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 2,568 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
JAMBOS offers a $10,000 payout if its football picks lose money
“If we're negative units, that means if you bet the same amount on every game, and you lose money, we will give you 10 thousand dollars back.”
Ries: LTSE Requires Boards to Track and Publish Stakeholder Metrics
“So we require companies to, at the board level, identify a committee of the board who has a fiduciary obligation to identify who the company's key stakeholders are. Identify what are the effects that you want to have on those stakeholders, then have the compan…”
UC Regents Required Buyouts to Offer Co-Investments or Hit 2.5x Net
“So we actually told our managers, if you cannot generate co-investment, there's not a role in the portfolio for you, unless you can, for buyout funds, unless you can generate a two and a half net fund returned to us. And so that's a pretty high bar. We general…”
Twenty-Five Managers Compose 80% of James Irvine Foundation's Total Assets
“And so, 25 managers make up 80% of the assets across all asset classes.”
Russo: Firm avoided Facebook because its engagement relies on unsustainable conduct
“And I haven't involved capital with Facebook, because within Facebook, though they are probably even more indispensable than Google in terms of programmatic advertising, part of the appeal has been the length of time and the height of passion that people exert…”
BlackRock backed small-business entity in Dish Network AWS-3 spectrum auction
“We did a wireless spectrum deal with Charlie Ergen and Dish Networks, where he was entering the spectrum auctions for the AWS three band, back to media and communications roots. And we backed a small business, which entered the auction as a small business elig…”
CalSTRS Mobilized a $5 Trillion Coalition for Firearm Principles
“We teamed up with a total of five trillion dollars of institutional asset To develop firearm principles and really go out there and engage with the entire distribution manufacturing chain”
Kuhn holds 10% of his net worth in Kindred Biosciences stock
“Probably 10% of my net worth is in one stock, because I think it's that mispriced. A friend of mine is obsessed with it, and he has convinced me that it's expected value, probably one-fifth the true value of the company.”
Baumgartner: IAS endowment was 100% alternatives, 80% hedge funds
“So the strategy by and large was in place, and it was A hundred percent alternatives. That portfolio was in place, that strategy. It was 80% hedge funds and 20% private markets funds, mostly venture.”
Schwimer Explains Big League Advance's Upfront Earnings-Share Model for Minor Leaguers
“Can I invest in them? Give them money, hundreds of thousands, at some point, sometimes millions of dollars, in exchange for a future share of their earnings. If they don't make it, they keep all the money, and if they make it, we share in their success.”
Schwimer: Big League Advance Projects Losing Money on 80% of Player Investments
“Just because I said over half the players will make it, we're still projecting 20% to be profitable. Keep in mind, they had to play three years. Even if they do 10%, they're returning 150,000, because they make 500,000 dollars a year. In order to be successful…”
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…”
Wolfe: Lux Capital hasn't used a financial spreadsheet in over a decade
“I joke, I haven't looked at a spreadsheet in over a decade. There's nothing for us to model.”
Lux Capital partners get one 'override' investment per fund despite team disagreement
“We have implemented, starting about five years ago, a process where if there's a super strong table pounder, where the vast majority of the team does not agree, but somebody is psychotically passionate about a particular entrepreneur and opportunity, they get …”
Getty Trust overweights energy on strong fundamentals despite negative sentiment
“We have the overweights that I mentioned in China, and the other big overweight is in energy. And what we like about energy, and still do, is the fundamentals are really, really good, but the attitudes, the news reports, the emotions are not good, and that's r…”
Malpass has never found a single good investment idea on the internet
“You're going to get ideas from smart, experienced people who've been around, not from looking online. Online can affirm things. You can develop some of the thesis. It could give you research, put the framework around it, but the best ideas, I haven't gotten on…”
Dunn: Verger avoids activist hedge funds to prevent conflicts with endowment donors
“If you give an activist money and you know, we get our money from our donors and some of our donors sit on publicly traded companies, and they're CEOs, and they gave us a million dollars for the endowment, and all of a sudden we take that money, give it to an …”
Dorsey: Dorsey Shifted Investment Criteria From 70% Moat to 70% Management
“When Dorsey Asset launched in 2014, I was probably 60, 70 moat and 30 management. So you want to weight things, and I'm probably the reverse today. That's largely because I've seen just how poorly people can behave and how much damage they can do to even a gre…”
Jain: GQG Partners avoids using sector specialist analysts
“First of all, we don't have any specialists, even in the traditional analyst pool, which is a classic buy side and the non-traditional, non-traditional journalists basically, and they go wherever.”
Jain: GQG bought Petrobras at a 35% dividend yield
“Petrobras, which we owned in a big way in the last five years, when we bought it was a 35% dividend deal. Today it's a 12% dividend deal, a 75 dollar oil. It's six times earnings.”
Ethos built a proprietary AI operating system indexing all firm communications
“We have built from scratch our own AI-powered operating system. We have these 16 partners in different locations that need to look at information asynchronously. Everything that we do at Ethos feeds into our data lake and is run through our knowledge graph in …”
Capacity constraints prevent UTIMCO from expanding allocations to major multi-managers
“We can't grow much more with these multi-managers, A, because they're closed, B, because their liquidity terms are a three-year or five-year slow pay.”
WCM partners receive seven years of profits before returning equity at book
“So our thing is the own equity. We'll continue to pay your dividend. You participate in the profitability of the firm for seven years. After that, you give your equity back at book value, which at an investment management firm is nothing.”
Payne: WCM operates without multi-year business plans
“Since I've been here, we have never had a five-year plan. We have sales targets and we have some projects we're trying to complete every year, but we don't have a business plan for the next one, two, three, four or five years.”
Perelman: Garnett Station has only lost money on a single deal
“So you don't run into the problem, which happened to us in our second deal, the only deal we've ever lost money on, where we had dis-synergies.”
Comegys: Vanguard Returns 95% of Securities Lending Revenue to Funds
“95% of the money made in the program goes back to the fund. The five percent of it Is kept to run the program.”
Comegys: Vanguard Owns Average of 8% of Free-Floated U.S. Companies
“We own on average about eight percent of every company in America that's free floated. Most importantly, we say, who are we owning them on behalf of? These are fifty million Americans, not Vanguard owning eight percent of the company.”
Baker: Fidelity led three Roku rounds when VCs feared Big Tech
“There's this company, Roku, no VCs would fund it, because every venture capitalist was worried about competition from Amazon, Google, and Apple. I was like, well, I'm really familiar with those companies. Competing with Roku, it is not on their top 50 list of …”
Grefenstette: Dietrich Foundation re-backs returning venture GPs who autopsy past mistakes
“Some LPs won't give them a second chance. We have done that where we have said to a GP, okay, we all know this is what went wrong here, and we can do the autopsy. And then we still supported them when they came back to the market because we think they're going…”
Warrington: Gresham Partners avoids capital-intensive venture sectors due to weak historical returns
“We're not going to fully buy into that view and we'll make the exceptions where we think they're deserved to be made, but we're not going to broadly focus on capital intensive areas. Because historically, those haven't put out the venture scale returns we want…”
Warrington: Generalist venture funds have historically been Gresham's top-performing investments
“The world went very sector specialized, and I understand why, but one thing we've looked at our portfolio and said, over time, the generalists spend the best funds, and we're making a concerted effort to make sure we have enough generalists, that way we captur…”
Kleinman: Apollo bought Bridge Investment Group to expand real estate
“Obviously, with rates moving and cap rates moving, we, this year, went out and bought a fifty billion dollar real estate Asset manager called Bridge, and that's now an area we're starting to redirect and lean into because the relative pricing has repriced ther…”
Kleinman: Apollo will roll out lower-leverage active equity strategies over next 5 years
“My only point is there are lots of ways that over the next five years, we will begin to bring other forms of equity to investors that isn't necessarily private equity, i.e. Levered equity buyout type capital that gives Premium to the longterm S&P with more sta…”
Capital Group ties portfolio manager bonuses primarily to eight-year performance
“And he's measured on his eight-year result first and foremost in his quantitative bonus, not his one-year result.”
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.”
Sacerdote: Whale Rock bought Nvidia in January 2023 at 4x forward earnings
“And similarly, we loaded up on NVIDIA right after ChatGPT in January, 20, 23. We were buying NVIDIA at four times the earnings they're going to do this year.”
Broyer: Newbrook avoids real estate acquisitions in California and New York
“We do not touch California. We don't touch New York. These places where you don't know if there's going to be restrictions put in place that are going to impact our ability to manage the assets the way we need to, or that are going to increase taxes on the sal…”
Khoury: Sunbelt Apartment REITs Trade at 25% Discounts to Private Value
“And the Sunbelt apartment REITs, which in aggregate are the largest exposure of the fund today, we're buying these companies at six and a half to seven percent implied cap rates, while the private market is close to five, five and a quarter, in 25, 30% discoun…”
Mahr: MDT trains its machine learning models on 50 years of data
“We train our models on roughly 50 years worth of data, which I say that to some potential investors and they're surprised. We think that market data from the 19 seventies and eighties is still useful for forecasting mispricing.”
CPPIB Closed Internal Macro Team and Shifted Capital to Passive Strategies
“We had an internal macro team. It's challenging. We're not set up. We don't have the technology stack to do it. We really didn't have a right to win. So we do invest in a few external macro managers, but largely the capital that would have been allocated to th…”
CPPIB Uses AI to Generate Baseline Investment Committee Questions in One Minute
“Part of the value, I think it makes the investment committee pick up their game a little bit, because we can put the memo into the model and get 10 questions in about one minute, and so you can ask the investment committee members, and whatever we paid for tha…”
Kokko: AlphaSense Just Launched an Autonomous AI Expert Interviewer
“One thing that we built and released Just weeks ago was a new AI interviewer. So our Tegus expert transcript library, it's created by buy-side firms doing interviews with experts and analysts that are hedge fund or VC firm, private equity firm has to get on a …”
Wagner: Finepoint Capital holds over a majority of its assets in Japan
“If you would have said to me, hey, Herb, when you started FinePoint, what's the chance that you're going to have Over a majority of your assets in Japan, I would have said you're crazy. And here we are.”
Arndt: Aggregating 20 active equity mandates entirely cancelled out to pure beta
“When we aggregated up all of the maybe 20 or so mandates we had across that portfolio, by and large they cancelled each other out at the whole portfolio level, and I would have expected we would end up with something like beta less fees. Now, actually, as I sa…”
Future Fund Migrated Equity Alpha to Market-Neutral Hedge Funds
“Mainly our alpha program has now migrated to long short market neutral hedge funds, because we can pick Managers with pure skill, and it's very evident if they have it or not very quickly.”
Future Fund acquired $1B direct stakes in Melbourne and Perth airports
“There was an opportunity in Australia to buy some domestic airports from a listed company, and we wanted to use a manager, but when we started talking to the market, we found that they weren't aligned sufficiently... So we actually went out, surprised the mark…”
Sullivan: Yale walked away from top buyout manager after 7.5x fund expansion
“We had a firm that we worked with. We were in their first two institutional funds in the early 2000 period. They were both spectacularly successful. When they raised their third institutional fund, they set out to raise a fund that was seven and a half times t…”