Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

Latest Episodes:

David "Bull" Gurfein - Interdisciplinary Lessons from the Marines (Capital Allocators, EP.10) Jun 05, 2017

Show notes

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 – Vision, Tenacity, and Empathy (Capital Allocators, EP.09) May 30, 2017

Show notes

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 – Multiple Ways to Win (Capital Allocators, EP.08) May 22, 2017

Show notes

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

Jennifer Heller – Thinking it Through (Capital Allocators, EP.07) May 17, 2017

Show notes

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 – When Witchcraft Failed (Capital Allocators, EP.06) May 09, 2017

Show notes

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

The Bet with Buffett (Capital Allocators, EP.05) May 02, 2017

Show notes

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 – Perpetual Thinking at Rockefeller University (Capital Allocators, EP.04) Apr 27, 2017

Show notes

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 – Asset Allocation for Families (Capital Allocators, EP.03) Apr 20, 2017

Show notes

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 – Academic Practitioner (Capital Allocators, EP.02) Apr 13, 2017

Show notes

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

Steven Galbraith – Five Tool Player (Capital Allocators, EP.01) Apr 13, 2017

Show notes

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

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