ReSolve Riffs with Ted Seides on Capital Allocators

This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on YouTube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day.

Our guest this week was none other than Ted Seides, host of the popular Capital Allocators podcast. Ted began his career under the tutelage of endowment legend David Swensen at Yale University Investments, then went on to found Protégé Partners, investing and seeding small hedge funds. This career arc gave him a unique perspective into the decision-making processes of multi-billion-dollar institutions, as well as the portfolio managers on the receiving end of their allocations.

After almost 200 podcast episodes and a recently released book – Capital Allocators, How the world’s elite money managers lead and invest – it’s hard to overstate the breadth and depth of Ted’s institutional “inside baseball”. We covered:

• The range of disciplines that are leveraged by some of the world’s most successful investors
• Why capital allocators are essentially interviewers (and can make for good podcast hosts)
• Repetition, pattern recognition, and separating the wheat from the chaff
• Governance and the constant tussle between CIOs and investment committees
• Negative screening, triangulation and reference checks – above and beyond due diligence
• Performance chasing, familiarity and other biases – why institutions often resemble retail investors
• Leveraging the work of Annie Duke, Gary Klein and Michael Mauboussin

We also discussed the difficulties of high information asymmetry, behavioral fortitude, and cognitive diversity. Ted even shared a few interesting anecdotes from his time working with Swensen.

Thank you for watching and listening. See you next week.