Insight
Over-communicating during crises keeps allocator assets sticky
“The firms that over-communicate during crises are the ones that have the sticky assets.”
Insight
Puns fail online and digital headlines require descriptive wording
“When you read an article in the New Yorker in print, the title is often a pun. It's like three or four words. You go online and look at the same story. The title is different. It's much more descriptive. And that's not just for search engine reasons. It's beca…”
Insight
Generic titles like 'Our Views' ruin high-effort asset management research
“I've just had a team of PMs and writers sit down and give 12 hours of their, like, scarce time
To writing this piece about fixed income, I don't want to screw it up by calling it our views on fixed income. You've just taken this gift and like thrown it in the …”
Insight
Institutional asset managers never win mandates from SEO search queries
“SEO is table stakes. Having your website optimized for search are table stakes, but us and institutional asset managers You're never getting a mandate via, like, no one types in hundred million dollar core fixed income search help.”
Insight
Email remains by far the most effective distribution medium
“Email is still by far the most helpful medium, and that is the case for marketers too.”
Disclosure
Institutional Investor is financially an events business, not a media brand
“99.9% of the people who are aware of Institutional Investor think of us as a media brand, and we are a media brand, but if you are a bean counter, we are an events business.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Only 15,000 individuals are true asset allocator decision-makers in the US
“It's probably 15,000 individuals who are really decision makers at the asset allocators.”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
McDaniel predicts Scott Malpass will never leave Notre Dame
“Some people, Scott Malpass, will never leave Notre Dame. He's in his dream job.”
Disclosure
Institutional Investor writers must anticipate who they will upset
“When we're writing stuff at Institutional Investor, we're trying to be what I call responsibly provocative. We never are gonna slander anyone. We're never gonna be mean about it, but sometimes people do wrong or do poorly in this industry, and we have to be wi…”
Insight
CIOs name Canadian and Australian funds as most respected peers
“The question I ask in every meeting with CIOs is which one of your peers do you respect the most? And there's a lot of commonality there. They'll always say one of the Canadian plans, They'll always mention an Australian or a sort of Nordic style plan and then…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McDaniel receives fake tips monthly aimed at undermining competitors
“I would say once a month I get an email that's clearly a made up Gmail account sending me something.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Asset manager threatened a $100M defamation lawsuit over an investigative story
“We, I was threatened with a hundred million dollar lawsuit. They never filed it, and in my view, it was a bullying tactic. We wrote something about an asset manager. I was the editor of the story, and we wrote something about this firm that I know to this day …”
Insight
A long-term horizon is often an allocator's only competitive advantage
“We all know that the, one of the major advantages is being long-term. That is, in some cases, the only advantage an institutional investor has.”
Prediction Held up
Average private fund fees have dropped to 1.5 and 18
“Now, I think that's going the way of the dodo. You know, it's, what is it, 1.5 and 18 now, but nothing says it's going to rebound to where it was. In average.”
Insight
Asset managers offer economic concessions to secure Yale seed capital
“You know, asset managers would love seed capital from Yale, and we're willing to give up a lot to get it, because of what it tells the market for the next fund.”
Assertion Contradicted
Nearly all US corporate pension funds use risk parity strategies
“You'd be hard pressed to find a corporate fund without risk parity.”
Opinion
NISA and Legal & General dominate the US LDI space
“I think of a NISA investment advisors who are just, you know, along now with legal in general, really own the liability-driven investing space in America.”
Assertion Supported
Canadian pension governance structures insulate compensation from political control
“The Canadians really set up the model so they're paying market wages. They may not be able to pay as much as Goldman Sachs in Toronto, but they're pretty darn close. They also set it up so that pay doesn't, it's not one year thing, it's three or five year thin…”
Insight
Clever asset managers prioritize Australia's highly sophisticated capital pools
“You can always tell which asset managers Are clever by the ones that invest a lot of time in Australia. Bridgewater was a very early player in that space, because I think Ray Dalio understood that these people were very sophisticated, and there's money coming …”
Opinion
Australian institutional investors operate on par with top Canadian pensions
“When you ask people about the sharpest investors, Future Fund, Aussie Super, Uni Super down there, They're doing things that the Canadians are also doing.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Investment consultants have not lost their power since 2009
“They were saying that when I started covering this in O-Nine, and I, as far as I can tell, consultants haven't lost an iota of power. They're gonna be here”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Institutional Investor U.S. readership grew from 1.1M to 2M+ by FY2019
“Whereas in 2017 we had 1.1 million U.S. Readers, in 2019 fiscal we had two million plus readers.”
Insight
Clickbait headlines are the fastest way to ruin a brand
“Clickbait effectively is a title that doesn't match
The content. It's a promise that's not delivered. And so when we title an article, it's gotta be aligned with the actual content that it's sitting over top of. There's no worse way to ruin your brand quickly …”
Disclosure
Kip McDaniel pledges never to moderate another chief economist worldview panel
“Never again will I moderate a panel where I, I'm going to listen to chief economist worldviews.”
