Soros Fund Management

“We can borrow against our public equities at Fed funds plus 20 basis points, lever up this safe but esoteric private credit, and it works really well.”

“So we allocate to 20 external hedge funds We allocate to over 90 external and private equity funds, and internally we have 28 portfolio managers and 17 kind of strategies or netting units”

“And if he was at a platform shop, he doesn't make it till September.”

“The private equity allocation that I inherited, and this goes back to our spend and what we're solving for being a little bit different than your typical foundation or endowment, we were over allocated to private equity generally with money in the ground and f…”

“So the interesting thing is the portfolio when I arrived was actually over diversified, I'd argue. So there weren't enough big bets in the portfolio.”

“This is neutral to what we expect to exist over kind of a five to seven year period, and for us, that equates to about a sixty-forty portfolio, so definitely not market neutral. That's fairly high octane, although it's less than your typical Foundation or endo…”

“So in public markets, we're about 75% internal and 25% external. And when I came in, we were about fifty-fifty.”

“When you look at equity long short managers, when they move beta, and we've looked at this a lot of different ways, we don't think there's real value added.”

“We really reduced the number of allocations we made to managers to try to increase the concentration and give ourselves the ability to make more big bets”

“That is a huge advantage that we have given, even with our external allocations, we get real-time price feeds on the vast majority of them.”

“If you have forward foundation commitments, that is effectively leverage in your portfolio.”

“When you aggregated our external managers and you took out kind of beta, which isn't hard to kind of approximate, we were not getting an excess return. It was Zero. And that's, you're paying a lot of fees, and you're adding a lot of complexity, and not getting…”

“We just had a firm that asked for an extension. The results of the so far have been poor. It's like a six percent IRR. They're asking for an extension where they want us to pay a management fee while they extend the call option of their performance fee.”

“The Open Society Foundation has a less elastic spend because it's a huge global organization, so the ability to maneuver spend very quickly, it's just harder, and in that context, you can't take as much risk”

“Amazingly, Stanley Druckenmiller was the chair of the committee at that time. He had just left Soros and was doing Duquesne”

“My contribution was just an observation that the British housing market, that mortgages there, floated with the base rate, which is their overnight rate. And if the Bank of England raised rates on Wednesday, mortgages went up on Friday. If they were trying to …”

“Because of the exchange rate mechanism, the Bank of England or the British government had to buy an unlimited number of pounds to keep the pound in a quarter. So it was an asymmetric bet. We could push them up against the wall And the most they could push us b…”

“A very good manager is someone you're proud to be invested with. They have good returns and you never have to worry about the phone call that things have gone pear-shaped. So that's a very good manager for an outside manager. A great manager would be someone w…”

“I think the greatest investment he ever made was finding Stan, because in He turned over the portfolio, but was still kind of actively involved from the sidelines. Then the following year when the Berlin Wall came down, he was able to spend more of his time on…”

“I think five days in, the biggest trade I'd ever done was John Corzine's firm got liquidated out of their Italian bond position, and it was a three and a half billion dollar trade. I still had the index card that I worked it out on. JP Morgan called us, and I …”

“There was a very good study from the Common Fund that said one of the most successful strategies for allocators that when you believe in the manager, and I always tried to do this when I was at Soros or any investment committee that I'm on, When a manager has …”