Opinion certainty 4/5 debate potential 4/5

Arndt: Future Fund avoids large buyouts, viewing them as fee-eroded levered equities

Raphael Arndt · CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund) · Sep 1, 2025 · at 41:05

Raphael Arndt, CIO of Australia's Future Fund, explains the sovereign wealth fund's distinctive private equity strategy to Ted Seides.

0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 portfolio.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Raphael Arndt

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.”
Raphael Arndt Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 44:09 CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund)
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…”
Raphael Arndt Sep 24, 2018 ▶ 42:29 Raphael Arndt – Australia's Sovereign Wealth Fund CIO (Capital Allocators, Episode 70)
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…”
Raphael Arndt Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 14:28 CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund)
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…”
Raphael Arndt Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 29:20 CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund)
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…”
Raphael Arndt Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 29:58 CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund)
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.”
Raphael Arndt Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 35:37 CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund)
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 700 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.