The Ledger
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McKinsey sent threatening letters to Institutional Investor and identified zero errors
“The article is called The Story McKinsey Didn't Want Written, and then we started the story by saying, during the reporting of this piece, McKinsey sent multiple threatening letters to institutional investor. We stand by this piece entirely, and they have not …”
Narrative writing cannot be taught past the age of eighteen
“But I think that the best way to get the narrative writing, you cannot teach that past the age of 18.”
No errors were ever found in the UC Regents investigation
“And that to this day we stand behind entirely because there's never been one error found with the story. And it's a story of UC Regents and Jagdeep Basher.”
Unpleasant behavior increases moving down the financial services value chain
“You know, the further down the value chain you get in asset management, in my view, sort of, not asset management, financial services. You have asset allocators on the end. They're the nicest group. And then within that group, probably corporate funds are the …”
Allocators must leverage their size instead of copying David Swensen
“Underlying that all is the people who are going to be successful going back are the people who, Are actually thinking long-term, are actually trying to use their size to almost bully the asset manager into giving them what they want, a true solution. Those are…”
Institutional Investor Media is profitable after abandoning print
“I won't give exact numbers, but II Media, standalone media is profitable. And it wasn't before.”
Asset management cultures treat marketing as a secondary support function
“There's always that cultural element that marketing within asset management organizations can be viewed as a secondary function, sort of a base level support function.”
Majority of allocators aspire to end careers as Ivy League CIOs
“There are huge exceptions to this rule, but I would say certainly a majority of the allocators would love to end their careers as a CIO of an Ivy League endowment, and they will make, take creative paths to go there.”
Ultra-wealthy individuals are infuriated when they cannot control the media
“The way I put it is, when people get to a certain amount of wealth, it could be ten million, could be a billion, when, there, there'll come a time when they control almost every aspect of their lives. They have the houses they want. They may always want more, …”
Annual compensation cycles prevent allocators from being true long-term investors
“You can't actually be a long-term investor if every single person making a decision is compensated on a twelve-month cycle.”
McDaniel says 70% of asset managers fake offering bespoke solutions
“Again, very much ballparking. I'd say 30% of the asset managers actually changed the way they did business. The other 70% just pretended to change the way they do business.”
US public pensions are unlikely to fix governance flaws for 30 years
“You know, will we get there with American public plans? I'm not sure in the, in my career. Hopefully I still have out of 30 years doing this, but I'm not sure we'll get there.”
McDaniel says pensions with 8.25% return targets are gaming their accounting
“Anyone who has an 8.25% target, all they're doing is, is gaming the accounting.”
Asset owner polling reveals 80% of asset managers provide poor service
“No asset manager thinks they're bad at client service, but when you pull asset owners, and we have formally pulled them, 80% of asset managers have poor client service.”
Institutional Investor is undergoing strategic review including a possible sale
“We're part of a public company, and it is public that we are going through a strategic review of the business, with one possibility being a sale of institutional investor.”
Institutional Investor spends more on journalism after ending print edition
“We actually now spend more on journalism than we did before, because we're spending less on printing and shipping magazines.”
Institutional Investor's most-read stories are consistently original long-form investigations
“It warms a journalist's heart that the most read stories of the year are always original, investigative, long form work.”
Articles with longest engaged time also draw highest total readership
“And inevitably, the stories that have the longest engaged time, that's readers spent reading it, are the ones that have also the most page use and the most readers.”
Most asset managers lack individual-level readership analytics
“Most asset managers haven't got that granularity yet, and they are confronted with all this technology they have, right? You can get satellite data on, on Walmart's parking lot, but I still can't figure out if Paula Valente is reading my piece of thought leade…”
Granular reader engagement data will redefine asset management sales
“For someone to actually figure out a mechanism that an asset manager can produce meaningful content and know when clients and potential clients are engaging with it and how is very much the holy grail of asset management marketing because then it's just going …”
Dalio and Schwarzman never reveal unstrategic information in interviews
“It's sometimes hard interviewing folks like Ray Dalio or Stephen Schwarzman because they are so smart and so well-practiced. They will never tell you anything that they don't mean to tell you or that hasn't been strategically decided to tell you.”
There are four PR people for every journalist
“I believe there's four PR people for every journalist now. I suspect it's even higher in the financial industry.”
Effective writing makes leaving more painful for readers than staying
“And so it's about those hooks that the point is always to make it more painful for the reader to leave than to stay. They just have to read that next section to figure out what's going on. That is the key, whether you're writing a feature for institutional inv…”
Over-communicating during crises keeps allocator assets sticky
“The firms that over-communicate during crises are the ones that have the sticky assets.”
Puns fail online and digital headlines require descriptive wording
“When you read an article in the New Yorker in print, the title is often a pun. It's like three or four words. You go online and look at the same story. The title is different. It's much more descriptive. And that's not just for search engine reasons. It's beca…”
Generic titles like 'Our Views' ruin high-effort asset management research
“I've just had a team of PMs and writers sit down and give 12 hours of their, like, scarce time
To writing this piece about fixed income, I don't want to screw it up by calling it our views on fixed income. You've just taken this gift and like thrown it in the …”
Institutional asset managers never win mandates from SEO search queries
“SEO is table stakes. Having your website optimized for search are table stakes, but us and institutional asset managers You're never getting a mandate via, like, no one types in hundred million dollar core fixed income search help.”
Email remains by far the most effective distribution medium
“Email is still by far the most helpful medium, and that is the case for marketers too.”
Institutional Investor is financially an events business, not a media brand
“99.9% of the people who are aware of Institutional Investor think of us as a media brand, and we are a media brand, but if you are a bean counter, we are an events business.”
Only 15,000 individuals are true asset allocator decision-makers in the US
“It's probably 15,000 individuals who are really decision makers at the asset allocators.”
McDaniel predicts Scott Malpass will never leave Notre Dame
“Some people, Scott Malpass, will never leave Notre Dame. He's in his dream job.”
Institutional Investor writers must anticipate who they will upset
“When we're writing stuff at Institutional Investor, we're trying to be what I call responsibly provocative. We never are gonna slander anyone. We're never gonna be mean about it, but sometimes people do wrong or do poorly in this industry, and we have to be wi…”
CIOs name Canadian and Australian funds as most respected peers
“The question I ask in every meeting with CIOs is which one of your peers do you respect the most? And there's a lot of commonality there. They'll always say one of the Canadian plans, They'll always mention an Australian or a sort of Nordic style plan and then…”
McDaniel receives fake tips monthly aimed at undermining competitors
“I would say once a month I get an email that's clearly a made up Gmail account sending me something.”
Asset manager threatened a $100M defamation lawsuit over an investigative story
“We, I was threatened with a hundred million dollar lawsuit. They never filed it, and in my view, it was a bullying tactic. We wrote something about an asset manager. I was the editor of the story, and we wrote something about this firm that I know to this day …”
A long-term horizon is often an allocator's only competitive advantage
“We all know that the, one of the major advantages is being long-term. That is, in some cases, the only advantage an institutional investor has.”
Average private fund fees have dropped to 1.5 and 18
“Now, I think that's going the way of the dodo. You know, it's, what is it, 1.5 and 18 now, but nothing says it's going to rebound to where it was. In average.”
Asset managers offer economic concessions to secure Yale seed capital
“You know, asset managers would love seed capital from Yale, and we're willing to give up a lot to get it, because of what it tells the market for the next fund.”
Nearly all US corporate pension funds use risk parity strategies
“You'd be hard pressed to find a corporate fund without risk parity.”
NISA and Legal & General dominate the US LDI space
“I think of a NISA investment advisors who are just, you know, along now with legal in general, really own the liability-driven investing space in America.”
Canadian pension governance structures insulate compensation from political control
“The Canadians really set up the model so they're paying market wages. They may not be able to pay as much as Goldman Sachs in Toronto, but they're pretty darn close. They also set it up so that pay doesn't, it's not one year thing, it's three or five year thin…”
Clever asset managers prioritize Australia's highly sophisticated capital pools
“You can always tell which asset managers Are clever by the ones that invest a lot of time in Australia. Bridgewater was a very early player in that space, because I think Ray Dalio understood that these people were very sophisticated, and there's money coming …”
Australian institutional investors operate on par with top Canadian pensions
“When you ask people about the sharpest investors, Future Fund, Aussie Super, Uni Super down there, They're doing things that the Canadians are also doing.”
Investment consultants have not lost their power since 2009
“They were saying that when I started covering this in O-Nine, and I, as far as I can tell, consultants haven't lost an iota of power. They're gonna be here”
Institutional Investor U.S. readership grew from 1.1M to 2M+ by FY2019
“Whereas in 2017 we had 1.1 million U.S. Readers, in 2019 fiscal we had two million plus readers.”
Clickbait headlines are the fastest way to ruin a brand
“Clickbait effectively is a title that doesn't match
The content. It's a promise that's not delivered. And so when we title an article, it's gotta be aligned with the actual content that it's sitting over top of. There's no worse way to ruin your brand quickly …”