Dunn: Wake Forest trustees voted to hire Bernie Madoff in blind test
Jim Dunn · Jim Dunn – Protect, Perform, Provide (Capital Allocators, EP.24) · Sep 4, 2017 · at 22:47
Jim Dunn describes running a blind due diligence test on the Wake Forest investment committee using Bernie Madoff's strategy to prove trustees cannot effectively pick managers in brief quarterly meetings.
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“So I gave them this big Wilshire book of 400 pages. It had this strategy, and I said, this is the kind of book that you typically get from a consultant. And it was a manager that was on the board of NASDAQ, and he was doing this and that. Eight billion dollars. He's never been down, and he does split strike conversions. You know where this leads. So I gave them Bernie Madoff. And they all said, let's hire this guy. I said, well, you've hired Bernie Madoff. You can't do in your 30 minutes a quarter, or an hour a quarter, the work you need to do to get the right kind of managers in the portfolio.”
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