← How I Invest with David Weisburd
How I Invest with David Weisburd
E257: What I Learned Advising the World’s Top CIOs at Goldman Sachs
00:46:28
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- [00:01]
A
So, Julia, you started as an intern and rose to become global head of portfolio for your team at Goldman Sachs, which advised CIOs all across the world. First of all, how did you accomplish that? And secondly, what did that teach you about constructing and putting together portfolios?
- [00:17]
B
I learned so much. As you mentioned, I was the founding intern on a team called Portfolio Strategy in Goldman's asset management division. Then over time, I worked, worked on that team, grew that team, and ended up being the global head of the business. Over time, I had the very privileged position of speaking with and sitting next to and advising chief investment officers and other decision makers at private banks, RIAs, sovereign wealth funds, pension plans, any of our clients were sort of fair game for my team. And so we would step in to advise them and help them solve asset allocation and portfolio construction problems. I really grew up in the doctrine of risk management. In fact, my granddaddy I Goldman was the founder, founding father of modern portfolio theory. So my training is very classical. It was all about getting up into the left on the efficient frontier, being well diversified, thinking about risk first. Nowadays I build portfolios that are a bit more concentrated and high octane than I did in those days because I found that actually if we don't have good conversations about risk with the owners of the portfolios, we can end up accidentally building portfolios that don't take enough risk.
- [01:24]
A
And. Sorry, you said your granddaddy, Harry Markowitz, Bob Litterman.
- [01:29]
B
Yeah, he. He was in the quant business at Goldman and his business birthed several other business lines of which mine was one.
- [01:36]
A
So you would travel all around the world for a decade, meeting with the world's top CIOs. What did you learn? That's a pattern across the very best portfolios in the world.
- [01:47]
B
I reflected on this a lot. One thing I learned, and this is hard for me to admit as a classically trained engineer, is that the CIOs who were doing the best job were actually holding the emotional and qualitative considerations high in their minds, right alongside, right alongside the technical and the quantitative. That was actually a big surprise for me. I thought that technicals would rule the day. I thought that the numbers would win. But over time I learned that especially as investors get more senior, the gut becomes more involved. And that's a global phenomenon. I found investors globally are doing everyone's a mere mortal human trying to do a good job. And that was consistent. Globally, we were really more similar than we were different. Even speaking with a UK financial advisor versus a Middle Eastern sovereign.
- [02:37]
A
So as these CIOs rose through the ranks of their respective organizations. It was more about their gut versus their raw IQ.
- [02:49]
Double click on that. What exactly determined the CIO's success as they rose through the organization?
- [02:57]
B
So starting with the textbooks, you would assume that if something helps your portfolio become more diversified, you should invest in it. If an investment was a good idea strategically, you should do it. But I found that actually diversification doesn't move the needle, doesn't make people actually change their portfolios. And also people won't invest if it's only a good idea strategically. It has to be a good idea tactically right now. And so I saw that folks would develop more of a holistic, both sides of the brain decision making process as they got more senior. And there's certainly a lot of theater about showing the numbers, that the numbers certainly matter. But at the end of the day, people were making decisions, big decisions, based mostly on vibes.
- [03:42]
A
Taken to the extreme, if you're fully diversified, that is definitionally market beta. So you'll get the average of all the markets, nothing necessarily wrong with that. But you're not going to be a top performer almost by definition. So you do have to take these idiosyncratic risks in certain parts of our portfolio. Where did you find that the very top CIOs took idiosyncratic risks?
- [04:05]
B
I actually learned this lesson the most when dealing with ultra high net worth families. Nobody got rich by being diversified. No one landed in the position of being able to found a family office by holding a well diversified portfolio that takes too long. Rather, you got to that position by taking a well calculated risk and banging away at it for usually decades. Right. So you did some one thing so well that the rest of it didn't matter as much. So actually I learned this lesson about how the mindset changes from wealth generation to wealth preservation from the ultra high Net Worth families, CIOs in more institutional setting, you know, they are thinking multi generational long term returns, much like a family. And at the end of the day they're focused on building a portfolio that is sustainable. They also don't want to be hugging the benchmark too much because then are you doing a good job? Is it worth going out there looking for alpha? So I found folks are trying to thread that needle of taking enough risk to be somewhat above benchmark, but not so much risk that you could potentially be very, very wrong. People want to build a portfolio that won't embarrass them in public.
- [05:17]
A
When you think about these patriarchs, you Think about this deserved ego. They've bet against what everybody else was saying over 20 years and they were right. And then they go into asset management and it you could say, well what got you there won't get you, get you the next level. And wealth concentration doesn't lead to great wealth preservation. But in which cases does it lead to good investing? In other words, where does the patriarch have alpha versus the wealth manager or the CIO you picked up picked up.
- [05:46]
B
With something that really matters to me. I am wondering why isn't every family doing operating business aware portfolio construction, you know, and Frank. And this theme also plays out across other kinds of investors. For example, you know, the institutions have deeper pockets so they're able to do certain trades that a family couldn't do. But on the flip side, institutions often will have a very strict investment policy statement. And that made many of my CIO clients be forced sellers of private equity exposures that they liked a lot of because the public markets were down. Their investment policy statement said, hey, you need to have no more than 11% and they were at a higher number because public markets were down. So then the families who are less constrained were able to step in, provide liquidity and buy those positions on the secondary market. So I think really how we should be thinking about it is what are your unique strengths as an allocator? What is the unique flexibility about your capital base that'll let you step into a trade that maybe somebody else can't do? And hey, remember, the providers of liquidity always get paid.
- [06:53]
A
There's this interesting trade off where let's say you're one of the top biotech entrepreneurs of the last generation. Not only do you have unique insights, you also have unique deal flow. And when you go to somebody, frankly like a Goldman Sachs or a large wealth manager, they'll do everything to diversify you away from that idiosyncratic, what I would call alpha. But really in some ways you should be leaning into that while also hedging it away.
- [07:15]
B
That's what I believe as well. I build portfolios that are purposely not as diversified to try to take advantage of your particular benefits, you know, your particular skills, your particular insights. That stuff is all emote, that is alpha. And then the risk management that we do around a portfolio like that is a lot about avoiding mistakes. You know, all the alpha comes from picking winners and avoiding losers. But of course it's sexier to talk about picking winners. That's what everybody focuses on. We're focused on, let's also make sure that we Avoid the losers and what we don't own is just as important. So for us it's about avoiding those losers as well as doing options based hedging in addition to fixed income. The usual risk management protocol is buy fixed income, but we've seen that that doesn't always work well. And frankly, the risk that most people are actually caring about deep in their guts is losing money, not standard deviation. And if those. So if you follow the behavior, what you should really be doing is trying to limit drawdowns, not limiting standard deviation. Bonds will limit your standard deviation, but it comes at a cost. I would rather pay something for options based hedging and then allocate more money to equities or private equity or whatever risk on trade is in the style of the family.
- [08:42]
A
Having a comprehensive portfolio approach versus making sure that every little position does not mean lose money.
- [08:48]
B
Yeah, and also if you think about a standard balanced portfolio, the 60 40. I'm not doing that anymore. 40% in fixed income, sure it'll reduce your risk, it'll reduce your drawdown depth, but you could accomplish a similar level of drawdown protection using options based hedging and that would free up a lot of that capital towards being invested for return in equities.
- [09:16]
A
Give me an example or a best practice on how you'd use options based hedging in in order to reallocate some of that 40% of your portfolio.
- [09:26]
B
It's not DIY territory. That would be my best advice. I would find a hedge fund to do it for you.
- [09:32]
A
How do you marry your risk mitigation with your idiosyncratic strengths? In other words, if you're heavy on biotech, then you would be hedging biotech specifically. And talk to me about how do you kind of marry those ideas of risk mitigation with idiosyncratic exposure?
- [09:49]
B
I actually quite like idiosyncratic exposure and I wouldn't try to diversify it. If you're a biotech guy, that's what gets you out of bed, that's what delights you. Then we shouldn't be hedging out biotech unless you had a very specific view, then we would take that into account. But rather what I'm talking about is what causes investors to make bad decisions is when everything's in the red, we're all on the slide heading down. Our brains interpret financial risk the same as a physical risk. So your blood is leaving your brain and heading towards your large muscle group so you can run or fight better. It's not exactly a good Decision making mindset. So in order to limit bad behavior and actually stand a chance of doing well during a bear market, the options based hedge pays off. It's up by a lot during a market drawdown. So that overall you feel that you haven't lost as much money. It keeps your head clearer and then those, those clearer heads do prevail.
- [10:52]
A
At the ex CIO of Northern Trust, Thomas Swaney recently and he said that you not only want your portfolio to do well on the average year, but most importantly where a lot of returns are lost are those 10, 10% plus drawdowns. People take the exact worst action at the exact worst time. And making sure that your portfolio is anti fragile enough to account for these drawdowns in the market is also very important. And in his case he actually, as equities go down, his bond portfolio goes up and he's actually able to lean in more into his equities and be opportunistic there.
- [11:30]
B
The most savage chart I made in my entire career was had the S&P 500 going up and down, up and down growth of a hundred. And then we overlaid the 10 biggest months where investors added money to the markets and the 10 months where they subtracted the most money from the markets. And it was a savage chart because you could see en masse investors are terrible market timers. We all get excited and pile in near the highs and then we get scared and sell low. And that's the opposite of the holy rule. You're supposed to buy low, sell high. But people en masse do the exact opposite.
- [12:10]
A
To quote Stanley Drunken Miller, arguably one of the best traders of all time, nothing feels as cheap as after it's gone up 40%. There's this paradoxical mismatch between how we should think about things rationally versus kind of our, our biology.
- [12:26]
B
Yeah, and you know, valuation. I don't actually rely on it too heavily because things always feel expensive. And if you were waiting to get into US equities for them to feel cheap enough, you'd still be sitting on the sidelines and you would have missed out on an incredible amount of growth.
- [12:42]
A
Speaking of missed opportunities, your mandate was to fly all around the world, meet with the largest clients at Goldman Sachs, typically pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, single family offices, and look in their portfolio to look at.
- [12:58]
Misunderstood risks and missed opportunities. What were some patterns around some misunderstood risks and missed opportunities inside some of Goldman's top clients?
- [13:09]
B
I have a lot of stories and patterns that I was able to find over time. First of all, in many Many scenarios outside the United States. So let's take the UK as an example, usually Goldman. The largest alpha trade in a portfolio would be an overweight in UK equity and UK fixed income.
- [13:33]
So if you, if you were to compare a typical British portfolio to the globally diversified market cap benchmark, the biggest reason why the portfolio was different was that the UK home country bias and it was impossible to avoid. You know, there would be, you know, very large famous asset managers creating global balanced portfolios, but it was still 50% UK equity even though it was marketed as global. That is a 10 times overweight in UK equities. And why do they do this? It's mostly for marketing. There's a perception that it'll be easier to market a fund if it has familiar names in it, household names. But arguably the average household in the UK doesn't need more exposure to the UK economy, especially 10x more, because they're already exposed via their jobs and their property and everything. So that was one trend I saw all the time. There's a kind of sneaky, innocuous home country bias that ends up being the number one either adder or detractor from performance versus versus a truly diversified neutral starting point.
- [14:46]
A
And that that would be almost by definition a detractor. Right, because it's concentration that is not risk adjusted positive. In other words, you're taking idiosyncratic risk without any additional return.
- [14:59]
B
And also without even realizing it, many professional investors were almost glazing over the impact of this home country overweight. And think about it, if you're going to be 10 times overweight your home country, where are you going to fund that overweight from? Usually the U.S. so many investors outside the U.S. were deeply underweight U.S. equities. And that was obviously a huge detractor. That was the wrong trade for many, many, many years. So I saw that a lot. And also I got the privilege of looking sort of behind the closed doors and investment committees. And I learned a lot about how to overcome behavioral biases because as I mentioned before, we're all mere mortals trying to do a good job. I've even seen a couple of fake investment committees where if there's a senior guy and he wants to do something, we're doing it. That's certainly a dynamic that I saw from time to time. Also we would try to do presentations where we removed the names of the funds. So, so do an actual comparison blind to remove the impact of any preconceived notions that you might have about a certain manager. That was a really Valuable technique to use an investment committee because then you would just had to work up a story from the cold hard numbers. Also I had one great investment committee who had this rotating role of being the devil's advocate. So there would be someone on the team and it would vary every investment who would have to take the other side and argue that is tremendously valuable. In an ic, it gets all of the counterpoints out there on the table for discussion. But you have to rotate who's doing that because it's a very socially heavy job, I would say. So now when I'm in ic, I'm using leaderless sessions, I'm using these blind comparisons that we don't have any biases based on the branding. And then also we're taking turns being the devil's advocate to make sure that we can argue both sides of any investment decision.
- [16:59]
A
What's a good size for an iC?
- [17:02]
B
5 is pretty perfect. You definitely need an odd number.
- [17:09]
It's also about if you do have one dominant personality who is going to make the end decision. You have to give the other folks on the IC enough power so that they feel it's an authentic discussion.
- [17:23]
This is more of a family dynamic, right? Because at the end of the day it's, you know, the wealth generator's money.
- [17:29]
But I've seen, you know, family office CIOs get a little frustrated at that from time to time.
- [17:35]
A
So you have this ambition of being a very high performing asset allocator for your clients. What does that mean and how are you able to outperform the average or the index?
- [17:49]
B
As I mentioned before, you know, I grew up in a very traditional portfolio construction mindset. But over time I just started to realize that it doesn't work for wealthy people.
- [18:01]
And frankly a lot of people are bored by their portfolios. You know, they're in these balanced multi asset portfolios with 80 line items. They don't feel a strong affinity towards any particular investment. So what I'm doing is trying to kind of bring the fun back into it. And it invests with high returns but also with high levels of meaning. So using investments that actually delight the individual as a person and as an investor. So what I'm focused on is let's be a bigger partner to fewer asset management firms.
- [18:34]
That allows often for better economics and a saving of fees. Let's do options based hedging in addition to fixed income to free up more capital to buy equities and other things that can return high. And then also, why aren't more people focused on taxes. You know, this surprised me. So most of the investment advertisement that you're going to get hit with as an LP is all, you know, not considering taxes. We should be doing analysis on a post tax basis and focusing just as much on, just as much on wealth structuring as, you know, these theoretical returns that you won't get because you're going to pay tax. That shocked me. Like why is it different every conversation?
- [19:13]
A
Just to give an example on that, a hedge fund might have an 18% gross, it might be 9% net or 8.5% net to somebody living in California or New York versus there's some tax free or even tax Alpha strategies. At 18% it could be 20%.
- [19:31]
B
Yeah. And hey, you could, you could do some fancy footwork around where you hold the hedge fund in order to improve your tax profile.
- [19:41]
A
Marrying tax strategy with, with structure.
- [19:44]
B
Yeah.
- [19:44]
A
You're also very bullish on GP stakes. What is it that you like about GP stakes and where do you think that there's alpha in the market today?
- [19:55]
B
I know you like GP stakes as well. For me it's all about showing conviction. You know, we, if you really love the way a manager is approaching the market, you're not going to be doing that market yourself. You're going to be outsourcing that exposure to show the level of conviction. I would prefer to take a GP stake as well as an LP stake. There is something also just so psychologically satisfying about receiving fees instead of always just paying fees. I haven't found a single human being who likes to pay fees. We know we must, but we all hate it. And look, I've literally seen billions of dollars move based on a 5 basis point difference in fees. You know, it moves the needle more than maybe it should. So there's this great psychological benefit to being on the GP side of the table, really collaborating with them and receiving some portion of fees. And then also of course, you enjoy better access. Sorry, go ahead.
- [20:52]
A
And your families that you work with, where do they bring the most value when they do invest into the gp? What value add are they providing?
- [21:00]
B
Normally it's the willingness to go in early. Many institutions have it in their investment policy statement that they can't, you know, come in early, they can't be more than 20% of a fund, whereas families are typically much less, less constrained. So they're able to be a little bit more adventurous. Right. And of course it's easier to negotiate a GP stake if you're coming in early because you're helping that manager find their feet and raise. And when I'm analyzing these GP stakes, I'm just as focused on investment performance as well as fundraising because that's what GP economics is. You have to have good enough performance and then excellent sales. Even great investment products do not sell themselves.
- [21:48]
A
And when you're on the other side and you're part of the gp, what strategic value does that bring to you as an lp? Is there a value above and beyond just not paying fees and getting a portion of the fees? Introducing Genius bank, the award winning bank that does things differently for our kind of genius spelled with a J. Award winning can mean many things, like most locations. But who still goes to the bank for us? Award winning means best newcomer bank of 2025 by bank rate. Visit genius bank.com genius with a J Genius bank registered trademark is a division of smbc. Manu Bank Awards are independently granted by their respective publication and are not indicative of future success or results.
- [22:32]
B
A lot of it is about access and showing that level of conviction and alignment. Actually yesterday I was sitting at breakfast with an excellent hedge fund seeder. He was, you know, very early or first money into several funds that you would know. And we're actually both in the same fund, the same hedge fund that's been up 100% for the last three years in a row. And many folks look at this fund and think, oh my gosh, I've missed it. Or maybe there's some trick that I'm not understanding or this performance is going to have to revert this much more. Senior hedge fund seeder, he lived through lots of different market environments where he saw huge returns of more than 100% many times before. And I have the conviction as well that that could continue.
- [23:21]
So I think it's really about being a little more adventurous and getting exposure to these great investors and just being willing to be a little bit early. That's really the strategic thing. And then they'll always take your call. And there's also a bit of pride in it, right? Of identifying someone before everybody thinks they're cool.
- [23:42]
A
And when you build these portfolios to be idiosyncratically weighted or more risk on, you invariably have these fluctuations from year to year, from quarter to quarter, sometimes from day to day. How do you put your partners in the right mindset in order to deal with significantly higher swings than typical portfolios have?
- [24:06]
B
That's a very good point because options based hedging, it's, it only kicks in if the drawdown is bad enough, right? So you have to have everybody around the TABLE coached on what kind of swings to expect in their net asset value. I actually found that our industry is underserved on risk. You know, it's, it's dead easy to explain to somebody why higher returns are better, but it's much harder to explain why a risk mitigation strategy is important or why they'll be happy that they have this options hedge while they'll be happy that they'll have fixed income. Because you really have to have both sides of the brain firing in order to have a productive conversation about risk. There's the emotional side that determines behavior as well as the intellectual grappling with it. Usually folks will say Your portfolio has 8.1% standard deviation and everyone's like, okay, that doesn't resonate. So there's actually similar math called value at risk. So instead of talking about standard deviation, I prefer to talk about value at risk because it's easier to translate that into an experience and it's easier to feel that risk in your belly. So I would say Mr. And Mrs. Client, in 99% of one year periods, we'd expect to be doing better than a 19% loss.
- [25:27]
And then I stare and I make sure that they're happy with the thought of losing 19% of their money in a year. And if they're not, that portfolio is too volatile. We need to do something to dampen those drawdowns either with options based hedging or more fixed income, more hedge fund exposure, or even more private equity, because it doesn't mark down.
- [25:50]
A
What tools do you use to figure out how your portfolio fits together and what your value at risk is on a portfolio level?
- [25:58]
B
So there's lots of commercially available tools. Also, many of the big asset managers will publish for anybody to download their expected risk and returns for asset classes as well as correlation matrices. So you can just download those files and calculate your standard deviation, calculate your value at risk, at least at the asset class level. Then of course you need to adjust for your idiosyncratic stuff. If you have managers that are acting a little bit more in a more spicy fashion, for example. But yeah, you can do the calculation, but at the end of the day, I'm just not as focused on that calculation anymore because risk is half math, half, half emotional. And so if somebody's okay with the thought of losing 19%, then I'm broadly all right, you know, I know that they are willing to be in an aggressive portfolio.
- [26:50]
A
You've been working with people in their risk tolerance for now, 12 and a half years.
- [26:56]
Do you Feel that people have good self awareness on their risk tolerance. And if not, how do you deal with that when it comes up in their portfolio?
- [27:03]
B
People don't have good awareness. Even professionals, you know, you have a certain image of, oh yes, I will have a cool head during a bear market. I'll be investing, not freaking out and selling everything. You know, we all, I think a lot of us don't have a very clear idea of what our real risk posture is. That's why I'm so focused on getting people to envision drawdowns. You know, how would it feel to be down this much? Would you have to sell something to pay for school fees? You know, we really think through how that would feel because it's those drawdowns that really inspire the very worst behavior from people. We just, we just freak out. It's your amygdala takes over and you're sort of powerless until you can calm down. Like I said, all the blood is in your major muscle groups, out in your brain.
- [27:50]
A
I look at this as how the military looks at this, which is war games. They understand that at the time that's something, there's a nuclear war, that people will not be irrational. So you have to constantly have the troops simulate and simulate, simulate. And I think the military has a good self awareness on this. It's part of their culture. I think a lot of people don't. And the answer to my own question, I think around self awareness is the people that have the highest self awareness are the ones that are actually doing these simulations and have a prepared mind. They're aware that they will not be able to look at it rationally. So essentially no one can look at these drawdowns rationally. But the most self aware people prepare for this amygdala response, as you mentioned, this fight or flight response, and are ready for when that kicks in, have a game plan for that.
- [28:39]
B
I actually love crypto for this. This is a bit of a hot take, but you can get a full career's worth of market drama experience in crypto in a very short amount of time.
- [28:51]
The highs, the lows. It's so stressful that I, the fact that most investors now have at least experimented with crypto has actually improved everybody's awareness of their own risk tolerance.
- [29:03]
A
It's also given context because if your crypto is down 10, 15% in a day and then the stock market's down 3, 4%, you don't even think twice about it.
- [29:13]
B
On that same train of thought, the market drawdowns and recoveries that we've had lately have been so sudden. Think about the COVID drawdown. If you could stay solvent for six weeks.
- [29:27]
You'D be fine, you would recover. So I think we've en masse. Investors have learned a bit of a dangerous lesson recently, which is that the market goes down fast and up fast. I think people haven't drawn the idea into their minds of a proper financial crisis type, multi year, dig out of the hole kind of experience because these crashes have been such flashes down and up.
- [29:54]
A
What have been the most unexpected things about going from Goldman Sachs to now print cap your own firm would have been.
- [30:03]
Some of the things that you didn't expect would come with the new territory.
- [30:07]
B
Well, I did have a pit stop in between the very large structured organization of Goldman and running my own firm. I worked at a small multifamily office that was a 30 person organization. So very different from the big one. I'd say that the biggest changes are that.
- [30:25]
There'S this magic in the room when you're talking about direct deals, that you don't feel as much in big organizations because of course, big asset management firms, mostly what you're selling is funds, ETFs, mutual funds, blind pool, private equity products. So it's more about manager selection and portfolio construction. Whereas in the wild west of family office world, I find that people are really coming around the table more to talk about direct deals. That's been a huge difference that suits my style because I do like a more concentrated portfolio. I love a structured return. I've just found it's. It's freeing to be able to focus on directs as well as of course, funds and ETFs.
- [31:12]
A
When done effectively, where should family offices focus their energy and their time and their resources in their portfolios? And where do they play the best in the ecosystem?
- [31:24]
B
A lot of this comes down to family offices being more flexible.
- [31:29]
But people know that about families, right? So families tend to attract decks. Like I am a deck magnet. People send me stuff all the time, people send me crazy stuff and some of it's fun and interesting, wacky, wonderful. But a huge challenge for a family is just managing the inbound deal flow and being able to sort through everything. And frankly, if you're only investing in stuff that is sent to you, that's a bias. You know, how many people had to say no before they sent it to you? Right. And so I'm focused on outbound, you know, fighting into, fighting my way into deals that are competitive, you know, doing outbound search as well as parsing the massive amounts of stuff that comes in. I think that's actually the biggest challenge of being a family is just dealing with the volume, with the limited number of people that you have. So I would love to see families doing this. I'm going to call it operating business awareness, portfolio construction. I'm working with a great family whose wealth is from the public equity space. So their family office is 15 direct private equity investments. That's it. To me that's beautiful, right? He has enough exposure to the public markets via his company and his income from the company. So what he's doing on the family side, it's purely this high control, direct private equity exposure. And this actually reminds me of a tough couple lessons I had to learn in the Goldman days to multifamily office to running my own business. I once had the CIO of a big German pension fund look at me and just say, julia, I don't care about risk. And this was back in the Goldman days and I was just shocked by that. Everyone cares about risk. What do you mean you don't care about risk? That sounded bananas to me. And I was actually very glad that I had already been married for a couple of years when he told me this because when you're married you learn how to listen and not judge.
- [33:35]
And you also learn that sitting there and planning what you're about to say is not real listening. So I sat there, I absorbed his message. That just was so surprising to me. But what he was getting at is that he needs to feed pensioners. So it's not really risk that he's solving for. He's going after edible returns. And then in the multifamily office world, I started talking with these ultra high net worth families. And in a strict asset allocation point of view, private equity has higher risk than public equities and higher risk than fixed income because it's illiquid, because it's equity, because it's smaller companies. All those things drive up the standard deviation into the 20s. But of course you don't feel that risk because they aren't mark to market. So I had a family tell me, just like right around when I transitioned from Goldman. Oh, I think of private equity as having the least risk of anything in my portfolio. And I thought, wow, that is really a different way of looking at it. But now I completely see where they're coming from because of the level of control they have in these private businesses of the steadiness of the cash flows. I've learned that risk really means different stuff to different People and trying to shove standard deviation as the main metric just doesn't work very well. Yes. To put a lot of thinking into a very short sentence, I would say outsource the stuff that you're not good at. Just get comfortable with the idea of outsourcing so that the investment professionals you do have are applied fully on the stuff that they love the most. That's why they'll stick around. So then what we saw work well for families and for institutions as well is.
- [35:20]
Think about the people you have that you want to motivate to stay. Let them apply themselves in whatever area they are the strongest in, and then be open to outsourcing the rest. Oftentimes also in institutions, the board would be personally liable if something went wrong on the investment side that led to outsourced CIO engagements becoming quite popular. How could you defend having an expensive team running, let's say emerging market debt, when you could buy that service from an asset manager for cheaper and there'd be more humans focused on it, more risk.
- [35:58]
Software being used? It's sort of hard to defend.
- [36:02]
A
Is that somehow solved through indemnification policies? And how do you solve this personal liability on board members?
- [36:10]
B
Frankly, the way I saw it being solved was outsource CIO mandates getting written. Right. You know, there'd be, you run the math on all your people. You know, did you have keyman risk? Did you have a lot of expensive software you were buying for the team? It's expensive to run investments in house. So sometimes you saw boards making the decision, okay, this is slightly outside our core competency. Let's outsource this piece of the pie. That is usually how I saw it being solved. And then on the family side, it's a real mixed bag. Like some family office executives are rotating through families quite frequently.
- [36:52]
It can be really hard to be the CIO for a family.
- [36:56]
Because maybe lots of the investment is getting done by a family member. Maybe a family member wants to do direct vc and that's not something that you think they should be doing. You know, these are all really hard professional situations to be put in.
- [37:11]
So. But in contrast, you know, I've, I've spent time with many decades long family officers who've had that stamina and have found something that works beautifully because it is such a, such an unconstrained great seat to have to be a family office cio. But it really comes down to chemistry with the principal. If you don't have that, start looking.
- [37:32]
A
For a new job before you join a family office. How do you suss out that dynamic.
- [37:37]
B
Family office world is really small, so you can, you know, find out quite a lot about the reputation of the team and their style before you join. So what I've seen work well for folks is spending a lot of time in that interview process making sure that you are truly comfortable with like all the cultural stuff, all the interpersonal dynamics, that all has to be solid.
- [38:00]
A
What's one piece of advice you wish you could give some family offices that you can't practically give, especially if they become your clients.
- [38:09]
B
Frankly, it's frustrating to be, you know, to be working with families sometimes because they are so well resourced. And you see, man, it is way easier to make money when you already have money. There's plenty of opportunities to become wealthier when you're already wealthy.
- [38:26]
A
Give me an example of that.
- [38:28]
B
Like, you know, you qualify for cheaper lending. You're able to get into better funds because you're able to write a better, a bigger ticket. You're able to position yourself as a strategic LP to get into a fund that's, that's supposedly shut to other investors. You're able to do private investments. You can get insurance policies to shield your gains from taxes. Like, there's just so many ways that it's just easier to get rich if you're already rich. And so I would love to see families thinking about pulling up, you know, smaller families or you know, minting more millionaires in their family businesses. I really love to see that. And like, on the advice side, it would be stop trying to predict the returns that are going to happen next year. There's so many people in our industry who are obsessed with predicting what's going to be the best asset class next year. What's the path of this squiggle on the return chart going to be? It's really hard to make a career out of that. So I prefer everybody focuses a bit more on the longer term picture. And frankly, if you get the risk side of your house in order, the returns will come.
- [39:36]
A
I know you're a big fan of AI and utilizing AI to improve your business. What are some clever ways they're using AI to scale yourself and to save on time and potentially improve returns.
- [39:49]
B
Trying to figure out how to replace myself with AI, it's hard. For now, I'm sure it's coming. One practical thing I'm doing is feeding investment memos into a LLM to look for bias because it can detect, you know, have I been objective, have I been fair? Is there some bias showing up across the written record of my decisions. And actually, I heard about this in Davos. Ray Dalio was presenting about AI and he has a whole digital ray that he talks to because he's been keeping notes about how he made decisions for decades. So digital Ray is very up to speed and it's a faithful representation of him. Now I'm trying to build up a digital Julia where I'm actually writing down what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, so that I can train a model to be my shadow, if you will. But, you know, there's. I've spent a lot of time trying to find good tools, and.
- [40:51]
For families, I haven't seen anything that's great yet. How come someone hasn't made an amazing personal CRM yet? You know, for family offices, that would be so important because there's just a tremendous amount of networking. Same for venture capital. As private equity managers, we would all be buying a great personal CRM.
- [41:08]
A
There's a couple tools that are coming out right now that are AI native CRM solutions. We've actually just. Just engaged one. It's something that needs to be kind of rewritten from first principles, like legacy CRMs. Just can't do this type of stuff and can't be as flexible as you want them to be.
- [41:25]
B
Yeah, like, why can't I ask my phone? Oh, who was that guy I met in Davos who has the small nuclear reactors? And it just does it, you know, that would be helpful for family offices.
- [41:36]
A
What's one piece of timeless advice that if you could go back to July 2013, when you started at Goldman, that you would give yourself that would either accelerate your career or help you avoid costly mistakes.
- [41:49]
B
I would have warned my past self about the seductive power of storytelling. We as humans, your stories are so meaningful to us. And I've seen most of investment decision making comes down to great storytelling. Like, I once attended a VC healthcare pitch that was so good that I wanted to quit my job and become a doctor. It was that compelling. So this is why we have to do things like those blind manager comparisons to kind of suck the seductive nature of the storytelling out of the investment decision. Right. And so there's been several big themes that have risen and fallen in my time. Like thematic equities would be a good example of it. Thematic equities got really popular around the time of COVID and the boom market after Covid because they're a great resonant storytelling device. You know, it's. Most people were dividing up their portfolios as us equities European equities, Asian equities, kind of a regional split, whereas thematic equities resonates better. It's about let's invest in technologies and businesses that'll make sense for an aging population. Let's invest in.
- [42:58]
Environmental impact, you know, instead of organizing yourself regionally, let's organize our equities according to a theme. And this worked really well for a while. But there was a sneaky. Well, not so sneaky that there was just an overexposure to growth factor across many of these thematic products. And the most popular risk software that people use for analyzing equity risk.
- [43:24]
Didn'T pick up on the growth factor that much across these products. Right. So this was a time when storytelling really captured everyone's hearts and minds. And we saw private banks allocating up to 50% of their core equity exposure into thematic equities.
- [43:43]
A
55, 0, 50.
- [43:46]
B
Yeah. And then, you know, most of the time growth does really well, so you're hunky dory. But then once in a while, value rips back. So then when interest rates spiked, growth went down, value went up. Those products traded down in tandem, you know, just hand in hand, even though they were all different themes.
- [44:05]
A
A thought experiment that I often use is how would an AI handle the situation? So it could be from a data situation. Oftentimes AI corrects for these behavioral biases. Sometimes you're overweight at risk, sometimes you're underweighted risk, sometimes you need more courage. And AI would have more courage because on a risk adjusted basis, it would lead to higher return. So same, same things goes with this. AI would not have this storytelling bias. Sometimes this thought experiment of how an AI would look at a situation could be extremely useful.
- [44:41]
B
Yeah, you know, I saw a live example of, you know, we had two businesses, quantitative equity and fundamental equity. And often quants would decide, sure, I'll own a state owned enterprise if it's cheap enough. Whereas fundamental equity people would say, no, I don't buy state owned enterprises because it's not aligned, you know, it's aligned with the state, not with the investor. All right, so maybe that quant thinking is exactly what we need to help iron out some of these behavioral biases. But I don't want to go so far as saying, I think we all need to act like computers because, you know, that's not fun, that's not exciting, that's not why people invest.
- [45:17]
A
Just another one for AI.
- [45:22]
One of the aspects of investing that I think is really interesting is that people become out of favor of entire asset classes without context to evaluation without context to valuation. For example, people might say, well I don't like pre seed venture, as if every single deal is going to be struck at the same valuation, not understanding that there's supply and demand dynamics. Whereas in the very time to go into an asset class, if you time it perfectly, is when it is the most out of favor and has the most intrinsic value. And same thing with private equity buyout. Obviously today it has so much powder in the large buyout, so it makes sense why people don't like it. There's a rational reason for that. But oftentimes people get down on these asset classes at the exact wrong time exactly when they should be bullish on it and they should be bearish on asset classes that have been run up.
- [46:10]
B
Yep. Do you remember how commodities were so out of favor for so long? You know, how did we all forget about the things that make the world go round? Came roaring back.
- [46:21]
A
Gold as well is actually outperforming bitcoin this year, which I did not did not have in my cards. Well, on that note, Julia, this has been absolute masterclass. Thanks so much for jumping on the podcast and look forward to continuing this conversation soon. Congrats on moving to the US So it's good to have you back and looking forward to meeting up soon.
- [46:41]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [46:42]
A
That's it for today's episode of how to Invest. If this conversation gave you new insights or ideas, do me a quick favor. Share with one person in your network who'd find it valuable or leave a short review wherever you listen. This helps more investors discover the show and keeps us bringing you these conversations week after week. Thank you for your continued support.