André Perold
Co-Founder & CIO, HighVista Strategies. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investoracademicfounderauthorhighvistastrategies.com ↗
Over a three-decade career at Harvard Business School, Perold served as Senior Associate Dean and developed foundational financial frameworks including the implementation shortfall concept. In 2004, he co-founded HighVista Strategies, an alternative investment firm managing over $10 billion across public and private markets.
1shows
2appearances
33statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
18said about them ↓ Everything André Perold said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Perold: Big pharma is bad at R&D, leaving discovery to small biotechs
“The reason they exist is that pharma is not good at R&D. These little firms all do R&D. They do drug discovery on the path to drug commercialization, and what we find, you know, they exist because pharma isn't good at it, and the capital markets have figured o…”
Perold: The manager selection versus asset allocation debate is a false dichotomy
“I think there's a bit of a false dichotomy that people draw between what's more important, manager selection or asset allocation. So let me first say, if you're selecting managers who can't outperform. That's a problem. Then it's a problem. You should just ind…”
Perold: Generating high alpha for low management fees is a complete misnomer
“For the kinds of skill we're looking for, you need talent, and talent is expensive, so the idea that you can generate high alpha for low fees, I think, is a complete misnomer. Very hard to do... But when you find true talent, you gotta pay them, and I think yo…”
André Perold: Allocating to asset buckets limits unconstrained investing
“It's very limiting to allocate to buckets and then have to fill the buckets. And it's much better if you can opportunistically look around for the best ideas that may not conform to buckets and then put those together.”
Perold: Allocators should focus on the opportunity set, not the manager
“And in fact, change the unit of analysis from the manager to the opportunity set. And so if we discover that a certain market is inefficient, let's say it's European micro caps or something. That's the inefficiency. We should focus on that as the unit of analy…”
Perold: Top-down macro forecasting is hard and almost nobody is good at it
“Those sorts of macro perspectives don't really feature into what we do. They're very hard to get right. We don't know anyone who's any good at it. We certainly are not.”
Perold: China is the rare enormous yet inefficient financial market
“China's the one exception to the rule that an inefficient market is small. It's an enormous market that still seems to be quite inefficient, not just in equities, but in other securities as well.”
André Perold: Concentrated active management will always have a place
“So there is absolutely a sense of time arbitrage in the markets. I think you see it in all markets. And as long as that's the case, I think longer dated, concentrated active management will always have a place. I don't see it going, even in the largest cap sto…”
André Perold: Standard 60/40 portfolios deliver only 3% expected real return
“Going forward, what's tough is that you think of a 60 40 portfolio 40 of the sixties earning zero. Okay. Zero real, or maybe even negative real. And if your PE is 20, that's an earnings yield of five. Now an earnings yield of five, if bond yields are zero, is …”
André Perold: Most investors copy others while pretending to do original work
“There are actually very few original thinkers. Everybody copies everybody else, but they all pretend to be doing their own thing. So the peeve is that people claim to be doing original work, but you know, they're just copying other people's stuff. And you see …”
Perold: The investment industry systematically celebrates luck as skill
“I think people don't understand the role of luck is huge, and I think we in the industry and society at large celebrate as skill what really is luck, often, not always, and when you're lucky, you can be lucky and come across like a genius, and the mistake we m…”
Perold: Probability of a major global war has doubled
“I think whatever probability you put on having a major war in the world, I think it's always been small in recent years, but however small it is, it's probably double that small. Still small, but maybe a little bigger than it was before.”
Perold: Alpha is scarce, transient, and quickly competed away
“I've always said, and I still believe that alpha is scarce, and it's transient. It doesn't stick around for very long because it gets competed away. And so you always have to skate to where the puck is going, knowing that it's not going to stay long in any one…”
Perold: Credit returns reward hard structuring work rather than genius
“Credit isn't about being a genius investor that has epiphanies all the time. It's really about finding borrowers that need help, finding borrowers that have very high cost of money, and then finding ways to create a loan that's going to give you a very nice re…”
André Perold: Public markets struggle to price three-to-five-year horizons
“The markets are focused on this quarter, next quarter. They don't look out five years. The markets have a great problem looking out five years for some reason. Three to five years is very difficult for people to want to bet on. And they'd like to see near term…”
Perold: Top HBS students prioritized collaborative learning over scoring points
“The good students were ones that moved the ball in the conversation, that they weren't just trying to make a point. They would understand what we were all struggling with, and would help us along. Even good didn't mean you knew what was going on, but just bein…”
Perold: Most people never have an investing edge
“You either do or don't have an edge in investing, and each of us, most people have no edge ever in investing, and some people have an edge some of the time, and the key is to know when do you have an edge and when do you not.”
Perold: Portfolio risk is the probability of losing a given dollar amount
“Risk to us is for, at the level of a portfolio, having, what is the probability of losing X dollars? Over a certain period of time.”
Perold: Permanent capital fundamentally changes what Warren Buffett can do
“Warren Buffett has the absolutely wonderful benefit that he has permanent capital, and it completely changes what he can do because he has permanent capital than any other investor can do who does not have permanent capital.”
Perold: Volatility fails as a risk measure for individual asymmetric securities
“At the individual security level, volatility need not be a good measure of risk at all. You know, a strategy that sells options and has limited upside and big downside, you're not going to detect that from volatility statistics.”
Perold: Market volatility strongly predicts a higher risk of subsequent drawdown
“There's very strong evidence that when things are volatile, thereafter, the risk of a big drawdown is much higher than when things are calm.”
Perold in 2017: Fantastic equity market returns unlikely over next decade
“It's hard to sort of have a belief that equity market returns will be fantastic over the next 10 years.”
Perold: Alpha Is Found in Market Dislocations and Capital Shortages
“You find alpha most of the time where there are dislocations, where there are capital shortages in the world. You don't find alpha all the time on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 47th. It just doesn't sit there all the time.”
HighVista Strategy: Hunt Niche Alpha First, Then Passively True Up Market Exposures
“Our view is look for the opportunities where they are, and then true up the exposures you get so that your overall exposures make sense. So how much U.S. Equity exposure am I getting by virtue of these terrific opportunities, and if it's less than I would like…”
The other half of the tape: André Perold's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 18 times in 8 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 11Sulaiman Alderbas 2Matt Botein 2Allison Thacker 2Rodney Comegys 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 18
2026 4 mentions in 1 episode
2024 2 mentions in 1 episode
2023 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
2017 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens André's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Co-Founder & CIO, HighVista Strategies | 2 | 33 | 100% 4/4 | full record on Capital Allocators → |