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 339 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Seides: The subprime short trade psychologically ruined some winning managers
“And one of the things you saw afterwards with some of the people who were in that trade without pointing to any particular manager, is that it almost changed the way they thought. They did something that was perfect, and then they proceeded to search for the n…”
Seides: Median Private Equity Has Historically Outperformed the S&P 500
“Middle market's been better than large. Small has been better than middle market. Median has outperformed the S&P. Bottom quartile, definitely not. Top quartile by a lot.”
Seides: Zero Institutional LPs Admit Their PE Portfolios Are Below Median
“I've asked at every AGM I've spoken to this year, please raise your hand if you think your private equity portfolio is median or below. And there isn't a single hand that's ever gone up. Everyone playing is playing for the top quartile.”
Seides: Proposed PE vs. S&P 500 Wager Found No Public-Side Counterparty
“At the end of the day, there wasn't anyone to take the public equity side of the bet. I reached out to some friends at Vanguard, but Vanguard isn't just a public equity index fund manager.”
Seides: Successful Venture Bets Create Trapped, Unexited Growth Equity Allocations
“So what's happened is a lot of the institutional allocation portfolios who never used to invest in growth equity, their most successful venture investments have created a very meaningful bucket of growth equity that they can't exit.”
Seides: Magnificent Seven AI valuations are probably a price bubble
“Is that a bubble in price? Probably. It's probably not a bubble in the underlying economic activity of the businesses. But Mag seven went from these dominant cash flow machines to taking all the cash flow and spending it in something that has an unknown ROI.”
Seides: Institutional allocator sentiment toward China is cycling back
“The only thing that's been interesting to watch has been China, because two, three years ago, China was going to be out of portfolios. Then you have a year where Chinese stocks perform really well, and now these things are cyclical. The U.S.-China relationship…”
Seides: AI Down Rounds Will Trigger Significant Private Market Valuation Compression
“So I will say whether it's next year or the year after the year after, I would be shocked if there isn't a significant compression. Maybe starts with the valuations of private AI companies and significant down rounds, and maybe that has downstream effects beca…”
Seides: Public Market Active Managers Poised for Outperformance
“I think people will be talking about public markets and the potential for outperformance from active managers because you're teed up pretty well to have a good period of time for active managers.”
Seides: Median Private Equity Barely Beats Market While Median Hedge Funds Lag
“And I can say the median private equity fund probably does a little bit better than the market. The median hedge fund probably doesn't get you that much. The median real estate fund probably gets you some beta of real estate.”
Seides: Wealth Channel Lacks Institutional Diligence Muscle for Top-Quartile Alts
“There's so much knowledge, experience, attention, resources deployed to try to get at who's better. And I'm not sure the wealth channels caught up with that yet.”
Seides: Retail hedge fund products were watered down due to capacity constraints
“And right around the time that started happening, the hedge fund products were pretty watered down. And the hedge fund managers saw that they were capacity constrained. They didn't want to give their best stuff. So I will give you the long book and we'll hedge…”
Seides: LLMs Won't Make Final Investment Decisions Anytime Soon
“It'll be a long time, unless you're a quant manager, before the ultimate decision gets made by an LLM.”
Seides: Dietrich Foundation allocates 90% to private assets and 30% to China
“Earlier this year, I had Ed Grefenstedt, who's the CIO of the Dietrich Foundation. And I'll just tell you one thing, then you'll say, wait, that's possible. 90% in privates, like half of that's in venture, like as much as 20 or 30% in China.”
Seides: Top Six Wealth Platforms Committed $110B to Funds Last Year
“According to Arctos Partners, the six largest private banking and wire house platforms committed a hundred and ten billion dollars to funds last year. Approximately twice the amount invested from the six largest institutional investors in North America.”
Seides: Swensen model ignores that business growth improves manager performance
“And while that's pristine, there's a part of that that doesn't consider the necessity of a successful business in generating optimal investment performance. Oftentimes, allocators see a manager, they like getting there early, someone who's great, delivering pe…”
Ted Seides Predicts Yale Fellowship Will Face Deluge of Low-Quality Applications
“Yale will be deluged by inbound interest, most of which will be of lesser quality than Yale has reviewed historically.”
Yale Does Not Demand Equity Economics in Spinout Investment Firms It Backs
“Spinouts of top investment managers may find Yale an attractive partner, especially knowing that Yale does not ask for economics in the newly formed business.”
Yale Prospect Fellowship Terms Beat Most Other Sources of Startup Capital
“Those trade-offs are more attractive than the asks from most other sources of startup capital.”
Yale May Lose 'Allocator of Choice' Status Over Fellowship Dropouts
“As many of the fellowship managers return to the market and struggle without Yale's backing, Yale may find it more difficult to be seen as an emerging manager allocator of choice.”
Seides: Rational assessment favors firm growth over staying a boutique
“In almost any rational assessment, the playbook favors growth. Expanding organizations can attract and retain talent and capital, which creates durability. Staying the same may benefit from focus, but it carries significant business risk.”
Seides: Boutique managers are always one bad stretch away from failing
“A boutique manager is always one step away from a bad stretch of performance that creates an existential threat to the business.”
Seides: Boutique asset managers are not designed to survive founders
“Boutiques are not designed to outlast their founder. The investment offering rarely passes on to the next generation.”
Seides details his famous $1M hedge fund bet against Warren Buffett
“So he picked the Vanguard S&P, 500 index fund. We picked five fund of funds for 10 years for a million dollars for charity. The bet started in January one of 2008.”
Seides: PE Firms Struggle to Get Financing Due to Excessive Valuations
“The reason the private equity firms can't get the financing is because they're still trying to buy deals at valuations that are too high relative to what lenders are willing to lend.”
Vista Equity Took $1B NAV Loan for Finastra Refinancing
“In a recently publicized NAV loan transaction, Vista Equity Partners took a one billion dollar NAV loan to complete a five billion dollar refinancing for portfolio company Finastra.”
Carlyle, Hg Capital, and SoftBank Used NAV Loans for Distributions
“Carlyle, HG Capital, and SoftBank reportedly used NAV loans to distribute capital this year.”
LPs Lose to Double Fees Across NAV Lending and PE Funds
“In the case where an LP invests in a NAV lending fund that extends a loan to one of their private equity funds, that investor loses by the fees it pays to both sides, just like Jack Bogle's critique of active management in public equities.”
Fund-Level Capitalization Lets PE Sponsors Operate Like Holding Companies
“Capitalizing businesses fund by fund, instead of deal by deal, resembles a holding company in which the sponsor can efficiently acquire and allocate financing.”
Seides: Investors following David Swensen often misinterpret his theory
“Investors following David Swenson too often miss the mark in their interpretation of his theory. Like children playing the game telephone, they listen to other voices and echo beliefs with shakier foundations than Yale's.”
Seides: Active management faces steep obstacles in market efficiency and fees
“Investors hoping to beat the odds by playing the game of active management face daunting obstacles ranging from the efficiency and pricing of most marketable securities to the burden of extraordinary fees in most alternative asset investment vehicles. Success …”
Seides: Embracing illiquidity is not a first principle of the Yale Model
“Embracing illiquidity is not a first principle of the Yale model, despite many misinterpreting David's beliefs as such.”
Seides: Illiquid markets are far more efficient today than in the 2000s
“The illiquid markets today are far more efficient than they were in 2000 or 2009 when David published his groundbreaking work.”
Seides: Brinson Study Describes Investor Behavior, Not Finance Theory
“The study describes investor behavior, not finance theory. Investor behavior causes policy asset allocation to dominate portfolio returns, since institutions tend to hold stable commitments to a broadly diversified portfolio of marketable securities.”
Seides: Asset Allocation Drives Returns Only in the Rearview Mirror
“David was a staunch proponent of asset allocation, but he recognized that asset allocation drives returns in the rearview mirror. If investors choose equities, and equities outperform over time, then asset allocation mathematically dominates long-term return a…”
Seides: Private equity offers limited diversification from public markets
“He said, because of the strong fundamental links between private equity investments and marketable securities, private equity provides limited diversification to investors.”
Seides: Value proposition of thought leadership conferences has decreased, perhaps permanently
“As a result, the value proposition of thought leadership events has decreased, perhaps permanently.”
Seides: Sponsored podcast episodes outperformed non-sponsored episodes in average downloads
“Average downloads for sponsored episodes exceeded average downloads of non-sponsored episodes, confirming our belief that a good conversation would not suffer audience dilution solely because of sponsorship.”
Seides: Retail investors have an agility advantage over committee-laden institutions
“This is where retail investors can have an advantage over institutions. Institutions have boards. They have committees. They have all these things that come in the way between an individual saying, I want to make this investment and an answer at the end of the…”
Seides: Web3 daily applications are a decade away, not two years
“I do think that it's likely that the new wave of technology innovation is happening on blockchains. The applications that we're using every day, the most powerful ones, 20 years from now may well come out of this web three ecosystem. But I think that's a decad…”
Seides: Real-world long-term investing horizons practically cap at 3 to 5 years
“One of the things I've come to learn is that given the constraints that almost everyone has, an individual with their spending, an institution with their board, that the long term, if you can really think about it, probably gets to three to five years.”
Seides: Hedge funds are primarily risk-reduction and wealth-preservation tools
“You read about a hedge fund that makes big, big money, but hedge funds by and large are risk reduction, wealth preservation type vehicles when done well.”
Seides: The CFA curriculum fails to teach essential CIO management tools
“The first section is called toolkit and it's five tools interviewing decision-making or two of the five, the other three are negotiations, leadership and management. These are all things that CIOs and investment professionals need to be effective in their jobs…”
Seides: Allocators ignore base rates by assuming their hedge funds outperform
“Everyone I know doesn't think that a portfolio of hedge funds, generally speaking, will get them the returns that they need for their portfolio, but they do believe that their hedge funds will get them there.”
Seides: Most hedge funds ignore the military's 'troops eat first' rule
“You don't see that in a lot of hedge funds. The notion that troops each versa, you've got to take care of the people at the bottom of the pyramid to make sure everything works.”
Seides: Data-driven decision tools are misapplied in people-driven institutional allocation
“There are some current projects in process in those institutions, but I think it's not the right application. It really is the most people-driven portion of the investment industry.”