Speaker 1When there's just five of you, you can't do everything. You have to make a choice about things to leave out. Because you're leaving out a lot, you really have to be focused on picking the right things to lean into. Our portfolio probably looks a little bit different in that there's a lot of things that we've decided to not spend our time on because we believed we'd be better spent spending time elsewhere. Things like private credit, China, Latin America, Africa. We decided to keep focused on other areas of opportunity. Market timing is a mugs game. As one of my old bosses said, endowments have an unfair advantage in that we work with the smartest investors out there. It's not necessarily market timing when your expert in emerging market internet companies comes to you and says, my companies have never been cheaper. We are seeing opportunities we have never seen before. That to me is backing good investors. Historically, endowments have done a great job of that. But in the last 10 or 15 years with the obsession of private assets, that tool has been taken out of the toolkit. We pride ourselves in keeping that tool in the toolkit. We have abundant liquidity to stay in, step into dislocations, either at the manager level or at the market level.
Speaker 2I'm Ted Seides, and this. This is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's show is Bruce McDonald, 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 in the U.S. and in the U.K. 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 of VCU's approach, including building a portfolio around secular tailwinds like India, Vietnam, gold, and artificial intelligence, while maintaining abundant liquidity to, counter cyclically during market dislocations. We explore VCU's team-based underwriting process, lessons learned from mistakes, and personal influences that shaped Bruce's investment philosophy. Before we get going, it's travel season. Partner meetings, board meetings, the Capital Allocators CIO Summit, Omaha for Berkshire, and Milken. Across planes, trains, and automobiles, you're bound to run into a few snacks. When they're all packed, you're ready to go. Unavoidable, I try to remember Will Godero's story of the pilot who lifted everyone's spirits by bringing families into the cockpit. But it's not always easy, which leads to my most recent pet peeve. I was on a flight with some unfortunate delays. We were scheduled to land from a cross-country journey at 11.30 p.m., but got diverted from New York to Philadelphia because of weather at just the wrong time. After a gas-and-go stop that took about a week, I was took about an hour, we finally landed at 3 a.m., and at that time, there's only a scant crew working at hangars, so we waited another hour on the tarmac. None of that was anyone's fault. But after a long flight and equally long day, you can imagine everyone was ready to go home. All the passengers queued up to depart one by one in an orderly fashion. It's actually uncanny how respectful people are when getting off planes. But. There's a moment when it's your turn to get moving, and on this particular flight, after eight and a half hours, the person in the row in front of me seemed oblivious to the cadence of the queue. When it was his turn, he arose, seemingly clueless, and forced everyone behind him to wait. Of course, this wasn't just a grab-your-bag-and-go. Two bags, maybe three, come down from above, then he pauses to put on his jacket, then reorganizes, his bags to put a backpack on top of his wheelbag. And then, without as much as an I'm sorry, he slowly started walking off the plane. Not a single movement in his deplaning occurred until after the person in front of him had started walking. So there you have it, my new recent pet peeve. Don't be that person who isn't ready to deboard a plane when it's your turn. It's just not that hard. And thank you for spreading the word about my most recent pet peeve, which you'll only hear by tuning in to Capital Allocators. A missed filing, incorrect source, or context that gets lost somewhere in a retrieval chain aren't edge cases. They're how decisions go wrong. AlphaSense is the AI platform built specifically for this. They own the content, over 500 million curated documents, from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls. And they own the retrieval layer on top of it. That means every answer can link back to an exact, verifiable source. Because the answer is only as good as what's underneath it. And with AlphaSense, you know exactly what that is. See it for yourself. Try a free trial at alpha-sense.com slash capital. That's alpha-sense.com with a hyphen in the middle slash capital. Capital Allocators is also brought to you by Morningstar. In a sea of data, you need to know what you can trust. Morningstar's data, analytics, and research helps bring clarity across public and private markets, connecting independent research and data into the tools and AI platforms you use every day. So insights are easier to spot and act on. Morningstar. Nothing in your way. Visit morningstar.com slash game on to learn more. One theme that keeps coming up on the show is GPs that build the strongest and most durable relationships with LPs are the ones that have both strong returns and strong operations. AI raises the stakes on operations. And having Juniper Square as your operations partner helps ensure your data is organized, accurate, and accessible so you can unlock operational alpha. That's why thousands of GPs trust Juniper Square. Learn more at junipersquare.com slash capital allocators. Please enjoy my conversation with Bruce McDonald. Bruce, thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker 1It's great to be here, Ted.
Speaker 2Why don't you take me all the way back to the influences from your upbringing?
Speaker 1If you believe that investing is a combination of art and science, I had a very unfair advantage. My mother was a printmaker. My father was a geologist. My father was a geophysicist. I literally am a combination of art and science. I grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, which was an idyllic college setting. My big passion was swimming. I was very competitive. I won an award because Hanover is such a small town. The newspaper came and interviewed me. This was when I was 10. There was a prize that came with it. They asked me what I was going to do with the money. I was going to invest it. Apparently, it's been in my blood for a while. I went to Wesleyan University and wanted to be an econ major. I took micro, absolutely hated it. It was the worst experience. I pivoted hard, and we're talking really hard. I became a religion major. I hadn't had a religious upbringing growing up. I was very curious about it. Wesleyan is a great liberal arts school. I decided to take full advantage and dive in. It's pretty much been a life journey since then, trying to figure out how that applies to investing. How did you pivot to religious studies? I took an intro to religion class that was a survey of all religions, from Christianity to Buddhism to early religions in Mesopotamia. I was curious. I was young and thinking big thoughts, trying to understand the meaning of the world, and thought I would find it there. Where I ended up really getting passionate in my religious studies was with Kierkegaard. He was a religious philosopher from the 19th century. I read, almost every one of his works as part of my studies. One of his books leans hard into the concept of true faith is not something that is blind. It's something where you're constantly questioning. There's a back and forth. In investing, you have to have faith that what you think you're doing, whatever you think you're buying, whatever manager that you're going to invest with is going to do well. You need to always be asking yourself, where can this go wrong? That was a central tenet of how he thought about faith, and I have carried that forward with investing. The analogy dies, though, because I don't think in faith you're supposed to change your mind as much as you have to. when you're investing.
Speaker 2You're coming out of school and thinking about work. What did that look like as a religious studies major with some underpinning of microeconomics once?
Speaker 1I got lucky in that I took the second half of intro economics my senior year and had an amazing professor named Richard Slotkin. He had this analogy that sparked my interest in markets. He asked this question, if Martians came down, went to Congress and said, we'll give you $50 billion in real wealth every year, but we're going to take 50,000 lives. Would Congress take that deal? Throughout most of my life, the answer would be a clear no. I thought that was fascinating. His answer was, that's what the car industry has done. By making transportation more efficient, they've generated all this real wealth, but there are 40,000 to 50,000 people that die every year in car wrecks. That is not a decision that can be made politically. It's a decision that can be made politically. It's a one that the markets make. I was turned on at that point. I was like, I want to understand how this works. I want to make this part of my life's work. It was a tough time to get into finance. This was post-RTC, post-1990 recession. Wall Street was not hiring. They definitely weren't hiring a religion major. I moved to New York. I slept on a friend's couch. I started taking temp jobs. The first one was counting receipts during Christmas in the back office of Bloomingdale's. With a group of 12 other temps, I somehow got a break and I got a job at Columbia being a fundraiser. They had this amazing benefit. They gave you tuition so you could take classes. Wesleyan is a great school. It has no core curriculum. I had not taken a math class in four years. I took calculus. I took intermediate economics, did great in them and realized I can do this. Part of it was to prove to myself that I could do it. Part of it was to prove to a future employer. I got another big break, which was a job. Columbia's investment office opened up. I took my limited experience and my class history and was able to get a job there. It was a wonderful opportunity. This was early days of endowment investing. There was private equity. There wasn't venture and growth and buyout. I got to see everything. It was also a time when a lot of the stuff that's been outsourced wasn't outsourced. We used to get private equity distributions. I had a great mentor there named Steve Lehman who ended up working at Pew. We trusted for a while. He would have me trade the distributions. I learned how to read a Bloomberg ticker. It was just an amazing experience. I gravitated towards fixed income. A lot of that was that underpinning of what drives the market, trying to understand that key driver is interest rates. I wanted to understand as well as I could the fixed income markets. I applied to Columbia Business School, made a huge mistake in that I did not take a single one of the value investing classes. I was too much of a contrarian. This was the Henry Blodgett years. It seemed like every one of my classmates wanted to be an equity analyst like Henry Blodgett. I was like, "No, I'm not going to do that." I had other great professors though. I took an economic history class with Rick Mishkin who ended up on the FOMC during the GFC. That whole class was just studying Freeman and Schwartz monetary history of the US, which if you're trying to understand historical parallels, is a great background for investing.
Speaker 2With that early experience in multi-asset, class endowment, how do you think about what you wanted to do after business school? I stayed on the fixed income path.
Speaker 1I still had this passion for understanding interest rates. I also thought of myself more as a quant. I liked the closed formed equations of fixed income land. You can answer the duration question and price a bond very clearly, whereas equity seemed more mysterious to me. I focused exclusively on getting fixed income jobs. I ended up getting a job at Putnam Investments, joining the FOMC. I had a great time there. I was joining in August of '98, right before the long-term capital crisis. My initial boss there was this guy, Krishna Mamani, who has since went on to become CIO at Oppenheimer Funds in the fixed income group and is now CIO at Lafayette. He was a great mentor. Unfortunately, I only worked with him for a short time because Putnam stubbed their toe in the long-term capital crisis. It had a big reorg. The work that Krishna had me doing fell perfectly into this group called the Global Asset Allocation Group that was run by Jeff Knight. They didn't have anybody who knew fixed income. If you think about the Global Asset Allocation Group, their alpha driver was this global tactical asset allocation model that they used to trade futures. They traded all the major G7 markets, both equity and fixed income. A big part of their alpha driver they had no expert in. Finally, my fixed income expertise became relevant and helped me land on my feet in that particular role.
Speaker 2What do you think you grew to understand with a lens of the fixed income markets that applied both before and since in thinking about multi-asset investing?
Speaker 1My original driver for wanting to go into fixed income was to understand what set interest rates and how interest rates drove things. That insight was driven by understanding that all cash flows are priced off of the current discount rate. That underpinning in fixed income helped me think about the cascading effect of changes in the economy to how the Fed behaved, to how interest rates were set, and then how asset prices were set. I got this intuitive grasp of the dynamics of asset pricing early on. It was ingrained into me, the flow through from what unemployment is doing into interest rates, then into equities, into currencies, and then into global markets. That's where I got my inspiration from. I got my inspiration from how unemployment is growing, and I got my inspiration from what the Fed has done in the past. You quickly picked up on the fact that the U.S. always seemed to lead interest rate cycles. If you were thinking about overseas investing, you had an edge because you could understand the dynamics of risk asset pricing because you had this underpinning of interest rate knowledge.
Speaker 2You navigated your career from coming out of school into an asset manager and then went back to the endowment world. Love to hear about your thought process behind that transition back. Some of it was
Speaker 1driven by personal choice, some of it was driven by personal choice. I had decided to move to Charlottesville, Virginia, and was a pioneer of the remote work setup. I was still working for Putnam. I was on the portfolio management team, managing a hedge fund strategy version of the global tactical asset allocation model that we ran. That particular hedge fund had been anchored by General Motors. I thought I was in a great role and I didn't want to leave. I got a call the day that I moved to Charlottesville from a recruiter for this role at UVMCO, at UVA's investment management company. I thought, "I'll take this interview. I'll just see what it's about." It was like lifting my head out of the weeds, which is funny to think about because I was a multi-asset class investor. It wasn't like I was just focused on an industry sector and equities, but still I had never thought about venture. Even though I ran a hedge fund strategy, I had never thought about all the different hedge fund strategies that were out there. I didn't understand multi-strats. I never dug into traditional long-short investing. It was an incredibly eye-opening experience. In the interview, you probably heard about the process. It seemed like a great fit for me. The CIO at the time was Chris Brightman, who had an untraditional endowment background. He didn't come from the endowment world, so he wanted somebody to marry the traditional investing framework into the endowment model. He saw my background as being quantitative with a risk component to be helpful in that process. It turned out to be an amazing role for me.
Speaker 2What was different for you in what you saw from the years after you started managing fixed income portfolios with those two bookends of Columbia at the beginning and then Virginia afterwards?
Speaker 1I came at it from a quantitative background. My interest in this all was fixed income was easy because you had closed form equations that could solve the pricing. When I got to UVA, I understood how so much alpha was generated by being able to have a more creative thought process about asset pricing. This was when the tiger cubs were at the top of the pyramid. Being able to look at the loan pine portfolio and see how Steve Mandel and his team could see into the future about what these high-quality businesses would be worth was eye-opening. It was a completely different model for making money than I had understood in the past. It was so much more potent. It lit a fire in me as far as thinking more creatively about investing, which fit my personal background really well.
Speaker 2Why don't you walk me through your path from there to ultimately the seat where you are today? It's a little bit of a rocky path.
Speaker 1I've learned the hard way that there's a risk to having risk in your title. I was at Uvimco when the GFC hit. Our $5 billion endowment went to $4 billion. As the guy with risk in his title, when you lose 20%, sometimes somebody has to take the fall, and I was that person. That was a challenging period professionally. I was fortunate to have an amazing experience afterwards that repositioned me. My career to get me to the path that I'm on. That's a real lesson to when you have hard times is understanding. It's cliche to say when one door closes, another one opens. In my experience, there's nothing more true. I met this guy named Jim Dilworth who had an idea for democratizing hedge funds. One of the things I had done at Uvimco was build a managed account platform. We transitioned a bunch of LP relationships in long-short equity into our own prime brokerage account. So we could control how much capital was at risk and how much leverage was used. it turns out that's exactly the model you would need to democratize hedge funds. Create a managed account platform and you put a 40-act wrapper around it and you've got a mutual fund. It was a great product for its time in one sense in that it was so much easier post-GFC to find a hedge fund that was willing to do a managed account than it was pre-GFC when hedge funds were the cat's meow. It was a lot harder because it was a straight up market and there wasn't a great market for a hedged product, especially in the retail world at that point. We did a good job building a business. We got a three-year track record. We got 100 million under management, but it really needed to scale at that point. There was not conviction on the team to hire a sales team, which is what you need to do in mutual fund land, either hire a sales team or JV with an established fund. So it was time for me to move on. I was fortunate to have gotten connected with Larry Koshard and he introduced me to, Nancy Everett. He said, Nancy's building this thing down at VCU. You should go check it out. Nancy and I connected. We hit it off. The rest is history. It's been a wonderful experience on so many levels. I didn't know much about the mission of VCU and getting familiar with it has been one of my favorite parts of this journey.
Speaker 2What's special about that mission as you think about managing the endowment?
Speaker 1VCU is a public university in the state of Virginia. But it plays a much more traditional role of a public education institution. It tries to serve the less traditional college student. For example, more than a third of the undergraduate student body of 30,000 people is first gen. More than 70% have some kind of job while they're in school. It's a majority minority undergraduate student body and it's predominantly in-state students. It's a unique mission among the established industry. In the endowment world, it gives us a lot of purpose because when you're running that kind of institution, it's not like you have a legacy of great donors that can provide a cushion to the university. Every dollar that we generate in returns has a profound impact on the university's bottom line. Even though overall endowment spending is a single-digit percentage point of overall university spending, every one of those percentage points matters. We also manage money for the university. We manage money for the university. We manage money for the health system that's affiliated with VCU. That plays a similar role. It's the designated indigent care provider. Every dollar that we earn, we have a sense of impact in everything we do.
Speaker 2Let's dive into how you go about it. I understand there was opportunity for a whole scale change not too long after you arrived. So why don't you walk through what was going on and what happened?
Speaker 1We manage money for six different entities at the university. Each one of those entities has its own governing body. The university has its own governing body. They had a plan to build an investment team. They actually ran an RFP to try and get everybody to pick one manager so the transition to hiring Visimco would be easy. Unfortunately, it didn't work out. It's hard to herd all those governing bodies into one box. So when we started, we had the opportunity to take over two portfolios or sell them all and start over. That was a weighty decision. What you decide at that point in time dictates what your primary use of your time is for the next two years. We had a plan to build an investment team. If you keep those portfolios, you're going to spend most of your time reviewing what's in there, slowly changing things out and adding new stuff. Whereas if you start over and start from scratch, you get to build the institutional knowledge from day one. You get to build your culture, build your taste, build your process. One of the most important parts of an endowment management process is sourcing, which would have been muted if you were spending that time looking at the existing portfolio. So we made the choice. To sell everything and start from scratch, which was a bit easier than it would be for most portfolios because there was actually no private equity at all. We weren't having to sell privates or figure out what to do with that side of the book. It was hard though. This was a market in 2015, 2016 that had just come through the energy crisis. There was an R&B scare that the R&B was being devalued. So the markets just ripped. We were underinvested as we built out the diversification of an endowment portfolio. We started with a portfolio of ETFs and slowly layered managers in. We weren't going to take the traditional amount of equity risk in those early days because we didn't have the traditional amount of diversification. That was a hard stretch. It was 100% worth it. We built the investment process. We built the culture. Even though those were hard times early on, it deepened our relationship with our board, which has turned out to be a strength of ours. There was a lot of back and forth with staff and board members. We built the board about how to optimize what we were doing. It built trust because we got feedback. We listened to the feedback. We acted on the feedback. It benefited us going forward and building a few key advantages to our process that wouldn't have existed if we had just taken the portfolios we
Speaker 2had inherited. When you start out that portfolio and you're looking at the world, there are probably some similarities, differences, competitive advantages you wanted to lean into. Walk me through the design of this. What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What's similar from other pools and what's different?
Speaker 1What's similar is we have equity-centric portfolio. Just like any other endowment, we need to generate a 5% plus real return. You can't do that any other way than investing in equities. We use primarily outside managers. Those two key tenants are pretty similar. What's different are a couple of things. One is we are resource constrained. It's been a team of mainly five investors since day one. The other real difference in our portfolios that's significant is we have less illiquidity risk. We only have about 20 to 25% of our portfolio in private assets. Some of that is a structural constraint that we have, which is that most of the assets that we manage are actually not true endowment assets. They're balance sheet assets. There's not a statutory constraint. Elroy Dempson is a researcher. He wrote a paper a few years back. One of the things he looked at was the 75-year history of endowments. What drove returns? One of the surprising findings of this paper was there was a real counter-cyclical behavior to endowments for most of their history. As asset prices became richer and more fully valued, risk asset allocations would decline. When there would be a crisis or a downdraft in the market, risk asset allocations would increase. That is a really important toolkit. Market timing is a mug's game. That, to me, is backing good investments. Historically, endowments have done a great job of that, but in the last 10 or 15 years with the obsession of private assets, that tool has been taken out of the toolkit.
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Speaker 1Primarily, that has come from our relationships with our managers. Some of that has also come from our own research. An example of the latter would be when we started, if you looked back on the last 10 years of our peers and where overseas they had generated all the returns, it really was in China. From the beginning of the admission of China to the WTO to 2015, that was one of the golden years of both the China economy and investing in China. That's right when we started. We looked back, you could see some of the political winds changing in China. You could see some of the political winds changing in the US in regards to its relationship to China. It was also clear to see that that opportunity wasn't the same as it was in 2005. We then started to think about where that opportunity might be. We spent a lot of time in India. Since 2018, India has been our largest overseas allocation of any region or country. That was primarily driven by an internal iteration of our own research. We've been fortunate to work with some managers who, this is a rare skill set, can see where economic value creation over the next 10 years will be. There was an individual named David Mock who had done an amazing job at Hill House riding that China wave. We backed him. Day one, when he launched his own fund, Composite Capital, within two years, he had stopped investing in China and pivoted his portfolio hard towards Vietnam. He just said, the opportunity that I see in Vietnam right now is exactly what I saw in China at a much smaller scale. That resonated. We found a way to make our own direct allocation into Vietnam, which was not easy. There are foreign ownership restrictions on many of the best companies there. With a big amount of money, we were able to make a lot of money. We were able to make a lot of money of resourcefulness. We found our way to have that be our own dedicated allocation. It is really a hybrid of trying to pull the best ideas from the smartest people around us, as well as doing some of our own iterative research.
Speaker 2What is it you're doing to get conviction that it makes sense to allocate to India over everywhere else in the world? Some of it is first principles thinking.
Speaker 1I read this book way back in my Putnam days called The Equity Risk Premium. Gripping title. Page turner. One of the great things about that book was it did this study of the equity risk premium. What has been the exceptional equity return in different markets over time? It was fascinating. If you went back to the 1870s, there were four emerging markets that were super promising that investors were jazzed up about. One was the US, one was Argentina, one was Germany, and one was Russia. Other than the US, three of those. Went to zero multiple times over the next 100 years. Obviously, that's a risk with any emerging market investing. What are the core drivers that allow an emerging market to retain value over time so that the capital gets the accrual of the value that comes from the economic growth? Rule of law is one of the big ones. India having the English legal history was key to us getting comfortable with India as an allocation. A lot of that was our first principles thinking, thinking about what makes sense. Similarly, looking at what the drivers of economic growth have been for many of these countries that are emerging, having a demographic base that is fairly young is important. That was something where we tried to do our own research, but vet it with other folks. And there were more controversial parts to the thesis that we batted around with a bunch of different people and got different opinions on it and had to make our own judgment call it. One of them was this question of capital recycling. And this is common, with many emerging markets, the wealth that gets generated there gets invested somewhere else. That was true. Still, when we started investing, there was a bit of a leap of faith that that was going to change. And that has started to change dramatically. I was in India for the venture AGM bonanza that happens every spring there. It was shocking to see the evolution of the venture ecosystem there where now many of the funds we visited, 60% of their LPs were domestic. That was encouraging. But that was a process of our own insights and then leaning on the expertise of folks around us to pick their brains.
Speaker 2Once you have the conviction, you want to step in. How did you go about the sourcing of the opportunity set? We leaned really hard
Speaker 1into our network to get referrals. One of the nice things about trying to invest in these secular tailwinds is you don't necessarily have to get the manager selection piece right. We like it when there's multiple ways to win in the stuff that we do. The nice thing about the secular tailwind is you ideally win on both fronts, but even if you screw up on the manager front, you've got the tailwind behind you. We also got fortunate where managers that weren't necessarily India-focused but had family histories in India would connect us with people in industry there. I remember one of my first trips, I got to meet the patriarch of a big real estate investing company. India is such a small world. I could ask him about two managers that we were looking at, and he would know them both. Even though I had just met him since I was in India, I could ask him about two managers that we were looking at, sitting face-to-face with him. Even though he would say great things about each of them, his facial expressions would be telling me something different. It's back on the ground legwork and using our network that we leaned into to make those investments.
Speaker 2How do you balance where you want to look for secular tailwinds and just global diversification saying you may not be right in picking those secular tailwinds? It is a balancing act.
Speaker 1We view it as there's a huge part of the portfolio that just needs to be US equity risk. When we say a huge part of the portfolio, 50% or more has to be generic US equity risk. We invest on the behalf of a US institution. Their expenses are dollar-based. We don't want to have too much overseas risk. It's thinking about in the global opportunity set, call it 50% US, 50% rest of the world. Let's be smart about what that 50% rest of the world is and tilt the portfolio that way. The way endowment portfolio works, it's going to be 50% US, 50% rest of the world. If you have long, short or hedge funds, you're not 100% exposed to any market. What we are is 50% US, 30% other, with the rest being manager held cash, short exposure, our cash. When I was at Putnam, if you were a smart international equity manager in the 1990s, your smartest move was to just not invest in Japan. They got to be so exploited, they started to create indexes that were just ahead of those dynamics. China, for us, was a perfect example. China became a large part of the index when we started thinking about where is that risk dollar best spent overseas and making sure it's in the best opportunities possible. One of our big advantages is we have a healthy risk culture below the portfolio level. We're happy to take manager risk or the strategy risk where we're doing a lot in Vietnam or India, but we're not taking manager risk or the strategy risk. We're taking a lot of equity risk. Our total portfolio risk is going to be at a 70-30 traditional benchmark level. If you can pick some of these higher octane or more promising secular tailwinds and marry it at that total portfolio risk, you end up with a portfolio that is more robust, better diversified than the index, which, as you know, is so concentrated these days. That has been something that has really worked in our favor. What are some of those other secular tailwinds you're excited about? We started owning gold five or six years ago. Part of the thesis there was we have this Indian-Vietnam exposure. We were worried about emerging market crises, the traditional emerging market debacle, which seems to me to be the biggest risk when you invest in India or Vietnam. Gold actually turns out to be the best hedge. The best hedge would be to be short those currencies, but those are super expensive. Gold tends to do really well as a hedge to emerging markets. Initially, we held gold for that reason. As time has gone on, the case for gold as an asset has gone up on a secular basis. We're in a period now of a total and complete restructuring of the geopolitical equilibrium. We're in a period of sustained higher inflation. There's one asset that fills that gap that's created when things change. All that change leads to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Gold has historically been the asset that benefits from that. Yes, it's very hard to price. You have no idea what fair value is. Sometimes it gets frothy as it has recently. For us, that's another example of a secular theme that evolved that as we saw, again, the political environment change in the US, the economic environment change, the geopolitical environment change, the secular case for gold solidified as time went on. Artificial intelligence, there's a tremendous amount of potential there. That is an incredible secular tailwind that we have been studying back to our early days in 2017 when we were doing autonomous vehicle co-investments. That has been a profound secular tailwind. We're seeing now that there's headwinds associated with it. That's a key theme for us to stay focused on.
Speaker 2Those two, gold and AI, have such different duration characteristics to them, longevity, ways of getting exposure. On gold, with the initiation of it being, this is a nice hedge for some of our exposure in Vietnam and India, how did you go about expressing
Speaker 1it? Very simply, just as an ETF. Over time, we've thought about adding managers who specialize in mining stocks, and we're still exploring that area. We thought about private equity strategies in mining. We decided to keep it really simple. This ties back to our focus on liquidity. If we can get the essence of the value of that in a liquid format, we'll do it. There might be a more clever way to do it. You might want to have structured exposure using options, given how volatile it can be and how episodic the returns can be. I find if you get too clever, you can outsmart yourself out of returns.
Speaker 2It'd be pretty hard to get a simple explanation of how to do it. It'd be pretty hard to get a simple
Speaker 1for example, that's almost a multi-asset class mini endowment portfolio. We had to benchmark them versus high yield because they had some credit background. They called us when they got the memo and they're like, we're not a high yield manager. We're like, no, no, we get that. Those are the conversations we want to have before we invest. Because if things do go wrong, the base of understanding was clear at the outset. One of the things we put in our memos are premortems. Along with those premortems, we have a bunch of KPIs that we monitor. We'll share those with the manager. There's a big faith-based trust thing going on there. They know what we're looking for. They could always game the relationship, but obviously, we wouldn't be investing with managers if we thought that would happen. When it comes time to have a difficult conversation, we have a document that we can point to and say, hey, these were concerns we had when we made the investment. We're seeing the manifest. We appreciate the work that you've done for us. We are big believers in you. We're not going to be invested anymore. There'll still be hard feelings. Everybody's got some emotional attachment to their work. It's a better communication mechanism than any other one that we've come across.
Speaker 2If I told you today, hey, Bruce, it's time to sell the entire portfolio again, take out liquidity restraints and things like that, but you could rebuild it tomorrow, how different do you think it would be from today's portfolio?
Speaker 1One of the big changes would be in our private portfolio. Because we have such a limited private allocation, we don't have a lot of money. We don't have a lot of money. We try to focus on where the most asymmetric return opportunities are. I do think our venture portfolio has many great managers in it. I don't think we've leaned hard enough into the asymmetry. We should have more managers who are at that smaller level of the fund sizes, 200 million and below, where their outcomes could be a 50X or an 80X. There's good reasons to invest with established managers. You end up paying a lot in fees for returns that might be available in public markets. It might be a better fit for our portfolio to just have a little bit more of that emerging manager risk or smaller fund risk, because the payoff when it works can be so much greater. That's probably the biggest change we would make.
Speaker 2How about a different scenario analysis? I told you you were doubling the size of the pool overnight. What would you do differently?
Speaker 1What we would do differently is lean a lot heavier into co-investments, direct investments. We have a fairly sizable allocation, high single digits. That's where the alpha would be when you get to that size is being able to do more concentrated single name positions. If we had more staff, I'd have a lot more faith in our ability to underwrite more of those. There aren't a lot of interviews with Seth Alexander out there. I found an obscure podcast that he was on. He mentioned that his team did a study similar to Elroy Dimson's of what an endowment looked like 50X. 50 years ago, and then did a thought exercise of what an endowment might look like 50 years from now. That got me thinking. 50 years ago, I think there were a lot more single stock holdings. It was just like an equity portfolio with a bunch of bonds, not all this illiquid stuff. Maybe we're back to the future. If you're at a larger size and you can find co-investment opportunities where you can have a lot more in a single name, that would be one way to compensate for the fact that your overall portfolio has a lot of equity. It has to be larger, maybe in larger managers that are less punchy or more diversified.
Speaker 2Some of those thoughts leaning more towards publics, more towards co-invests are at least contrarian in the sense that more channels are leaning towards privates. People are concerned that co-invests might get crowded out by the high net worth channel. In the private markets, how are you viewing the various bottlenecks of liquidity, and the new flows that may be coming in from different pools of capital?
Speaker 1It's been a confirmation of some of the biases we've held. We've not done a lot in the buyout space. A lot of that was driven by, we try to not make things too complicated and think about from a valuation perspective, are the assets priced where we'll get a reasonable return for the amount of risk that we're taking? What we've seen in the buyout space since we've been invested is that that's just not been true. The valuations have been extended, and some of that was related to low interest rates, but even as interest rates have repriced, we haven't seen enough of a valuation retrenchment to get really excited. When we see retail money come in, I almost worry that it's, be careful what you wish for, private equity managers. You get a bunch of retail investors in there who don't have a great experience. It's not a great thing for the industry. That industry is very mature and super competitive. When there's that much money chasing an idea, all the talent tends to chase it too. I don't have statistics to back this up. Anecdotally, there's been a talent vacuum into private equity. Given the predominance of indexing in public markets and that talent vacuum into another space, there might be a lot more alpha in public markets. Even if there's not, we love the option value of liquidity. Having the ability to step into those dislocations can make up for the alpha that we might be sacrificing in private markets. I continue to worry about geopolitical risks. The current conflict in Iran is troubling from the perspective of our India and Vietnam exposure, so we're focused on that. I worry about the geopolitical reshuffling that's happening. The current conflict that's happening, does that make it easier for China to invade Taiwan? That particular risk is one of a hugely cascading impact that would be felt across the portfolio because so much of the risk is being felt across of the public and private markets are linked to the AI build-out. There's no part of the portfolio that wouldn't be severely impacted by that. When I like to worry, I like to worry about the big things, and that one is definitely worth worrying about. There is positioning changes we can make in our portfolio broadly in terms of equity risk. There's not a lot that you can do to protect yourself. Even getting in front of it and trying to think about your game plan in such a scenario is very helpful. We pride ourselves on being counter-cyclical, and a prepared mind heading into one of those environments is going to allow us to not feel as much regret and lean into the opportunity set that's in front of us.
Speaker 2Bruce, I want to make sure I get a chance to ask you a couple of fun closing questions before we wrap up. Before we get to the closing questions, I want to tell you about one of our strategic investments. We've made a few, and each are working on a product or service we think will be valuable to our community. One is Ascension Data. Ascension provides workflow software for your team that allows you to track, plan, and take care of your team. We're excited for you to check out how they can help solve the sticky pain point of compensation. There's a link in the show notes so you can learn more. And here are those closing questions. What's your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family?
Speaker 1I still swim. There's a sensory deprivation component to it. All day, there's a lot of talking, both to and from. It's great to have the silence that comes with it. Component to swimming that is meditative because it's polyrhythmic. This ties back to music. You've got your stroke rhythm that's happening. You've got your breathing rhythm that's happening. You've got your kicking rhythm, and they all have to fit together. That is when it works, a very gratifying experience. I went to Wesleyan. I was recruited to swim there. When I got there, I did a season of water polo, and then I was like, I don't want to swim. Wesleyan had this great program where you can swim. Music is my other hobby. I've always loved listening to it. For three years, I took jazz guitar, and I got really annoyed. In my fourth year, I went to see my teacher, and he couldn't remember my name. I was like, that's it. I'm not doing your lessons anymore. So I'd gotten into bluegrass music, and it just so happened that the guy who wrote the book on how to play the dobro, which is acoustic steel guitar, was at Wesleyan. I ended up taking dobro lessons, and the dobro has been my passion as far as music goes. I actually went back to swimming my year, too, and had an amazing experience. One of the challenging things about living as a human is the allegory of Plato's cave. We mistake our perceptions for reality. The way our brains work, it's really hard to see the essence of things. When I play music, especially with other people, there are times when it feels like music approximates more closely than anything else getting to the essence of something. It's really a liberating and sustaining experience for me.
Speaker 2Which two people? You've had the biggest impact on your professional life.
Speaker 1My daughters have had a big impact because they taught me patience. I have four daughters. That's big. There have been two individuals. One is Jeff Knight at Putnam. Jeff was an incredible mentor to me. One of the things you have to have to be a successful CIO is to realize that it's not just investing. There's multiple parts of the business. You have to have relationship expertise and experience with the board. You have to have an ability to sell, the managers, the mission of the university, how great investors you are. There's a lot more that goes into being an investor. Jeff gave me the opportunity to not just be on the portfolio management team at Putnam, but to also take part in pitching for business. He was having me in front of big Middle Eastern clients when I was 30 years old. I couldn't understand why he was doing that, but I was grateful for it. The other thing he did was before he put me on the portfolio management team, he said, Bruce, if you're going to take risk, You got to know how to do it. futures account and start trading. I've great lessons learned from that. I traded two assets. I traded Eurodollar futures and S&P minis. I was good at one, bad at the other. That is a great lesson when you're looking at managers. It gives me a lens to understand whether or not they're in their sweet spot. Their skill set matches to what they're doing. That's really important. The other person who had a huge impact was Nancy Everett, who hired me here. I had been out of the endowment world for a few years, and she took a big chance on me, even from day one. I showed up the night before my interview. I had driven my daughter down to a beach vacation with a family friend. I tried to pack everything for my outfit for the interview with Nancy the next day, and I did, except for shoes. So I walk into my interview in flip-flops. Nancy, that's just who she is. Everything for Nancy is substance over form. She's such a perfect fit for me culturally to be with her. She spent so much time grooming me to be a CIO. She told me to build relationships with each of the board members. Her superpower is that she hires smart people and lets them run with it, which takes an incredible amount of trust and faith. Finally, she was led by example in that she was fantastic about receiving feedback. It's hard to give your boss feedback and give them direct feedback. She made me feel like I was a part of the team. It's so easy. It set an example for me as a leader. I want to do the same thing for my people because getting honest feedback is one of the hardest things to get. The more senior you are, it was a huge impact on me. What's a mystery you wonder about? I'm very curious about intuition. I've had experiences personally with it that have been really profound. Somebody was telling me recently there's clairvoyance, but there's also something called claircognizance, where your body is not clear. It's not clear. It's not clear. It's not clear. It's not clear. It's not clear. It's not clear. It's not clear. It's not clear. It's not clear. of something before your mind does. I've had a few of these experiences where I even got physically ill because I had to make a choice. I didn't understand for even months afterwards what I was doing. It's a mystery to me. There's something obviously outside of your brain that serves some kind of reasoning function that I'm not exactly sure how it works. I'm trying to lean into it, but it's kind of like Peter Parker after he got bit by the spider, where it's just everything's going all over the place. When I try to use my intuition, that's what it looks like. I think it's real. I think it's there. Learning how to use it can be a really important and valuable skill set for an investor.
Speaker 2Bruce, last one. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life?
Speaker 1Oldest daughter, she was 14 or 15 and doing what teenage daughters do, and I got annoyed with her. She looked at me and she said, Dad, it's not about you. That has been, wow, one of the best lessons in life as a boss, to know that people have stuff going on and how they're acting to you might not have anything to do with you. The real professional one that has been most profound was I did not start building a professional network intentionally until I was 40 years old. It's been such a benefit to me since then. My network now is one of my strengths. If I'd had another 20 years to build it and compound it, how valuable it would be. I used to think of networking as transitionary, transactional, and I've since learned it's not that at all. It's a real profound life lesson. Bruce, thanks so much for sharing this incredible journey you've been on. Thank you, Ted, for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com, where you can access past shows, join our mailing list, and sign up for premium content. Have a good one and see you next time.
Speaker 3are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Capital Allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast.
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