The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 99 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Monk: Clean infrastructure assets cannot support 2-and-20 fee structures
“And when they look to the traditional private equity funds or infrastructure funds to see if there are exciting products there, they don't see any because the fee structures are too high for the underlying assets. They won't, those assets won't support a two a…”
Monk: Few institutional asset owner advisors are truly unconflicted
“I don't see a lot of people out there that are unconflicted in their thinking or remarks.”
Monk: Adopting Total Portfolio Approach requires completely changing fund organizational structure
“If you're going to go from a strategic asset allocation to a total portfolio approach, that's a shift in asset allocation. Can't do that in a vacuum. You're going to have to completely change your organization and how you're implementing it, and that's the par…”
Monk: Total Portfolio Approach will be obvious standard in 22 years
“It's the future. 22 years from now, we'll be like total portfolio approach. That's so funny. We weren't doing that.”
Monk: NZ Super Fund eliminated individual asset-class compensation links
“I can remember the New Zealand Superfund, which is one of the best total portfolio investors having to scrub out all of the individual portfolio links to their compensation. It was total fund, qualitative metrics for compensation.”
Monk: TPA shifts the institutional unit of work to knowledge analysis
“The unit of work becomes knowledge work instead of deal work. The unit of work is different. It's not capital deployment. It's not bucket filling. It's something else moving you towards your objective, intelligent understanding of additionality in your portfol…”
Monk: TPA infrastructure enables rapid counter-cyclical investing
“Once you have these systems in place, you could pivot around beliefs, assumptions. It also allows you to be counter-cyclical very quickly. If markets move quickly, you're going to be able to buy low, and if you feel like things are inflated, you can sell high.”
Monk: Recruiting senior talent into pure TPA structures is difficult
“By the way, that's going to help you to recruit and retain human beings. It's hard to recruit and do a TPA. You recruit people into private equity jobs, real estate jobs, because we demand, especially at the senior levels, a certain level of expertise and netw…”
Monk: 15-year private asset commitments restrict dynamic TPA portfolio adjustments
“If you're a big private equity infrastructure investor, you're probably a little nervous about the TPA push. It's hard to do TPA when you're making a 15 year commitment. You're planting seeds that are going to take a long time to grow. It's harder to move arou…”
Monk: AI Inference Will Primarily Benefit Long-Term Pension Allocators
“That's what I'm mostly excited about, and that inference is gonna benefit the long-term pension fund investors. They're the ones that are managing assets over longer horizons, where inference, insight, have enough time to get priced.”
Monk: Development funds must generate high returns to become industry role models
“Very few pensions are going to copy a development fund that is delivering two percent return. But if there's a development fund like a Tomasek that is out there driving really high performance, then all of a sudden they could become a role model that gets copi…”
Monk: Australian super funds lead in real-time private market valuation
“There's now the big eight Australian super funds. They're doing a lot on private market real time valuation because you can move from one super fund to another super fund in real time.”
Monk: PGGM is launching 3D TPA across risk, return, and impact
“PGGM in the Netherlands, so they're about to launch their version of TPA, which is exciting because PGGM has what they call three D TPA, three dimensions, risk, return, and impact. Every deal gets analyzed in terms of those three dimensions.”
Monk: Large funds need technologists and data infrastructure experts on boards
“Just as we're sort of achieving that, I'm going to turn around and go back to them and say, we need technologists, people who've built data infrastructure. We need the right skills on these boards. If you're going to make a hundred million dollar investment in…”
Ashby Monk: True GP-LP partnerships drive uncompensated value for allocators
“The sign of a good partnership is you help drive a change in your partner's portfolio that you don't get paid for.”
Monk: Most pension fund innovation requires leaders risking their jobs
“Much of the innovation in pension funds is courage-based. Some leaders fed up, and they're willing to put their job on the line.”
Monk: Pension funds fail to explain their operations to technologists
“I don't think we do a great job of explaining to technologists what we do as pension funds.”
Monk: Crises and leadership changes trigger institutional fund innovation
“The classic one is a crisis, internal or external. The next classic one is a leader. That leadership change Leads to some new innovation and on and on and on.”
Monk: Asset owners manage $120T opaque to most finance professionals
“So that's a 120 trillion dollars in capital that kind of exists in this opaque world to the broader community of Researchers, but also people that just are operating in the financial services industry.”
Monk: Investment risk budgets must align with board governance capacity
“The concept is you need to align your risk budget with your governance budget, which is to say you can't take on a ton of risk in your risk budget unless you have a board that has the time and capacity and skills to really understand the portfolio and to prope…”
Monk: Asset owner boards lack tech and data leaders
“I don't see a lot of technologists sitting on boards of directors of pension funds or sovereign funds or endowments. You see lots of ex-finance professionals. You see lots of representative people coming out of the constituencies, teachers, firemen, public emp…”
Monk: Tech's primary allocator unlock is internal portfolio visibility
“If you get your tech stack right, fundamentally transforms what you know about yourself. It's less about what you know about the world. It's great to use technology and chat GPT to go collect knowledge on the world, but ultimately I think the real unlock with …”
Monk: Average institutional investor spends just 1-2 bps on tech
“Right now, I would say in my community, the average institutional investor is spending somewhere between one and two basis points of AUM on their tech stack”
Monk: Portfolio data infra will spawn tech verticals like GPS did
“We've built a lot of different businesses on GPS. There's Lyft, Uber, there's Amazon, there's DoorDash, there's all this stuff that exists as a function of GPS. And I think we're going to get a lot of those verticals coming in the investment sphere in the next…”
Monk: Allocators should target specific cash flows over generic 7.2% returns
“Right now, when you say, oh, I need 7.2%, which is a very generic destination, everybody's like, well, I need this amount of private equity, and I need that amount of hedge fund. But when you say, no, no, here's your confidence interval for the amount of cash …”
Monk: Major pension funds spend $30M to $100M annually on tech
“We're talking 30 to a hundred million bucks a year going into technology. By the way, the problem I have with the fact that not everybody knows this is all these technologists at places like Stanford or Princeton or Harvard, they don't even know that these pen…”
Monk: Big pension funds rely on established tech vendors over startups
“So when these big pension funds need technology, it's not like there's an army of startups out there that are trying to solve their problems. It's actually just the established players that are invited to participate in RFPs.”
Monk: Tech allows endowments to execute the Yale Model more effectively
“Part of me thinks the technologized model is going to empower them to be even better at the Yale model. Why? Because you're just going to have much more confidence in how your GPs draw and return capital.”
Monk: Conservative asset owners only innovate when forced by crises
“So the punchline to answer your question is we often need crises to drive change because these organizations are fairly conservative and slow moving and they are monopolistic. But interestingly, technology is going to reveal little mini crises inside these fun…”
Monk: Australian superannuation fund mergers act as natural innovation drivers
“I think the mergers that you're seeing in Australia are a natural driver of innovation. You're bringing these big teams together, smushing them and seeing what are the best practices that emerged.”
Monk: Allocator collaboration succeeds best in middle and back-office functions
“Collaboration is often incredibly effective where organizations don't feel like they're really competing to deliver out performance is like these middle back office functions or thinking through like, how do we design a legal function? Those are parts that I'v…”
Monk: The investment industry lacks tools to evaluate market recovery shapes
“And so weirdly, we don't have great tools in the investment industry to think about the shape of recoveries. And so we have a lot of work through MPT on drawdowns, on value at risk, We do a lot of work on volatility and variance, but we don't think as much abo…”
Monk: Portfolios can diversify by drawdown duration, not just volatility
“You can diversify your portfolio according to submergence. You don't just have to diversify according to risk factors and volatility and things like that. You can say, well, this type of asset has this submergence profile, and that asset has this submergence p…”
Monk: Most public pensions and endowments lack aligned definitions of success
“I've done this in a research project in the last four years, and I have to tell you, I was blown away that most of these organizations actually have different definitions of success.”
Monk: Granular cash flow modeling allows pension funds to hold less cash
“We found that if you can really kind of model out those cash flows that we were talking about, cash flows, liquidity, unfunded pacing commitments and all of that you can drive. In fact, there's a UK based pension fund that did this. You can drive these organiz…”
Monk: Measuring diversity prompted London Pension Protection Fund to alter strategy
“And then most recently, the neat one that I saw was PPF in London recently, Pension Protection Fund. They measured the diversity and inclusion in their organization and portfolio, and realized the moment they started measuring it that there was like fundamenta…”
Monk: Asset owners innovate by pooling career risk with peer institutions
“How is like we've seen, and I've written about this like collaborative model of investment where Pension funds and endowments and sovereign funds will come together and collaborate. They'll pool resources. They will pool career risk. If I'm working with Ontari…”
Monk: COVID-19 pandemic will be remembered for triggering digital transformation
“The crisis that we're living through now will go down as the crisis that like triggered the digital transformation and frankly, the integration of ESG, but that'll be kind of a secondary part of that digital transformation.”
Monk: Unifying institutional portfolio data across custodians and GPs takes months
“What was really hard to do was to get all the data unified, to get it into the system. It could take six months. It's like when you said at Yale we had all this data. It's a huge lift to get this stuff out of
The custodians, out of the general partners, out of…”
Monk: Pennsylvania pension staff interviews required speaking before 40 colleagues
“My interview at one of those organizations was me sitting in a room with 40 people, and every single person had to say what they were going to say to me in front of the other 40 people.”
Monk: Pension boards need technical expertise on derivatives to enforce accountability
“All these organizations need boards of directors that can like hold the staff accountable, that understand derivatives contracts and how they're priced and what the tail risks are for certain different assets.”
Monk: Gamification and variable rewards are behavioral finance's next phase
“Our thinking and our thinking remains that this is the next phase of behavioral finance. And what we think of as like the nudges of personal finance, we're going the next step. Which is to bring a bunch of extrinsic motivators, gains, variable rewards, into th…”
Monk: UC secures aligned manager terms using its research ecosystem
“And over the last three years of watching Jagdeep Bashir and his team implement on that, I can tell you that works. Like, they're getting into managers on terms that I would describe as aligned, and I never would have imagined we could actually do it.”
UC CIO partnered with Vivek Ranadivé's Bow Capital for deal flow
“We partnered with Bo Capital, which is in effect the entity that is UC Ventures. And that's a guy named Vivek Ranadive that's running that. We partnered with them, and we brought the deal flow that is privileged to the University of California to the partnersh…”
Monk: Showing external fees beside internal budgets forces governance changes
“If you could take the fees that were being paid to external managers and present them back to the board alongside the internal budgets that were being paid to staff, the inevitable question time and time again that came out of the mouths of the board members w…”
Monk: UC Investments cut manager relationships from 340 to 120
“Like, at UC, when we got there three years ago, I think this is all public, but it's, we had about 340 fund relationships, and now Jeg Deep and the team has whittled that down to something like a 120.”