Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

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 unusual investment environment he has experienced, alongside his thoughts on how to build capabilities and construct portfolios to navigate exponential change. We then turn to the beautifully inefficient markets where HighVista has built core...

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 HighVista over the last few years. We discuss changes in the business and the firm's response by focusing on inefficient markets. We then dive into examples of opportunities in biotech, private credit and litigation finance, and close with a perspective on act...

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 legen...

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 with thousands.

What emerged is a range of use cases — from using AI as a personal productivity tool, to changing investment workflows, organizing institutional kn...

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.

We hope you've enjoyed this summer exploration in improving the investment process with some of the best conversations over the last nine years.

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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.

We hope you've enjoyed this summer exploration in improving the investment process with some of the best conversations over the last nine years.

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 what the course covers, who it's for, what we learned from the past five years, and why we decided to move it online.


Full details here. We look forward to welcoming you as...

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 Allocators University.

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A...

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 Allocators University.

Try ALEX by Admired Leadership.

Learn More
Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides or LinkedIn
Subscribe to the mailing list

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 Miller – creator of Storybrand, a business started with his book of the same name – describe how to improve your storytelling ability.

Learn more about Capital Allocat...

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 Miller – creator of Storybrand, a business started with his book of the same name – describe how to improve your storytelling ability.

Learn more about Capital Allocat...

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 University: https://www.capitalallocators.com/capital-allocators-university/

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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 see for themselves the benefits of elite coaching. Try ALEX: tryalex.admiredleadership.com.

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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 threads in the decision-making process.

Since writing Thinking in Bets, Annie has consulted several investment organizations to apply her insights to investing, including becoming a Special Partner focused on Dec...

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 threads in the decision-making process.

Since writing Thinking in Bets, Annie has consulted several investment organizations to apply her insights to investing, including becoming a Special Partner focused on Dec...

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 leading platforms.

Our conversation traces Lauren's journey from analyst to Global Head and the evolution of Morgan Stanley's real estate business before, during, and after the Global Financial Crisis. We cover the firm's thematic approach to investing behin...

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, and a foundation that shaped her investment philosophy and views on portfolio construction, risk management, and manager selection. We then turn to the transformation of NYU's investment office from the ground up across governance, portfolio str...

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 Everest Capital before crossing to the LP side, and our conversation digs into how he's leveraged that experience as an allocator. We discuss how the cadence and depth of decision-making changed when he went fr...

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 special situations and distressed loans to build a performing credit platform across asset backed finance, direct asset lending and corporate private credit.

Our conversation discusses what global investors can learn from the model of private credit in A...

Baroness Dambisa Moyo is a global economist, author, board member, and investor who sits at the intersection of public policy, corporate governance, and capital allocation. Dambisa serves in the U.K. House of Lords, sits on the boards of Chevron, Starbucks, Condé Nast, and Oxford University's investment committee, is Chair of the Economic Club of New York, and oversees Altered Trajectory alongside her husband, Jared Smith, the family office formed after his sale of Qualtrics in 2018.

Our conversation traces Dambisa's journey from growing up in Zambia to becoming a leading voice on global economic development and g...

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.

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 quantitative analysis, switching costs, network effects, brands, management, alignment, capital allocation, and reinvestment runways. We then turn to Pat's application of moat analysis to his investing, including concentration, global scope, position sizing, decision making, and lessons learned.

Any leader should see...

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 is a fascinating one. He studied composition and earned his Doctorate of Music at Juilliard. While there, he talked his way into an internship at Juilliard's endowment and never looked back.

...

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 seat.

Our conversation traces Abigail's nearly twenty-year journey inside the Williams Investment Office, from joining as an early analyst to becoming the internal successor CIO. We discuss the consistent mandate throughout alongside Abigail's evolution from analyst to deputy to d...

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 her one of the 100 Most Influential Women in Finance in 2020.   Our conversation covers Collette's career path and lessons learned before joining Williams. We then turn to her arrival at Williams in 2006 to a phone, a computer, and a...

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.

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 and EOS' hotel investment process across market selection, property type, underwriting, vertically integrated operations, and managing through cycles. We also discuss extensions into residential real estate, hotel credit, and opportunities and risks going forward.

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, team dynamics, and portfolio construction to avoid losses. We then turn to Rajiv's contrarian views, including current significant positions in energy, utilities, steel, tobacco, and emerging markets, avoidance of hyperscalers and semiconductors, and nimbleness...

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, lessons learned about risk, the importance of betting on people, and the evolution in his thinking that led to forming Ethos. We then cover Ethos' focus on durable business models, one-deal-a-year cadence, operating system to evaluate and...

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 Development.


Our conversation covers Kimmer's philosophy about raising capital, the sales process, art of persuasion, best practices in a meeting, frameworks determining fundraising success, taxonomy of institutional investors, ideal sales team structure and compensation, and the features he carried over f...

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 media investment banker  and co-founder of private equity firm Quadrangle Group in 2000, worked as an operator at Bloomberg in the 2010s, has served on Yale's Investment Committee for nearly...

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 at the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, and Tony Caruso is Managing Director of hedge funds at UTIMCO. Together, they co-founded Dockside Platforms, a managed account platform that gives institutional allocators direct access to portfolio managers...

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 over credentials, trust as an operating principle, overtrusting before proof exists, generous compensation and shared equity, values as a daily practice, connection through relational investment, making mistakes feel survivable, scaling culture by modeling behavior, accountability alongside kindness, and...

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 the franchisor. That operating experience became the foundation for their investment firm.

Our conversation traces that evolution from operators to investors. We discuss their "shared desk" partnership and culture of debate, and the Garnett Station playbook, from sourcing "l...

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 running one of the world's largest index fund operators. We discuss Vanguard's ownership structure, values, product selection, and mechanics of delivering an index fund. We then turn to common issues around indexing, including concentration in U.S. equities, corporate governance, private assets, a...

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 conversation covers the framework for uncovering the behaviors and best practices of admired leaders and then dives into examples around giving feedback. We also discuss how admired leaders both generate results and...

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 executives and 400 CEOs, and in our world, the most senior executives at JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Blackstone. Randall is also well known among the titans in the hedge fund community, where he's worked with...

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 in philanthropy, starting from humble beginnings to now making grants of $5 million in 2025 through Ares and launching Promote Giving in October.

The proposition of Promote Giving is simple – GPs commit up to 5% of their promote on at l...

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 professionals.

Our conversation covers Bruce's unconventional path from a religion major at Wesleyan to fixed income investing at Putnam and endowment roles at Columbia and UVIMCO before arriving at VCU. We discuss the principles...