and un...

André Perold, the Co-Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of HighVista Strategies, a $4B firm with roots in endowment-style investing that searches for inefficiencies across asset classes. André was the 2nd guest on the show, where we discussed his background as a renowned investment professor at HBS and the founding of HighVista.   Our second conversation covers the evolution of HighVist...

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...

AI is top of mind for everyone in the investment business. Our Summits are abuzz with curiosity about what others are doing. I asked 8 CIOs to share how they're using AI today, including what's working and what isn't, the tools they've adopted, and where they're headed next. They range from a single-family office with one investment professional to one of the largest pension funds in the world wit...

This week's Summer Series concludes with a two-fer on habits. There may be no better way to improve the investment process than to understand what it takes to improve ourselves.  We've got two of the best – James Clear and Katy Milkman, experts and authors of wildly bestselling books Atomic Habits and How to Change. Please enjoy my conversations with James Clear and Katy Milkman, both from 2021. W...

This week's Summer Series concludes with a two-fer on habits. There may be no better way to improve the investment process than to understand what it takes to improve ourselves.  We've got two of the best – James Clear and Katy Milkman, experts and authors of wildly bestselling books Atomic Habits and How to Change. Please enjoy my conversations with James Clear and Katy Milkman, both from 2021. W...

We're excited to share something we've been working on for a while: we're bringing Capital Allocators University online. For years, CAU has been an in-person, once-a-year cohort of 25 or 30 professionals, built around a set of disciplines that matter enormously for investors and investor relations professionals but rarely get taught explicitly. We put together a brief conversation to share more on...

This week's Summer Series is another two-fer, this time on negotiations. The first is with legendary former FBI-hostage negotiator Chris Voss, the author of Never Split the Difference and founder of the Black Swan group where he teaches tactical empathy in negotiations.  The second is with Yale professor Daylian Cain, who opened my eyes to the importance of walking away. Learn more about  Capital...

This week's Summer Series is another two-fer, this time on negotiations. The first is with legendary former FBI-hostage negotiator Chris Voss, the author of Never Split the Difference and founder of the Black Swan group where he teaches tactical empathy in negotiations.  The second is with Yale professor Daylian Cain, who opened my eyes to the importance of walking away. Learn more about Capital A...

This week's Summer Series is a two-fer on the essential skill of storytelling. Whether pitching an investment fund to a prospect, an idea to a portfolio manager or CIO, or a request of a family member, storytelling helps you get what you want. To help understand the art and science of storytelling, Matt Dicks – a retired middle school teacher and author of the best-seller Storyworthy, and Don Mill...

This week's Summer Series is a two-fer on the essential skill of storytelling. Whether pitching an investment fund to a prospect, an idea to a portfolio manager or CIO, or a request of a family member, storytelling helps you get what you want. To help understand the art and science of storytelling, Matt Dicks – a retired middle school teacher and author of the best-seller Storyworthy, and Don Mill...

This week's Summer Series covers the pre-mortem analysis with its founder, Gary Klein. Gary discovered pre-mortems while working with fighter pilots and wrote a white paper applying the tool to investment analysis alongside Paul Johnson and Paul Sonkin. Please enjoy this discussion of the proper use of pre-mortem analysis with Gary, Paul, and Paul from 2019. Learn more about Capital Allocators Uni...

This week's Summer Series is a highly atypical episode, where I appear as the guest.  Matt Breitfelder from Apollo asked to interview me about interviewing, something I learned far more from hosting the show the last nine years than I ever did while interviewing managers for 20. The conversation has been sufficiently popular that it made the Summer Series on investment process. Any leader should s...

This What Ted's Thinking brings Situational Awareness to the underlying causes of hedge fund disasters.   Read Ted's blog  here.   Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant ( ⁠ https://thepodcastconsultant.com ⁠ )

Our Summer Series kickoff is with one of the all-time greats,  Annie Duke . The former world-class poker player has become a noted academic and practitioner in the art of decision-making. Her best-seller Thinking in Bets is a one-of-a-kind set of tools and tips to try (emphasis on try) to get past our embedded behavioral biases.  And her follow-up works How to Decide and Quit pull different thread...

Our Summer Series kickoff is with one of the all-time greats,  Annie Duke . The former world-class poker player has become a noted academic and practitioner in the art of decision-making. Her best-seller Thinking in Bets is a one-of-a-kind set of tools and tips to try (emphasis on try) to get past our embedded behavioral biases.  And her follow-up works How to Decide and Quit pull different thread...

Lauren Hochfelder is Head of Global Real Assets at Morgan Stanley, where she oversees a team of 300 investment professionals across 13 countries, managing $80 billion across real estate, infrastructure, equity and credit. Lauren joined Morgan Stanley as an investment banking analyst directly out of Yale 26 years ago and has spent her entire career at the firm, helping build one of the industry's l...

Michelle Knudsen is Chief Investment Officer of NYU, where she oversees the university's $8 billion endowment. Michelle joined NYU two years ago, after fourteen years as an allocator at Partners Capital and the Mellon Foundation, with a mandate to build a best-in-class endowment from a clean sheet of paper. Our conversation traces Michelle's lessons learned working at Goldman Sachs, a growing OCIO...

Our next guest on the Senior Decision Makers series is Luis Laboy, Director of Public Equity at the Hewlett Foundation, where he's spent the last decade running the public equity book alongside CIO Ana Marshall — a mentor and colleague he first met nearly thirty years ago. The foundation's assets stand at roughly $14 billion today. Luis spent fifteen years as a direct emerging markets investor at...

Frank Danieli is Head of Global Credit Solutions at MA Financial Group, an ASX-listed alternative asset manager that oversees A$15 billion ($10 billion) across a broad range of private credit and lending strategies and A$179 billion ($125 billion) in a lending ecosystem platform. Frank began his career in restructurings, the self-described 'dark side of credit', and has used the lessons from speci...