David Salem
Managing Director, Hedgeye Risk Management. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorexecutiveanalyst@DSalemInvestor ↗hedgeye.com ↗
David Salem was a partner at GMO and served as the founding president and CIO of The Investment Fund for Foundations (TIFF). He currently leads capital allocation strategy at Hedgeye Risk Management and manages the Hedgeye Capital Allocation ETF.
1shows
1appearances
26statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
24said about them ↓ Everything David Salem said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Salem: The prudent allocation to Chinese-domiciled company stocks is zero
“And that is one important reason, among many others, why I continue to maintain that I think from a tactical and a strategic point of view, but most emphatically from a policy point of view, the prudent allocation to stocks of companies domiciled in China is z…”
Salem: Asset managers cannot rigorously prioritize ESG while maintaining fiduciary duties
“I think there are some very conspicuous, visible actors running some of the largest asset management firms in the world that a few years ago Started to exalt and extol the virtues of ESG to an extent that even at the time, some of us could say, wait a minute, …”
Salem: Throwing a golf club should immediately disqualify an asset manager
“If you get on a golf course and you see a manager that you either have money with or might consider giving money to, And they hit a bad shot and they throw their golf club. Disqualifying. Disqualifying for business, for managing money. Why? Because they can't …”
Salem: GMO's founding partners were famously not speaking to each other
“You look at GMO when I joined it, everything's firing on all cylinders. The returns are great. They're growing. The sun is shining. You get in there and after a week or two, you realize that founding partners don't even talk to each other.”
Salem: Elon Musk's favorable narratives are driven by Tesla's reflexive stock price
“But I assure you that the narratives that are swirling on Elon Musk, particularly the favorable ones, would not be swirling and would not be of the character that they are if he weren't one of the wealthiest people in the world. That price has driven the stock…”
Salem: Admitting China to the WTO in 2001 was a massive mistake
“Starting with China's admission to WTO in 2001 of the great policy mistakes I
I think this country has ever made.”
Salem: Top LPs realize cash returns far below reported venture capital IRRs
“A lot of LPs of longstanding relationships going 3040 years back to the firms that are still on the short list of what are the best BFC firms in the world have gotten returns that are quite a bit south of The IRRs that reported in those manager records.”
Salem: David Swensen cut contact after Salem refused a job interview
“It came from Swenson, actually. David just called me one day and said, look, I have some advice for you. There's this job that's open, and I'm involved in the search, and I want you to jump into the search, and I want you to take the job. And for various reaso…”
Salem: Standard industry business principles must be reversed in money management
“Money management is such a curious industry where a lot of the precepts and principles that work really well in other industries only work in money management if you reverse them.”
Salem: Investing's cardinal sin is abandoning a sound strategy at inopportune times
“The cardinal state of investing is, of course, to get into a position where you're either an involuntary buyer or an involuntary seller. That's for sure. And you want to avoid that. But the broader cardinal sin of investing is to just bail out of an otherwise …”
Salem: Stepping down from TIFF was the biggest mistake of my life
“I think I did it very, very well, almost as well as one could do it, and I think it was the biggest mistake of my life.”
Salem: Price almost always drives market narratives, not vice versa
“It is almost always the case that price drives narrative, not the other way around.”
Salem: Private companies compound capital far better than public equivalents
“Private companies are a superior way to compound capital relative to public. It's just that they're not as scalable.”
Salem: Skeptical of Bitcoin, but highly bullish on Ethereum's value transfer potential
“Came out generally skeptical of Bitcoin and really, really bullish on the longer term potential for the Ethereum network as a technology to help people transfer things of value in coming decades and beyond.”
Salem: Part-time consensus committees are the worst environment for investment decision-making
“Logically, they meet on a part-time basis in an environment where consensus comes first. That is the worst possible environment for investment decision-making, bar none.”
Salem: The asset management industry faces massive future fee compression pain
“We're probably not even in the third inning in terms of the pain that's going to be incurred by the folks who are not on the right side of those trends, transparency, ease of use, and shared economies of scale.”
Salem: 40 years of falling interest rates provided massive industry tailwinds
“Those of us who entered the money management industry roughly when I did had essentially a forty-year tailwind of falling discount rates in the global economy generally. Which creates multiple expansion. What does that favor? It favors all kinds of enterprises…”
Salem: Effective manager selection screens from disqualifying to essential attributes
“The four-part framework is very simply, you screen first and foremost for disqualifying attributes, then unfavorable attributes, then favorable attributes, and finally, essential attributes.”
Salem: TIFF required managers to provide ex-ante written decision write-ups
“So the emphasis that I placed from day one at TIFF, and I probably led us to miss and pass on managers that might have otherwise cleared the bar and made us even more money, Was I would basically insist on ex-ante written write-ups of decisions that produced t…”
Salem: Managers must establish client boundary conditions before announcing strategy shifts
“So answer your question is you have to set up the boundary conditions way before the conversation unfolds where you're going to impart to a trusted and valued client some significant, noteworthy, uncomfortable change in what you're doing.”
Salem: Cash provides essential psychological freedom to seize rare market opportunities
“What you learned over the years is that it actually has a utility that goes way beyond its obvious help in meeting unexpected redemptions. Psychologically, it frees you up, and Buffett, more than any other actor in my lifetime, has proven the value because you…”
Salem: The US military and geopolitical alliance with Japan is vastly underestimated
“Our alliance with Japan in a military and geopolitical sense is vastly underestimated to a lesser extent with the Philippines, but emphatically with Japan.”
Salem: Private equity will endure permanently after shakeout to stronger institutional hands
“I do continue to believe emphatically that private equity investing, as is true of any otherwise sound form of investing that maybe gets overdone and overcrowded, it will be around forever. It's just a question of boiling off the overfunding and moving it esse…”
The other half of the tape: David Salem's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 23 times in 4 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Chris Douvos 15Matt Bank 4Ted Seides 3Patrick O'Shaughnessy 1
Statements about David Salem, by other people (1)
True Outperformance Requires Taking Career Risk to Be Right and Alone
“They're so afraid of being wrong and alone and taking that career risk that they migrate from being alone and having conviction to being with the crowd. But when you migrate towards the crowd side, you take the right and alone box out of play. And that's where…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 23
2024 7 mentions in 1 episode
2022 6 mentions in 1 episode
2017 10 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens David'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 | Managing Director, Hedgeye Risk Management | 1 | 26 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Capital Allocators → |