Anne-Marie Fink
CIO, Private Markets & Funds Alpha, SWIB. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Anne-Marie Fink oversees more than $70 billion across private equity, hedge funds, real estate, private debt, and venture capital for SWIB's pension portfolio. She previously served as CIO for the Employees' Retirement System of Rhode Island, spent over 16 years as an analyst at JPMorgan, and wrote the book The Moneymakers.
1shows
1appearances
40statements
3resolved
3supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Anne-Marie Fink said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Fink: Competence drives workplace happiness, not the other way around
“To create a successful and happy workforce, you actually need to be good at your job, and then the happiness follows, or to be successful in whatever endeavor you're going after, rather than let's make everybody happy, and then they'll be good at what they're …”
Fink: Delegated investment authority gives SWIB a major partnering edge
“So we have delegated authority, which is great because it means we can move fast. We can speak for investments. We don't have to say, well, we'd like to invest, but talk to us in a month after we've talked to our investment committee and we'll let you know. So…”
Fink: Capping pension upside while absorbing downside mathematically guarantees underperformance
“When Detroit went bankrupt, what was that, five, seven years ago, You looked at the plan and the expected rate of return was eight percent, and any year that they performed higher than eight percent, they paid it out. So by definition, you're never going to ge…”
SWIB reduced portfolio leverage to 12% amid an inverted yield curve
“We're currently at about 12% leverage, so we have 112% invested for every dollar that we have in assets, and that used to be higher when the yield curve was not inverted. It makes much more sense to do this when the yield curve is more normal, so we used to ha…”
Fink: Neutralizing underlying hedge fund beta is operationally impractical for allocators
“What we don't do is try to take out the betas underneath. Partly we haven't done it because operationally it's difficult, and then partly because if a manager tells us at the end of the month or even the end of the week that they're along something, by the tim…”
Fink: Lower mid-market private equity offers better return opportunities than mega-caps
“We actually are pretty big believers in lower mid-market funds, but we think that the opportunities in lower mid-market, if you've got the skill to really go in and assess people, we think the opportunities for returns are better.”
Fink: Current private equity liquidity is slightly subnormal, not vastly abnormal
“The 2021 liquidity was unusual. And the 2023, 20 24 liquidity is probably less than normal, but not Vastly abnormal. It just feels vastly abnormal because 21 was so amazing.”
Fink: Private Debt Has Not Operated Through a Real Distress Cycle
“On the other side, the private debt markets haven't really been around during a proper distress cycle. Because they really weren't of any size in 2008, which was the last time you had a real cycle.”
Fink: Managers leaving pod shops no longer face negative selection bias
“Part of the reason that we did a separately managed account platform now and not in the past is we feel like now that there's not negative selection bias on the talent. So what we're finding is there's a lot of folks who are high quality managers often worked …”
Fink: Other states lack trust needed for SWIB-style shared-risk pensions
“And in fact, other states would love to set up a similar system, but there's just not enough trust between the pension participants, the taxpayers, and the investment professionals to set that up.”
Fink: Private company governance is superior to public company governance
“I do believe that the governance model of privately held companies is better than the publicly traded governance model, and the difference has only gotten starker over the last twenty-plus years that I've been doing this.”
Fink: Investors prefer incremental business transformations over five-year CapEx bets
“And really what investors are looking for is not that people can't transform their businesses, but that they do it in an incremental way, in a way where you take small steps, You make sure they work and you get better and better over time rather than I'm going…”
Fink: Hedge fund managers differentiate themselves by responding thoughtfully to bear cases
“Where you really figure out who's got that something extra is when you feed back to them the bear case and say, well, okay, you said this is positive, but what about this risk and what about that risk? And how they respond to those risks, whether they thought …”
Fink: Long/short equity pitchbooks look identical until you probe granular stock details
“If you look at, particularly in the long, short equity space, if you look at everybody's book, the first four or five pages look exactly the same. We know our stocks better than anybody else, blah, blah. It's when you get into the details, you can really figur…”
SWIB applies whole-plan leverage to lower baseline asset risk
“We do a little bit less risk in terms of the assets that we own, and then we add back a little bit of risk through levering the entire plan.”
Fink: SWIB's 112% asset allocation spans 38% equities, 26% fixed income, 30% privates
“But we're about 38% in equities, 26 in fixed income, 19% in tips, 30%, give or take, in privates. So that's 10 in private real estate and 20 in private equity and private debt. And that gets you to about a 112.”
SWIB allocates 20% to 25% of public equities to passive index strategies
“So we do have about 20 to 25% of our portfolio in passive, mostly because we want to do all of our rebalancing in passive space. So we're also very rigorous about rebalancing each month, and we want to be able to do that without hitting our active managers all…”
Fink: Extension strategies help active managers navigate highly concentrated stock markets
“Particularly last year with the magnificent seven and the stock market being so dominated by seven companies, it's been hard to be active because so much of your allocation gets eaten up by just even having a market weight in those seven. So what we find by lo…”
Fink: SWIB uses hedge funds strictly as a portable alpha overlay
“So we have a very distinct way that we use them, which is portable alpha. So we do not actually, and you'll notice when I gave you the allocation, there were no hedge funds in there. It's because we actually think of the hedge funds as almost an overlay. So we…”
Fink: SWIB exits hedge fund managers showing persistent beta bias
“What we do look, though, is over time, does anybody have a bias? And if they tend to have a beta bias, then they're probably a candidate to leave our portfolio.”
Fink: SWIB offered $25M top-ups to close PE funds for better terms
“So we had some managers where we had made an initial allocation and we went back to them and said, OK, you're having trouble getting to your final close. What if we give you another twenty five million that'll get you Close enough. And in exchange for us givin…”
Fink: Mega-cap PE managers face severe exit constraints compared to mid-market
“So in that environment, it's particularly more difficult for larger managers because you have fewer ways to exit. You really can only exit through IPO or through publicly traded company making a very, very large acquisition. Those don't happen every day.”
Fink: SWIB runs local Wisconsin venture portfolio with standard return hurdles
“One is we have a Wisconsin venture portfolio. So we have a portfolio that Is designed to either invest in managers that are based in Wisconsin or ones that spend a lot of time with Wisconsin companies. Now, unfortunately, I don't have a lower return hurdle for…”
Fink: SWIB Uses Trigger Funds in Distressed Debt to Avoid Idle Fees
“We're doing more in MEZ, more in distressed, and a lot of the distressed people that we're working with, we're giving them trigger funds, so that we'll give you a certain amount of money today, and if there's a real proper distress cycle, we'll give you more, …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Anne-Marie'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 | CIO, Private Markets & Funds Alpha, SWIB | 1 | 40 | 100% 3/3 | full record on Capital Allocators → |