“A ship is safe in a harbor, but that is not what ships are built for.”

– John Shedd, Salt from my Attic

Announcements

Capital Allocators University. We are halfway through CAU and excited by the engagement of our widely diverse, high-end, oversubscribed cohort! Here’s a little peek behind the scenes from our first session, Creating Personal Leverage with Khe Hy. Watch Khe describe the $10k Framework here.

Join Capital Allocators as an Intern. We’re looking for an intern to work with our team on a strategic review of the business and projects focused on content and education activities. Send your resume and a short paragraph on why you want to join us to victoria@capitalallocators.com. More Details here.

Hot Jobs to Share

We come across friends looking to hire talent from time to time. These three different opportunities from close relationships came across our desk this month.

Chief of Staff for Managing Partner of a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. A smart, organized, and nice leader of a large fund is looking for someone to help manage aspects of his business and life. The ideal candidate has both investment experience and some family office experience. Read the job spec here.

Premium Sample

Perks of a premium subscription include episode transcripts, connectivity to show guests, Ted’s investment thoughts, and a weekly email.

Ted’s Blog: Wash U and Kim Lew. When Warren Buffett and I made a charitable bet in 2007, Carol Loomis wrote a terrific story about it in Fortune magazine. Within a day, dozens of news reports followed based on her piece. Almost every other story got the facts wrong.

What gets reported in the media often isn’t quite right, and at times misses the mark entirely. This rule of thumb serves as a constant reminder of the importance of primary research.

Sometimes the news shares a headline that hints at the truth, even when that truth lies below the surface of the story. The recent reports of the Washington University of St. Louis endowment’s exceptional one-year return and Institutional Investor bestowing a Lifetime Achievement award on Kim Lew are perfect examples.

Read the full Blog post Here.

A Word from Our Sponsors

Janus Henderson Investors. Recent Manager Meeting’s guest Daniel Graña and his team discuss the rise of innovative and value-added industries that should place the future trajectory of emerging markets on a more stable footing despite near-term risks caused by the pandemic. You can access JHI’s entire institutional blog here.
Read Near-Term Uncertainty Match with Long-Term Opportunity

Northern Trust Investment Data Science. Northern Trust announced a strategic partnership with Essentia Analytics (past guest on the show), part of its network of partnerships that bring a curated suite of solutions across EDS, Essentia, and Venn by Two Sigma, to combine Northern Trust’s foundational data with data science and behavioral analytics for asset managers and allocators.
Read More About NT IDS

Bipsync. The modern research management platform for investors has assembled Buyer’s Guides for 6 different fund types to help you learn how different strategies can effectively utilize a modern RMS system.
View RMS Buyers Guides

Nasdaq Asset Owner Solutions. eVestment – a part of Nasdaq – has offered its manager DE&I data free of charge for qualified investors in an effort to improve transparency and standardization across the industry.
Request Free Access to DE&I Data

Reading

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

1. The One Thing Successful Private Equity Firms Have in Common. Ted’s thoughts synthesizing the Private Equity Masters mini-series, published this month in Institutional Investor.
Read Ted’s Piece in II

2. Lyrically Speaking: Teach Your Parents Well, Jeff Solomon. Cowen’s CEO follows his motto of ‘Vision, Tenacity, and Empathy’ with lessons he’s learned from the younger, digital-first generation when he dropped off his daughter at college.
Read Jeff Solomon’s Teach Your Parents Well

3. Quantum Change and Trend Following. Eric Peters describes the difficulty in orienting to the significant changes at hand and makes the case for trend following strategies as a result.
Read Eric Peters’ Assessment of Markets

4. Overcoming Barriers to Change in Sports and Investing. Michael Mauboussin maps behavioral bias to the slow adoption of innovative edges in sports (the 3-point shot in basketball, the football draft) and describes how organizations struggle with change. In the end, the investment lessons are easiest to say and hardest to achieve: get the people right, align the organization, and have a long time horizon.
Read Michael Mauboussin’s Latest

5. Hedge funds are back. We saw two signals of hedge fund strength hit our inboxes earlier this month. First, Bloomberg reported on funds closing to new capital – always a good sign for investors. Second, Scott Schweighauser at Borealis released a study on hedge fund launches over the last three years. Most research on the industry suffers from poor data, but Scott is a consummate professional and draws conclusions from front-line experience.
Watch Bloomberg’s Report on Hedge Funds
Read Hedge Fund New Launch Landscape 2021

Listening

Past Capital Allocators Episodes

EP.212: Mike Tian – Moat Trajectories and Investing in China at WCM

EP.213: Katie Hall – Hall Capital Partners

EP.214: Luke Ellis – The Man Behind the Man Group

EP.215: Friends Reunion – Five Allocators Riff on Investing

Past Manager Meetings Episodes

EP.9: Jan Garfinkle, Arboretum Ventures – Interviewed by Roz Hewsenian

EP.10: Leda Braga, Systematica – Interviewed by Mario Therrien

EP.11: Ryan Batchelor, Clifford Capital – Interviewed by Paul Black

EP.12: Nikhil Basu Trivedi & Mike Smith, Footwork Ventures – Interviewed by Beezer Clarkson

EP.13: Danial Graña, Janus Henderson Investors – Interviewed by Ted

Best of the Rest

Scott Wilson – Concentrated Investing at Wash U (EP. 159). Scott described his approach that led to Wash U’s headline-grabbing performance in our conversation last year.

Decision Education podcast – Annie Duke with Rich Eisen and Les Snead In this gem, NFL Network’s Rich Eisen and Los Angeles Rams General Manager Les Snead discuss the balance of analytics and intuition in football. In particular, listen at 30:30 to a fantastic story about the Rams and Tom Brady.