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Capital Allocators

How the world's elite money managers lead and invest

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Capital Allocators

By: Ted Seides
Narrated by: Ted Seides
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About this listen

The chief investment officers (CIOs) at endowments, foundations, family offices, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds are the leaders in the world of finance. They marshal trillions of dollars on behalf of their institutions and influence how capital flows throughout the world.

But these elite investors live outside of the public eye. Across the entire investment industry, few participants understand how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital.

What's more, there is no formal training for how to do their work.

So how do these influential leaders practice their craft? What skills do they require? What frameworks do they employ? How do they make investment decisions on everything from hiring managers to portfolio construction?

For the first time, Capital Allocators lifts the lid on this opaque corner of the investment landscape.

Drawing on interviews from the first 150 episodes of the Capital Allocators podcast, Ted Seides presents the best of the knowledge, practical insights, and advice of the world's top professional investors.

These insights include:

- The best practices for interviewing, decision-making, negotiations, leadership, and management.
- Investment frameworks across governance, strategy, process, technological innovation, and uncertainty.
- The wisest and most impactful quotes from guests on the Capital Allocators podcast.

Learn from the likes of the CIOs at the endowments of Princeton and Notre Dame, family offices of Michael Bloomberg and George Soros, pension funds from the State of Florida, CalSTRS, and Canadian CDPQ, sovereign wealth funds of New Zealand and Australia, and many more.

Capital Allocators is the essential new reference manual for current and aspiring CIOs, the money managers that work with them, and everyone allocating a pool of capital.

Critic Reviews

Ted Seides has achieved a remarkable book that draws on the expertise and experience of a broad cross-section of industry leaders. He expertly distills interviews that he conducted directly into a book that seamlessly covers executive, leadership and investment skills and lessons. Capital Allocators is a well-crafted and informative read for existing and prospective investment professionals as well as for those who work with the investment industry in any capacity. (Gregory J. Fleming, President & CEO, Rockefeller Capital Management)
This book boils down the most interesting insights and important lessons from the biggest and most powerful investors on earth -- the ones that literally put the capital in capitalism. It offers a glimpse into the thinking of capital allocators in a coherent and digestible format. It should be required reading for anybody interested in investing and certainly will be for my students! (Ashby H. B. Monk, PhD, Executive Director, Global Projects Center, Stanford University)
Unlike many 'invest like the best' books, Capital Allocators does not pretend there is some magical trick that will turn anyone into an investing genius. Instead, Ted Seides details how great investors do the hard work that leads to better outcomes. You won't get rich quick reading this book, but if you take the time to really understand the lessons it teaches, you will be a better, more thoughtful investor. (Ben Inker, Head of Asset Allocation, GMO)

Page by page, Ted Seides' Capital Allocators brings us tools, frameworks and a rich collection of wisdom captured from his professional network. Ted’s book allows us to discover how successful CIOs incorporate various aspects of the investment process and lessons learned in navigating financial markets. This book should be mandatory for any investment teams aspiring to evolve and win. --Mario Therrien, Head of Investment Funds and External Management, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec

The world of institutional investing needed Ted's voice -- it just didn’t know it yet. With this book, and with his unparalleled podcast, Ted has brought a whole hidden world to a broader audience, and anyone interested in how the world’s most prominent investors move money is better for it.

(Kip McDaniel, Editor-in-Chief, Institutional Investor)
I have learned something from every podcast, and this book pulls them all together. There is no one right way to be a CIO, we are all unique, but there are still lessons that we can learn from one another and value that comes from understanding the nuances among us. Thank you, Ted, for providing a forum for CIOs to share ideas and for writing this great collection of highlights. (James Williams, CIO, J. Paul Getty Trust)
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