Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

James Aitken is the Founder and Managing Partner of Aitken Advisors, a one-man macroeconomic research boutique based in Wimbledon, England from where he pens his weekly "Notes from a Small Island" and consults approximately one hundred of the most influential pools of capital in the world. After a wildly popular show two years ago, James came back for another doozy. Our conversation covers the ESG...

Peter Kraus is the Chairman and CEO of Aperture Investors, a $5 billion asset manager he founded after a storied four-decade career on Wall Street, including heading the Investment Management Division at Goldman Sachs and serving as Chairman and CEO of AllianceBernstein. Throughout his career, Peter has been a vocal proponent of pay-for-performance compensation models and the need for trust betwee...

Last year, I appeared on the Rational Reminder podcast, a show hosted by Cameron Passmore and Ben Felix of PWL Capital, a terrific Ottawa, Canada-based wealth manager that focuses on low cost, passive investing. We discussed the depth of the institutional investment research process, hedge funds, alternatives for individuals, index fund investing around the world, lessons from the big Bet, and a f...

Beezer Clarkson is Managing Director at Sapphire Ventures where she is responsible for the management of Sapphire's fund investments in early stage venture funds globally.  Her career through direct and fund investing has left her with unusually deep knowledge and insights in the space. Our conversation starts with Beezer's meandering career and turns to her work at Sapphire, including its structu...

Gregory Zuckerman is a special writer at the Wall Street Journal and the author of five books, including his most recent, The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution .  Greg joined the Journal in 1996 and writes about big financial trades, firms, and personalities.  He's a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb award, the highest honor in business journalism, and his...

Our annual rundown of the most downloaded shows of 2019.  Wishing you a new year filled with wealth, health, and joy. 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

Dr. Sarel Vorster is a practicing neuro surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, where he performs procedures on the brain and spinal cord. Sarel has a cross-disciplinary interest in the effect of stress and risk on cognition and decision-making.  He attended Yale to study for an MBA at the ripe age of 50 to pursue that interest. Our conversation covers the process of conducting surgery, offering an thoro...

Neal Triplett is the CIO of DUMAC, the organization that oversees Duke University's $19 billion endowment, and Kim Lew is the CIO of the Carnegie Corporation, where she manages the $3.5 billion foundation created by Andrew Carnegie. A few weeks ago, Institutional Investor named Kim its CIO of the Year.  She also appeared on the show last year in Episode 52, which is replayed after this one on the...

Kip McDaniel is the Chief Content Officer and Editor-in-Chief at Institutional Investor.  In the early days of Capital Allocators, Kip joined me to share his insights about the CIOs he covers as a journalist. You can find that show in the feed right after this one. This time, we got together to talk about II's business and the lessons he's learned in producing content for allocators.  We cover the...

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 Cambrid...

Anne Martin is the Chief Investment Officer for Wesleyan University, where she manages the school's $1 billion endowment. Anne's career started in the tech world and shifted to endowment management at Yale's famed investments office. She took over at Wesleyan a decade ago, as one of a handful of Yale Investment alumns serving other institutions. Our conversation covers Anne's path from competitive...

Drew Dickson is the founder of Albert Bridge Capital, and CIO of the Alpha Europe funds, where he manages $350 million in European equities. Our conversation covers Drew's early career across the Chicago school, Fidelity and Och-Ziff, and his perch in Europe. We then go through Albert Bridge's investment process, portfolio construction, assessment of risk-reward, and client communication through b...

Steve Rattner is the Chairman and CEO of Willett Advisors, which invests former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's personal and philanthropic assets. Steve's career has ranged from a journalist for the New York Times to investment banking at Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and Lazard Freres, to founding private equity firm Quadrangle Group, and lastly to serving in the Obama Administration as head...

Jason Karp is the Founder and CEO of HumanCo, a mission-driven, disruptive holding company focused on investing in healthier living. Before diving into this endeavor, Jason had a very successful twenty-year career in the hedge fund industry, culminating in a six-year run as founder of Tourbillon Capital. Our conversation covers Jason's career in hedge funds across quant research, quantamental inve...

Dawn Fitzpatrick is the Chief Investment Officer at Soros Fund Management, where she manages $25 billion in Soros family and philanthropic assets. Dawn started her career as a trader at O'Connor and went on to serve as the global head and CIO of O'Connor. In 2016, UBS Asset Management promoted her to Global Head of Equities, Multi-Asset and O'Connor, where she oversaw more than $500 billion in ass...

My guest on today's First Meeting is Ash Fontana, a Managing Director at Zetta Ventures, a venture capital firm that backs Artificial Intelligence companies with B2B business models.  The firm invests in early-stage companies with unique data sets and models, and rolls up their sleeves to help founders by using a playbook Zetta created specifically for AI companies.  Ash started his career as an e...

Ana Marshall is the Vice President and Chief Investment Officer for The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she oversees a $10.5 billion pool of capital. Ana joined Hewlett in 2004 after spending eighteen years as a direct investor in high yield credit, emerging market debt, and international equities. Our conversation covers Ana's lifelong passion for investing, joining the "super buy sid...

Jay Girotto is the President of Farmland Opportunity, a $400 million investment manager that provides direct ownership of high quality, consistently productive row crop farmland in the U.S.  Like many managers in traditional asset classes, Farmland Opportunity searches for inefficient transactions, value-added improvements, and an aligned structure to maximize the benefits of farmland for the long...

Jonathan Tepper is the founder of Variant Perception , an economic research group that works with institutional managers, hedge funds, and allocators to provide objective and comprehensive data to form actionable ideas from leading indicators and emerging trends. He is also the author of three books, the most recent of which, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition , receiv...

Joe Lonsdale is a founding partner at 8VC, a leading venture capital firm that partners with top founders and entrepreneurs to build lasting technology platforms.  He began working at Peter Thiel's PayPal while Joe was an undergraduate at Stanford, and upon graduation became an early executive at Thiel's Clarium Capital, which became a multi-billion dollar global macro hedge fund. From within Clar...

Gary Klein is a noted cognitive psychologist with an innate ability to see what others don't. Over his 40-year career in the field, he's pioneered the field of naturalistic decision making, the Pre-Mortem method of risk assessment, and the ShadowBox training approach. Gary is the author of five books and editor of three more, and most recently, founded Shadow Box, LLC in 2005 to train decision mak...

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...

Michael Schwimer is the CEO of Big League Advance (BLA) and JAMBOS.  Last year, I sat down with Michael and discussed his playing career and the formation of BLA.  That conversation, which you can listen to on the feed right after this one, has been the most downloaded episode of Capital Allocators. Our second conversation starts with an update on BLA, the private equity fund that takes stakes in...

Michael Schwimer is the CEO of Big League Advance, a company that makes investments in Minor League baseball players in exchange for an agreed-upon percentage of their future earnings.  Before founding BLA, Michael was a professional baseball player, working his way through the minors and reaching the majors as a pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies.  A shoulder injury left him pondering what to...

Matt Whineray is the CEO of New Zealand Superannuation Fund or Super Fund, one of the highest performing, most innovative and well-regarded large-scale investment allocators in the world. The New Zealand government created the Super Fund in 2001 to help defray the costs of retirees in the country in the decades to come. Matt joined the organization in 2008 and became the CEO in 2018 and oversees N...