Institutional Investor
also referred to as: institutional investors
79 statements across 45 episodes · 23 bullish · 27 bearish · 42 people on the record · first statement May 22, 2017 by Charlie Ellis · said 67 times in 18 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
Mentions by year
brought up most by Kip McDaniel (33), Ted Seides (27), Ron Biscardi (1), Michael Milken (1), Michael Cembalest (1), Julia Bonafede (1), Donna Snider (1), Chris Ailman (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2024 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2021 5 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- Stefan Kaluzny – Sycamore Partners [Manager Meetings, EP.16]
- Matt Spielman – Executive Coaching in Asset Management (Capital Allocators, EP.210)
- Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7)
- Julia Bonafede – Rosetta Analytics (Manager Meetings, EP.04)
- Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174)
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2019 38 mentions in 5 episodes 8 per episode
- Kip McDaniel – How to Get an Allocator's Attention (Capital Allocators, EP.115)
- Donna Snider – Inside the Investment Process at the Kresge Foundation (Capital Allocators, EP.84)
- Neal Triplett and Kim Lew – Issues of Management at Duke and Carnegie (Capital Allocators, EP.116)
- Chris Ailman – CalSTRS' Venerable CIO (Capital Allocators, EP.86)
- Ron Biscardi – Putting Hedge Funds in Context (Capital Allocators, EP.83)
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
Everything said about Institutional Investor, oldest first
May 22, 2017
Jul 3, 2017 neutral
Aug 7, 2017 neutral
Aug 7, 2017
Ultra-wealthy individuals are infuriated when they cannot control the media
“The way I put it is, when people get to a certain amount of wealth, it could be ten million, could be a billion, when, there, there'll come a time when they control almost every aspect of their lives. They have the houses they want. They may always want more, …”
Aug 7, 2017 neutral
Aug 7, 2017 negative
Aug 7, 2017 neutral
Aug 7, 2017 negative
Asset manager threatened a $100M defamation lawsuit over an investigative story
“We, I was threatened with a hundred million dollar lawsuit. They never filed it, and in my view, it was a bullying tactic. We wrote something about an asset manager. I was the editor of the story, and we wrote something about this firm that I know to this day …”
Aug 7, 2017 negative
Aug 7, 2017 positive
Institutional Investor writers must anticipate who they will upset
“When we're writing stuff at Institutional Investor, we're trying to be what I call responsibly provocative. We never are gonna slander anyone. We're never gonna be mean about it, but sometimes people do wrong or do poorly in this industry, and we have to be wi…”
Nov 13, 2017 positive
Jenkins: Top allocators succeed by managing stakeholder anxiety during crises
“The people who've had the most success have not only been good investors, but they've been able to manage those dynamics so that they are in a position to do really interesting stuff when real interesting stuff happens. Which tends to be when people are most a…”
Dec 11, 2017 neutral
Dec 11, 2017 bullish
Acito: Institutions will shift from one-off credit funds to broad multi-strategy mandates
“And I see that as a big part of the future growth, and I think institutional investors will no longer view some of these emerging firms as, oh, they have an interesting distressed fund or RMBS fund. They'll say, we have a bunch of credit investing partners, an…”
Jan 28, 2019 neutral
Snider: Institutional Investor's Rising CIO List Implied Everyone Was Talking to Recruiters
“That list was admission that pretty much everybody on that list was talking to a recruiter, because I believe that list was mostly put together by the recruiters, and so the recruiter probably didn't nominate you if they hadn't had at least one conversation wi…”
Jan 28, 2019 neutral
Snider: Sell-side structuring prioritizes product volume while investing demands filtering for quality
“My job and when I was on the sell side was create a bunch of widgets, and the more widgets I could create and get out the door, the better. And now my job as an investor is evaluating all those widgets and only picking the best. So I really switched from quant…”
Feb 18, 2019
Moodgal: Rushing Fundraising Conversations Leads to Mistakes and Misplaced Pressure
“Do things slowly, don't be in a rush, because when you're in a rush, you can say the wrong things, things can come out the wrong way, and you can put pressure on people where you shouldn't be putting pressure on people.”
Feb 25, 2019 bullish
Large institutions will shift to separate accounts over traditional commingled funds
“I think for the biggest institutions, you'll see more separate and managed account platforms that those will gain share because they give just so much more Control. Control and transparency to investors. I think at the big end, you'll clearly see that.”
May 13, 2019 neutral
Jul 1, 2019 negative
Institutional LPs hold the power to end two-and-twenty fee structures
“Institutional investors are the market. You're charging yourself, right? Who is going to change that? Who is going to take action to finally put an end to two and 20? Well, where is the power? Without your allocation, they can't generate a fee. I'm just asking…”
Sep 9, 2019 bearish
Sep 9, 2019 neutral
Whineray: Forestry has matured through its institutional lifecycle
“Forestry, I think is, you know, you go back from an institutional investor perspective, maybe 1015 years. Started, the Timo's started up, and institutional investors started to allocate the timber, and then you had all this big trade where all of the timber as…”
Dec 9, 2019 negative
McKinsey sent threatening letters to Institutional Investor and identified zero errors
“The article is called The Story McKinsey Didn't Want Written, and then we started the story by saying, during the reporting of this piece, McKinsey sent multiple threatening letters to institutional investor. We stand by this piece entirely, and they have not …”
Dec 9, 2019 positive
Dec 9, 2019 neutral
Dec 9, 2019 positive
Dec 9, 2019 negative
Generic titles like 'Our Views' ruin high-effort asset management research
“I've just had a team of PMs and writers sit down and give 12 hours of their, like, scarce time
To writing this piece about fixed income, I don't want to screw it up by calling it our views on fixed income. You've just taken this gift and like thrown it in the …”
Dec 9, 2019 bullish
Dec 9, 2019 positive
Dec 9, 2019
Effective writing makes leaving more painful for readers than staying
“And so it's about those hooks that the point is always to make it more painful for the reader to leave than to stay. They just have to read that next section to figure out what's going on. That is the key, whether you're writing a feature for institutional inv…”
Dec 9, 2019 negative
Clickbait headlines are the fastest way to ruin a brand
“Clickbait effectively is a title that doesn't match
The content. It's a promise that's not delivered. And so when we title an article, it's gotta be aligned with the actual content that it's sitting over top of. There's no worse way to ruin your brand quickly …”
Dec 9, 2019 positive
Dec 9, 2019 neutral
Dec 9, 2019 neutral
Apr 23, 2020 negative
Jul 13, 2020 positive
Fisher: Rezoning creates huge value because institutional investors despise the risk
“Buying something that's zoned for X and rezoning it for Y creates enormous value. And nobody likes to do it, by the way, and even to this day, people hate it. The large institutional investors despise that risk. There's nothing that gets them excited about tha…”
Aug 10, 2020 positive
Walthour: Asset managers succeed by reverse engineering products from allocator fears
“Because I think sometimes, in my career at least, I have found that the street produces a product. And then it goes out there and it tries to jam that product through decision makers. And what it taught me was that reverse engineer the process. Go and spend ti…”
Nov 9, 2020 bearish
Williams: Standard deviation rarely reflects the actual risks institutional investors face
“So the expected return being a point estimate May connect well into, I want to cover expenses, and I want to grow, and I want to pay fees, but the risk, meaning of variance and their standard deviation, only by some strange coincidence would be connected to th…”
Nov 9, 2020 negative
Williams: Granular trading risk models are a bad fit for institutional allocators
“Well, that's helpful to someone who's trading A portfolio, say, of a number of stocks and bonds, multi-asset class, we brought those models to institutional investors, but that's not at all the right way to approach the problem. They have different purposes. S…”
Mar 8, 2021 bullish
Peters: Bitcoin and Ethereum Skew Heavily to the Upside at $50,000
“The upside versus downside is so skewed to the upside that the most important thing I can do as a fiduciary for my clients, which are big institutional investors, they're not small mom and pop punters or Robin Hood investors, they're just Institution. So the m…”
Mar 11, 2021 bullish
Sonnenshein: Institutional career risk has flipped to FOMO for crypto allocators
“They have all capitulated from the career risk Of getting involved or being the guy in the investment committee that raises their hand and says, well, why don't we put 50 basis points into crypto or, you know, and capitulated to the career risk of not being th…”
Apr 12, 2021
Nov 8, 2021 neutral
Dec 13, 2021 neutral
Pension board governance forces allocators to write bigger checks to mega-funds
“He said, if I go to my board and say, these are the 20 managers we're going to hire this quarter, and next quarter we're going to hire 20 different ones, at fifty million bucks a piece, I'm going to get fired. Because of the fact that they're not going to want…”
Feb 14, 2022 neutral
Kayden: Allocations to diverse managers remain experimental, not core for institutions
“There's been no data on that, and so it is very much of an early days in terms of trying to prove that out, and so I think people are separating out a small pool of capital to sort of run an experiment and see what happens with it, but it's not core to their p…”
Sep 5, 2022 neutral
Seides: Real-world long-term investing horizons practically cap at 3 to 5 years
“One of the things I've come to learn is that given the constraints that almost everyone has, an individual with their spending, an institution with their board, that the long term, if you can really think about it, probably gets to three to five years.”
Sep 5, 2022 positive
Seides: Retail investors have an agility advantage over committee-laden institutions
“This is where retail investors can have an advantage over institutions. Institutions have boards. They have committees. They have all these things that come in the way between an individual saying, I want to make this investment and an answer at the end of the…”
Oct 3, 2022 negative
Duke: Institutional investors underperform random selling by 70 basis points
“When you look at their sell side decisions, they're usually about 70 bips worse than the benchmark.
So if you were to just randomly
Free the capital up from your portfolio.
How would you do?
That's the benchmark.
When you look at their actual decisions, and th…”
Oct 17, 2022 negative
Griffith: Direct litigation funding creates reputational risks for institutional allocators
“For some institutional investors, that's a complicated place to be because there is quote unquote reputational risk if you're funding litigation. You don't know where the spear is going to point. It might get pointed at one of your competitors. It might point …”
Nov 14, 2022 positive
Rubin: Mega-funds like CPPIB must manage investment teams as business portfolios
“Managing portfolios of franchises and businesses is something that a large institutional investor like CPPIB needs to grapple with our collection of investment businesses and the infrastructure and real estate and private equity and private credit and hedge fu…”
Nov 14, 2022 negative
Accounting stability in private assets may induce a negative illiquidity premium
“I'm even concerned that there are some large institutional investors who would be willing to pay up for the accounting stability of private assets, which might In some points of the cycle, induce a negative illiquidity premium.”
Nov 17, 2022 negative
Institutional investors rely on manual spreadsheets across fragmented software systems
“As much as every institution has some sort of permutation of a CRM system and a performance system and a risk system in some way that they're tracking liquidity and they have a custodian, they still are responsible for shipping data between those systems and m…”
Nov 17, 2022 neutral
Dec 19, 2022 bearish
Marshall: Funding private obligations without distributions will pressure public markets
“I mean, you still have institutional investors that, whether they reallocate back to fixed income, or they have to fund cash flows, or they have to fund private market capital calls without there being the benefit of distributions. I still think that hits your…”
Dec 19, 2022 neutral
Apr 17, 2023 bearish
Toomey: Longer PE Holding Periods Will Delay Realizations
“I think you'll see an elongation of the holding period. So when you look back and you saw what happened, again, it's not the same as the global financial crisis, but there's some lessons learned there. I think when managers are sitting on investments that are …”
May 1, 2023 neutral
May 1, 2023 bearish
May 1, 2023 negative
Monk: Traditional fund cash flow forecasting relies on GP guesswork
“The traditional tools we use for predicting how a mid-market buyout fund in Europe draws capital and returns capital. A lot of that is putting the finger in the air and hoping for the best and looking at historical means or turning to the manager and asking th…”
May 1, 2023 negative
May 1, 2023 positive
Monk: Allocators should target specific cash flows over generic 7.2% returns
“Right now, when you say, oh, I need 7.2%, which is a very generic destination, everybody's like, well, I need this amount of private equity, and I need that amount of hedge fund. But when you say, no, no, here's your confidence interval for the amount of cash …”
Jun 29, 2023 negative
Mullen: Institutional allocators find unconstrained absolute return mandates unappealing
“While a lot of people like to be absolute return people, most of the investors that I've come in contact really find that abhorrent. Just like, how do I allocate that into my broader portfolio that the mandate is do whatever the hell you want.”
Aug 7, 2023 positive
Khajuria: PE fund durations match institutional LP liability requirements
“Durations match, broadly speaking, the requirements of the underlying investor. And the reason that you're seeing increasing diversification in those durations is not just because the industry is growing, and therefore it's growing in different ways, different…”
Aug 7, 2023 positive
Khajuria: Institutional LPs Increasingly Co-Invest and Lead Deals Directly
“The industry has changed from institutional investors going into funds with perhaps less involvement to now co-investing alongside funds at more attractive terms. To some very large institutional investors having their own invest direct investment teams, often…”
Aug 14, 2023 positive
Sargent: Investors should not rush to exit China despite new left-tail risks
“There are certainly some left tail scenarios to investing in China that weren't there a few years ago. But on the other hand, you may be getting paid to take those risks right now, and I don't think it's a moment to rush for the exits.”
Oct 30, 2023 negative
Oct 21, 2024 positive
Briner: Interpersonal networking beats brand names for winning deal allocations
“Some firms are able to Sell their capital with their brand name, but most it's interpersonal relationships and going out there and meeting people at conferences and networking and showing up to board meetings and things like that is the best way to sell that c…”
Mar 31, 2025 negative
Reynolds: LPs Avoid Direct Public Stock Picking but Co-Invest in Risky Privates
“Very few institutional investors organizations are actively managing public equity portfolios. They're not choosing stocks directly, but almost all of them are choosing in private companies directly and co-investing in companies where they have less informatio…”
Mar 31, 2025 neutral
Reynolds: Institutional LPs will abandon mega venture funds for smaller managers
“You will see The institutional investors that have historically loved venture and participated in those big pools move down market, just like they did in buyout. All the ENFs left the mega funds between 2008 and 2012 for the most part. I think the same thing w…”
May 19, 2025
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.”
May 19, 2025 neutral
Mogelof: Wealth Portfolios Allocate Only 2% to 3% to Alternatives
“If you look at the typical institutional investor, you can see that they are allocated to alternatives and private markets anywhere from 20 to 30 to even 50% of their portfolios. If you look at the wealth market today, that number is two to three percent.”
May 26, 2025 bullish
Top six wealth platforms committed $110B, doubling top six institutions
“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.”
Jun 9, 2025 negative
Jun 9, 2025 negative
Jun 23, 2025 neutral
MacArthur: Institutional PE allocations will increasingly become a zero-sum game
“They're going to continue to write checks and invest in private equity, but it's going to be much more of a zero sum game. If I'm going to get an allocation from a certain LP, somebody else is probably going to lose their allocation from that LP.”
Jun 30, 2025 neutral
Harris: Institutional allocators exploring secondary market sales are not forced sellers
“People aren't being forced. They're choosing to be tactical. There's no downside to exploring the market right now. I think a lot of people are looking, but I'm not hearing anybody who's in a forced situation.”
Jul 14, 2025 bearish
Sullivan: Private equity will struggle to drive alpha like the past 40 years
“It's going to be very difficult for private equity, broadly defined venture and buyout and related stuff to be the single defining alpha creating strategy for institutional investors the way that it's been over the last 3540 years.”
Dec 1, 2025 bullish
Jan 12, 2026 bullish