BlackRock

“I would say both of those experiences probably gave me a different sense of how hard it was to raise outside capital than it should have been. You didn't have to market. You just get a phone call being like, XYZ client wants to send you a large pile of money. …”

“And so I approached the client who seeded this fund at BlackRock and I said, would you support me if I did it independently? And I was really lucky that they said yes.”

“BlackRock was probably one of the pioneers in sophisticated marketing in the asset management space. They didn't become BlackRock overnight. They've been marketing for 35, 40 years, and Larry Fink's been a thought leader for, what, 25 years.”

“I used to encounter at BlackRock, we met a pension fund that had come to us for permission to basically hypothecate their entire art portfolio to Deutsche so that they could get an intraday liquidity facility because their board wanted them to be intraday liqu…”

“We did a wireless spectrum deal with Charlie Ergen and Dish Networks, where he was entering the spectrum auctions for the AWS three band, back to media and communications roots. And we backed a small business, which entered the auction as a small business elig…”

“First of all, empirically, the private equity industry has delivered a premium. We did these studies at BlackRock, and even when you controlled for Cap selection, industry focus, leverage adjustments, fees. It still delivered, you know, three to 400 basis poin…”

“There's so many smart people in the financial services industry, and you just take for granted that you could just show up in an industry and just be surrounded by people that, and it's not just smart, finance smart, just like worldish smart”

“I took 18 months worth of living expenses, moved them out of one account to another account and paid myself a monthly salary with like very comfortable buffers.”

“We ended up at that time owning 49% of BlackRock, and I went on the board, so I had Intimate insight into BlackRock going into the crisis, which was big asset for Merrill Lynch.”

“BlackRock's a good example of great leadership. Larry Fink, he's a really good leader, both strategically in terms of where they should go, and putting people in the right seats and motivating them. And that's one reason why that firm has done as well as it ha…”

“BlackRock comes out and says that they're going to be incorporating sustainability. We did this eight, nine, 10 years ago.”

“And they might have 10 or 15 ideas for ESG change. And, you know, of those, call it 10 ideas. Five might be value neutral. Three might be value destructive, a waste of time or a waste of capital without return. And two might be value accretive.”

“Larry Fink comes out with an announcement on June, 22nd, that he's going to increase his black staff by 30% over four years. I'd like to think that we had positive influence there, but I think that it really was not a heartfelt announcement. It was really desi…”

“And they offered them very, very generous fees, among other things, to participate in this transaction that accomplishes three things. One, it's gonna give them some liquidity to refinance out some of their other debt. Two, it's going to remove the most onerou…”

“First they had to get a couple of commitments from GSO and from BlackRock, which I think they committed to about half of this 1.7 billion dollar renew financing to be the seventh tranche of this term loan. And they got something like two hundred twenty million…”

“I'm the CIO of global fixed income. So I guess our total size of that is 2.6 trillion. We've got obviously huge I shares business, a big passive business.”

“We think a lot of the U S high yield markets got rich. So we've been pairing that back on more up into up an IG, running up more of a barbell with some securitized assets, learning a little bit of EM and then just letting the teams go.”

“Oftentimes today, for example, the CLO market, We like to own the lower parts of the debt stock because we'd like to own the structure.”

“If we have somebody in Europe that's trading credit, I'll let them run a piece of equity in their position because there are times where like credit spreads are too tight. And I don't want them to be sitting there doing nothing.”

“The information flow within the four walls of this organization around how many walls there are in this organization is unbelievable. And I always think like, how can they make masks? Do you think Japan will be a buyer or seller of bonds and manage a lot of mo…”

“Within a fixed income allocation, It's a pretty high tracking error strategy when you think about what most fixed income strategies deliver for tracking error.”

“Then I went to Lehman, went out of Lehman to run a hedge fund, and unfortunately I did a Mayo eight, wasn't exactly perfect timing. Good timing to leave Lehman, but it wasn't a perfect time to set up a credit hedge fund. And then we had a tough oh eight. And t…”

“So we do think highly of them and we use them in a lot of different ways, but Rick's strategic income opportunity strategy is probably the most notable one that we use.”

“My philosophy and fixed income Is diversify, do a lot of trades, get regime right, get the asset allocation right, and then do a lot of relative value trades. Don't make a huge bet on duration. Don't make a huge bet that's going to overwhelm the whole portfoli…”

“I think where a lot of the real alpha is going to be going forward. It's bespoke investments where you functionally create the investment, whether it's in the commercial real estate or resi or a European asset finance. The term loan to an aircraft producer. Th…”

“I'm pretty wigged out, but I think the Fed's waiting too long, and I think they're making a mistake.”

“And you have to say the two best investors I've ever seen, Stan Druckenmiller and David Tepper, both are friends of mine. They have an ability in a much more efficient way than I do of separating out. That's not important. That's not important. This is importa…”

“BlackRock and certainly the work that they've done to acquire eFront and try to pull together Aladdin and eFront, these are all the same indicators, right? That clients no longer want their public markets data and their private markets data into separate syste…”

“In the United States, if you talk to the huge asset gatherers, the Black Rocks, the Goldmans, if they get a new investment client, so they come in and they're going to have an investment advisor, and they're going to allocate their portfolio, 10% of them want …”

“We were doing at BlackRock larger investments on the fund side, larger investments on the co-invest side and secondary side, and that part of the market has historically generated less returns, and certainly in a less risky way as well.”

“So BlackRock's ETF had thirty seven billion of inflows in 2024. That was the third most of any ETF In the market. And by far the largest first year launch in history.”

“I'll call out a Bain survey from twenty-twenty-two. Bain and company asked 418 ultra high net worth individuals. Name three firms that come to mind when you think of alternative assets and who are the providers. First answer, the biggest answer in the bubble c…”

“There are really six managers that dominate the market, probably have 85 plus percent of the assets. That's Vanguard, Fidelity, BlackRock, State Street, T. Rowe, and Capital Group.”

“BlackRock just bought Prequin, and they're going to be putting out private equity index products first”