Andy Golden
Former President, PRINCO · 3 appearances on the record.
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investorexecutive
Golden led the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO) as president from 1995 to 2024, overseeing the endowment's growth from roughly $3.5 billion to nearly $35 billion. He previously worked at the Yale Investments Office under David Swensen and at Duke Management Company.
49statements → 5claims → 1claims resolved → 3.86/5average certainty → 2.06/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 28said about them ↓
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 4 assertions · 5 opinions · 22 insights · 17 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Andy argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Andy Golden on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Andy Golden said on Capital Allocators that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Golden: In investing, theory can outweigh conflicting empirical data
“Being able to have an appreciation of theory over data in the right bounds is key. You know, there are times when you want to say, if the data don't support the theory, the data are wrong, right?”
Golden: Since 2009, there has been an active cost to portfolio diversification
“It's still, you know, since 2009, the frustration has still been that not just zero return to diversification, there's been a cost to diversification, but there's also been a cost to hard work.”
PRINCO entered the 2020 crisis with a significant bet against US stocks
“We had also not done that evenly and had a fairly significant bet against the US stock market. Which was helpful in March.”
Golden in April 2020: China is the least troubled financial market
“China is the least troubled area in terms of markets right now.”
Dislocation drawdown vehicles force allocators to suboptimize their portfolios
“I have long been frustrated by a trend among Marketable managers to create drawdown vehicles to be used in market dislocations because it causes us to suboptimize our portfolio.”
Golden: Performance attribution studies are rarely worth the paper they're written on
“You know, attribution studies tend not to be worth the paper they're written on, and I believe or not can go on long about that.”
Golden: PRINCO allocates 4% of the endowment to a single equity manager
“Within domestic equity, we've got 40% of that 10%. Your listeners can do the math. It's about four points with just one manager, right?”
Golden: Most institutions suffer from over-diversification rather than concentration
“I think most institutions are much more prone to over-diversification or its cousin de-worsification, as Pierre Lynch would say than they are the opposite issue.”
Golden: PRINCO wouldn't invest in hedge funds for median returns
“If we were condemned to produce the median return of the hedge fund space, there's I don't think we'd have any allocation.”
Golden: LPs should optimize private equity fees, not just minimize them
“On the specific point about fees, we believe it's important to optimize fees, not minimize fees. And we want to make sure that the firms actually have, you know, revenues to the principles that are enough to make them silly rich without having to find some oth…”
Golden: Base management fees should not create major wealth for fund managers
“Base level fees really should not be the source of major wealth.”
Golden: Lateral investment hires often fail to adapt beyond fixed recipes
“And what we're really looking for are first principle thinkers as opposed to learn a recipe and just use that recipe, which is one of the reasons why it's often difficult to bring the lateral higher in because they've got a certain way of doing it, and it's ha…”
Golden: Rotating devil's advocate processes sound better than they actually work
“Process of that rotating assigned devil's advocate sounds a whole lot better than it actually is. We still haven't cracked the code as to how they're really implemented”
Golden: Over half of PRINCO's worst investment decisions involved political friction
“I only got to about number seven or eight when I realized that more than half of them shared this characteristic of there was some kind of political element”
Golden: Quantitative manager selection fails because return engines do not stay stable
“You can't get enough data to base a decision without, you know, running afoul of a key premise, which is that the engine that produced that is stable, right? And that nothing's changed.”
Golden: PRINCO holds heavy China exposure but hedges RMB currency risk
“We've got, if you were to dig deep enough, you would say, oh, I bet you they've got a lot of investment in China.
Yeah, we do.
And so maybe we want to take that RMB exposure down a little bit, because that's something you could imagine having, you know, a real…”
Andy Golden: Backing managers everyone roots for creates true force multiplication
“We want to work with people that we know that everyone who meets them is going to root for them, because that's where you'll really get the force multiplication.”
Golden: Early COVID-19 volatility surpassed the 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse
“During what I think is objectively the most volatile markets in my career, even compared to the Lehman days, you gotta understand Is there anything particularly unusual going on?”
Developing internal talent requires showing juniors how decisions are made
“You can only grow your own talent if you don't grow well, at least if they see not just the output of decisions, but see the how the sausage is getting made.”
PRINCO prioritizes post-crisis culture over exploiting immediate market opportunities
“In terms of big worries right now, a surprisingly large share of my worries are not about getting through this crisis, not even about Exploiting as much of the opportunity created by the crisis as possible. It's more about what happens after the crisis and how…”
Investors are likely overconfident about understanding their portfolios during crises
“Like, yeah, you probably are overconfident in your ability to Know what's actually going on in your portfolio, let alone know what's going on in the world.”
Universities must evaluate liquidity holistically rather than isolating the endowment
“One of the lessons that we actually learned as opposed to were reminded of during the global financial crisis was a benefit of looking at liquidity in a unified way across the university. So it's not so much about how we're deploying liquidity within the endow…”
PRINCO paused offensive capital deployment during the early 2020 market crisis
“We're really hitting pause on the offense for now, because it's just so hard to figure out.”
The 2020 crisis may accelerate asset manager adoption of drawdown vehicles
“I think one of the issues that may come out of this current crisis, Is that for those few managers who were willing to just play it more informally, they're going to be processing the advantage that some of those managers with the legal draw had, and it may ac…”
The other half of the tape: Andy Golden's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 23 times in 9 episodes on Capital Allocators. 5 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 8Jen Birmingham 8Tony Yoseloff 1Margaret Chen 1Kip McDaniel 1
Statements about Andy Golden, by other people (5)
Time Horizon Is the Only Durable Risk Premium Left in Investing
“He said that all of the risk premia have been arbitraged away, except for one. He said, horizon. People just need cash sooner. And by being a long-term liquidity provider, you know, if we can be, he, I think his phrase is BLT investor, if we can be a beyond th…”
PRINCO intentionally preserves inefficient large meetings to improve organizational learning
“It is ok to be inefficient sometimes if you are more effective in the learning process. So we have huge meetings. One might say that would be much more efficient if there was just five of us. We'd probably come to the same decision. Be done with it. However, y…”
Seides: David Swensen's Yale disciples consistently outperformed peer endowments
“There is something to the structure of what Yale did and the discipline that has been proven that David has been able to teach other people. It could Seth Alexander, who I worked with, and Paul Valente at Bowdoin, and Andy Golden at Princeton, and Peter Ammon …”
Ted Seides: Allocators Are Probably Better Off Balancing Growth and Value
“You're probably better off being balanced between the two. Because if you get too far ahead of your skis and you're wrong, if you're right in the long term but you don't survive to the long term, I think as Andy Golden said on one of the shows, finish first, y…”
PRINCO Mandates Every Team Member Vote on Investments Without Abstaining
“The culmination of all of that work comes to a bull bear decision meeting, and that is just the Prinko team, and we all vote. So we have this voting dynamic, two right pound the table, two left Negative, or one and one. You have to vote, though. You can't abst…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2024 4 mentions in 1 episode
2023 14 mentions in 4 episodes 4 per episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2018 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
Appearances (3)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Allan Jean-Baptiste and Marco DeMeireles – Under-covered Venture Markets and Teams at Ansa | Sep 1, 2022 | 5m |
| Andrew Golden – Navigating Princeton's Endowment Through (Another) Crisis (Capital Allocat | Apr 23, 2020 | 23m |
| Andrew Golden – Beyond the Long Term (Capital Allocators, EP.13) | Jun 26, 2017 | 56m |