investment committee
also referred to as: ic · investment committees
81 statements across 58 episodes · 18 bullish · 27 bearish · 52 people on the record · first statement Apr 20, 2017 by Brett Barth · across every show →
Everything said about investment committee, oldest first
Apr 20, 2017
May 2, 2017 positive
Seides: Committee discipline and rebalancing matter as much as asset allocation
“And the ability to communicate with a committee and say, these are our targets. We want to shift it. Let's shift it this way and keep people on board was so powerful. I think that was as big of a component as just that particular asset allocation strategy.”
May 17, 2017 negative
Heller: Many institutional investment committees exist merely to rubber-stamp ideas
“A lot of investment committees at organizations like ours, Frankly exist to rubber stamp ideas, and it's very easy to get into that model because you meet with them quarterly, and you're meeting with your team weekly”
May 17, 2017
Jul 10, 2017 neutral
Investment committees require managing people rather than just asset allocations
“It's a whole different skill set, because I'm managing not only that, those allocations and those investments and the breadth across different continuum, but I have to also then manage the committee members, obviously, who, Whose, whose participation you solic…”
Jul 17, 2017
Blitz: Evanston requires unanimous nine-person committee approval for new managers
“So we have a nine person investment committee that is the formal kind of investment body, if you will, of the firm. And we need unanimous approval of all nine of those investment committee members before someone makes it in the portfolio. Only really need one,…”
Sep 18, 2017 positive
Sep 25, 2017 positive
Oct 2, 2017
Oct 9, 2017 negative
Klein: Debating 1-2% positions with elite investment committees is inefficient
“If we're pulling together that kind of a group, and we're discussing a one or two percent position, it's just not the best, highest impact that we can bring their experience to bear on behalf of Memorial Sloan Kettering.”
Dec 11, 2017 negative
Acito: Institutional investment committees are dominated by equity specialists
“Because if you go to your typical investment committee, there are 10 guys and gals who know equities. They're private equity people. They're hedge fund managers. They're long only managers. You rarely get to the committee where of the 10 people, six are credit…”
Apr 23, 2018 positive
Cembalest: Institutions rebalance far more systematically than private clients
“On the other hand, investment committees for institutional clients are much more religious about rebalancing. So, As equity, as asset prices go up, they are religiously rebalancing back to normal, and are also adding risk when markets go down, which is a much,…”
Aug 6, 2018
Oct 29, 2018 negative
Nov 19, 2018 neutral
Dec 17, 2018 positive
Institutional boards are increasingly delegating manager selection to staff
“As that dedicated staff is billed out, boards or investment committees seem to be getting more and more comfortable with giving those staff members some authority, if not full authority, but authority to make manager decisions, hiring and firing decisions, but…”
May 13, 2019
Mauboussin: Investment Committees Should Always Use Independent Ballots for Decisions
“And once again, for example, a simple rule, if you're ever voting on something, it always should be independent ballots. What is not uncommon is for people just to go around the room and say, hey, Ted, what do you think? So, you know, Ted, you're a really impo…”
May 20, 2019 negative
May 20, 2019 positive
May 20, 2019 neutral
Recker: James Irvine Foundation is running light on portfolio liquidity
“We are pretty light on liquidity relative to probably where we should be because the opportunity cost has been so high, but we're actually having a conversation in October with our investment committee around that to really hone in on like what we think about …”
Mar 2, 2020 negative
Mauzé: Sound investment decisions require repeated team discussions, not rapid IC votes
“I think we've made good decisions as a team because we talk about the deals many times. I'm always amazed by firms that can have, like, an investment committee meeting, and people are seeing it for the first or second time, and they are saying yes or no. It's …”
Apr 6, 2020 bearish
Peters: Portfolios leveraging pseudo-diversification will be the worst performers
“I think we're going to find that the portfolios that applied that logic to the greatest degree are the worst performing. And so that behavior will be significantly curtailed, whether it's through regulation or whether it's through investment committees and end…”
Apr 13, 2020
Sep 14, 2020
Duke: Decision-Makers Should Be Grateful for Dissenters and Skeptics
“If the person is in the role of the sort of person who's pushing back on it, You should kind of be grateful that that person exists because it forces you to be thinking about things from different perspectives. And like I said, it forces you to actually be abl…”
Sep 14, 2020
Duke: The Goal of Group Meetings Should Be Informing, Not Consensus
“The goal of a really good group meeting is not to agree. And we think that the goal is agreement. We think that everybody has to walk out of that room on the same page. The goal of a great group meeting, rather, should be to inform, which is very different. So…”
Oct 12, 2020
Oct 12, 2020
Chabran: Junior investment team members should speak first to avoid bias
“I'm co-CIO. I remain co-CIO of the group, and over the years, I've learned to ask sometimes the most junior team member to speak up first, okay? Because otherwise, it's just his or her judgments, you know, get biased because someone, you know, Talks louder tha…”
Nov 9, 2020 negative
Williams: Investment committees waste time scrutinizing minor, backward-looking line items
“It really bothers me when the conversation veers toward the small and insignificant and backward looking. So think, Wow, this portfolio has, you know, these 15 different investments. Like, you delegated that decision, and that decision's been made.”
Jan 18, 2021 negative
Jan 18, 2021 positive
Jan 18, 2021 negative
Fired active managers usually outperform the managers hired to replace them
“When you look at higher fire decisions, there's a number of higher fire decisions out there for active managers, where you fire the incumbent because he has a, you know, significantly bad three, five year return. You hire the new manager based on good past per…”
Jan 25, 2021 negative
Feb 4, 2021
Mauboussin: Assigning Probabilities Compels Deeper Analysis and Better Discussion
“Just asking people to assign a probability, just that app, as you point out, compelled sort of a much more thoughtful process, which then led to a much more, you know, much richer discussion around the issues. So you're right. Probably the calibration is sort …”
Mar 22, 2021
Seides: Investment committees must focus on policy, not manager selection
“The question is like, what does good governance mean? And I think that's pretty simple to say, a little bit harder to pull off. So the first is just clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Everybody knows if you're on the committee, you're responsible for …”
Mar 25, 2021
Seides: Optimal investment committee size is four to six people
“Optimal decision-making units are four to six people. I cannot tell you the research of why that's the case. I just know it is. So you think about your investment committee should not be 12 people. It probably shouldn't be two investment people either. Four to…”
Sep 13, 2021
Katie Hall: Clear Role Definition Is Critical for Investment Committee Success
“I think having a really deep and shared understanding of the role of the committee is critical. And in some cases, those have been, I've been involved in committees where there is a very active involvement in the portfolio composition. In others, it has been t…”
Nov 24, 2021
May 2, 2022 neutral
May 2, 2022 positive
Dowling: Effective investment committees require a strong chair to align members
“They have very different personalities, and by changing one or two people, it can be night and day, and so a lesson is make sure you have good governance, make sure you have a really strong IC chair, make sure everybody's rolling in the same direction. If not,…”
May 19, 2022 negative
Barber: Requiring unanimous investment committee votes discourages honest dissent
“Well, if you have everybody unanimous, then no one wants to be negative during the process. And nobody wants to say, I don't like it, okay, I'm good. So let somebody say they don't like it and say no. And I really thought that was genius.”
Aug 1, 2022 negative
Samuels: Investment Committees Fixate on Line-Item Risk Over Portfolio Hedges
“But it's very difficult for humans to think in terms of pair trades. The temptation to look at line item risk is huge. Even if you know that a long treasury position is in there to offset the meaningful equity risk in the rest of the portfolio, you still might…”
Aug 1, 2022
Sep 1, 2022 negative
Jean-Baptiste: Separation of sourcers and investment committees weakens venture conviction
“When you think about the structuring of traditional firms, It tends to be that the most junior people are doing a lot of the sourcing, developing a lot of the theses, having those initial conversations and building a point of view. But the investment committee…”
Dec 12, 2022 bearish
Feb 13, 2023 negative
Clearlake requires deal models to show returns without assuming unidentified M&A
“If you were an investment committee, clearly you would know that you showed me an upside case that includes a bunch of acquisitions that we haven't done that have not been identified. You're going to be called out for it. It's okay to have a buy and build stra…”
Feb 13, 2023
Clearlake's investment committee brutally challenges overly optimistic deal presentations
“So if you come to a investment committee at Clearlink with a fancy deck and it's all offside and the objections go up into the right and it
Everything's great.
You're probably going to come out a little bloody from that investment committee, because there are …”
Feb 13, 2023 negative
Feliciano: 200-page investment decks indicate deal team laziness, not rigor
“So a long, you know, PowerPoint presentation is just, you didn't have time to really digest kind of the information for the consumption of the committee.
You got lazy and just put out every PowerPoint or every slide that you could.
That's not the way I like to…”
Feb 27, 2023 neutral
Apr 3, 2023 negative
Joy: Investment committees resist firing managers with stellar trailing returns
“I think, and history's shown me, that it's very hard to get an investment committee to agree to firing a manager when their performance is stellar, or to not re-up With a manager when they've got absolutely shoot the lights out numbers, but in our view, they'v…”
Apr 3, 2023
Joy: Church Commissioners team controls manager firing and re-ups without IC approval
“The different subgroups below the IC, one that focuses on all assets, excluding real assets, and one that is really a real assets group, they determine or approve new partnerships. So if I'm bringing partners in, new managers, external managers, I get them app…”
May 8, 2023
Investment committee members must be coaches, not players
“I do think when you serve on an IC, you have to remember that you're a coach and not a player in that regard. I have the benefit of seeing ICs from multiple angles, not just serving on them, but also we obviously have a lot of ICs that we present to here as we…”
May 8, 2023 positive
May 22, 2023 negative
Amy Falls: Rejects full delegated authority to keep investment committee debate
“I have been offered in various situations, you know, you don't have to bring managers to the committee anymore. Just do what you think. I always say no, because I don't actually think I'm going to get to the right answer by myself.”
May 22, 2023 positive
Falls: Northwestern uses an 'on-deck' section to involve committees earlier
“One of the things we do when we do committee meetings, we have an on-deck section, which is these are some managers that we're just starting the process on. So if you have a thought, let me know now. That's really intended to invite them into the conversation …”
May 22, 2023 negative
Falls: Flooding investment committees with finished proposals suppresses critical feedback
“One is if you flood a committee with information, you won't get any feedback. If you come to committee meetings with every I dotted, every T crossed, very few people are going to say, gosh, I know you've done months of work here, and you have a point of view. …”
Jun 12, 2023 positive
Sacca: Lowercarbon opens its investment committee and memos to all employees
“The one all hands meeting we have is everyone in the company is invited to our investment committee. The lead on the deal or the co-leads on the deal present the deal, but everyone in the company has access to everything we've done. All the diligence, the deal…”
Jul 24, 2023 positive
Oct 9, 2023 positive
HESTA rejects committee decision-making in favor of individual risk delegation
“We actually delegate decisions to key decision makers. There are a lot of decision makers in our business. I don't get to make every decision, for example. We're very fortunate that we've got a lot of delegation from our investment committees. They set clear p…”
Apr 1, 2024 positive
May 13, 2024
Asness: University investment committees suffer anti-contrarian bias due to donor selection
“Those on the committee are often some of the biggest donors over the last 10 years. Let's just be honest. The biggest donors are the most successful parts of the financial world over the last 10 years. Therefore, committees tend to be people of goodwill who be…”
May 13, 2024
Asness: Committees should scrutinize their best-performing managers alongside their worst
“One of the things I do when I'm on a committee, I'll make suggestions like, if we're bringing in our three worst managers, let's bring in our three best, too, because those are anomalous returns also. They're more pleasant to have anomalous big returns, but th…”
May 13, 2024
Asness: Investment committee members face asymmetric downside risk with no upside
“Individual members of the committee get far more punished for disasters than they get for good portfolio returns. That's true in a lot of walks of investing. I think it's particularly true of committees where they don't own anything, they don't get the upside,…”
Aug 19, 2024 positive
Hewsenian: Departing CIOs Need a One-Year Gap Before Joining Committee
“First of all, I wasn't given a choice, but second of all, I think ideally that would be the best way to do it because it gives the successor the opportunity to get his or her sea legs under them without necessarily the scrutiny of sitting there in front of you…”
Aug 19, 2024 neutral
Sep 9, 2024 positive
Auby: TRS decentralized investment committees into separate asset class verticals
“One thing we did was to make sure that we had one internal investment committee that approved all investments for the entire fund. And now we've put investment committees into each vertical. So now there's a private equity investment committee, a real estate i…”
Sep 9, 2024 positive
Auby: Investment committees function best with five to six members
“So the size of a committee is very important. You want it large enough that you get a very diverse set of viewpoints, but you don't want it too large because then there can be a real free rider problem actually when you have a committee that's too large and yo…”
Sep 30, 2024 negative
Oct 21, 2024 negative
Nov 25, 2024 negative
Bank: Successful money managers often make poor committee members
“The more important things tend to be the soft skills. Is this person a good listener? Is this person open-minded? Do they work well and collaboratively in a group? Those are things, interestingly, that often aren't typical of really successful money managers b…”
Nov 25, 2024 negative
Bank: 14 to 17 investment committee members is too many
“Charlie Ellis would tell you five to seven committee members is the right number. We see some institutions where they have 14 to 17. That's too many. It's very well understood that after a certain point, the loss of motivation and the loss of coordination of a…”
May 26, 2025
Sep 8, 2025
Seides: Ultimate decision-makers should speak last in committee discussions
“Ultimate decision maker should speak last. Because if they speak first, everyone wants their bonus, and so everyone's gonna start agreeing, and the person who's not sure because of this one obscure thing that ends up being the biggest risk factor that no one t…”
Oct 13, 2025 neutral
CPPIB Avoids Decision Committees Outside Core Investment Committee to Enforce Accountability
“And we delegate also a belief that people make decisions because we need accountability for decision making. So we don't have committees that are making decisions other than, let's say, the investment committee.”
Oct 13, 2025 positive
CPPIB Uses AI to Generate Baseline Investment Committee Questions in One Minute
“Part of the value, I think it makes the investment committee pick up their game a little bit, because we can put the memo into the model and get 10 questions in about one minute, and so you can ask the investment committee members, and whatever we paid for tha…”
May 18, 2026 negative
Investment committees frequently fail to address internal firm pressures and behavioral biases
“Investment committees, in my experience, are very good about talking about the specifics of an underlying investment. Here's this company. What do we think its cash flow characteristics are? What's the competition like? We're much less adept at discussing what…”
Jun 29, 2026 negative
Jul 16, 2026
Jul 16, 2026
Jul 27, 2026 neutral
Jul 27, 2026
NYU endowment delegates manager selection to internal team up to 3%
“When it comes to manager selection, we rely on the expertise of the team who have spent their careers Getting to know the managers, understanding the landscape, the manager selection decisions rest with the team up until a certain point. Once you have a manage…”