Ted Seides - Always Diversify, Anything Can Happen

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ted-seides-4258021 (Ted Seides), CFA, is the son of a teacher and a psychiatrist. Perhaps by genetic disposition, he is passionate about sharing his insights and investing in people. He is the chief investment officer of Perch Bay Group, a single-family office he joined in 2017 to manage a diversified portfolio of direct and fund investments across asset classes. Ted produces and hosts the Capital Allocators Podcast, which by the by the end of 2018 had reached one million downloads. From 2002 to 2015, Ted was a founder of Protégé Partners and served as president and co-chief investment officer. Protégé was a leading multibillion-dollar alternative investment firm that invested in and seeded small hedge funds. Ted built the firm’s investment process and managed the sourcing, research, and due diligence of its portfolios. In 2010, Larry Kochard and Cathleen Ritterheiser profiled Ted in Top Hedge Fund Investors: Stories, Strategies, and Advice. Sharing the lessons from his experience, Ted authored https://amzn.to/2CLx2Qv (So You Want to Start a Hedge Fund: Lessons for Managers and Allocators) in February 2016. He began his career in 1992 under the guidance of David Swensen at the Yale University Investments Office. During his five years at Yale, Ted focused on external public equity managers and internal fixed-income portfolio management. Following business school, he spent two years investing directly at private equity firms, Stonebridge Partners and J.H. Whitney & Company. With aspirations to demonstrate the salutary benefits of hedge funds on institutional portfolios to a broad audience, Ted made a non-profitable wager with Warren Buffett that pitted the 10-year performance of the S&P 500 against a selection of five hedge fund of funds from 2008-2017. Ted is a columnist for https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/ (Institutional Investor), wrote a blog for the CFA Institute’s Enterprising Investor, and wrote guest publications for the late Peter L. Bernstein’s Economics and Portfolio Strategy newsletter. He is also a trustee and member of the investment committee at the Wenner-Gren Foundation, an active participant in the Hero’s Journey Foundation, and is a decade rider with Cycle for Survival. He previously served as a trustee and head of the programming committee for the Greenwich Roundtable and as a board member of Citizen Schools-New York. Ted holds a BA in economics and political science, Cum Laude, from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.   “It was one of those examples that the market can stay rational longer than you can stay solvent, and that really anything can happen. There was nothing about the fundamentals of these assets that would have told you that this could have happened.” Ted Seides   Support our sponsor   Today’s episode is sponsored by the Women Building Wealth membership group, the complete proven step-by-step course to guide women from novice to competent investor. To learn more, visit: WomenBuildingWealth.net.     Worst investment ever Ted chose one of his worst investments ever based on its outcome. In 2002, during his early years at Protégé Partners around the launch of that fund, one of the core investments they were making was in a multi-manager hedge fund portfolio. Within that portfolio, one of the core investments was in a relative-value arbitrage hedge fund called Parkcentral Global Hub. Principled fund group included Perot family It was a group that had spun out of or was included in the family office of the late Ross Perot. And the group had been managing its strategy for a long time very successfully in a kind of value-oriented, relative-value manner with a very long time horizon. There was a tremendous amount of co-investment (a minority investment made directly into an operating company alongside a financial sponsor or other private equity investor, in a leveraged buyout, recapitalization or growth capital...