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: The subprime short trade psychologically ruined some winning managers
“And one of the things you saw afterwards with some of the people who were in that trade without pointing to any particular manager, is that it almost changed the way they thought. They did something that was perfect, and then they proceeded to search for the n…”
Seides: Median Private Equity Has Historically Outperformed the S&P 500
“Middle market's been better than large. Small has been better than middle market. Median has outperformed the S&P. Bottom quartile, definitely not. Top quartile by a lot.”
Seides: Zero Institutional LPs Admit Their PE Portfolios Are Below Median
“I've asked at every AGM I've spoken to this year, please raise your hand if you think your private equity portfolio is median or below. And there isn't a single hand that's ever gone up. Everyone playing is playing for the top quartile.”
Seides: Proposed PE vs. S&P 500 Wager Found No Public-Side Counterparty
“At the end of the day, there wasn't anyone to take the public equity side of the bet. I reached out to some friends at Vanguard, but Vanguard isn't just a public equity index fund manager.”
Seides: Successful Venture Bets Create Trapped, Unexited Growth Equity Allocations
“So what's happened is a lot of the institutional allocation portfolios who never used to invest in growth equity, their most successful venture investments have created a very meaningful bucket of growth equity that they can't exit.”
Seides: Magnificent Seven AI valuations are probably a price bubble
“Is that a bubble in price? Probably. It's probably not a bubble in the underlying economic activity of the businesses. But Mag seven went from these dominant cash flow machines to taking all the cash flow and spending it in something that has an unknown ROI.”
Seides: Institutional allocator sentiment toward China is cycling back
“The only thing that's been interesting to watch has been China, because two, three years ago, China was going to be out of portfolios. Then you have a year where Chinese stocks perform really well, and now these things are cyclical. The U.S.-China relationship…”
Seides: AI Down Rounds Will Trigger Significant Private Market Valuation Compression
“So I will say whether it's next year or the year after the year after, I would be shocked if there isn't a significant compression. Maybe starts with the valuations of private AI companies and significant down rounds, and maybe that has downstream effects beca…”
Seides: Public Market Active Managers Poised for Outperformance
“I think people will be talking about public markets and the potential for outperformance from active managers because you're teed up pretty well to have a good period of time for active managers.”
Seides: Median Private Equity Barely Beats Market While Median Hedge Funds Lag
“And I can say the median private equity fund probably does a little bit better than the market. The median hedge fund probably doesn't get you that much. The median real estate fund probably gets you some beta of real estate.”
Seides: Wealth Channel Lacks Institutional Diligence Muscle for Top-Quartile Alts
“There's so much knowledge, experience, attention, resources deployed to try to get at who's better. And I'm not sure the wealth channels caught up with that yet.”
Seides: Retail hedge fund products were watered down due to capacity constraints
“And right around the time that started happening, the hedge fund products were pretty watered down. And the hedge fund managers saw that they were capacity constrained. They didn't want to give their best stuff. So I will give you the long book and we'll hedge…”
Seides: LLMs Won't Make Final Investment Decisions Anytime Soon
“It'll be a long time, unless you're a quant manager, before the ultimate decision gets made by an LLM.”
Seides: Dietrich Foundation allocates 90% to private assets and 30% to China
“Earlier this year, I had Ed Grefenstedt, who's the CIO of the Dietrich Foundation. And I'll just tell you one thing, then you'll say, wait, that's possible. 90% in privates, like half of that's in venture, like as much as 20 or 30% in China.”
Seides: Top Six Wealth Platforms Committed $110B to Funds Last Year
“According to Arctos Partners, the six largest private banking and wire house platforms committed a hundred and ten billion dollars to funds last year. Approximately twice the amount invested from the six largest institutional investors in North America.”
Seides: Swensen model ignores that business growth improves manager performance
“And while that's pristine, there's a part of that that doesn't consider the necessity of a successful business in generating optimal investment performance. Oftentimes, allocators see a manager, they like getting there early, someone who's great, delivering pe…”
Ted Seides Predicts Yale Fellowship Will Face Deluge of Low-Quality Applications
“Yale will be deluged by inbound interest, most of which will be of lesser quality than Yale has reviewed historically.”
Yale Does Not Demand Equity Economics in Spinout Investment Firms It Backs
“Spinouts of top investment managers may find Yale an attractive partner, especially knowing that Yale does not ask for economics in the newly formed business.”
Yale Prospect Fellowship Terms Beat Most Other Sources of Startup Capital
“Those trade-offs are more attractive than the asks from most other sources of startup capital.”
Yale May Lose 'Allocator of Choice' Status Over Fellowship Dropouts
“As many of the fellowship managers return to the market and struggle without Yale's backing, Yale may find it more difficult to be seen as an emerging manager allocator of choice.”
Seides: Rational assessment favors firm growth over staying a boutique
“In almost any rational assessment, the playbook favors growth. Expanding organizations can attract and retain talent and capital, which creates durability. Staying the same may benefit from focus, but it carries significant business risk.”
Seides: Boutique managers are always one bad stretch away from failing
“A boutique manager is always one step away from a bad stretch of performance that creates an existential threat to the business.”
Seides: Boutique asset managers are not designed to survive founders
“Boutiques are not designed to outlast their founder. The investment offering rarely passes on to the next generation.”
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 → |