Insight
Hynes: Biopharma must price rare diseases high and common diseases low
“I'm a big believer that this industry needs to price for the risk they take and the innovation they take, and they need to earn a return over the life cycle of their patents. And if you are going after a very large disease, such as cholesterol or heart failure…”
Opinion
Hynes: Lone-wolf investors do not belong at Wellington Management
“If someone wants to be a lone wolf and doesn't want to collaborate, they shouldn't be at Wellington. It's not the place for them. There are many very successful investors who probably are successful in their own right, but we wouldn't benefit from them and the…”
Disclosure
Hynes: Wellington does not cap or predetermine partnership size
“The size of our partnership will be determined by the amount of people that are having that kind of impact that allows us to grow, add capabilities, serve our clients in all parts of the world. We don't have a determined size.”
Insight
Hynes: Wellington partnership economics must beat launching an independent firm
“Our private partnership, the ability to become a partner and be an owner in the firm, and the economics have to work out that they're equal to better than setting up your shingles someplace else.”
Opinion
Hynes: Wellington investors launched hedge funds for strategy expression, not compensation
“I think we had interest in running hedge funds in longshore portfolios because we had just great investors who really understood their sectors. They were looking for avenues to express the whole sector. I don't think it was really because of the compensation. …”
Insight
Jean Hynes: Clients invest in privates solely for differentiated returns and illiquidity premium
“The only reason clients invest in privates is because you give differentiated returns. They take the illiquidity premium.”
Disclosure
Jean Hynes: Wellington will package private market boutiques into multi-strategy platforms
“I think we'll do it in the private space. You take all those small boutiques where people really spend their time and can optimize, but then we can scale them Through platforms and vehicles.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hynes: Market concentration will broaden, favoring active managers over index funds
“I think what will benefit active management is that Concentration broadens. I'm a big believer that those seven companies will be successful only if the benefits broaden to the economy around the world, and so I would suspect that you're in an environment in t…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hynes: Active therapeutic innovation areas have expanded from 15 to 40–50
“So if I look at over my career, there's probably been 15 areas of medicine in any rolling two or three-year period that was changing, and now there's probably 40 or 50 areas of medicine, so there's a lot more change happening in the sector than there has been …”
Insight
Hynes: Overly narrowing healthcare analysts' focus blinds them to 10-year industry changes
“The reason why 12 is enough is it's a very long cycle industry. So it is an industry that is, even though there's a lot of change happening, that change happens over 10 years to bring a drug to the market. And so we want to make sure we're covering all the com…”
Disclosure
Hynes: Wellington candidates undergo 20 to 30 interviews before joining
“One of the things they said is by the time you're done with these 20 or 30 interviews, you actually are ready to join.”
Disclosure
Hynes: Wellington rejects candidates who require star status
“It goes back to the fact that Wellington is not a star culture. So that goes back to who we hire, If someone needs to be a star, they're not going to be a good fit here.”
Assertion Supported
Hynes: Vanguard's philosophy is low cost across active and passive, not just indexing
“If you listen to Vanguard and what their philosophy is, they're not a passive company. Their philosophy is to be a low cost, both on the active side and the passive side, and there's a place for both passive and a place for active.”
Insight
Hynes: Sizing thematic insights across multi-stock baskets reduces risk
“Personally love when I can have an insight and I can do it in four or five or six stocks. So I might be able to do it in a big company. If you go back over a decade, if implementing a bet on diabetes, you could do it with big companies, you could do it with sm…”
Insight
Hynes: Investors must trim positions when valuations outpace timelines, even if liked
“Knowing at any point in time what that is worth. So there's a long time before this drug makes it to the market, and if it makes it to the market, it's going to be worth this, and sometimes it can get ahead of itself, so being very disciplined about scaling ba…”
Disclosure
Hynes: Wellington tracks sector inflows and IPOs instead of competitor positioning
“I guess we don't spend a lot of time looking at how our competitors are positioned. We try to be extremely independent. But saying that, what we do look at is what are inflows into sector funds? How many IPOs are happening? What's the inflows into the passive …”
Insight
Hynes: Rising data and IT costs threaten mid-sized active asset managers
“Differentiated investment insights about the world will still matter, but you're going to need to invest in IT, and you're going to need to invest in science to augment that art, and so how do mid-sized companies continue to make those investments? I know they…”
Insight
Hynes: Elongating the investment cycle is Wellington's competitive advantage
“People are very short-term. So it's not a pet peeve in the sense that I can ignore most of that short-termism. I mean, that's, I think, one of our competitive advantage, that we can elongate our cycle.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jean Hynes: Wellington candidates now undergo approximately 30 interviews
“I only had two interviews, not the typical 30 that we have now.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hynes: Wellington's $1.3T Platform Is Split Across Roughly 60 Teams
“So in our 1.3 trillion dollars, it really is approximately 60 teams across equities, across research sector teams, across fixed income, long short strategies, and now private strategies. Most are small teams of anywhere from two or three to up to 10 people tha…”
Assertion Supported
Hynes: Wellington manages around 250 products across 60 investment teams
“We have more products than the average asset manager. We have about 250 products and with 60 teams.”
Disclosure
Hynes: Wellington uses an oversight group to investigate alpha outliers
“We have an oversight group at the firm that looks across all of the investment platform and says, how is the whole investment platform? Are there any outliers? Are there outliers that are doing too well? Are there outliers that are doing not too well? And then…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hynes: Wellington turnover is under 10% overall and lower for investors
“The turnover in the organization overall is under 10%, and turnover of investors is lower than that.”
Disclosure
Jean Hynes: Wellington Management is now open to hiring intact investment teams
“Five years ago, we might say we were only going to hire a person and then build a team around them. We're more open to hiring teams.”
