Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

This WTT, 5.5 Lessons at 55.5 reflects on what five-and-a-half decades of investing, podcasting, and mistakes have taught me about people, markets, and myself. Read Ted's blog here .   Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant ( ⁠ https://thepodcastconsultant.com ⁠ )

Pat Dorsey is the Founder of Dorsey Asset Management, a $1.7 billion global public equity manager focused on companies with competitive advantages and long investment runways. Pat created Morningstar's moat research framework and led its equity research efforts for a dozen years before launching his firm in 2014. Our conversation covers the nuances of investing in businesses with wide moats across...

Our first guest on the Senior Decision Makers mini-series is Nick Csicsko. Nick is a Managing Director at the Trinity Wall Street endowment, where he joined CIO Meredith Jenkins at the founding of the investment office in 2016 and has spent the last decade helping build a young endowment inside a 320-year-old institution. Today the endowment has grown to over $6 billion. Nick's path into investing...

Abigail Wattley is the Chief Investment Officer of Williams College, where she oversees the school's $4.5 billion endowment. She became CIO three years ago upon the retirement of Collette Chilton, whose past conversation is replayed in the feed.  Abigail has spent two decades in the Williams investment office, and her tenure manifests the benefits of duration and institutional knowledge in the sea...

Collette Chilton is the CIO of Williams College where she has overseen its $3 billion since 2006. Collette is nothing short of a legend in the business. She has sat in a CIO seat since the early 1990s at the helm of public pension MassPrim and corporate pension Lucent before joining Williams. Institutional Investors bestowed its Lifetime Achievement Award on Collette in 2019, and Barron's named he...

This WTT, AI: Fundamentals, Valuation, and the Next Allocator Dilemma takes on a high-level assessment of AI companies as late-stage private winners prepare to go public, and the next big challenge allocators face as a result. Read Ted's blog here . Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant ( ⁠ https://thepodcastconsultant.com ⁠ )

Jonathan Wang is the founder and CEO of EOS Investors, where he has built three real estate investment platforms totaling $2 billion  in assets under management across the hotel and residential sectors. Jonathan also  created a wholly owned hotel management company that  oversees 60 properties for the EOS funds and five core partners.     Our conversation covers Jonathan's path to hotel investing ...

Rajiv Jain is the Chairman and CIO of GQG Partners, a global equity manager he founded in 2016 that has soared to $160 billion in assets, rebuffing the challenging decade for active managers.    Our conversation covers Rajiv's path from trading in India to his long tenure at Vontobel and founding of GQG. We discuss the periodic crisis lessons that shaped his approach, his definition of quality, te...

Erik Brooks is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Ethos Capital, a middle-market private equity firm built to bring seasoned C-Suite operators into every aspect of the investment process. Erik's experience prior to founding Ethos in 2019 spanned privatizations in Eastern Europe, value investing at Baupost, and twenty years at Abry Partners. Our conversation covers Erik's path to private equity...

John Kim, or Kimmer, has raised more than $70 billion across his career for leading venture capital and private equity firms. Kimmer recently distilled three decades of lessons into The Tao of Fundraising, the best book I've ever read on fundraising for investment managers. Since then, Kimmer joined a General Catalyst portfolio company, Lila Sciences, as Chairman and President of Corporate Develop...

Josh Steiner is a polymath of the New York and D.C. power corridors across government, media, and finance, and co-author of From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You. Josh rose to national prominence as the youngest-ever Chief of Staff at the U.S. Treasury in the Clinton administration, where he made a high-profile mistake he unpacks in the book. He pivoted to finance as a m...

Today's show discusses an innovative joint venture between asset owners and a multi-manager hedge fund that seeks to deliver smooth, equity-like returns at a lower cost than available in the marketplace. My guests are Will England, Derek Drummond, and Tony Caruso.  Will is the CEO and CIO of $12 billion multi-strategy hedge fund Walleye Capital. Derek is head of external public markets investing a...

Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger are the COO and CCO of WCM Investment Management, a firm chronicled over the years for its remarkable culture and growth to $120 billion in assets under management. This special conversation was hosted by Scott MacDonald on our affiliate Investment Management Operations podcast. Their conversation describes WCM's culture in practice that includes hiring for character...

Alex Sloane and Matt Perelman are co-founders of Garnett Station Partners, a $4 billion private equity firm focused on buy-and-build investments in founder-led, core economy businesses. Alex and Matt are lifelong friends who took an unconventional path out of business school, acquiring a 23-unit Burger King franchise in North Carolina that they scaled to 1,100 locations before selling it back to t...

Rodney Comegys is the CIO of Vanguard Capital Management and its Head of Global Equity Indexing, where he oversees $8.5 trillion in index assets across domestic, international, and multi-asset strategies. Rodney joined Vanguard twenty seven years ago and has worked across operations, customer service, risk management, and investing.    Our conversation covers the philosophy and mechanics behind ru...

Randall Stutman is the founder of Admired Leadership and one of the most sought-after executive coaches in the world. He's known across Wall Street, the hedge fund community, professional  sports, the Olympics, and the White House entirely by word of mouth. Randall was a past guest on the show six years ago in a rare public appearance, and that conversation is replayed in the feed.     Our convers...

Randall Stutman is founder and co-head of the Leadership Practice at CRA. and the Admired Leadership Institute. Randall is probably the top executive coach that you've never heard of before. He's spent 30 years coaching and learning about the behaviors and routines of extraordinary leaders. To give you a sense, he was worked in the White House and the Olympics, with something like 2,000 senior exe...

My guest on today's special episode is Joel Holsinger, Co-head of Ares' $50 billion Alternative Credit strategy. In addition to his long and stellar career in the credit markets, Joel spearheaded the launch of Promote Giving, a philanthropic initiative similar to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates' Giving Pledge, designed for alternative asset managers. Our conversation covers Joel's path to engaging i...

Bruce MacDonald is the CEO and CIO of the Virginia Commonwealth University Investment Management Company, which runs $2.5 billion for VCU's endowment and health system. Bruce joined the University in 2015 and shortly thereafter, had the opportunity to sell the portfolio and start fresh. Since being promoted to CIO in 2022, VCU has been a top decile performer with a team of just five investment pro...

Kieran Goodwin is a Partner at Saba Capital, a $6 billion hedge fund manager that seeks to identify dislocations in credit and equity markets to generate convex returns in volatile times. Kieran has been one of the top credit traders on the Street for the last three decades across roles at investment banks in the '90s and early 00's, King Street, his own hedge fund, Panning Capital, and most recen...

Jeremy Grantham is the Co-Founder of GMO, a $100 billion Boston-based asset management firm co-founded in 1977. Over six decades in markets, Jeremy has been one of the most respected and outspoken voices on value, market bubbles, and long-term investing. He recently published The Making of a Permabear with Edward Chancellor, an account of his career and investment lessons learned along the way. Ou...

Throughout most of my career, the S&P 500 has been an appropriate bogey to assess manager performance. More than that, it's the most widely used benchmark in the capital markets. But today, it doesn't represent the broad-based, diversified exposure to the U.S. economy that most participants take for granted when investing passively or measuring manager skill. This WTT, When the Benchmark Becomes a...

Will Guidara is the author of Unreasonable Hospitality and the soon to release Unreasonable Hospitality: The Field Guide. Unreasonable Hospitality has become a New York Times bestseller and a business bible for elevating customer experiences. Will was co-owner of Eleven Madison Park alongside Danny Meyer when the restaurant ascended to #1 in the world, the co-producer of Emmy Award-winning streami...

Ryan Lovell is the Director of Capital Markets at Chainlink Labs, where he leads the development of blockchain-based solutions for tokenized finance across banking and capital markets. Chainlink has powered more than $28 trillion in transaction value and powers the majority of decentralized finance. Our conversation explores the hidden plumbing of modern finance and the upgrade blockchains provide...

Katelin Holloway is a Founding Partner at Seven Seven Six, a technology-focused venture firm backing great early-stage entrepreneurs that she started with Alexis Ohanian in 2020. Alexis was a past guest on the show, and that conversation is replayed in the feed. Katelin and I explore the intersection of human capital and venture capital. We cover her upbringing, work alongside Steve Jobs at Pixar,...