Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

John Pfeffer is an entrepreneur, investor and author of "An (Institutional) Investor's Take on Cryptoassets."  He is currently Partner of Pfeffer Capital.  In the 2000s, John was a Member at private equity firm KKR, and in the 1990s, he was Chairman of the Executive Board of leading French IT company Groupe Allium S.A. Before that, he advised on turnarounds while with McKinsey in Europe and Latin...

Ross Israel is the Head of Global Infrastructure Investments for QIC, Queensland, Australia's 82B AUZ ($62B USD) investment fund. The Queensland government formed QIC in 1991 to oversee its Superannuation Fund, and the business has since evolved into a Global Diversified Alternative Asset Manager. Ross joined QIC in 2006 to create the Global Infrastructure effort and also serves as a member of QIC...

Kim Lew is the Vice President and CIO of Carnegie Corporation, where she is responsible for the investment and oversight of the Corporation's $3.5 billion Foundation. Kim joined Carnegie in 2007 after spending a dozen years at the Ford Foundation. She is also a Trustee of Ariel Investments, the Board Chair of the Stevens Cooperative Schools, and a member of the investment committees of the Girl Sc...

Paul Black is Co-CEO and portfolio manager at WCM Investment Management, a $26 billion manager of global equities that he joined when it was a $200 million boutique in 1989.  With so much of the institutional world, including my own training, focused on value investing, I was pleasantly surprised to learn about a large, high performing growth stock manager located in a non-descript building in Lag...

Jim Williams is the Vice President, Chief Investment Officer, and Treasurer of the Getty Trust, where he oversees a $7 billion portfolio for the Getty Museum. Before joining the Getty in 2002, Jim spent three years as the President of Harbor Capital Advisors and prior to that, was manager of the Ford Motor Company pension department. Our rich conversation covers all aspects of managing a significa...

Michael Cembalest is the Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, a global industry leader with $2 trillion of client assets under management. Michael is also a member of the Investment Committee for J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management and the Investment Committee for the J.P. Morgan Retirement Plan that covers the firm's 250,000 employees. Before tak...

One common refrain across my conversations has been the importance and subtleties of effective governance in making optimal investment decisions.  Alongside Steven Galbraith's incredible career as an analyst, strategist, portfolio manager, and entrepreneur in the asset management business, he has served on as many Boards as anyone I know. I imagine many of you have heard Steve's story, but if not,...

Chris Brockmeyer is the Director of Employee Bennefit Funds for the Broadway League, the national trade association for the Broadway theatre industry.  Chris serves as an employer-appointed trustee, in most cases as Co-Chair, on eleven multi-employer pension funds, seven health funds and four annuity/401(k) funds with approximately $7 billion in assets. For 11 years, Chris has artfully navigated d...

Andy Redleaf is the Founding Partner of Whitebox Advisors, a $5.5 billion multi-strategy hedge fund launched in 1999 with primary offices in the metropolitan hubs of Minneapolis, Austin, and Sydney, Australia. Before founding Whitebox, Andy spent twenty years trading options, for two years at Gruntal & Comes mpany alongside Stevie Cohen, fourteen on the CBOE, and five as a Founding Partner at Deep...

Last fall, I sat down with a fellow former hedge fund of funds professional Khe Hy, who left the business a few years ago and has developed a fascinating media platform around introspection, self-awareness, and self-development. Certainly a set of characteristics we don't normally associate with folks in the asset management business. Khe interviewed me about my career path and some lessons I've l...

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 Co...

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 behav...

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 Qun...

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 inves...

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 w...

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 U...

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...

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 conve...

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...

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 p...

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 pod...

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-rangin...

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...

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 th...

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...