Hello Fellow Listeners,

It’s 2021 – nuff said!

Announcements and Gratitudes

* Capital Allocators Summit on Operational Due Diligence, January 29th.  Rahul Moodgal and I are hosting our first of a series of specialist webinars. We’ll share our insights and hear from one of the leading experts in the space.

* Chief of Staff for Capital Allocators – we’re hiring!

* I found myself basking in gratitude while writing my first Capital Allocators Annual Review. It became an example of seeing a lot more progress over a year than I ever noticed day to day. We have a lot more to come in the year ahead.  Thank you for your support!

Reading (Ordered by reading time: tweets first, books last, and blog posts and articles in between) 

Quote from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, “Success isn’t always about greatness, it’s about consistency. Consistent, hard work gains success. Greatness will come.”

1. Filtering opportunities, Fred Wilson.  Fred’s blog post describes a framework Union Square uses to deal with the paradox of choice.

2. MITIMCo, the modern day Yale Investments Office. MITIMCo under my former Yale colleague Seth Alexander quietly has become an innovative endowment leader. This job description offers a glimpse of an ideal work environment and follows Seth’s reflections after ten years in the seat, now 5 years ago. The investment office recently advertised to new managers on Invest Like the Best, and long-time team member Joel Cohen on Twitter reveals an uncommon depth of insight.

3. The Case for Digital Assets, Eric Peters. Across the board, CIOs have added digital assets to private equity and sustainable investing at the top of their research agenda for 2021. In a busy month when Bitcoin hit all-time highs, Coinbase filed its draft S-1 and Eric transacted the largest Bitcoin trade in history. Those groundbreaking moves followed Michael Saylor, CEO of public company Microstrategy, who replaced $650 million of balance sheet cash with Bitcoin. On the show last year, Michael Novogratz pointed out that bubbles attract talent and resources, which enables the development of technology and businesses. The 2017 bubble did just that, and this time it feels real.  Alliance Bernstein put together a thoughtful piece for consideration of crypto assets in institutional portfolios, and Eric Peters shared his thesis as well.

4. Innovation in portfolio construction, Patrick O’Shaughnessy. Patrick describes a directional arrow of progress leading to Custom Indexing. Private wealth advisors will be the first adopters, but the power of OSAM’s Canvass platform to address efficient public equity and fixed income portfolios will find their way to internal institutional investment offices before long.

5. Composition of winning teams, Cade Massey and Jessica Flack. Through the lens of sports, Wharton professor Massey and Santa Fe Institute professor Flack review research on whether a team can be greater than the sum of its parts.

Listening

Capital Allocators

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