YouSaid · the spoken record

Abigail Wattley

lines on the record: 61
first: 2026-06-22
most recent: 2026-06-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Once you built that technical knowledge, you could say even in those two asset classes and then started applying it to understanding who was good in the space, what did you come to learn about managers to get to the point where you were comfortable that you felt like you knew what you were doing?”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we would sit in a classroom, we would look at well reports. They would tell us what we were supposed to be looking at. I learned a ton from that. There were so many great people along the way who were re-established in those asset classes that helped me along. That was my first experience, how to dig in in a market, how to dig in on managers. It set me up for what I ended up doing later.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had not a lot of background in either of those areas of the market. Those are really technical asset classes when you start to peel back the layers of the onion. I had a lot to learn. That was one of my greatest lessons figuring out how to dive deep and learn an area of the market. It started with a lot of conferences. I remember going to a PIMCO bond boot camp for a week. They used to run this amazing boot camp. Spent a week out in California. Bill Gross was there and they had all their senior PMs teaching us everything there was to know about bonds. That was my indoctrination into the world of fixed income. Similarly with oil and gas, I grew up in New England. So that meant I needed to go spend a lot of time in Texas. There also was this great program that SMU used to call it oil and gas investing for non-petroleum engineers. It was a week-long course and it was the same thing.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the time, one on the marketable, one on the non-marketable side, and said, which asset class do you want to give up? I like to think that I ended up with great asset classes, but I think they were basically the ones nobody wanted, which meant that I was managing investment grade fixed income and real assets.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't know a lot early on. I was here for a year before I went to business school. I came back to the investment office in 2010. I remember sitting down with Colette. I'd gone out to lunch with her. It was my second year of business school. I had a couple job offers and I was sitting down to ask her advice about which one I might take. She said, well, I'd really like for you to come back to the investment office. Would you consider doing that? I said, yes, I'd love to. She said, okay, why don't you write the job description for the job that you'd like to do? And then we'll talk about it. I remember going home and writing that job description. There were three key things that were on that job description. One was I wanted to own asset classes. Two is I wanted to manage people, hence the analyst program. Three was I wanted to report to collect because I knew that was going to be my opportunity to learn a lot. I think what she did was went to the two managing directors.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have continued to develop as an investment organization so much during that time. When we first started, it was $1.3 billion. Today we're about four and a half billion in assets. We've accrued a lot of knowledge about what works for the portfolio. We've made mistakes, but we've also made good decisions along the way.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a tremendous amount of growth both for me personally as well as for our portfolio and what it is that we do today. When we first got here back in 2007, the history of the office prior to that was everything was managed by a volunteer committee early on. One of the things that we did was to put in place a policy portfolio. There were a lot of manager decisions that we had to go through. Being here even as an analyst early on was such an eye-opening experience. We did everything from a $400 million transition, from a separately managed account that we had to stuffing the FedEx envelopes and everything in between. I remember setting up a lot of the performance reports. Some of them we still use today. Sometimes people will say to me, this is how this report works. And I just chuckle and say, yep, I'm sure it works still exactly the same. I know what the ins and outs are.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You listen to her podcast, there was a joke about her having a computer and a phone and not much else when she finally had office space in spring of 2007. I ended up joining her here at the Williams Investment Office. Been here ever since, except for a two-year break for business school.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I graduated from Williams in 2005 from there, was very lucky to get a position at Cambridge Associates. I had gotten interested in the economics of higher education as a senior in college. I was fortunate to get to take a tutorial with our then president of the college, Morty Shapiro. He was an economist. That opened my eyes to this whole world of higher education and finance. That's what interested me in going to Cambridge Associates. I was there for two years, right place, right time. I was fortunate to be a very junior analyst that happened to be staffed on the Williams account. It happened to overlap with the period of time where the college had made a choice to hire its first dedicated chief investment officer, Let Chilton, when she came on board.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them from other investment offices. We understand and respect the history of the portfolio, why we've been able to generate the returns that we have over time, what's important to stay focused on. And yet we're not stagnant in the work that we're doing. And one of the things that's been very fun for me in having this team is the ability to learn from them, to draw from them the best practices that they bring to the table from the different places that they have all worked.”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've been clear eyed about what our strategy is since day one, and that hasn't changed. By having an internal candidate become the CIO, we can stay laser focused on what it is that we're here to do. There was no time wasted or lost repointing the ship. That is a huge benefit. I also coming into the role knew the portfolio, especially some of our long-standing relationships, the role that they played, the value that they added, the fact that those were not going to change anytime soon, having some clear things that we weren't going to be changing was very valuable. On the flip side, there were a couple new people that joined as I became CIO. One of the things that is powerful right now about our team is that we have a lot of people that bring different experiences with”
2026-06-22 · Capital Allocators · Homegrown CIO at Williams College - Abigail Wattley (EP.507) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source