Brandywine overlooked broken culture while underwriting a complex quant strategy
Jenny Heller · Jennifer Heller – Beginner's Mind with Professional Wisdom at Brandywine (Capital Allocators, EP.211) · Aug 30, 2021 · at 31:00
Jenny Heller, CIO of Brandywine Group Advisors, reflects on past diligence failures where excessive analytical focus on complexity blinded the investment team to fundamental organizational risks.
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“And I'm thinking in particular of quant for us, which is a space where we invested in A manager that was sort of a tax scheme, and it seemed very clever, and it was a factor strategy, so we spent a lot of time looking at factor research and understanding all of the reasons why the strategy should work out, and we missed some real basics on a broken culture and team dynamics and research dynamics that were very, very broken at an organization that were what ended up really hurting the firm in the long term.”
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