pension funds

“If you record over time, systematically, who are the best firms as judged by their clients, institutions like pension funds, if you're doing that, and you get to know the firms that are the 10 best, and you come back five years later, and half of the 10 best a…”

“Oh no, that, those rates are going to be low for a long time, because that demand for that long bond is so high, and so when I'm thinking about rates rising, and people kept saying it was going to happen, it was going to happen, and I was like, it's going to h…”

“Well, we've seen a, like a large number of very big pension funds go direct. There's an internalization that is occurring. They are attracted to the duration of the assets, the cash, yields that come off that, particularly in this point in the cycle where yiel…”

“So the concept of super normal extraction of wealth and abhorrent returns just isn't going to happen if you have pension fund owners. It's unnecessary.”

“The real issue is that pension funds were designed at times when people retired at age 65 and conveniently died at age 68. Today, people retire at 65 or 70 and live to a 108. How are you going to survive 30 or 40 years not working, not generating an income, li…”

“If you're under a state legislative body, any politically derived body, chances are you're going to be suppressed for compensation, for resources, including travel, training, materials, systems, risk controls. Everything.”

“I used to make the joke that Lucent was really a pension fund with a little bit of technology on the side, which is what drove the earnings of the company for that whole time, but nobody thought that joke was funny except for me, but it was actually pretty clo…”

“Because for some god unknown reason, the government said, we don't want to take your assets, we'll take your cash. So everything was converted into cash, and there was no price sensitivity at all.”

“Because the type of capital that an endowment runs or a foundation runs is similar compared to a pension fund or compared to a wealth advisor, they do tend to have a similar way of looking at the world. Because of the nature of the capital.”

“We found that if you can really kind of model out those cash flows that we were talking about, cash flows, liquidity, unfunded pacing commitments and all of that you can drive. In fact, there's a UK based pension fund that did this. You can drive these organiz…”

“And without fail, that active-passive conversation inside a pension fund actually boils back to governance.”

“I really truly do believe, Ted, that these are the most important organizations on the earth, and that's full stop. I don't even have a caveat around that or a constraint.”

“Pension funds work like icebergs. Okay, so you might start the concept and then many years later you might get to where you actually get movement. And so understanding that you can't have instantaneous decisions and outcomes with clients, especially clients th…”

“We find them to be more understanding in periods of underperformance because they are so long-term and they have less pressures in terms of clients or stakeholders that some of the other LP segments might have.”

“So it's just no pension fund, no, no big asset management firm can suffer a 80% drawdown and live to tell that tale. Just not going to happen with their LPs.”

“The theory that I was putting forward and I stand with it right now is that all the different participants have made contributions to the problem of investment results, particularly of pension funds and endowment funds, typically underperforming the markets. T…”

“Even in the private side where so much Of renewable infrastructure is priced. It's likely below our cost of capital. It may be more appropriate for pension funds or other large pools.”

“I often joke that the only way you get fired from a pension fund is you innovate, which means you've deviated from a peer group, and somebody says, huh, what are you up to? And then all of a sudden, you've got to justify it.”

“You can get a PhD in economics. You can get a CFA or a CAIA designation and not necessarily truly understand how sovereign funds operate, how pension funds operate.”

“I don't see a lot of technologists sitting on boards of directors of pension funds or sovereign funds or endowments. You see lots of ex-finance professionals. You see lots of representative people coming out of the constituencies, teachers, firemen, public emp…”

“We're talking 30 to a hundred million bucks a year going into technology. By the way, the problem I have with the fact that not everybody knows this is all these technologists at places like Stanford or Princeton or Harvard, they don't even know that these pen…”

“So when these big pension funds need technology, it's not like there's an army of startups out there that are trying to solve their problems. It's actually just the established players that are invited to participate in RFPs.”

“So the punchline to answer your question is we often need crises to drive change because these organizations are fairly conservative and slow moving and they are monopolistic. But interestingly, technology is going to reveal little mini crises inside these fun…”

“What it shifts from is not so much catastrophic risk, not so much existential risk, Run on the bank type risks. It turns into more, how do you most efficiently use risk, most efficiently deploy it?”

“It's a pension fund is not levered. So it's one of the only pools of capital on the planet that doesn't actually have balance sheet leverage. So you're talking about a public pension funds, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds. These are the unlevered pools …”

“We are 50th best performing out of 50, and so there's a lot of desire to help fix that and move it up the curve that is really appealing to certain people.”

“When might Delta not be able to stand up to that pledge that they made in those early days, which is we're going to pay the five percent mandatory. And if you don't hit a nine percent expected return, we're going to stand up and make it like you did make a nin…”

“They've outperformed so much that the rebalancing that you're going to see in every pension fund, in every endowment, away from these strategies back towards listed equities or back towards, frankly, just bonds, it should be relentless.”

“The barriers to this industry in institutional asset management are so low. Anybody can start a fund. They can call up whomever it is, pension fund, and try and get meetings.”

“Much of the innovation in pension funds is courage-based. Some leaders fed up, and they're willing to put their job on the line.”

“Oftentimes a pension fund will say, oh, we're really innovative. We're an amazing partner to our funds. They bring us a co-investment and we respond in 15 days. I have to remind them, what you've just described is speed and efficiency. It's the opposite of inn…”

“The classic one is a crisis, internal or external. The next classic one is a leader. That leadership change Leads to some new innovation and on and on and on.”

“They have quietly become the most important organizations in the world, and I don't put a caveat on that one. They are the cornerstone of our modern social welfare state. They are integrated into so much policymaking from Saudi Arabia to United States to Austr…”

“I don't love that framing. I love thinking about how technology unlocks additional basis points of return. It gives permission to pension funds to spend more money. Especially on the initial setup cost of getting your data right.”

“I don't think we do a great job of explaining to technologists what we do as pension funds.”

“You can take a simple combination of equities and bonds, and it will track the actual portfolio very closely. And that'll be the case for most pension funds.”

“People think you get fired for underperforming in bear markets, which is nonsense. In a serious bear market, the client becomes catatonic.”

“You can be an early mover at a leading college endowment more easily than most people can. A pension fund officer of a medium-large firm has got so much career risk he doesn't know whether he's coming or going.”