I paid no attention to private wealth managers early in my career. Their transaction-based compensation model with bank-owned parent companies created obvious conflicts of interest. Furthermore, closed-platform narrowing of investment options made it easy to dismiss their investment activities. After all, institutions backing independently-owned asset managers with better-aligned incentives, surely seemed an intellectually superior pursuit of capital allocation.
但如果我通过树木错过森林怎么办？
如果机构分配者缺少它也是怎么办？
If I make a 10% return on money, I should meet all of my obligations and be happy. If I make 2%, I probably won't and shouldn't. Sometimes I wonder why investing isn't that simple.
High-quality private wealth managers endeavor to understand their clients' goals and create an investment strategy that offers the best chance of achieving those goals. They focus equally on their clients' assets and liabilities. Most of the time, a variety of easily accessible investment options - often low-cost vehicles - can put clients on a likely path to success.
以符合金钱的目的匹配投资策略的深思熟虑改变了顾问花时间的方式。例如，这些财富经理几乎没有必要花费过多的时间建立建立关系，以获得领先的印度专注于风险投资经理的能力。追求独立于对负债的整体理解优化投资与更大的画面无关。
相比之下，机构花费巨大的时间调整资产负债表的一侧 - 资产方面。相应地，在理解投资科学方面增加了复杂性，导致了基准的时代：每个资产分配，资产类别和资产经理都与基准相关联。机构投资团队及其治理委员会在每次自下而上决策中仔细审视他们的时间优势。它很容易可测量，主要是在近期表现不佳的管理者中的反复行为错误中。
Seth Masters, the recently retired CIO of AllianceBernstein, highlighted structural flaws in the investment program of many institutions on a recent Capital Allocators podcast. "It's like someone deciding that they're going to check every newspaper in the world for grammatical and graphical errors as opposed to understanding whether or not they're reading fake news."
In Seth's estimation, the low hanging fruit is for each board to spend less time in the weeds and more time focusing on the core problem the money is intended to solve. It's about the hard questions of the purpose of money and our relationship to it, not the easy one of whether a manager beat a benchmark. It's about the specific goals, risk tolerance, spending requirements, liquidity, and time horizon of each institution, not the headline performance compared to peers, each with a different nuanced objective.
One such enhancement comes from integrating investments with operations. Despite revolutionary improvements in asset allocation and investment selection, few institutions have thought differently about spending and fundraising practices. Connecting the two does not involve asset allocation or investment implementation, but can have even more impact on the longevity and sustainability of a pool of assets than the investment activity itself.
For example, few institutions break down their expenses into fixed and variable costs. Should a foundation alter its grant giving methodology or an endowment change its compensation policy to delineate fixed and variable costs, any market shock can be addressed in a planned and orderly way by selling assets, reducing spending, or a combination of both. In the process, the long-term pool of capital may be well-positioned to be a selective buyer in a downturn instead of a forced seller of assets at temporarily depressed prices.
Disconnect在二十年前的同一资本结构中提醒我股票和学分的定价。不同市场的参与者互相交谈，每个市场的供需供需均衡价格往往没有考虑相同基础业务的公平和债务的证券相对定价。它没有意义上面 - 而那些明白差距的人已经获得了效率的效率。
Changing a long-standing practice at an institution is a lot easier written than done. Imagine the challenges in altering the way money gets spent in a politically charged setting like a pension fund or university endowment. At a time when the U.S. government has imposed its first tax on large non-profit investment pools, the pushback that would come from professors - if their compensation were amended to be partially exposed to significant market drawdowns - would be intense.
On the other hand, a thoughtful, patient approach to introducing the concept of alignment across an institution's balance sheet might offer another arrow in an investor's quiver at a time when capital market prices seem set to disappoint going forward.
At least this one time, CIOs can take a lesson from the private wealth community. Shifting the investment program from benchmark-based to goal-based allows every institution an opportunity to succeed, however they may define success.
我会拿到10％的回报，并非常感谢你，即使标准普尔也飙升多少金额。
Maybe that dumb money wasn't so dumb after all.