Pod Insights How I Invest with David Weisburd E334: Texas Tech CIO: How We Find Asymmetric Bets About this episode Why buy an office when everyone else is selling?
In this episode, I sit down with Tim Barrett, CIO of the Texas Tech University Endowment, to explore how he builds high-conviction portfolios across private equity, real estate, and hedge funds. Tim shares why governance, manager selection, and a generalist team structure drive consistent alpha, how he balances risk and upside with portable alpha, and why lower middle market investments can outperform flashy venture deals. He also dives into building team culture, aligning incentives, and using the endowment’s size and flexibility to access niche opportunities others can’t.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 David Weisburd? So Tim, you're the CIO of Texas Tech's Endowment. And out of the hundreds and hundreds of conversations that I have with allocator, you're the only one really taking a deep dive on office space today. Why are you so bullish on office space?
0:11 Speaker 01 Right, I think if you pull the curtain back and look at office space in general, it's an abysmal story and that's the headlines you see everywhere. Our job as investors is to dig beneath that headline and see if there really is opportunity. Are we hitting the turning point? When we think about office now, the vast majority of office, especially second tier cities, et cetera, we don't want to touch. But we think that there's a unique opportunity to buy at a discount to replacement cost. In some cases, a meaningful discount, trophy assets in growing areas. We specifically like certain areas of the Dallas market and the Plano market. We think there's a lot of opportunity there to pick up high end trophy assets with a population that's growing in that area. And you'll see people migrate from these, call it class B or A minus buildings to these trophy assets. There's a lot of opportunity there.
0:57 David Weisburd? Is that just a rule in asset management in general where some of the best trades are one or sometimes two levels below the headline? So the headline says, do not touch this asset. And then when you dig down, that's where the alpha is made?
1:08 Speaker 01 I would say that's almost a quintessential rule of investing, right? If, if you, we can talk about real estate, we can talk about private equity, private credit, just about any asset class you're thinking about.
1:20 Speaker 01 The pain part of that asset class is, is usually talked about pretty quickly. Like last week, it was software and AIs wiping out all the software companies, right? That's kind of the canary in, in the coal line for, for an investor to go look at his portfolio, specifically private credit in this case, and decide whether we have the right exposures with the managers and talk to them like, do you have exposure to software companies, specifically application type companies, right? Enterprise probably going to be fine. The application companies are in serious, serious hurt with AI coming. So we think it's a perfect opportunity to dig down to that next level, have discussions with our managers and try to find out how they're repositioning that portfolio.
2:00 David Weisburd? If you go upstream of being able to make these trades, it's really a governance question. It's a question of whether your IC empowers you to make that trade in office space that everybody is saying, stay away from it, but you see the alpha there.
2:14 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I've been doing this for almost 30 years and I can, I've worked in a number of different places and I can tell you that governance is the hidden thing that nobody really talks too much about. And it can radically impact your ability to manage your portfolio successfully, depending on how tight that governance is. At Texas Tech, we have the government's authority to make those trades. We don't go to an investment committee for approval. Our committee is myself and my investment team. So we're able to quickly do a co-investment if one comes across our play that we really like, or if we want to go into office, we can do that. We're held accountable at the broad portfolio level to that kind of global 65 plus 35 benchmark, which is our benchmark. So that's how the
2:59 Speaker 01 Board of Regents thinks about our portfolios. Are you beating that on a risk-adjusted basis? And luckily for us, we are, but at times we aren't, right? I mean, markets go up and down. We're probably a little more defensive than that benchmark right now, and I think that's the right place to be. But that government's authority to allow us to make trades, to move the portfolio around as we see fit, is critical. Just think about a regular pension fund that may have to go to a quarterly meeting. They may have to go to two or three quarterly meetings before they get a change in the portfolio approved. That's pretty standard practice. A lot of times it takes two meetings, that's half a year before you're even moving. To me, whether that's a co-investment, or whether that's jumping into a new strategy you think is going to be very good for the next year, year and a half, you're missing
3:43 Speaker 01 a large part of that play, all because of governments.
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5:45 Speaker 01 That's exactly right. If, when you think about the 65, 35, we don't go down to the next level at the 35. So let's just call that stable value, right? It's benchmarked against the Bloomberg Global aggregate. Nobody on the regents or our investment resource council are telling us, hey, put money in the Bloomberg aggregate, put money in treasuries. Nobody has that discussion. We separately build a structure and a portfolio and we try to beat that aggregate, that benchmark on a very consistent basis, but at a high level. So like, we're usually running 500 basis points over that benchmark over time. This last year was an exception. I think the Bloomberg aggregate was up close to 8%. We're still going to beat it for the calendar year 25, but it was a much, was much tighter
6:30 Speaker 01 spread this year. It was a little tougher benchmark. But overall, we get to take and manage the risk profile of that portfolio.
6:38 David Weisburd? Many endowments, when I talk to them, they talk about their alpha strategies, how they're contrarian. But then when you look at their returns and their asset allocations, they're very tightly banded. Seems like there's a hesitancy to go against the grain because there's so much incentive not to do that. What has led you to be more independent and willing to take risks where other endowments are not able to?
6:59 Speaker 01 That's a tough question. Other endowments is a hard thing to answer on how they invest in their governance style. There are many endowments that, in my view, take way more risk than we do. And they build massive venture capital portfolios, which is kind of the endowment model. I would say if you look back at our portfolio over the last few years, we had quite a bit of venture capital at one time. And it really wasn't because we planned to. It was because, I think it was 2022 or 21, where our venture portfolio shot up by over 100% in one year. Right? Fast forward today, had three years of no returns. Right? So it's been flatlined. We're starting to see signs of it coming up now. And that's been like how endowments thought about adding lots of value is really through these private equity portfolios
7:40 Speaker 01 that were massive. Our teams got together and said, we actually don't even like that model. So we're probably anti-endowment in that regard. And we're lowering our venture capital exposure pretty dramatically in favor of what we think is a more consistent returning asset, which is lower middle market buyout. Yes, we may not get the highs that venture capital does, but we're going to be much more consistent in that space. And frankly, the companies are easy to underwrite. Right? They have revenue. They have EBITDA. There's a game plan that says how many bolt-ons we're going to do on that company. And we're able to underwrite that much easier, at least my team, than a venture capital idea. Right? So Whoop is a perfect example. We did a co-investment in Whoop with one of our managers. Loved
8:23 Speaker 01 the idea. Didn't have any idea that the Ring thing was going to come out and six other devices were going to come out and make Whoop not quite as valuable as we originally thought. I think venture capital is very tough from that regard. So we're kind of pivoting to a different way of managing the portfolio than I think the traditional endowment, if that makes sense.
8:43 David Weisburd? When we last chatted, you said that you like to spend a lot of your time with managers, talking to them about their best ideas. Maybe double click on what that looks like and what you're trying to ascertain in these meetings.
8:55 Speaker 01 The manager selection and partnering with managers is probably one of the most critical things that we do, right? That's how we get our alpha. That's where we get it from. It's not like anybody in my office is doing really internal trading, right? It's all through managers. So that partnership is everything. So a perfect example of that was when we were in Europe, we were really trying to focus on small nichey secondary managers that we could find over there, and we found one. And it was a spin out from another company, and we sat down and talked with them about, how would you go about building a secondary strategy? And we partnered with them. I think we were the first institutional capital really to partner with these guys. For that, we get a piece of GP economics out of them.
9:37 Speaker 01 And we also have co-investment rights, and we negotiated rights in the future funds for capacity. This is a perfect example of like talking to managers and getting out on the road and finding ideas that really work for you and can add value. I would say the other piece of that is every one of my senior guys on the team, they talk to all of our managers minimum once a quarter, and some of the managers they're talking to once a month or once every two weeks to pay on it, how much dialogue they have with that individual manager. That flows through to the entire team about ideas and what they're seeing in the market. It flows through at our pipeline meetings, and it also flows through at our strategy meetings that we have. And those are every two weeks. So they're pretty constant updating on what the managers are seeing. Think of it as just a funnel of knowledge, right?
10:23 Speaker 01 Is how we think about it.
10:26 David Weisburd? Scott Wilson at St. Louis Wash U is famous for this. He would meet with his manager, and he would actually ask a very simple question, which is, what is your biggest position and are you at your concentration limit? And for those that were at their concentration limit, he would ask to co-invest more. So the idea was that if you have a concentration limit of 20 and you're 20%, you're actually underweighted. You still have to manage your portfolio, and sometimes you have constraints as a manager. So he would look to literally co-invest into the manager's best ideas. He saw the signal that their best managers were actually underweight in their best ideas.
10:56 Speaker 01 We haven't gone through and done that per se. I think when we think about co-investing, which is really what we're talking about here, we really are looking for asymmetry in the co-investment. You know, five years ago, we did a lot of co-investments, and we've really slowed it up. And we slowed it up for two reasons. When we went back and looked at it when we were doing lots of co-investments. And we did that because we thought we could, one, lower fees. And two, improve our returns because these were great ideas for managers, right? It had to be from a manager that was in our book that we trusted that was already putting it in their portfolio. Right? So that was our way of like keeping the guardrails on and allowing a small team to still be able to do co-investments. Is what we found is that we still did too many. The returns were kind of middling.
11:39 Speaker 01 Like they kind of did okay right around the fund returns, but they weren't providing outsized returns. When we look back and decided to really dig in, say, which ones were outsized returns? They were ones that we really commented on the high asymmetry of the trade. And I'll give you an example.
11:57 Speaker 01 One of the companies that we invested in recently has contracts with the US government. And it's a very technical company that uses lasers and atomizes metals to then print. Right? So you could, for instance, if you wanted to print a missile or you could print anything, really anything metal. It does it at a super fast speed. It's an autonomous factory, basically, is what these printers become. And we looked at the contracts that they had that were coming in and we said, this has a lot of asymmetry in it. We're already protected by the first few contracts that came through. If they're successful, need more contracts coming through. That's pretty sticky money when you start talking about Department of Defense. So those were ones where we had success at. So we really look for that asymmetry.
12:42 Speaker 01 We really look for locked in contractual income that we know is going to come in those deals. And we'll go bigger on those.
12:48 David Weisburd? When you meet with a manager and they present you an opportunity, how do you know that it's something that you should double click on?
12:54 Speaker 01 That's a great question. It goes back to a little bit of that asymmetry, right? I think the second piece that we think about is how successful, like if we have a manager in the book and he's sending us stuff. How successful have we been with that manager? Because most likely we've been doing other co-investments. Right? If he's proven track record, the one that he's feeding us over time that they're working. We have much more confidence to continue that process. And then it's a, then the second step after that is individual underwriting of that deal. Is it like the other deals we have in the portfolio? Is it differentiated and does it have asymmetry? And does it have long-term staying power contracts, right? If we see that, we like it a lot more.
13:31 David Weisburd? Curious, you mentioned asymmetry. So on one end, that's potential 10x. On the other end, oftentimes it's a zero. How do you think about that? Do you have to present the zeros to the investment committee? Are you presenting on a net basis? The symmetry on the downside, is that something that you care a lot about? Or is it just part of the game?
13:49 Speaker 01 It depends a little bit on what asset class. When you go to like private equity and private credit, we're really looking for consistency. I don't think we do very many co-investments at all that we think could have a zero. Back in the day, we used to do venture co-investments. Those definitely could have had a zero. But as we've moved more to lower middle market and growth investments for co-investments, we don't believe we're going to hit zeros on any of the ones we do. We think downsides in a lot of them could be, you know, single digits. You could have that kind of downside and upsides could be, you know, 30, 40, 50% kind of IRRs on those trades or multiples in the three to five X. There's very few that we underwrite where we go, oh, we think we can get a 10x.
14:32 Speaker 01 I think there's only one in the portfolio that's been mentioned that we think we could have a 10x on. And most people don't even pay attention to that because it's, it doesn't happen very often.
14:42 David Weisburd? Tying back to what we talked about earlier, you said that you went away from heavy on venture to more lower middle market. In simple ways, they have somewhat similar returns, but venture once in a while will have this huge outperformance, will have this, this 10x fund, which is much more rare these days. What are the second order effects of having a more stable portfolio and focusing more on lower middle market versus venture? What are you solving around?
15:06 Speaker 01 The first thing a CIO solves around is ensuring that his stakeholders are happy. Because that is your career, right? So when you think of the board of regents or donors at Texas, at Texas Tech, what they want to see is consistent outperformance over the benchmarks. And as soon as you introduce a ton of venture, that volatility and that ability to have two, three, four years of middling returns creates a lot of stress on the time and a lot of political stress. From my standpoint, that's probably the main driver of wanting to push that direction. The second piece has to do with benchmarks. It goes right back to governments again, right? So some endowments will have a venture cap benchmark, a buyout benchmark, a growth equity
15:49 Speaker 01 benchmark, and they blend those three together and that's what they're trying to be. Well, if the benchmark has 30% venture in it.
15:57 Speaker 01 You're naturally going to push to 30% venture because you're trying to match that benchmark up. So whether venture is a great deal or not, you're in it. We don't have that. The acquiesce our growth benchmark equity plus 100 for the entire growth portfolio, whether it's public equity, long short equity, private equity, real estate, whatever. And that's what we're trying to beat.
16:17 Speaker 01 So when you think about that as your benchmark, you're not compelled to invest in venture. You're compelled to invest in something that will build a portfolio that will consistently beat that benchmark and beat it handily. Right? Not just by a little in the private, you probably want to double that benchmark at least. Right? Um, I don't think that's possible in years where acquiesce running at 20%, but that's rare. Right? That's happened the last few years. That's not going to continue. The equity over time, 78% return. So if we can get high teens to 20 in our private asset portfolio on the growth side, that's all right. Uh, and that's what we're trying to do.
16:48 David Weisburd? When I had Larry Kochard, former CIO of McKenna, UVA in Georgetown, he talked about this. And he also had a storied career over many decades and he found that what's very underrated is the sustainability of the endowment strategy. What does that mean? It's all fine and dandy. If you could get 9% versus 8% for seven years, but then if a new CIO comes in and then they have to sell via secondary, and then the next two years are 6%, you're going to end up at the same 8% versus if you actually have a compounding strategy that could survive over many decades, you're actually going to outperform a very spiky portfolio that the stakeholders might not like.
17:21 Speaker 01 A couple of different things when you think about that, right? I think the first one is governance and turnover.
17:28 Speaker 01 If, if from a governance standpoint, the university in this case is not taking care of its team and paying people appropriately, you're going to have massive turnover. Every time you turn over a private equity guy
17:40 Speaker 01 and hire a new one, he has a new strategy that he wants to implement. There's always turmoil and change. If you hire a new CIO, that's gargantuan wholesale change at the portfolio level. Like we run portable alpha, we run different strategies. Most of that stuff would probably be wiped out by the next guy.
17:57 Speaker 01 That sustainability partly is driven by governments and how they manage the relationship with the Office of Investments at the university. The second piece is sticking to your long-term knitting, right? Obviously, we're not in some ways, right? Like, I'm moving away from venture. We're making that smaller to go to lower middle market. And that's after probably seven, eight years of building out the venture portfolio. Now, we're going to keep the ones that we like the best in that portfolio, but we're shrinking that exposure. So I would say in some ways, we're not being sustainable in the venture portfolio because we're not doing it the same size. But I still think by going to lower middle market, it's a better portfolio for us. But those changes happen all the time in portfolios and hurt that sustainability.
18:38 David Weisburd? Portable alpha, it's a big buzzword in investing. How would you explain portable alpha to an eighth grader?
18:46 Speaker 01 It's a great question. If I think about portable alpha eighth grader, I would say market exposure, we get very cheaply. Now, we do that through a swap, but you can think of that as the same return as an index fund, right? So we're getting the same return. What we're getting out of doing in a swap is we're not putting any money out really to get that exposure. So let's say we want to put $100 million portfolio together. I'm going to buy $100 million swap on the equity. I've spent no real money. So what am I going to do with $100 million, right? This is a levered trade, right? So I get the exposure of the market for 100 million. Now, I'm going to take that 100 million, I'm going to put 70% of it in multi-strat hedge funds, maybe some short bias hedge funds, stuff that doesn't correlate with that $100
19:28 Speaker 01 million of market index exposure or very lowly correlated. And then I'm going to put 30% in treasuries. Why do I need the treasuries? Well, I got to put the money somewhere. You can't put it all in locked up hedge funds because the market will draw down and then the guys that sold you the swap are going to want to get paid. When it goes down, you got to pay money in. So you need that for when a drawdown happens. That's how portable alpha used to run for decades. I ran it through the GFC that way of San Bernardino. That was a pretty harrowing time. And it really highlighted the faults in portable alpha, to be honest. Because when the market goes down that fast and that long,
20:10 Speaker 01 you're constantly chewing through your collateral and you're getting to the bare end of your collateral. So if you're going to run portable alpha that way, you also have to have the flexibility to completely take beta down. You need wide ranges. So if the market really gets in trouble, you need to be able to reduce your equity exposure by like 20%.
20:29 Speaker 01 And having that kind of governance structure is also difficult to get. So portable alpha is very tough for most people, but the idea is beta and an index fund. You take the cash 70% hedge funds, 30% treasuries. That's the old way of doing it.
20:41 David Weisburd? So another way, you have $100 million in an index fund. Let's just call it S and P 500. And then you're borrowing against it and you're putting 70% in multi-strat and 30% in cash. And that 30% is a cushion
20:53 David Weisburd? against the portfolio going down.
20:55 Speaker 01 That's exactly right.
20:56 David Weisburd? Differentiate portable alpha versus how other people will do alpha. They'll put 100 million into a fund that tracks both beta and alpha. But here you're actually getting exposure to the alpha through the leverage.
21:08 Speaker 01 We are, right? So the leverage in its fact is your market index is levered, right? It's a swap.
21:16 Speaker 01 So you get your leverage there and then we're also putting more leverage on at the alpha level, which allows us to put more treasuries behind the market index. The reason it works is because you're in the alpha pool, you're levering your least correlated asset. So if you think across the whole portfolio, the one thing that doesn't move around with the market that much is that alpha pool, and that's what you're building it for. When you build an alpha pool, you build it based on drawdown risk and correlations. You don't build it to maximize returns. You want high returns, you want good returns, but your focus has to be on the downside and the correlation. And that's, that's the trick to port the alpha.
21:50 David Weisburd? So now when the market goes down, you still have the treasury buffer from leveraging the, the multi-strat position, the uncorrelated part, because it's not correlated, it's the market going down. So it's, it's unaffected.
22:04 Speaker 01 That's correct. It's, it's generally unaffected. You can have like a 30% correlation, but we stress test the heck out of that. And believe that we can handle a 50% drawdown. And we look at it every week. Last year it ran at 800 basis points over the index. The average global equity manager, if they consistently deliver between 1 and 200 over, like there's probably only a handful of those guys in the whole world. Like hardly anybody, you look at S and P persistence report, active managers can't beat it. That's why we do this.
22:33 David Weisburd? Texas Tech is at $3.3 billion, which is no small amount of money, but it's certainly not Calipers, it's not Utemco. How does your size give you an advantage over other allocators?
22:45 Speaker 01 I would say we almost have a Goldilocks portfolio. I think anywhere around three to five billions, an amazing portfolio to run. We can do a lot of things that move the needle that a Utemco or a TRS here in, in town, they just can't do.
23:02 Speaker 01 We just recently went into a lower middle market secondaries player in the United States. It was a pretty small firm. Their fund is like 300 million. We took a pretty good bite out of that fund and we're taking co-investments for those guys. TRS or Utemco, they would, they would take the whole fund. So we're able to get into these, what I would call niche year, lower middle market investments. And it's meaningful to us, right? 20 million is, is 1% of the endowment because we run two pools of capital, two, two billion on the endowment, about 1.4 billion in operational. So 20 million is really meaningful. These guys, they can't even move the needle doing that. It's not worth doing the deal. They want to put 100 million to 300 million dollar checks out.
23:45 Speaker 01 That is a massive advantage. I think the second advantage goes back to what we talked earlier is the governance. We can react quickly on all of that because we aren't going through a committee process.
23:53 David Weisburd? You last chatted, you said that you like to hire generalists on your team who are senior. Double click on that strategy.
24:00 Speaker 01 I've probably always been a generalist guy, sector specialist or specialist in, in general, that, that whole concept. The larger you are, the more that makes sense. At our size, we wouldn't have the budget to even hire enough specialists to cover the market. Right? I think that'd be very difficult for us. What I like about the generalist approach is it's about total portfolio management thesis. If, if I have a specialist in healthcare, healthcare is always going to look good in private equity healthcare to a, to a healthcare specialist. He'll always find stuff to do and put money in, but he, he's not thinking about industrials. He's not, he's not thinking about real estate. He's not thinking about anything else in the portfolio. He's hyper focused on the healthcare space. Will he find
24:43 Speaker 01 good deals? Probably. But if the beta of that market is not good and is struggling, he'll still put that money to work. Whereas a generalist, I want them looking across the portfolio, not even, if you think of my generalist in credit, he's public and private credit. I want him to think about that, but we also use hedge funds in our stable value and other strategies. I want him understanding, knowing those as well, because what we want is the best risk adjusted return, whether it's in your book or the hedge fund guy's book. Having the generalist for me allows the team to think more holistically about the portfolio in the same way I think about it. And it gets buy-in from them that, hey, why are we doing this hedge fund strategy versus another private credit? Well, we're doing it because we think private credit is starting to get long in the tooth. We're a little worried
25:27 Speaker 01 about the economy. We'd rather have more defensive posture right now. So we'll put in that hedge fund. That might be the discussion that day. Right? And I just think it allows a better total portfolio management approach.
25:39 David Weisburd? You're not creating the wrong incentives in terms of investing. You're also, although you have a generalist layer on your team, you're partnering with specialists. So you're going lower middle market, secondary person, somebody that spends all their time in a very specific niche. And you're having the generalist part of your team member manage that relationship and basically get abreast on the opportunities in that niche.
25:56 Speaker 01 I was just describing the team portion only, but you're absolutely right in the manager side, right? Like we have exposure to Orbamed. They're our healthcare specialist. They're phenomenal at what they do. We have them in venture. We have them in credit. And that's all they do for a living. We think you need that exposure, but I don't need somebody on my team that's a specialist in that exposure.
26:15 David Weisburd? Had over three decades of dealing with people, managing, developing them. What's something that you've recently changed your mind at around talent management?
26:23 Speaker 01 The biggest thing for me, and this is probably, unfortunately for me, it probably occurred in the last 10 years of my career. Now, I didn't pick up on this early, was I always believed early that investment skillset was, you know, are you a CFA? Did you go to a good school? Where did you work? What'd you do? Let's talk about the deals you did or the funds you hired, et cetera. Like, and I really was hyper focused on investment skill. And as I've done this for decades now, yes, that you have to have that in this field, but that's just the table stakes. That's, that's what gets you into the game. If you're in the game, you probably already have that. And I kind of stopped worrying about that part so much
27:05 Speaker 01 and really started focusing more almost on culture and drive
27:12 Speaker 01 than the other two. Because what I've found is that even if you hired really smart investment guys, if your culture gets fractured from bringing in a person that just doesn't fit or having one or two that don't fit on the team well, that creates way more havoc than having somebody that might not be quite up to speed in investing. In the end, I can teach somebody how to invest and how to think about managers, now think about strategies. And I can walk them through analysis and show them what to look for. What I, what is hard to teach is culture and fit. That, that to me is almost ingrained in a personality behavior and how you behave. So to me, that whole personality and culture fit is taking a much bigger driver in how I hire.
27:52 David Weisburd? How would you describe the Texas Tech culture?
27:55 Speaker 01 Very open. Our doors, we all sit within 20 feet of each other in the office. And even on the weekends, like on a Saturday, people will call me or they'll be shooting texts and emails. They're working on something and it's just constant open dialogue. Anybody feels comfortable walking into anybody's office and talking about an idea in their portfolio, or just being a channel check, you know, Mike, my credit guy will go over and talk to Clint about a credit deal and see what he thinks about it and they'll have big dialogue on that. You know, outside of our strategy meeting and outside of the pipeline meeting, they'll do these things. Everybody's fighting for the same thing. We all get paid on the same bonus for total portfolio performance. And it's that open culture that really drives success in my opinion.
28:35 David Weisburd? Did you come up with that incentive scheme? And what are the trade offs of individual versus team based incentives?
28:41 Speaker 01 I did come up with the incentive scheme and I was the one that wrote it up for approval. The incentive scheme is, is really based on outperformance over three and five year periods on excess performance over the benchmark. It's also built on Sharpe ratios over the benchmark. And then the last piece is personal objectives on my view of how they've integrated as a team member. So those three components to me hit, hit what's really important. And the reason why I like it is because it's completely aligned with my institution's goals. So if we beat that 65, 35 plus 100 over a long period of time, we do it with less risk through a better Sharpe ratio.
29:20 Speaker 01 That's, that's, that's the Goldilocks scenario everybody wants. And they want it over longer periods, not one year. So that's why the three and five year period. And the last piece of that is when you think about adding 30% of your bonus and it's more behavioral personnel, individual based. That puts a line in the sand. Everybody comes to work for me and says, hey, this is important. 30% of your bonus is going to be based on how you operate as a team member, how you operate in our organization. And I want to see openness. I want to see dialogue. I want to see arguments back and forth about ideas. If I don't see that, you don't get that bonus. You just go to your office and do private credit, you're not getting the bonus. Right? Have to be integrated. The incentive structure is paramount in how well an organization runs.
30:04 David Weisburd? Last time we chatted, we had this interesting conversation about hedge fund fees. Not that you love paying hedge fund fees, but you're fine with them. Why are you fine with paying these exorbitant hedge fund fees? And how do you justify that?
30:14 Speaker 01 In the end, it's about net return. So I'll just take us back to portable alpha for a second because that's, that's the place where we probably have the most hedge funds. And that's where all those kind of pass through fees come through for the hedge funds. When you start talking about value, I think point 72, these big multi-strats. And the fees, they are, they are a little egregious, but they run massive organizations. And no, we don't like paying them. No one does. But what we get is uncorrelated returns. So true, what they call idiote return, idiosyncratic, meaning we've stripped away all the factor returns, all of that. And if somebody can really deliver true idiote return, that's worth paying for. What's not worth paying for in my mind is hiring a high yield manager to just give me high yield exposure for the most part.
30:58 Speaker 01 Or hiring a beta manager, you know, a stock manager, who if I'm lucky will give me a hundred basis points of alpha. And basically I'm paying all those fees for him to replicate the index. So when you think of market exposure, I don't want to pay anything for that. But if it's true idiote, it's worth paying for it because it's uncorrelated.
31:17 David Weisburd? Said another way, if you're, somebody's just striking, that's a B500. And even if they beat it by a hundred points, but you're paying two and 20, which is the equivalent of 600 basis points. You're losing 500 basis points versus if you're just using them for the alpha and they're getting you a return of like we mentioned earlier, 800 basis points. Then paying some, some small percentage of that makes sense.
31:36 Speaker 01 That's a perfect example. We have multi-strat credit managers in Europe and the United States that blow the doors off the bar cap consistently over rolling three and five year periods. And when I say blow the doors off, I'm like, one of them was up 17 this last year. Well, the bar cap was up eight. 17 is probably the high mark for that guy. So it'll probably gravitate back towards 12.
31:59 Speaker 01 But that's fine. That's still beating it substantially over long periods of time. So we'll pay more for that as well. Right? That's a hedge fund construct. They're moving the money. It's not beta oriented.
32:09 Speaker 01 And we like those types of strategies as well.
32:11 David Weisburd? When it comes to investing, what's something that you've changed your mind on in the past two years?
32:17 Speaker 01 We used to run a lot of tactical asset allocations when I was at San Bernardino and we even ran it for a while at tech. And we found that over time doing it, we added a little bit of value, but a lot of consternation. There's a lot of stress moving the money around and trying to tactically be right on the market, you know, or over each three to six month period. And we found that just being more stable and letting structure win is an easier way to do it. So portable alpha is just a structure. I'm going to always create my alpha on top of it. Probably with about a 90% hit rate. Whereas if I do tactical, my ability to add alpha is probably closer like a 52, 53% hit rate. It's just harder. People have added value at that level.
32:58 Speaker 01 But it's not as consistent and it's a brain drain. You spend a lot of time doing it and you could be spending your time doing something else in the portfolio. So.
33:05 David Weisburd? You've essentially shifted this tactical layer down to the manager. So if you think about what are these multi-strats doing, they're basically trying to fit the best strategy. But it allows you to essentially obfuscate that layer from your day to day. So you're not constantly making 53, 47 decisions.
33:21 Speaker 01 You're hitting on a key point of good portfolio construction. So whether we talk about the alpha pole, they're picking stocks long and short. So they're already picking winners and losers and doing that. They're also picking different strategies within the multi-strats, as you said. So that's a layer of what I call dynamic management. I don't have to do it tactical. They're doing it. The other place that we do that is in the multi-strat credit guys, right? They're being dynamic, moving money around in the credit markets. I don't have to try to figure out, do I want to be in triple Cs in high, in high yield? Do I need to be in double Bs? Where do I need to be?
33:52 Speaker 01 We're not trying to figure that out. We're outsourcing that. And that's how we think about being dynamic in the portfolio. And we think it's better than building a tactical overlay.
34:01 David Weisburd? Again, if you go one layer up,
34:04 David Weisburd? why does it matter that you're spending all this energy being tactical in your portfolio? Well, there's opportunity cost to that. And that opportunity cost is spending more time with your managers, finding the best opportunities and generating alpha where you could actually generate alpha. The manager relationships versus being the best hedge fund manager in the world. It's very difficult to outperform point 72 of Bali Azmi, which is essentially is on the other side of any tactical move.
34:24 Speaker 01 I'd rather have my guys spend their time on finding the next really good manager. In a strategy that we think has a lot of opportunity than thinking about how to shift it around like our manager lineups are pretty stable. The portfolio has been built up for a while. It's working. There might be one or two managers that come and go each year, but it's not very many.
34:41 David Weisburd? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it seems like you tolerate a lot of spikiness within specific domains of your portfolio because you're able to construct your portfolio in such a way that smooths out the returns. Is that kind of your approach to it? And is that a philosophy that you adhere to?
34:54 Speaker 01 We try to think about the portfolio very holistically. Each sub asset class has a focus on consistency. There are different managers in there. Some are higher vol, some are lower vol. There's usually a mix in each asset class. And I think then what we try to do is then model that sub asset class and say, okay, how consistently will this structure beat whatever that benchmark is? If it's in stable value, it's the blimber gold. I agree. So if Mike builds a public hedge fund portfolio in credit, how well does that do? And let's compare that also against our hedge fund book that's in that space. Where do we see the most consistency and how do we build those those together? Should I be putting more in the hedge fund? Should we put more into credit?
35:37 Speaker 01 If in credit, which manager adds the best downside protection and improves the risk adjusted return? That's kind of the holy grail of how to structure those things together. It's very hard to do because managers change over time, right? So you got to constantly keep looking at this and seeing if there's a signal in the noise that says this manager is taking more and more risk. And you got to kind of follow that on a monthly basis and really look at that to see if there's changes going on. And that's where the dialogue with the managers comes in as well.
36:06 David Weisburd? If you could go back to 1996, when you first started at San Bernardino County. So you first started as investor. What's one piece of advice you would have given a younger Tim that would have either accelerated your career or helped you avoid cost of mistakes?
36:16 Speaker 01 Be willing to go get your experience at dollar shops where you're going to get more authority and faster trained up because it's not a massive organization. That's how I spent my career doing it. I went to San Bernardino. People didn't want to go to San Bernardino. They wanted to go to LA or Orange County or San Diego, right? So Sam Bardino gave me great opportunity. Within three years, I was CIO. Within like five years, I was CEO and CIO, right? All of a sudden, I was running it as a young, very young person. Probably shouldn't have been, but I got that opportunity. Why? Because I went to a place where a lot of people didn't want to go. So I think you can get a lot of opportunity in the world by thinking that way and opening up your mindset to other opportunities that are a little smaller. My investment standpoint has been fairly stable over a long period of
37:00 Speaker 01 time in my view, and I probably wouldn't change it much. We take a lot more credit than than most people, both in private and public credit exposure. Would say I do that more than my peers, and I still believe in it. I believe that that yield cushions the overall portfolio is really important. What you'll see with our portfolio over a long period of time is we're in second and third quartile in the Google all the time. We're rarely in first quartile. We're rarely in last quartile. We're trying to get the middle of that distribution of returns and be consistent. And it shows up in our data. What we're doing is work, works over a long period of time. That's over the last 17 years. It's worked. And we think it will continue to work.
37:38 David Weisburd? Tim, on that note, thanks so much for jumping on and sharing your wisdom and looking forward to doing this again soon.
37:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, really enjoyed it, David. Thank you.
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