E117: What Will Family Offices Invest into in 2025? w/Hansen Ringer

Hansen Ringer, Managing Director at Sepio Capital sits down with David Weisburd to discuss the asset class that delivers equity-like returns without the market risk, what distressed credit reveals about market cycles and investor behavior, and what happens when stocks and bonds move together.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We talked about the dominance of the 6040 and when you can hedge a portfolio with bonds that are cheap and understandable, the need for kind of a defined hedge strategy has been less acute. And I think we all suffer from recency bias. And when you go through a period of underperformance for these strategies as an institutional investor, you get sick of defending the hedge funds that are high fees, that are complex, that have difficult reporting and illiquidity, and it doesn't become worth the squeeze to own them. We expect there to be an illiquidity premium, meaning if we're going to lock up capital, remove the ability to borrow against these assets, remove the optionality of selling them tomorrow, we want excess return. So if you told me there's two return streams at

• 0:42Speaker 00

  10% each, one has daily liquidity and one is illiquid, you're going to choose the daily liquidity just because it's an added feature.

• 0:49David Weisburd?

  Walk me through how you get knowledgeable on a new space.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  We have lots of.

• 0:57David Weisburd?

  Hanson, I've been excited to chat since our friend Grady Buchanan made the introduction. Welcome to the Ten X Capital Podcast.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Thank you. Glad to be here. Appreciate the time.

• 1:03David Weisburd?

  What is Sepio Capital?

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Sepio Capital is a multifamily office, an institutional asset manager. We oversee about $6 billion of capital on behalf of a limited number of clients. We started the business seven and a half years ago, 2017, in San Francisco. And I'm fortunate that we worked with many of our clients for decades across multiple institutions.

• 1:21David Weisburd?

  How do you guys differentiate against other multifamily offices?

• 1:24Speaker 00

  David, the way that we try to differentiate ourselves is on the investment side, we have a fairly robust investment process and we're passionate about that. The alternative space is an area that we spend a lot of time in.

• 1:34David Weisburd?

  You mentioned you have a differentiated investment process. Tell me about that.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  The traditional asset allocation framework that we all know is equities, fixed income, alternatives, and cash. And while we invest across all those assets, we use what we call a role-based framework, which we think helps us assess kind of the underlying risks and really the reason why we hold these various assets in the portfolio at a deeper level. So our role-based framework, David, is really four primary buckets. We have the growth drivers, which are the portion of assets intended to grow the portfolio over a long period of time. So really equities is the primary exposure. They are both private and public equities, though. And then anything that has that sort of higher standard deviation would be competing for capital in that bucket. The second group of assets is we call diversifiers, which is maybe the most complex group that we'll talk about.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  But diversifiers are assets with a low correlation to both stocks and bonds, but have return targets more similar to equities over a full cycle. And then the last two are maybe more understandable inflation sensitive and deflation sensitive. Inflation sensitive assets tend to be real assets like real estate and commodities. Deflation sensitive tends to be the balance of portfolio, core bonds and cash.

• 2:44David Weisburd?

  When it comes to the family offices that you serve, what are the different ways that family offices look at their portfolio construction?

• 2:50Speaker 00

  We have a really wide range of the way that families look at the asset allocation. We use the same framework for all of them, but we have families that are very growth focused, if you will. They want they want high beta portfolios and they maybe took companies public and we're managing around a public position that that really drives a lot of the other assets that we put in the portfolio. We have foundations and institutions that have defined giving amount of 5% per year, where we know we need to manage risk around the liquidity constraints that they have.

• 3:20David Weisburd?

  What are the different factors affecting decision making?

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, great question. So risk profile and liquidity constraints are the biggest, maybe two variables. I think time horizon affects that dramatically. So if we have a, and we have a number of them, young entrepreneurs who sold businesses to businesses public with very little in the way of of short term cash needs, they tend to be much more aggressive in the way that they can allocate to growth assets. The inverse is very much true as well for folks that have high burn rates, spending rates, whether it's giving or business interest that are driving a lot of the capital, where we want to stay very liquid with assets mitigating that volatility.

• 3:54David Weisburd?

  So today you have a tale of two cities. You have private credit that is the hottest asset. Some people think maybe approaching the end of that cycle. And private equity venture capital is, you know, cold or not as sought after as it typically is. As an allocator, how do you look in terms of portfolio construction relative to the hotness or coldness of a specific sector?

• 4:16Speaker 00

  It's a great question, and it's something that we actually focus quite a bit on. Private credit's been an interesting space because to your point, it's very hot now, maybe peaking or kind of to a place that's unhealthy. I would say it was not that way a decade ago. When rates were at zero, there was very little appetite. And it actually, to us, was pretty interesting a few years ago, particularly in a world where spreads in the public markets haven't expanded, so high-yield spreads are pretty tight. But in some areas of the private credit markets, you actually were getting a decent amount of excess return for the risk you were taking. You're being compensated on a risk-adjusted basis. It was interesting. For example, right now, we still really like the distressed credit space. So there's some areas within distressed credit that we think are interesting. It's a pretty wide-ranging opportunity set, as you know, but things like non-performing loans, to us, the risk return seems very interesting still, too.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  On the flip side, you talked about venture capital and private equity. The late-stage growth area of venture to us, I think to a lot of the markets, seemed really overheated for a number of years, kind of culminating in the declines of 2021, 2022. It looks like we may have an opportunity where companies are going to have to raise at either down rounds, or there's going to have to be a repricing in the market that will make that an interesting space again. It's challenging to be too tactical for us in the venture and private equity space, given five-year investment horizon terms for the funds and kind of vintage-level diversification. We don't try to get too cute on that side. But certainly, in areas like private credit, distressed credit, lean in and out quite heavily.

• 5:39David Weisburd?

  As a multifamily office, are you more likely to pull money and time, credit, and hedge funds more than private equity and VC? How do you look at both the relationship as well as the investment strategy?

• 5:50Speaker 00

  If we go back to our role-based framework to maybe set the stage and put it into practice, with private equity and venture capital, we're really competing for capital there with our public equities. So when we're looking at the relative opportunity set for those equity beta positions, that's going to be the comparable. Private credit tends to be, depending on if it's performing credit, is really competing with your fixed income. If it's distressed credit, in many situations, we're looking at that as a diversifier. So part of the question is, is that relative between each other? And then also on an asset allocation basis, when do we want to be overweight? Growth versus overweight diversifiers. We've really liked the diversifiers group within our portfolios over the last few years and on a tactical basis have been overweight diversifiers. And part of that has been through kind of the last five years was being slightly underweight fixed income and then some underweight to growth as well.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  So there is an interchange between the two, but it's not directly between private equity and private credit, but rather the role that they're playing in the portfolio.

• 6:42David Weisburd?

  I had James Langer on the podcast, CEO of Redmont Wealth Advisors, and he worked with Eugene Fama on the whole three factor model. And going back to his University of Chicago days, how do you look at the public market? Do you expect the magnificent seven to continue to outperform? And how do you look at large cap versus small cap or however else you dissect the industry?

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Great question. We tend to have a value bias at Seppio kind of across the board. Most of our teams started in equity research roles and in roles that were kind of very valuation centric. And we very much ascribe to the data that you just referenced that that in public markets, it's hard to have repeatable alpha. And one of the factors over a long period of time that's shown to outperformance is value. You couple that with a period of a significant dislocation between value and growth. We think the opportunity set for companies that produce a strong amount of cash and are priced at a relatively fair valuation is strong going forward. So I think, you know, I think for us, value versus growth is sometimes hard because it gets a lot into the subsector. And it's like, do you like financials and energy or do you like tech?

• 7:47Speaker 00

  I think for us, we're more focused on the relative value of the company and think right now to your point on the mag seven. We think the other 493 companies in the S and P have a pretty interesting opportunity to potentially catch up over the next five to 10 years over the next cycle. And I think part of that's driven by better earnings expectations for the for the non mag seven S and P 500 components and a better starting valuation. If you look at the S and P market cap weighted, the forward valuation is kind of scary for what that might mean for forward returns on an equal weight basis. It's it's more attractive. You asked a second question about small cap. I think that the same math applies to small cap in a couple of ways. Historically, small cap equities, as we all know, have done well. We're coming to a period of significant underperformance relative to large cap and a valuation gap.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  I think part of that can be justified by the large number of unprofitable companies in the small cap space. So the way we try to tackle that is being thoughtful around getting that exposure to companies that have attractive values and produce profits, particularly in the small cap space. To try to avoid some of the the junk in the indices.

• 8:48David Weisburd?

  Let's talk about correlation. Last time you spoke, you said that the decade prior to 2022, stocks and bonds were negatively correlated. Has that always been the case?

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Yes, that has not always been the case, and it's something that we focused on internally as it sort of became an issue for everyone in 2022. So 2022, we all recall, the 60-40 portfolio got hit pretty hard because bonds were down double digits and stocks were down double digits. You didn't have the negative correlation between the two that we experienced for the prior, really 20 years. Back to 1998, over that cycle, you had this really nice negative correlation between stocks and bonds. It made the 60-40 portfolio super efficient. But if you look prior to that, really for the 50 years before 2000, so back to the 40s, you had a period where stocks and bonds for most of that time were positively correlated. And what the data shows you, David, really is that in periods where inflation is sub 2%, that inverse correlation

• 9:40Speaker 00

  works great, and bonds work as a hedge to stocks. In periods where inflation is higher than 2%, that hasn't been the case.

• 9:47David Weisburd?

  Is that because when there's high inflation, treasuries are higher, therefore sucking out capital from both stocks and bonds? Talk to me about the intuition.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a function, you're exactly right, it's a function of rates. And in a world where rates are going down, so in a period like the first 20 years, so from 2000 to 2020, you had essentially a declining rate environment with slower growth, and the Fed can lower interest rates when you have a shock to the system, which makes your bonds rally when your stocks are probably going down because it's a recessionary environment. If we think about the issues like 2022 or the 70s, it was not the same. You had inflation causing the shocks to the system. Thus, the Federal Reserve couldn't lower rates to solve the issue. They had to, in some cases, raise rates. So your bonds were selling off for the same reason your stocks were selling off. And in some ways, if you think about the correlation in corporate bonds and stocks, is that sometimes the same risks are there

• 10:38Speaker 00

  for a corporate bond and an equity position because you have the same position in the company. Normally, that's offset by interest rates coming down in some periods that create that hedge. So when that's not happening, you have that positive correlation.

• 10:51David Weisburd?

  Are there any assets that are just dominated by other asset classes, whether public or private, that just never makes sense to invest in?

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good question. Nothing immediately jumps to mind of a broad asset class that a lot of people invest in that you generally shouldn't. We've looked at maybe a different way to answer this question.

• 11:07David Weisburd?

  Assets.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, potentially speculative assets, I guess is a way to think about it. We don't tend to invest in assets that we can't understand the fundamental case of the intrinsic cash flows. Some people can gamble well and probably trade those, but it's not what we tend to do. We've looked a lot at the 60-40 portfolio because it's often the benchmark that we think about. And in our framework, it's still a component, but we talked about having something like diversifiers, which aren't represented in that 60-40. And when we back test adding 10% in diversifiers, so 60, 10, 30, 30% in bonds, it really meaningfully increases the sharp ratio of a simple portfolio on a long-term back test. And in this case, we proxy diversifiers

• 11:51Speaker 00

  with a managed futures benchmark. So not perfect, but managed futures are kind of an interesting diversifier that we like to look at. And in that case, you had higher sharp ratio because you had improved returns with less downside or volatility.

• 12:03David Weisburd?

  Tell me more about diversifiers. Which diversifiers are you talking about and what do you like to invest in?

• 12:08Speaker 00

  When we look at diversifiers, what we're really looking for is the characteristics of the asset, which are principally low to negative correlation to stocks and bonds with equity-like returns over a full cycle. And that opportunity set is fairly wide, and there's a lot of esoteric assets within that category. And at different cycles, like we've talked about, different things may be interesting. But some of the things that we're focused on at CPO in that bucket are things like distressed credit. We talked about non-performing loans. There's kind of a group of assets there that we think exhibit equity-like returns, particularly now, but don't have a correlation to the economic and we would say in some cases have a negative correlation, given that the drivers of returns there. Managed futures are another sub-asset class within diversifiers. I just referenced

• 12:50Speaker 00

  them. But things like managed futures that can be trend-following, trade various underlying securities that have no correlation to stocks and bonds, turn the long and short side, have historically shown significant benefit to the portfolio by increasing the true diversification while having equity-like returns over a full cycle. We also look at absolute return-focused multi-strat hedge funds or partnerships that have a similar effect of targeting equity-like returns with very little correlation about the stock and bond market.

• 13:18David Weisburd?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Reed Smith. The practice of law has the power to drive progress, to move businesses forward and support them in achieving their goals. By seizing opportunities and overcoming obstacles, Reed Smith is focused on outcomes. They know that your time is valuable and that your matters are important. Their deep industry insights and local market knowledge allows them to anticipate and address your needs. Reed Smith delivers purposeful, highly engaged client service that drives progress for your business. So you're bullish on diversifiers. Why do you think so many institutional investors are down on hedge funds today?

• 13:56Speaker 00

  It's a great question. I think that the commonly cited reasons would be high fees, illiquidity, complexity, and probably most importantly, a lack of alpha over the last 10 years. And I think, I guess, at a high level, we agree with all those things. And it's been a challenging time for anything that's hedged. If you think about sort of the last period of bull market and S and P 500 dominance, if you've had any hedge to that equity beta, you've almost by definition underperformed on a relative basis. As well, we talked about the dominance of the 60/40, and when you can hedge a portfolio with bonds that are cheap and understandable, the need for kind of a defined hedge strategy has been less acute. And I think we all suffer from recency bias.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  And when you go through a period of underperformance for these strategies as an institutional investor, you get sick of defending the hedge funds that are high fees, that are complex, that have difficult reporting and illiquidity, and it doesn't become worth the squeeze to own them. And we agree with all those things. We have a very high bar for any partnership vehicle, particularly if you're giving up daily liquidity for something that is less liquid. So when we're looking at a hedge fund vehicle, we're looking at something that's truly different. We don't invest in many of the traditional hedge fund sectors where you're essentially getting S and P 500 exposure with some hedges on it at an expensive price. We would look at things like managed future structures that truly have or trend-following

• 15:23Speaker 00

  systematic strategies that have truly negative correlations with interesting return profiles.

• 15:28David Weisburd?

  And the intuition being that those hedge fund strategies, whether the market goes up or down, it's independent of that because it's just looking for some kind of other signal or maybe some futures based on crop cycles or things like that. What are the futures that you like to invest in?

• 15:41Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. Most of our managed futures, managed futures funds that we invest in have a component of trend following in them and they're trading really all asset classes. So from equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities, both on the long and short side. So what that, what that equates to is that even if we have multiple strategies in that same bucket, they don't tend to move like each other either because there's, it's such a wide market. It also is a very interesting space because your counterparty isn't always profit seeking. You could be trading French power contracts and it's, your counterpart is not looking to, to make a profit on that trade where if you're a hedge fund shorting Apple, almost in all circumstances, your counterpart is trying to, you know, take the other side of the trade and make a profit on that.

• 16:23David Weisburd?

  So it's not just two really smart people trying to outsmart each other. Similar to secondaries where somebody has a liquidity need, which is why they're, they're selling that.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. Yeah. No, we, we like secondaries at times for that same reason.

• 16:35David Weisburd?

  Speaking of secondaries, you like GP led secondaries. Tell me about that opportunity set.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  We like GP led secondaries for a lot of the reasons that, you know, any secondary transaction, you know, historically LP led secondaries have been interesting for a portfolio. You get a shorter duration asset in the private markets typically, you, you reduce your J curve by getting invested quickly. I think GP led secondaries are interesting in, in this time period because we, we've had such a lack of transactions over the last few years that have led to funds really seeking liquidity for, for some of their best performing assets that they don't, that they don't want to sell or, or take public at this particular time. So GP led secondaries, you often have really strong alignment from the, from the general partners that they still have conviction in their deal. You don't have the blind pool risk and you have this arbitrary deadline that sometimes can create really interesting opportunities for great assets near the end of their hold period.

• 17:25David Weisburd?

  Walk me through that. What happens when a fund is in year 13, year 14? How have you seen that play out?

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, we, we, we're seeing it. I, I think as, as many institutional investors are, we're seeing it right now because you've had funds that were sort of banking on getting liquidity in, in 2022, 2023, and then the window, the perceived window wasn't open and they had to figure out other, other ways to do that. So, you know, one of our, one of our partners had an asset that they have a lot of conviction in. It kind of, it's been really their winner for the last decade. We're hoping to take it public that the Though at the time, they didn't feel like was open. So ultimately, they went through this this secondary process where you hire an investment bank. They come in, value the asset, give all the existing LPs the opportunity to get bought out at that price. If they choose to, that's where the, you know, the new investor comes in to backfill that demand. Otherwise, you you have the opportunity to re up at that defined valuation for another

• 18:13Speaker 00

  five year continuation fund or whatever the terms is on that next continuation fund. But it tends to be five years, maybe with another two one year extensions. And that's kind of a common way to extend a position that you have a lot of conviction in. Otherwise, you you have to go and fire sell your assets and try to wind wind the fund down as quickly as you can.

• 18:28David Weisburd?

  As an LP, let's say that your venture fund or private equity fund has delivered a top quartile return via DPI in the first 13 years. How do you look at these continuation funds and lack of liquidity? Does that still irk you or is that just kind of standard practice?

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not ideal from from our underlying client's perspective because oftentimes they had sort of a fixed timeline in their minds. I think for us, hopefully by that year, by year 13 of being a partner with this general partner and understanding there the assets they own. We hopefully have a pretty good understanding and agreement and alignment with them on whether these assets are worth a continuation fund or not. And most of the times, we've been very aligned with the general partners we work with on the decisions on that end. So and for us, if you have a if you have a defined, well thought out private equity allocation that's that's perpetual and self funding. Ultimately, if you've gotten DPI throughout the period, you should be okay to potentially extend that last piece if it's going to be the highest potential IRR on that that investment.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  So we we've generally been okay with it. While it's not ideal and, you know, it in some cases continues to drag down in IRR even with a good multiple as you extend that out. We agree that you should try to get the best price for the the assets you have. In many cases, it tends to be kind of the crown jewel of your fund. That's the one that you're extending because if you're an earlier stage manager, it's the company that's continued to raise capital and move toward, you know, the public markets. And that's taken some time.

• 19:48David Weisburd?

  It's the Stripe or the SpaceX that has stayed private for so long and compounded. There's other structures in the market. How do you look at evergreen funds, specifically something like GP Stakes, that is providing income, you know, starting in year one?

• 20:02Speaker 00

  We like evergreen structures on the margin, particularly for things that have the liquidity matching the underlying fund structure. And what I mean by that is sometimes we have concerns about a private credit fund that's evergreen that offers monthly or quarterly liquidity. But if you understand the underlying assets in the portfolio, they may not be that liquid. So the concern is always, how do you message that constraint? Where it says quarterly liquidity, but we all understand that there's going to be gates or delays if everyone runs to the gate at the same time.

• 20:31David Weisburd?

  It's a tool chasing a solution, but it's inherently part of the strategy.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Exactly. So I think, you know, when we think about it from ourselves, if we're allocated, I think the evergreen structure provides a lot of flexibility that should be able to be helpful as you're thinking about investing kind of over periods of time. You don't have arbitrary investment deadlines that constrain you or periods of time where you don't have capital to put to work. On the limited partner side, we just have concerns sometimes about the mechanisms for getting liquidity with no fixed term. So you see it in the real estate space where they provide liquidity on some basis and it works in the periods of time where you're able to refinance and keep, you know, bringing capital back to the portfolio. And you have new investors who want to come in. And there's these mechanisms that create liquidity. In periods where that dries up and you're not selling buildings, you just have to understand that in an evergreen fund, there's no defined term and you might be in there for years. And I think if you understand that constraint, you're comfortable with that, it can be interesting from an investment.

• 21:20David Weisburd?

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• 22:03David Weisburd?

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• 22:45David Weisburd?

  In other words, by being a liquid manager, are you in essence competing against lower expected returns from an opportunity cost basis?

• 22:54Speaker 00

  We expect there to be an illiquity premium, meaning if we're going to lock up capital, remove the ability to borrow against these assets, remove the the optionality of selling them tomorrow, we want excess return. So if you told me there's two return streams at 10% each, one has daily liquidity and one is illiquid, you're going to choose the daily liquidity just because it's an added feature. That being said, you know, we don't think of the same, we don't think of the risks in a daily liquid public equity like we would in maybe a illiquid private credit where you're higher in the capital stack. So we may have a different return bar across different asset taps. But if we're thinking about, to keep it simple, private equity versus public equity, we do think of there being a different hurdle rate for the different assets.

• 23:34David Weisburd?

  So let's talk about private equity and venture capital. What's your breakdown, your portfolio between private equity and venture capital?

• 23:40Speaker 00

  We tend to be at a target of roughly two thirds to private equity and growth equity, if you will. So maybe later stage venture or or or growth equity checks to one third more true venture capital. Obviously, these terms, we know the nomenclature can change over time, but we think about it as sort of that that first bucket in private equity being cash flowing businesses that you're potentially buying a majority of. Then the next bucket being growth companies that are large stabilized businesses where you're buying a minority check. And then venture capital being, you know, I think the way we all think about ventures, earlier stage with a lot of upside, but and kind of an unproven outcome at this point.

• 24:18David Weisburd?

  Talk to me about growth equity. A lot of people are very down on that asset class, even more.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Than private equity and traditional venture. Tell me about the opportunities you're seeing in growth equity. This is where the nomenclature is interesting because I think when I hear growth equity, and I think most people, I sort of jump to late-stage ventures, so series C, D, E, F, in this environment of funding, but really kind of venture-like companies and venture firms doing those later-stage rounds. And I think that's a component of growth equity. That's an area that maybe I mentioned earlier that we had challenging investing in earlier in this decade when things were very expensive. There's also a form of growth equity where you're investing in profitable companies that are maybe more old-line, growing companies, but you're not buying the majority of the business, you're providing a growth check and you're not using financial leverage. And we think that's an interesting area of the growth equity market, meaning it's not

• 25:06Speaker 00

  necessarily late-stage venture, the businesses look more like private equity, but as opposed to doing a buyout and using a lot of leverage to try to generate extra returns, you're looking at those types of businesses that are growing quickly and you're taking a minority check and you're looking to get a rate of return based on the growth of the underlying earnings as opposed to reducing costs, using leverage and doing some financial engineering. Oftentimes, in asset classes like growth equity or secondaries, the money is made on the purchase and on the structuring. Talk to me about that and where's there room in a portfolio for family office for something like that? It's been interesting to us to see over the last couple of years to see structured terms coming back to rounds of financing, so liquidation preferences and notes that carry interest rates and some of these things.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  And for us, at a high level, we're always looking at risk-adjusted returns. So we've actually done some sort of structured deals in the private equity and venture space where we're collateralizing shares or doing different things to try to generate those risk-adjusted returns. Goes back to this principle of if we're going to get 10% private equity or private credit, we'd rather be higher in the capital stack. And if you can make private equity have some downside constraints and maybe your return target's the same, we're going to choose that all day long. Of course, there's this component of not being predatory in the financing and being founder-friendly, and we certainly ascribe to all those notions, but we've tried to do things to protect the downside and look at more structured opportunities. When we last chatted, you talked about

• 26:31David Weisburd?

  Cambridge data on venture capital. Tell me about that.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Cambridge sort of famously compiles vintage level data for private equity, venture capital, various sub asset classes that that help us all assess if our individual checks are top decile, top quartile, quartile, bottom quartile, etc. They benchmark against the other opportunities in that specific vintage and these specific sub asset classes. And that's a really helpful tool for us to see how we're doing on our commitments. One of the takeaways that Cambridge, I think, has popularized is around around what types of funds and what fund sizes tend to outperform. And this is an area that we that we agree with them on in a few areas. So we look at earlier fund vintages in a firm's life, meaning the data would show that funds kind of

• 27:14Speaker 00

  two through five tend to do very well. And part of that is structural, right? If you have done very well in your early funds, you get the right to raise larger funds and generate higher asset management fees. And that's good for the business, but can often lead to strategy drift and reduced alpha as you continue to succeed and grow out of what made you successful, just structurally. So we couple that with fund size. We're very deliberate about the the size of the fund being raised. And we want that target fund size to match the underlying strategy. And that varies dramatically from early stage venture to, you know, private equity. But we want there to be alignment with that. And Cambridge data would show, I think, that oftentimes smaller funds

• 27:56Speaker 00

  outperform. And I think that's just a function of funds getting larger and losing alpha and maybe getting some strategy drift along the way.

• 28:02David Weisburd?

  When you look at private equity managers that are in a fund three, fund four, fund five, let's say they've had top quartile performance, what else are you looking for? Like, what would get you not to invest in a top quartile fund?

• 28:13Speaker 00

  It's a great question, because what's so interesting for us that I think everyone thinks about when you're making a commitment here as an LP is that you're signing up really for a partnership for a decade plus. And so historical performance is important, but it can sometimes be irrelevant when you look at a new vintage and see the people deploying the fund. So for us, Making sure the track record of the firm matches the current investors. Oftentimes, if you've had a few great funds, you were very successful and it can lead to succession and change of hands. So making sure that there's continuity in the team and that that structure is set up to last and you've got succession plan and you can look at firm ownership and make sure that there's the right alignment for the team members to succeed for the next 10 years.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  The other thing, I guess, is related to what I last mentioned. If the firm did great in Funds 2, 3, 4, and 5 at $250 million funds and then are raising a $5 billion fund and are going to be focused on a very different strategy, then for us, it's kind of a totally new underwriting process and we might not give a lot of credence to the prior track record.

• 29:16David Weisburd?

  Outside of team continuity and fund size, what are other red or yellow flags for you to re-up an existing manager?

• 29:24Speaker 00

  Concentration of returns. So if there's been a low hit rate, that could potentially be a concern across these assets. I think in private equity, you're not likely to see the outsized return of one company over time like you do in venture. So we'd want to see those returns distributed. We'd also want to see generally the ability to produce returns in different interest rate environments. I talked about financial engineering, but I think some private equity firms' strategies have been more heavily predicated on lower interest rates. So we'd want to see the ability to produce these types of returns in a world where the cost of capital is not close to zero.

• 29:55David Weisburd?

  Hey, we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. Our sponsor for today's episode is Karta, the end-to-end accounting platform purposely built for fund CFOs. For the first time ever, private fund operators can leverage their very own bespoke software that's designed from the ground up to bring their whole portfolio together. This enables formations, transactions, and distributions to flow seamlessly and accurately to limited partners. The end result is a remarkably fast and precise platform that empowers better strategic decision-making and delivers transformational insights on demand. Come see the new standard in private fund management at z.karta.com Talk to me about benchmarking.

• 30:36David Weisburd?

  What data are you using and how do you bring benchmarking to your decision making when it comes to asset allocation?

• 30:41Speaker 00

  We use benchmarks in a pretty material way across all asset classes. So we, in our reporting software, we look at our assets, each of our individual line items relative to the benchmark that best is the best proxy for what they're trying to accomplish. So when we're looking at returns, we're looking at risk adjusted returns relative to a policy benchmark that represents the risk in their portfolio. And some of our clients tend to be very benchmark agnostic, meaning they don't, they don't care what the S and P did necessarily, if it was up or down. What they care about is sort of the risk return of their portfolio and tends to be more absolute return focused. On the flip side, we have institutional clients that have an investment committee that are very much oriented toward relative performance versus the benchmark. In US large cap, it tends to be hard. It's an efficient market.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  It doesn't mean that we don't try to lean into value and be systematic, particularly when there's excesses like we're seeing now that we talked about earlier. But, but on, on margin, it's harder to have alpha numerically in US large cap because of the efficiency. In some of the areas and diversifiers that we talked about, there's not great benchmarks and we think taking that benchmark risk, if you will, is valuable to the portfolio. So we, we, we look at it on a sub asset class basis, on an asset class basis, even within equities, small cap equities tend to be less efficient. There's more room for alpha and active management in small cap than there is in large cap, for example.

• 31:57David Weisburd?

  And the reason the benchmarks don't really make sense in the hedge fund strategy is because so many of those are idiosyncratic. It's like the price of corn or the weather or some global event and they're almost by de facto, by not being correlated, the benchmark is almost nonsensical in those cases.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  That's right. And then from a, from a client perspective, the benchmarks are also irrelevant. I think most of our clients have mental benchmarks of what the S and P has done, what fixed income has done, you know, maybe treasury market. And those, those become mental benchmarks for how their portfolio is doing. Some of these esoteric areas, you could show a benchmark, but if you don't even understand what the benchmark is, it becomes less meaningful as you're working through that.

• 32:33David Weisburd?

  And those diversifiers are essentially just a way to get higher than treasury returns in a non-correlated way. So taken to extreme, you could just have the money in cash or treasuries, but you want to have a higher return without increasing the volatility of the portfolio.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  That's correct. And I think to our correlation point earlier, in a world where stocks and bonds may be positively correlated for some periods of time, it's an asset class that can provide diversification against that. So if you look at 2022 as the example, most of these strategies that we have in our diversifiers bucket did very well despite a year when both stocks and bonds really struggled.

• 33:05David Weisburd?

  Outside of a concern for liquidity, is there ever reason to own treasuries or cash?

• 33:09Speaker 00

  There certainly could be periods of time where the risk-free rate of a treasury relative to a public equity looks attractive. I mean, I think if you look back to the 70s and understand where rates were for some of those periods of time, and if you could have locked in, again, better-than-equity-like returns, 10-plus percent in a treasury bond, with hindsight, you'd probably say that's a pretty good trade. And then over that period, you also had rates coming down steadily and improving prices on your underlying fixed income instrument. So I do think there are times where your risk-adjusted returns can be better.

• 33:39David Weisburd?

  In the times of high interest rates, in the times when treasuries are at high numbers, does it ever make sense to lock in those rates over long times?

• 33:47Speaker 00

  Yes, we think so. We think so. Even over intermediate or short-ish timeframes, I mean, we think back to a year ago, you could get slightly higher rates in money market funds than you could in a one-year, two-year treasury. But the reinvestment risk to us in a treasury or three-month T-bill looked fairly high, given the probability of rate cuts at some point. And the market prices that into some extent, obviously, it's a relatively efficient market. But we like to, with our clients, we're looking at kind of a barbell strategy where, within the treasury space, where you're locking in some higher-yielding, short-term T-bills from kind of six-month, one-year, two-year, to then going out and locking in some yield at 20 years. And so far, I think, it won't always work. It's played out over this period as rates have come down more recently, and the expectation for rate cuts

• 34:31Speaker 00

  has increased. We've gotten some price appreciation, importantly locked-in rates that felt attractive at the time.

• 34:36David Weisburd?

  You've been at Sepio Capital for seven and a half years. What do you wish you knew when you first started at Sepio?

• 34:41Speaker 00

  I don't think I fully understood at Sepio how vast the investment universe would be for us. Prior to this, I had been at various investment banks and institutions with a walled garden, and you saw the same types of strategies. And I think our hope at Sepio was going to be that we'd have the opportunity to look at more niche opportunities. And I don't think we understood at inception just how wide that universe is, for better for worse. There's a lot of very unattractive opportunities shown to us and to clients. But the amount of interesting things that you can invest in across the space, if you truly have an open architecture, is broad, and it takes a lot of team capacity. So we've staffed up and tried to get in a place where we can diligence really anything in the investment landscape.

• 35:25David Weisburd?

  Talk to me about how you've improved your skill set and your knowledge base over your seven and a half years.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  I've been fortunate to have really sharp and impressive colleagues that I've been able to learn from. I've tried to really lean in and work on everything in a team-oriented way. So at Sepio, we don't have a sharp-elbowed culture where one individual owns something and takes all the revenues from that strategy or workflow, but rather a team-oriented process. So we have team members that focus on real estate. We have team members that focus on private equity on the direct side. I focus more on the LP side. And for me, working in a collaborative way across our Alts platform, working as an investment committee to really understand what's attractive without any bias for our own coverage area has been really helpful for me. And I think as a firm as well, to be able to be nimble and look at different areas, it may become more attractive based on the network environment.

• 36:15David Weisburd?

  Talk to me how you would get comfortable or how you would accelerate your learning growth in new space like GP Stakes.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're very comfortable diving into new spaces. We've done it often. I think for us, it's a time and resource management and really what we think makes sense to our clients. So where we have client demand or we think it's a need for a client, we'll put whatever resource is necessary to dive in and understand that. GP-led stakes have been I think from that client perspective, sometimes challenging to understand who's going to benefit from the economics of a GP stake, given that it's our client's capital, but maybe we'd be aggregating capital on behalf of them as a firm and making sure that they get those underlying benefits at times hasn't been overly clear to us. So it's not an area that we spent a lot of time on, but if the opportunity presented or if it felt like it was a need, we'd certainly dive in.

• 36:59David Weisburd?

  Walk me through how you get knowledgeable on a new space. Do you bring in advisors? Do you talk to prospective GPs?

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, we've done all of those things. We've had investment consultants in the past, particularly when we had a leaner team that we could lean on for kind of high level diligence. We, of course, have access to all of the major research platforms that provide good data and then the, you know, the software systems like Bloomberg and PitchBook and, you know, all of those underlying opportunities to get data. So part of it becomes a quantitative process of understanding in a certain space, what investment partners have the best track record and that's not overly difficult to try to screen for those things. And then to your point, we have lots of discussions with general partners. So when we're exploring an area like distressed credit that we referenced before, that maybe was less interesting to us before, became very interesting to us, we're going to end up talking to 50 plus

• 37:48Speaker 00

  underlying firms, understanding the market as well as we can, diving in on track records, the quantitative process, and ultimately getting comfortable with various partners.

• 37:56David Weisburd?

  What is the minimum amount of GPs you would want to talk to before investing in a new strategy?

• 38:02Speaker 00

  I think the minimum number of GPs we'd want to talk to before investing in the strategy is probably 20, if we felt like that we had it, if we felt like we had a curated list of 20 of the best GPs in a certain subsector. In a space like venture, I probably end up talking to 100 plus GPs a year. It's very referral based and there's lots of new entrants and smaller funds and it's a little bit different than certain areas of the investment landscape. So maybe warrants more conversations.

• 38:27David Weisburd?

  Those 20 being warm introductions?

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Correct, yeah.

• 38:31David Weisburd?

  So potentially spanning from hundreds of firms, those are the 20 that you were told to speak to and then from those 20 conversations, you start to getting a good sense of the space?

• 38:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you think about traditional funnel in every investment deck, we're probably going to look at, you know, 100 plus GPs in any one of these areas and trying to funnel it down to kind of a smaller group that we do initial screen call with and then, you know, get down to some amount of, call it 20, where you're going to really do some diligence and have multiple calls with team and multiple constituents internally and externally to try to understand the opportunity set.

• 39:03David Weisburd?

  As an LP, what mistakes have you made in terms of investing in GPs? What has looked good that's actually not good?

• 39:10Speaker 00

  Some challenges we've had on initial LP checks is understanding how good partnership dynamics are internally. We've invested in folks before where we felt like their partnership was very stable. And then you get a few years into a fund and you start to understand that maybe the underlying chemistry of the partners wasn't as good as you thought. And you have to deal with a GP breakup mid-fund. And I think that sometimes coincides with investing earlier in a firm's lifecycle. So if you're investing in fund two or three, sometimes there's still some kinks to be worked out and you hit a more challenging period and you have general partners splitting. So that's been a challenge, is something that we spend a lot of time trying to assess and make sure that the partnership's in a good space before we engage as a limited partner.

• 39:49David Weisburd?

  You suss that out by taking them to drinks, taking them to coffee, seeing how they are with their family. How do you suss out that risk? How do you become better at understanding the partnership dynamics at a GP?

• 40:00Speaker 00

  Extending the diligence period, so really getting to know people, not necessarily in time, but in the amount of time spent with the GPs. I think reference calls can be very helpful. And maybe more than anything, not everyone, but many of the folks we work with are driven by the economics at some point. So some of the situations we've seen that haven't worked out were in part potentially driven by one general partner owning more of the firm and potentially doing an equal amount or less of the work and no mechanism for that changing over time. So I think on a quantitative basis, really making sure that we've got a good understanding for the underlying economics of the business and making sure that they feel sustainable through the life of a fund.

• 40:40David Weisburd?

  How do you make sure that your reference calls get to ground truth? And what are some non-obvious signs? I'm sure it's unlikely that the person says is a terrible person, never give money to them, but what are some things that you look for that would indicate that the person might Not be a GP that you want to invest in.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, for on on list references, for references that were provided, you you sort of have to assume that they were curated because they've got a good relationship and they're going to tell you that they're a great fund manager. I think the common advice that that I've gotten and read in books about references for whether it's hiring or or these sorts of things is asking open ended questions and asking follow up questions. I think when you ask, you know, how if you're talking to an entrepreneur, how were they, you know, through this process, they're going to say good. And then if you say, tell me about that, and they'll tell you, you know, how they did well, and then, you know, what was one of the struggles you've had. I think at that point, they tend to be a little bit more open to telling you about some of the challenges they've had throughout that process. So I think I found if I have a list of 10 questions and I go through and just let the reference answer kind of yes or no, or the first question. And if it's someone that's provided, you're just going to get great answers.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  If you ask one layer, two layer, three layers down in a way that doesn't feel threatening and you agree with the initial premise that they're great. You tend to get some some open feedback from the referencee. I think that to my point of off list of references, if you can find folks that can speak freely, knowing that that's more anonymous because they weren't provided as a reference. It becomes much easier to to get at the the truth, if you will.

• 41:59David Weisburd?

  And even them unwilling to jump on a call after opening your email is a pretty strong signal itself, correct?

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Correct. Yeah, totally. And I think you you've probably seen this, we've all felt this. It's it's a small world and most in general partners are, you know, one degree of separation through another GP or through a company. It hasn't been too challenging for us to find someone that we can connect with off list.

• 42:22David Weisburd?

  One thing that I try to do in my reference calls is to get to the truth while providing plausible deniability to the interviewee. In other words, not making them say this person is a terrible person, but perhaps seeing, you know, how they answer the enthusiasm. What they say, what they say without being prompted, those are all very, very strong signals, especially on on a live call.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  Totally agree.

• 42:46David Weisburd?

  What would you like our audience to know about you, about Sepio Capital, or anything else you'd like to shine a light on?

• 42:51Speaker 00

  Hopefully, this has been illustrated throughout our conversation, but we have a flexible, wide mandate on the investment side. So we we welcome any opportunities to look at interesting strategies. We're also more than happy to dive in and talk further about our asset allocation, our high conviction investment opportunities and what we're looking at now.

• 43:07David Weisburd?

  Excellent. Well, I appreciate you jumping on the podcast and look forward to sitting down soon.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  David, really appreciate the time. Thanks so much.

• 43:13David Weisburd?

  Thank you for listening. The 10x Capital Podcast now receives more than 170,000 downloads per month. If you are interested in sponsoring, please email me at [email protected].