Ted Seides
Founder and Host, Capital Allocators. On 1 show, 578 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
hostinvestorfounderauthorexecutive@tseides ↗LinkedIn ↗capitalallocators.com ↗
Ted Seides is the founder and host of the Capital Allocators podcast and author of investment books including Capital Allocators and Private Equity Deals. Previously, he worked at the Yale Investments Office and co-founded Protégé Partners.
1shows
578appearances
339statements
51resolved
40supported
2contradicted
78%fully supported
19said about them ↓ Everything Ted Seides said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Seides: Private equity faces a shakeout of undifferentiated mid-market firms
“Every industry as it matures gets concentrated into winners, and then some losers, and then specialists that have a place but are smaller.
Saw that in hedge funds, and you're going to see it in private equity.
There's going to be a shakeout of what's called th…”
Seides: Major private equity platforms will acquire deal teams within five years
“I'd be very surprised if you don't see one of the larger private equity players try to grow through acquiring teams. They are long capital and short origination or dealmaking capability relative to the capital they could command. So it does make sense that if …”
Seides Predicts 14 of 15 Yale Prospect Fellows Will Not Graduate
“The TRS data implies that one of Yale's lucky fellows will graduate to its core portfolio every three cohorts. In other words, 14 of 15 won't make it.”
Seides: Surviving hedge funds almost always expand beyond initial products
“Almost every instance of a hedge fund lasting beyond its first generation has followed a business strategy that expanded beyond the manager's initial product offering.”
David Swensen accepted illiquidity only as a necessity for equity diversification
“If you want to diversify your equity exposure away from the US equity market, by definition, everything else you do in the world is less liquid. You have to embrace some level of illiquidity in order to get the diversification. In the book, he described illiqu…”
Seides: The US economy cannot sustain private debt loans at 15%
“Fresh money opportunities in private debt are really interesting, because rates have gone up, and there's a dearth of capital, particularly in the middle market. The problem with that is that the economy can't sustain itself on loans at 15%. It just won't work…”
Seides: Future money management compensation won't match the last 20 years
“I don't think the remuneration for that in the future will be anything like it has been over the last 20 years.”
NAV Loans Destroy Private Equity's Cross-Collateralization Protections
“A portfolio of options is more valuable than an option on a portfolio. One of the attractive features of private equity is the absence of cross-collateralization of debt across portfolio companies. Nav loans take away that benefit.”
Using NAV Loans to Do More Deals Rarely Saves Failing GPs
“Borrowing to do more deals is the ultimate misalignment of interest. If a GP is out of dry powder and unable to raise money, the market has told that GP that it's not supportive of their future deal-making ability. Their response of using more debt to reload i…”
Cross-Collateralization Could Boost PE Returns by Lowering Debt Costs
“With long track records of low losses at the portfolio level, maybe all sponsors would generate higher returns by exchanging cross-collateralization for a lower cost of capital.”
Lenders Pitch NAV Loans for Up to 50% of Portfolio Value
“I've already seen presentations from lenders offering NAV loans for up to 50% of a private equity portfolio value.”
Ten NAV Loans Cure GP Woes for Every One Value-Enhancing Deal
“For every VISTA Nav loan, there are probably 10 used to cure the woes of a GP.”
Late-Cycle NAV Loans Bring Uncompensated Risk to LPs
“No matter how you look at it, NAV loans are a late-cycle response to the higher cost of debt and slowing fund flows that will bring uncompensated risk to LPs.”
Seides: Nearly every aspect of fund management suffers from principal-agent conflicts
“Nearly every aspect of fund management suffers from decisions made in the self-interest of the agents at the expense of the best interest of the principals.”
Seides: Hedge fund odds were highly favorable; I would bet Buffett again
“I would make that bet at the same time. Again, I think the odds were highly favorable of winning. It just didn't play out that way.”
Seides: Proving manager selection skill quantitatively requires 30 to 40 years
“Well, the first thing you go in knowing is that you will absolutely have the data to figure out if that was a decision, probably in 30 or 40 years. So you know that you can't do that quantitatively, right?”
Seides: A good hedge fund portfolio has 50-50 odds against the market
“I think that it's probably fifty-fifty if you had a good hedge fund portfolio versus the market for the next 10 years, but I would never make what I thought was a fifty-fifty bet in public with Warren Buffett.”
Seides: Top investment managers are only right 55% of the time
“The best guys in the world are in this business are right about 55% of the time. Barely over, like, you flip a coin, you're fifty-fifty. Barely better than that, and those are the guys who eventually become billionaires.”
By 2027, hedge funds will only charge 20% on true alpha
“So I think what you're likely to see is 10 years from now, there'll be an active management fee on the long side. And the hedge funds that are charging a 20% incentive fee, they're really going to be charging a fee on what's truly value added.”
Dedicated short-only hedge funds are commercially unfit to survive, says Seides
“But as a dedicated short pool, I think Darwin has shown that that is not a species fit to survive.”
SAC Capital spinouts struggled independently, whereas Tiger Management alumni thrived
“The old SAC was a great example for many, many years SAC generated phenomenal returns on the capital, and yet, with somewhat, some great consistency, the people that spun out couldn't come anywhere near replicating it on its own, and back then, SAC was really …”
A young Warren Buffett starting today would likely avoid public stock markets
“I think if you gave him a million bucks today, in 15 or 20 years, he'd be a billionaire again. But he probably wouldn't do it in the stock market.”
Seides: Long-short equity hedge funds cannot replicate past success due to crowding
“Equity long short is this sort of existential question, which is, can this succeed in the way it has in the past? That's easy. No, it can't. It's more crowded.”
The other half of the tape: Ted Seides's own voice is left out of every number here. 19 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Ted Seides, by other people (19)
Capital Group compensates portfolio managers based on returns, not asset volume
“If our investment results are the same and our tenure at Capital Group's the same, our bonus is the same. Meaning we don't incentivize a money grab to manage as many assets as you can.”
Aitken: Fundamental investors account for only 5-10% of listed turnover
“And yet the facts are that if you and I, Ted, decide we're going to buy some listed asset today, well, we're going to be five to 10% of the turnover. Because the way the world works today is that the flow is dominated by the machines, and that's not a criticis…”
Housel: Sustaining average returns over long periods beats maximizing single-year returns
“What actually matters in investing is not what the highest returns that you can earn are in any given year. It's what returns that you can sustain for the longest period of time. And I think the dirtiest secret in investing is that average returns sustained fo…”
Prosek: Firm Culture Does Not Need Uniqueness, Only Unique Packaging
“No, I think it has to be uniquely packaged.”
Duke: Decision groups improve judgment by policing mutual biases
“So if we make a pact between the two of us, That you're going to watch my bias, and I'm going to watch your bias, and now we can form kind of a decision group together where we make rules about what the interaction is supposed to be. You can set me straight. I…”
Stutman: Frame feedback as recommendations to drastically reduce employee defensiveness
“What I tell leaders all the time, Ted, is they need to get out of the feedback business and get in the recommendation and suggestion business. They're going to be able to give a lot more feedback a lot more often with a lot less resistance and defensiveness ju…”
Stutman: Embed feedback inside 'how' questions to completely bypass defensiveness
“A how question, if it's done and carries feedback, actually embeds the feedback inside the question. When I say to you, Ted, how are you going to upgrade the talent on your team? The feedback is that your team talent needs to be upgraded. But I don't say that.…”
Spielman: Six to eight reports are optimal; check-ins need five minutes
“The six to eight is the sweet spot, but let's just even take the 20. I still think that that person can meet with his folks once a week, and it doesn't have to be an hour conversation. It could be Knocking on the door, popping by. Say, Ted, what do you got goi…”
O'Leary: Getting managers to reveal concealed truths is 90% of diligence
“I think holding people's feet to the fire on tough stuff, like the conversation around the succession planning, those conversations where this is a safe venue for us to talk about hard things and really having managers understand that, and then feeling empower…”
Leaving money on the table generates repeat deals and superior long-term returns
“If I can sell you this for one dollar, yeah, I can sell it to you for one 40 because I have the hammer and I have the leverage, but that'll be the last deal that I ever did with Ted, right? But if I can sell you this for nine bucks, when you know it's worth 10…”
Scouting and investing are both processes of elimination, not discovery
“So everything about scouting, just like I'm sure about stock investment, is about elimination, not finding. Everything's about elimination.”
Duke: Decision-makers must form accountability groups because others spot their biases better
“Other people are actually pretty good at spotting our biases. So in the same way that you sort of naturally recruit people into the process with you when you express things probabilistically, why not do that intentionally and just purposely recruit people into…”
Duke: Framing decisions as bets transforms dissenting information into helpful calibration
“What a bet does is it shifts your idea of what winning means. So winning is now actually having the most accurate representation in the world. And that really comes through the accountability that this idea of betting is, because when you challenged your daugh…”
O'Shaughnessy: Zero fund-of-funds fees would not have won the Buffett bet
“If the fund to fund fees had been zero, you still would have lost.”
Moodgal: IADEI comprises 800 global institutions screening minority managers quarterly
“And on the back of that was born IADEI, Institutional Allocators for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which today has 800 institutions across the world that quarterly sifts through minority owned organizations. Minority led organizations in a certain asset cla…”
Adventur.es closed its last two acquisitions without senior debt
“The last two deals we've done with no senior lender involved. We've done all equity with a combination of equity and seller debt.”
Beshore: Adventur.es conducts deep diligence on about 15% of inbound deals
“In terms of real work, I would say probably 15% of the businesses that come through, we take a really close look at.”
Carnegie maintains roughly 120 external manager relationships across eight asset classes
“We have too many relationships, but we have about a 120. Roughly the way we look at it, eight asset classes. It's roughly 10 or so in each asset.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ted'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 | Founder and Host, Capital Allocatorshost | 578 | 339 | 78% 40/51 | full record on Capital Allocators → |