Opinion
Arndt: Future Fund avoids large buyouts, viewing them as fee-eroded levered equities
“Our portfolio has no large buyout at all, because we think that large buyout is really just levered equities, typically. And if there's skill added on top, and there might be, then most of that goes away in fees. So we don't think it adds a lot for the portfol…”
Opinion
Future Fund avoids brand-name PE managers that rely on leverage over operations
“Well, there's a lot of brand names we don't have, and it varies why, but one of the most significant reasons is because they just use leverage we found to juice up their returns, and we don't think that's attractive.”
Disclosure
Future Fund Avoids Large-Cap Buyouts Entirely in Private Equity Portfolio
“Our portfolio has no large buyout at all, because we think that, well, that makes the capacity so much harder, by the way, but we think that large buyout is really just levered equities, typically. And if there's skill added on top, and there might be, then mo…”
Disclosure
Future Fund: Tail-risk hedges make up roughly 20% of hedge fund book
“So we have a couple of hedge fund strategies that really are sort of volatility traders or tail protection type mandates. And if we had diversified hedge fund portfolio, and if the person running that or the team running that were incentivized just based on th…”
Disclosure
Arndt: Future Fund holds almost no physical bonds due to low yields
“We hold almost no physical bonds. We don't have any concept of liability matching. We've only got a return target, and bonds aren't paying all that well at the moment, so there doesn't seem to be a strong reason to hold them, but we do have some rates exposure…”
Disclosure
Future Fund manages zero assets internally, deploying capital via 120 external managers
“We actually don't manage any assets internally, so we use managers for all of our implementation, and we've probably got about a 120 or so managers on the books at the moment, and would like it not to grow too much more than that, just so that we have the band…”
Opinion
Arndt: Stock-Picking Skill in Equities Is Rapidly Arbitraged Away by Technology
“We don't think that skill is widely available in equity markets today. Technology means that it's being arbitraged away very quickly.”
Opinion
Arndt: Large multi-strategy hedge funds often charge alpha fees for pure beta
“Those large hedge fund, sort of multi-strategy hedge funds, Many of them have delivered significant beta, whether it's equity beta or credit beta, and that is not something we want to pay for.”
Insight
Arndt: Not enough alpha exists globally to actively deploy a $45B equity book
“Today the equity book is maybe forty-five billion dollars, and we're just not going to find enough skill out there in the world to invest forty-five billion dollars”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Arndt: Only 6% to 7% of venture capital managers return enough capital
“Venture managers don't return capital, and only six or seven percent return enough capital to justify their existence.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Arndt: Chance of US recession over three years is quite high
“So, we think the chance of a recession in the US is quite high over, say, a three-year time horizon, and it doesn't appear that markets are currently pricing that in.”
Insight
Arndt: Static 'Set and Forget' Portfolio Allocation Is Dead
“And so really, in saying the death of traditional portfolio construction, and my team made me put a question mark on the end of the title, because we're really calling for a debate, but I guess I personally think it is. What we're really saying is there might …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Arndt: Future Macro Regime Demands Less Reliance on Equities and Bonds
“When we look at the world going forward, we see more inflation, more volatility, probably wars, at least in localized places more frequently, deglobalization, more populist governments that will direct capital, all those things detract from economic growth, al…”
Disclosure
Future Fund Added Gold in 2020 to Hedge Populist Currency Debasement
“In 2020 we put gold into the portfolio for the first time because we saw that more populist governments would be more likely to print money or otherwise debase their currencies because that's what governments always do when they're in those sort of situations,…”
Insight
Arndt: Diversification Requires Granular Scenario Modeling, Not Asset-Class Labels
“I don't use the word diversification because we don't assume asset classes behave differently in a particular way. We try to look through that in a more granular way to say, well, these subsets, let's say, of real estate in these geographies will behave this w…”
Disclosure
Future Fund Holds Almost No Physical Bonds Due to Low Yields
“We hold almost no physical bonds. We don't have any concept of liability matching. We've only got a return target, and bonds aren't paying all that well at the moment, so there doesn't seem to be a Strong reason to hold them, but we do have some rates exposure…”
Opinion
Arndt: Many Large Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds Merely Deliver Expensive Beta
“Those large hedge fund, sort of multi-strategy hedge funds, many of them have delivered significant beta, whether it's equity beta, or credit beta, or other sort of momentum type exposure. And that is not something we want to pay for.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Arndt: There Is Not Enough Global Skill to Allocate $45B to Alpha
“Today the equity book is maybe forty-five billion dollars, and we're just not going to find enough skill out there in the world to invest forty-five billion dollars”
Opinion
Arndt: Total-Fund Fee Caps Exclude Essential Private Equity and VC Investments
“Some of our local peers here in superannuation who have to compete for members have decided to go down a road of setting a fee budget for the whole fund, and then reporting those fees as a competitive advantage in their marketing, and we think that risks cutti…”
Opinion
Arndt: Institutional portfolios rely on flawed, backward-looking CAPM assumptions
“Most funds, I would say, they're quite backward looking in their portfolio construction. What I mean by that is they take their sort of CAPM theory and their main variance optimization, and they look at historic data, and they then optimize the portfolio using…”
Insight
Arndt: Populist Politics Usually Drags on Growth and Drives Inflation
“Populist politics in general is usually detractive from economic growth and inflationary.”
Disclosure
Arndt: Aggregating 20 active equity mandates entirely cancelled out to pure beta
“When we aggregated up all of the maybe 20 or so mandates we had across that portfolio, by and large they cancelled each other out at the whole portfolio level, and I would have expected we would end up with something like beta less fees. Now, actually, as I sa…”
Disclosure
Future Fund Migrated Equity Alpha to Market-Neutral Hedge Funds
“Mainly our alpha program has now migrated to long short market neutral hedge funds, because we can pick Managers with pure skill, and it's very evident if they have it or not very quickly.”
Insight
Arndt: LPs should not re-underwrite deals during co-investments
“We don't try to re-underwrite the deal. We've already underwritten this manager, we've already backed them, and we trust them.”
