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
Seides: Believed Buffett was 'the patsy' for picking the S&P 500
“I thought Warren was the patsy at the poker table, because he threw out the S&P as the index. I thought that was the wrong index to be picking, and it was something that was going to be an easy hurdle to overcome.”
Lew: I only give negative feedback to high-potential people and let others fail
“And when I don't like somebody, I don't say anything. Hey, just go and fail. I don't care. It does come down to that. And because it's painful, right? It's not comfortable to give people negative feedback. So I really only do it to the people who I care about …”
Hostplus allocates 0% to fixed income, opting for unlisted assets instead
“53% of our strategic asset allocation is public equities, listed equities. It's a combination of domestic equities and international equities developed markets and international equities emerging markets. 53% in total. The other 47% is unlisted infrastructure,…”
Hostplus demands intrusive personal financial details from prospective fund managers
“How much money do you earn? How many kids do you have? What schools do they go to? What are the school fees like? At what stage are you at? What car do you drive? Is it mortgaged? There's a whole set of, you have a right not to answer those questions, but you'…”
Future Fund Avoids Large-Cap Buyouts Entirely in Private Equity Portfolio
“Our portfolio has no large buyout at all, because we think that, well, that makes the capacity so much harder, by the way, but we think that large buyout is really just levered equities, typically. And if there's skill added on top, and there might be, then mo…”
Dorsey: Dorsey Passed on CoStar Due to CEO Stock Sales and Misalignment
“The CEO in that case was successful, but for a founder, he largely had sold stock along the way, so he didn't retain a large ownership stake in the company. If all that spend and competing with Zillow didn't work out, shareholders were probably going to suffer…”
Williams College endowment no longer backs dedicated oil and gas funds
“Similarly, we no longer do funds dedicated to the extraction of oil and gas.”
Jain: GQG's research team is half journalists hired to criticize investments
“Now we have an equal amount of journalists and traditional analysts. Their job is to take the opposite view by default. Journalists are pretty good at that. I've learned a lot hanging out with journalists. Half the team is journalists who basically criticize e…”
Jain: GQG holds almost zero exposure to tech and semiconductors today
“Today, for example, in 12 months now, we have almost nothing in semiconductors. We have almost nothing in tech.”
Perelman: GSP only rolls up sectors that were previously consolidated
“Alex touched on it earlier, we're only doing roll-ups in categories and asset classes and businesses that have been consolidated before. The benefit to that is there is off the shelf Tech solutions that have been created to manage these businesses in a multi-u…”
Perelman: GSP avoids roll-up categories with bolt-on multiples above 8x cash flow
“We are actively avoiding categories where the bolt-ons are trading outside of our price range. There are categories today that people are having success rolling up, whether they be Resi HVAC or pest control, or in a prior cycle, perhaps VET, where the platform…”
Saba Capital is tendering for Blue Owl's OBDC-II fund at a discount
“We are tendering for one of the Blue Owl funds, their Blue Owl OBDC-II, which we're going to see if there is any demand for liquidity at a discount to NAV.”
Dietrich Foundation's massive venture allocation features a heavy China and India focus
“Our focus on China and India, it's a big chunk of our 52% that's venture.”
Gilmore: CalPERS recommended a 75/25 reference portfolio with 400bps active risk
“We've recommended a 75% equity, 25% bond portfolio. We've recommended an active risk range around 400 basis points.”
Kleinman: Apollo Holds Lower Leverage and Fewer PIK Loans Than Competitors
“Our private equity portfolio is more defensive than most of our competitors. Our credit portfolio is for sure much higher rated, much less leverage, much less portfolio leverage. Our private lending portfolio has a fraction of the pick loans or other aggressiv…”
Kleinman: Apollo decided against launching semi-liquid private equity products
“We don't think it's a great product. So we have decided not to bring a semi-liquid private equity product. We have a variety of semi-liquid other products, but for private equity, we've made the decision, this isn't the right Product.”
Capital Group compensates portfolio managers based on returns, not asset volume
“If our investment results are the same and our tenure at Capital Group's the same, our bonus is the same. Meaning we don't incentivize a money grab to manage as many assets as you can.”
Centerbridge spent years evaluating First Brands and Tricolor but passed entirely
“First Brands and Tricolor. We looked at both for years. People said there's never been a picture of Patrick James. We flew to his office. We met him in person. We had the Tricolor management team at our office. We spent a lot of time with both these businesses…”
CPPIB Slashes Emerging Markets Allocation to 15 Percent on Reduced China Appetite
“And recently we have scaled back over the past few years, we actually scaled back our allocation to emerging markets. It's still reasonably large compared to many funds. I think we're about 15%, but it's not as large as it once was. And a lot of our appetite f…”
CPPIB Refuses Concessionary Capital and Avoids Impact Funds
“We're about value, not values. We don't do concessionary capital. We don't do impact funds. We're about value. We're about returns.”
CPPIB Deliberately Holds Less AI Exposure Than Broad Public Market Benchmarks
“On the investing side, we obviously have exposure in the portfolio. We have invested in a lot of the big AI companies and we have exposure to them. Net though, we don't have as much AI exposure as the broader public markets. And that's a challenge from a relat…”
Wagner: Finepoint buys Asian derivatives at 80% discount due to pod shorting
“So we actually have recently found a derivative in an Asian market That we're buying for 10 to 20% of what we think it's worth, so 80 to 90% discount, and it's solely the result of the fact that there's a market in Asia that has such a large demand to be short…”
Future Fund: Tail-risk hedges make up roughly 20% of hedge fund book
“So we have a couple of hedge fund strategies that really are sort of volatility traders or tail protection type mandates. And if we had diversified hedge fund portfolio, and if the person running that or the team running that were incentivized just based on th…”
Arndt: 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…”
Future Fund manages zero assets internally, deploying capital via 120 external managers
“We actually don't manage any assets internally, so we use managers for all of our implementation, and we've probably got about a 120 or so managers on the books at the moment, and would like it not to grow too much more than that, just so that we have the band…”
J.P. Morgan halted allocations to mega-cap buyout funds in 2013
“So we made a decision in 2013 to stop investing in some of the mega cap buyout funds because we felt like returns were coming down.”
The Dietrich Foundation operates entirely without an investment committee
“Yeah, he put in the controlling trust document the fact that he wanted the trustees to delegate investment authority to the CIO and CEO of the foundation. That's unusual. We do not have an investment committee.”
Dietrich Foundation has held zero direct U.S. index exposure since 1997
“We have not had a direct exposure to the U.S. S&P. 500 or any U.S. Index since 1997, ok?”
Dietrich Foundation's total portfolio exposure to China peaked at 38% in 2020
“We peaked at a total portfolio exposure in China of 38% in late twenty-twenty, which is a big number. Today, as we sit here, we're about 19 or 20%.”
Green: Lead Edge publicly shames analysts who fail to write thank-you notes
“I actually have a handwritten thank you note tracker that I get for every employee at the firm, and I assure you, if a twenty-two-year-old analyst wants to get called out in front of 85 people, I have no problem doing it.”
Delta's 2014 Pension Strategy: 40% Hedge Funds and 50% Leverage
“We go back to July of 2014, and that's the portfolio. 30% privates, 40% hedge funds, 10% cash, borrow 50%. You've got this other 20% funded stuff in case you've got a liquidity event if you really need it. That's what the portfolio looked like back in 2014.”
Kaname Capital Files Derivative Lawsuits Against Boards Over Insider Self-Dealing
“We exercise all of our rights as shareholders. We bring shareholder proposals. We bring derivative lawsuits against the board in cases of obvious self-dealing.”
Texas Teachers maintains a unique zero percent allocation to credit
“And then we also have, which is pretty interesting, we have zero allocation to credit, which is a little bit unique. Most public pensions have some allocation of credit. We don't have any.”
Texas Teachers excludes venture capital from its emerging manager program
“We don't allocate to venture capital in our emerging manager program. And there are a lot of emerging managers in venture capital. But we've not had success there.”
Texas Teachers instituted proxy policy to systematically vote against activist shareholders
“Several years ago we went to our proxy provider and we said, We're going to need you to come up with a new benchmark policy for us that takes out these more activist types issues, and we suggested they call it the strict fiduciary policy, and they actually end…”
Ohanian resigned from Reddit's board in 2020 over hosted hate communities
“I left Reddit pretty publicly in protest back in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd, because it did not align with my views that the company would take such a stance in support of communities of color and black communities in particular, and also still have thou…”
Amherst omits real estate, private credit, and emerging markets managers
“We have some very meaningful holes in the portfolio when you look at us compared to peers, one of which is real estate. We have very little private credit to speak of. We don't have any global emerging markets managers. There are all sorts of things that we do…”
Morehead did a one-hour reference check with a fund manager's wife
“I have one manager in our book, and it was early in the life of this firm. I already had known the guy, but he was starting this new firm, and I actually called his wife. I was like, I need to know this is ok with your wife. So I called his wife and spoke to h…”
Jacobs: A 2x to 3x return over ten years is a very bad outcome
“For me, if I'm going to spend five or 10 years putting all my life into something seven days a week and really in it, I want to win it. That would be a very bad, bad outcome if we only made two or three X after that period of time.”
Seventeen sovereign funds rejected Jacobs's oil roll-up over ESG mandates
“I was thinking about returning to my roots of energy. Spent a lot of time in Houston, a little time in New Orleans, et cetera. And talked to a lot of oil folks, love the business, and couldn't raise money for it. I talked to the 17 or so sovereign wealth funds…”
Future Fund Added Gold in 2020 to Hedge Populist Currency Debasement
“In 2020 we put gold into the portfolio for the first time because we saw that more populist governments would be more likely to print money or otherwise debase their currencies because that's what governments always do when they're in those sort of situations,…”
Michelakis: Gladstone Targets 20% Alpha Versus the 3% Platform Standard
“And then if you go all the way to the factor neutral world, it seems that three percent alpha works for everybody. That's fine. We're shooting for 20% alpha.”
Rice Excludes Fund Managers Who Won't Commit to Carbon Neutrality
“We don't invest in a single fund that hasn't committed to be using carbon offsets and become carbon neutral.”
Partners Capital prefers allocating to platform spin-offs to keep more gross alpha
“So what do we do? We allocate it to their spinoffs. And it's mostly Citadel spinoffs. They've done very well, and they're closer to two and 20, and we get roughly 50% of the gross alpha, and we diversify.”
Klarman: Baupost made its biggest profits averaging down on catalyzed ideas
“We have made our big dollar profits over the years, usually on ideas that have gone against us at first, and we average down, and when they are catalyzed, Which means some event is going to happen that will cause us to make money.”
Klarman: Baupost Invested in Chinese Equities for First Time in Decades
“We talked to our clients not that long ago about a few Chinese stocks we were finding. We had never owned anything in China for decades. It was in favor. Everybody was lining up to go there. I knew that they have a pretty authoritarian system of governance and…”
Sacca: Lowercarbon Capital is not concessionary; partners are largest LPs
“This is not concessionary capital. Crystal and I are the biggest investors in our fund. We are in this to make a lot of money.”
Sacca passed on Dropbox and Airbnb due to competition and safety fears
“I told the Dropbox guys that Google was going to crush them because we already had G Drive internally. I told the Airbnb guys that somebody was going to get raped or murdered and the blood was going to be on their hands when they were renting out a room in som…”