Announcements and Gratitudes

* In the spirit of the Thanksgiving season, I’d like to express my gratitude for those who have allowed me to keep the wheels turning on the podcast.

–  Individual Members:  Each individual subscription goes a long way to expressing your thanks and supporting the show.  If you’d like to become a member, please sign-up here.

–  Corporate Members:  Special thanks to Aitken Advisors, Alternative Investment Management, H Partners, EJF Capital, Soros Fund Management, Richmond Global, and WCM Capital for quietly and strongly supporting the show.  Asset managers and companies who would like to support the show while keeping a low profile, the Corporate Membership is for you.

–  Corporate Episode Sponsors:  Shout out to episode sponsors Northern Trust Front Office Solutions, Colmore, Canoe, Top Traders Unplugged, and Barings’ Streaming Income Podcast for testing the advertising market on the podcast and for listeners for engaging with their products.  Reach out if you’re interested in sponsoring future episodes to reach this incredible audience of engaged allocators and managers.

–  Special thanks to two individuals who have worked with me to provide the content on the website, Marcelino Pantoja and Connor Aller. Both have been just outstanding in raising the bar on the experience.

Without you, I would not be able to have taken the podcast this far.  Let’s see where it goes from here!

Reading (Ordered by reading time: tweets first, books last, and blog posts and articles in between) 

1.  Close Friendships Matter. By now, we’ve heard about the power of having a few close friendships in our lives. This short piece from the NY Times shares five tips on how to develop these relationships.

2.  How to Make a Pitch. Venture capitalist James Currier from NFX shares a sixteen non-obvious fundraising lessons.

3.  Structural Advantages. Ashby Monk wrote this gem in 2014 looking at how venture capital firms build competitive advantages and how asset owners can apply the same principles..

4.  Cracking the Code on the Market. Greg Zuckerman’s book on Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies is an entertaining read that tells the story of perhaps the most successful hedge fund organization.  No, we still don’t know what Renaissance actually does to generate such insane results, but Greg does a terrific job cracking the veil of the secretive organization.  Stay tuned for a podcast conversation with Greg next month.

5.  Moneyball 3.0 – The MVP Machine. The original Moneyball found that analytics could change the way baseball teams find talent and play the game. “Moneyball 2.0” explored what happened after teams learned this new information, highlighted by the rise of the Houston Astros in Ben Reiter’s Astroball.  Both versions held the premise that player ability is static. The next evolution in baseball has been using data analytics to change that premise by improving player performance. Travis Sawchik (author of fantastic Moneyball 2.0 book Big Data Baseball) and Ben Lindbergh wrote The MVP Machine, which shows that a whole lot more is happening in the cat and mouse game of baseball beyond what we see and hear watching games.

Watching

Michael Batnick of Ritholtz Wealth Management interviewed me about hedge funds on The Compound. The Ritholtz crew are great thinkers and prolific writers and podcasters. Josh Brown and MIchael Batnick have both been guests on the podcast.

Listening
Capital Allocators
Episode 112:  Dawn Fitzpatrick – Multi-Faceted Investing at Soros Fund Management. Dawn tracks her career from options trading to taking the helm at Soros, and ends by sharing that she is seeking talented fund managers to join their unique platform.

First Meeting Episode 12:  Jason Karp – From Hedge Funds to Health and Wellness at HumanCo.  Former hedge fund manager Jason Karp is building a new holding company investing in healthy consumable products. He shares his story, both personally and professionally..

Episode 113:  Steve Rattner – Overseeing Michael Bloomberg’s Family Office. A week before Mike Bloomberg announced his candidacy for President, Steve came on the show to talk about his multi-faceted career path and his approach to overseeing Bloomberg’s family office.

First Meeting Episode 13:  Drew Dickson – Blending Behavior and Fundamentals at Albert Bridge Capital. Drew writes a terrific blog, has an engaging twitter account, and invests in European equities staying particularly attuned to behavioral biases.

Best of the Rest
Invest Like the Best, with Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify, and with Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger,co-founders of Instagram. Patrick is diving into interviews with CEOs, and these two stories are imminently accessible, thanks to ubiquitous knowledge of the products and deep insights in how modern technology companies are built and managed.

Masters in Business with Ilana Weinstein.  Barry Ritholtz does a fantastic job preparing for and delivering high quality interviews, and with the Bloomberg booking agents behind him, gets an array of ‘extra special’ guests.  Ilana is a superstar recruiter for some of the most demanding hedge funds and she offers deep insights into these organizations.

Have a good one,
Ted