Ashby Monk
Executive & Research Director, Stanford University. On 1 show, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
academicfounderinvestorauthor@sovereignfund ↗LinkedIn ↗longterminvesting.stanford.edu ↗
Ashby Monk is an expert on institutional asset owners, governance, and investment technology who has authored books including The Technologized Investor and Reframing Finance. He has also co-founded several venture-backed fintech companies, including Real Capital Innovation and Long Game Savings.
1shows
4appearances
99statements
19resolved
16supported
0contradicted
84%fully supported
8said about them ↓ Everything Ashby Monk said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Monk: Asset allocation performance depends 100% on organizational capabilities
“I think what we think is a best practice is to say, actually, 100% of your performance in your asset allocation is a function of your organizational capabilities.”
Monk: Public pensions contrive asset allocations to hit aggressive return targets
“In the case of public pension funds, yes, like you'll have actuaries come along and do a pretty rigorous Examination of the liabilities. They'll tell you what your asset allocation strategy would be, but then it gets complicated because the assumptions underpi…”
Monk: Allocators hide data fearing stakeholders will block high-fee strategies
“I think there's a lot of investment professionals at these organizations that believe that if they reported it to the stakeholders wouldn't let them pursue the strategy that they believe in their heart of hearts is needed to meet the obligation of the plan. So…”
Monk: Hedge funds divert top scientists into socially useless activities
“It appalls me that we are dragging some of the best and brightest minds in society, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, Away from, you know, what I would describe as more traditionally value-adding activities and into the pursuit of basis points through a bl…”
Monk: Investment Professionals Will Become Co-Pilots to AI
“The human beings in these organizations will become the co-pilot to the AI, rather than the AI being the co-pilot to the human beings, because they're gonna have all the data, and they're gonna have that customization available.”
Monk: UC Investments' Jagdeep Bachher Is Attempting to Buy College Leagues
“Our friend Jag Deep is trying to buy college leagues.”
Monk: Innovating and deviating from peers gets pension allocators fired
“I often joke that the only way you get fired from a pension fund is you innovate, which means you've deviated from a peer group, and somebody says, huh, what are you up to? And then all of a sudden, you've got to justify it.”
Monk: Sustainability and ESG factors correlate with faster portfolio recoveries
“So what we're learning, and the findings are still being developed on our team, is that it's these sustainability factors, these long-term factors, employee satisfaction, environmental footprint, things like that, that you would say, well, really good ESG tool…”
Monk: Permanent allocator monopolies remove organizational survival pressure to innovate
“Most of these organizations have monopolies over the asset base, which means Stanford management company isn't going away. CalPERS isn't going away, but the people in those organizations can be fired. And so you as an employee of these organizations, and I'm n…”
Monk: Board bans on first-time funds force allocators into expensive managers
“A lot of the boards of directors think they're protecting their organization from failure by telling their teams they can't do first time funds, or they can't invest in hedge funds below a certain AUM, which is another way of saying you can only invest in fund…”
Monk: Investment consultant margins discourage deep diligence on new managers
“The consulting businesses are based on scale. So if they go and do a diligence on a manager, A deep dive and really understand that manager. They want to use those reports many times because that's how they make the business work. That's how you get the margin…”
Monk: ESG factors are pre-financial risks that become financial over time
“The reality is the ESG stuff is just pre-financial risk. I'm on the Future of Finance Council at the CFA, and it's actually Roger Irwin who instructed me on this. He's like, look, we should just be thinking about ESG as pre-financial risk. It will become finan…”
Monk: Pennsylvania pension board misunderstood portfolio complexity, hurting risk-adjusted returns
“And when we got done with all of the analysis on a risk adjusted basis, It was much worse than I thought. And then there was a sense for me that this was a governance challenge and that because the board struggled to understand the complexity of the portfolio …”
Monk: 401(k)s are like asking patients to self-medicate via WebMD
“And so we create these various iterations of defined contribution pension plans that are the equivalent of, if we took the parallel into the medical industry, it would be like saying, here's WebMD, go diagnose yourself, and here's the medicine cabinet. That yo…”
Monk: Universities can build top VC portfolios by aggregating pro-rata rights
“If I was going to do it My way, I might have designed it like this, where we were creating all these little seed funds on each campus. Those seed funds would then collect rights to deals, and at the same time, we would collect rights to deals out of the IP off…”
Monk: Financial services captures about 40% of US corporate profits
“We have an asset management industry and financial services industry that's capturing about
40% of all after tax corporate profit in America.”
Monk: Financial intermediation unit costs are higher than a century ago
“Even the research shows us that we may now have a 10 X fold increase in trading activity from the 19 sixties, but our financial services industry is less efficient today than it was a hundred years ago.
The unit cost of intermediation is higher today than it …”
Monk: Cap-weighted index fund diversification is fundamentally flawed
“And by the way, global diversification through index funds is a fake diversification. Index funds and ETFs are often calculated on a cap-weighted basis, which is a fundamentally flawed way to calculate indices.”
Monk: Only 1% to 2% of hedge funds deserve their fees
“And, you know, the one or two percent, you disagree with me, but I think one or two percent probably deserve to be making all the money they're making.”
Monk: Research shows pushing financial literacy does not work
“And rather than push financial literacy at them, which the research now shows does not work, we want to educate through doing.”
Monk: Large Asset Owners Are the World's Most Important Organizations
“They have quietly become the most important organizations in the world, and I don't put a caveat on that one. They are the cornerstone of our modern social welfare state. They are integrated into so much policymaking from Saudi Arabia to United States to Austr…”
Monk: No pension plans today are good at valuing private assets
“I don't know any plans today that are really good at valuing their private assets. It's incredibly difficult to bring real-time valuation into venture capital, private equity.”
Monk: Asset Owners Should Value AI by Alpha Over Headcount Automation
“I don't love that framing. I love thinking about how technology unlocks additional basis points of return. It gives permission to pension funds to spend more money. Especially on the initial setup cost of getting your data right.”
The other half of the tape: Ashby Monk's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 7 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 4Eric Ries 2Kip McDaniel 1Daryn Dodson 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 8
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ashby'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 | Executive & Research Director, Stanford University | 4 | 99 | 84% 16/19 | full record on Capital Allocators → |