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Anne-Marie Fink

lines on the record: 75
first: 2024-06-03
most recent: 2024-06-03
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

“So the people who set up the system 70 years ago were just really smart. My understanding is that it was a bunch of insurance executives so that they understood how investments work. Because I think one of the biggest challenges in a lot of public investing in particular is people don't understand that things can go up and down. When Detroit went bankrupt, what was that? five, seven years ago, you looked at the plan and the expected rate of return was 8%. And any year that they performed higher than 8%, they paid it out. So by definition, you're never going to get to 8% if you're capped at 8% and you can be below 8%. So it's not surprising that that lack of awareness on how investments work can create problems.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this idea of a structure set up to allow the investment team to invest, compensate people appropriately, have payouts that are aligned is not what you usually hear about, certainly in public pension funds in the U.S. How did this come about?”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are willing to get a more adept and therefore also more expensive investment staff. So we pay pretty well. We're able to keep people for a long time because the pay is relatively strong relative to other, certainly public plans. We have a lot of discretion. We also have delegated authority. So in Wisconsin, we have this unusual idea that investment decisions should be made by investment professionals, which relative to other public plans is somewhat unusual. So we have delegated authority, which is great because it means we can move fast. We can speak for investments. We don't have to say, well, we'd like to invest, but talk to us in a month after we've talked to our investment committee and we'll let you know. So it just makes us a much better group to partner with. And that gives us a huge edge.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The main reason is because of how well aligned the incentives are. So the way the plan works, it's somewhat like a cash balance plan in that when you retire, your annuitized at a minimum of five percent, but anything above that that you get rather than a cost of living adjustment, it's based on five-year trailing returns. So any returns that we generate greater than 5%, a portion of that gets paid out to the retirees every year. So over time that should grow. However, if we have a period of bad performance sub five on a five-year trailing basis, the benefits can actually go down. So because of that, the incentives are highly aligned and there's a lot of interest among the pensioners and the pension system to make sure that the returns are high. So because the incentives are aligned,”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“SWIB is the state of Wisconsin Investment Board. We manage the assets for the Wisconsin retirement system. We just do the investment management. There's another group that does the benefits administration. And we also manage a few other small pools of capital, but the main one is the WRS, the Wisconsin Retirement System. And we have about $140 billion in assets. So it's a very large pool given mid-sized state. I think we're top 10 in the country. And it is, I believe, the best setup plan in the country.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent about four years at Rhode Island, the treasurer changed. So I went to a multifamily office for a little period. It did not turn out to be a great fit. And then I also went to State Street where they were managing some corporate pension assets. So that was an interesting opportunity as well. And then I was fortunate enough that the recruiter at SWIB found me. And SWIB is great because it's actually to meet the ideal combination of the resources and breadth that you have in the corporate world with the mission and the opportunities to really impact everyday people's lives that you have as a public plan.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of them were being under-resourced, so there were basically three of us that were managing eight billion dollars with consultants, but we were doing everything. I think we were hitting the broad side of the barn, but that's about all we could do. So that was one. And then the second was, at least in Rhode Island, the lack of trust in the government. So there was a real suspicion about what we as investors were doing on behalf of the pension. So there was a little bit of guilty until proven innocent, which is impossible to do. So there was a lot of concern that we were not managing the plan well. And at the same time, there had also been some pension reforms. So people were already less than thrilled.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was great and interesting. So it was a big change, one from going from a very corporate place to a government agency. I was a political appointee and we were massively under-resourced. So we were doing everything by the seat of our pants. But it was also very exciting at the same time. I got to go even more meta. So if you think about my career, I keep going broader and broader. So started with actual companies, then went to stocks and from stocks went to funds and then from funds went to an entire portfolio. So it was really exciting to learn new asset classes to really use some of the skills that I had developed as an equity analyst in looking at private companies or private equity. So it was all very exciting.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learned a lot about different strategies and different ways of thinking about investing. So let me unpack that a little bit. When I was at JPMorgan, there was a very specific way that we analyzed companies. And like anybody, we had a very specific process. So what I had to learn in going to the fund side was there are multiple ways to analyze companies and there are multiple ways to think about how you're investing. So actually in some ways I wish I had done that and then gone back to the director.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a big believer that the details are where you really can figure out what somebody's doing. If you look at, particularly in the long short equity space, if you look at everybody's book, the first four or five pages look exactly the same. We know our stocks better than anybody else, blah, blah. It's when you get into the details you can really figure it out. And some of the most shocking things were once I remember feeding back to somebody, the bear case on a stock, and they were just, well, my analyst knows that. So that wasn't a great answer. And then in other cases, I had somebody tell me a stock was great because the management team was buying back stock and they'd never done it before. They do it all the time. What are you talking about? Maybe they took a pause for about a year, but before that, they were serial repurchasers. So this is not that different. So it's things like that where you can really find out if they really know their stocks better than anybody else.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'd love to pull a thread on that. And you know this from being on both sides. When a manager has a portfolio of stocks, inevitably they'll know some names better than others. You're picking out the one you know. What did you find about the consistency of when you were able to dig in, putting it in a context of the skill of the manager based on that one idea?”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That tells you their bowl case on their biggest position, it always sounds great. Where you really figure out who's got that something extra is when you feed back to them the bear case and say, well, okay, you said this is positive, but what about this risk and what about that risk? And how they respond to those risks, whether they thought through them, if they've got maybe an early warning system for some of them, those are where you really feel like somebody's differentiating themselves. So it was really the ability to go into the fund selection business really grew off of the stock selection business.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was thinking about coming back, I wanted to leverage the skill set that I had used as an equity analyst or that I had built as an equity analyst, but take it to the next level. And it was actually going into a job also at JP Morgan where I was analyzing long short equity hedge funds was actually the great way to take that skill set but then grow on it. And the thing that was so great about it was when I would meet with managers in that role, I could ask them, tell me what your top 10 stocks are. And there was usually a position in there that I knew reasonably well and could then dig much more into it with the manager. And any manager worth their salt doesn't really want to talk about their redemption terms or those kind of things. They want to talk about their stocks. So that usually would get a much better dialogue going. And then also I would find that usually any manager.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were some now to be fair, the book came out in 2009 and it was not a particular time when investors looked particularly smart. So my timing was not good. Certainly the incrementalism, I think, was something that resonated a little bit. The idea that usually if there's one problem, there's multiple, so you really have to dig and not dismiss a little problem and think it'll go away. And then a third one that I think resonated a little bit with people was the idea that to create a successful and happy workforce, you actually need to be good at your job and then the happiness follows or to be successful in whatever endeavor you're going after rather than let's make everybody happy and then they'll be good at what they're doing after.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of them were around how investors think about timeframes. So a lot of company management still complain that investors are too short term. And then investors will complain that management teams are like betting the farm and saying, come back to us in five years and find out if this massive bet that we made works. And really what investors are looking for is not that people can't transform their businesses, but that they do it in an incremental way, in a way where you take small steps, you make sure they work, and you get better and better over time rather than I'm going to spend whatever half my CapEx budget and in five years we'll find out if it worked.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The book is called The Money Makers, and it's about what equity analysts or equity owners want companies to do. So it's a general management book, but from the perspective of investors. And it came about as an equity analyst watching company managements and equity analysts and PMs talk past one another. And originally, I was like, there's got to be a book out there because there's a management book about everything from how Harry Potter would manage a company to every great CEO, how they manage their company. But interestingly, I couldn't find a book about how the owners of companies wanted them to be managed. So that was the idea.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an approximate answer and then a bigger answer. So the proximate answer is after about 11 years at JPMorgan Asset Management, I actually had an idea for a book. I had a friend of a friend who was a book agent, so I wrote a couple paragraphs and sent it to him. And he's like, great, let's do it. And I was like, what? So ended up taking about a year and a half off to write the book.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing about this business is it's very much an apprenticeship business. So you learn by doing, talking to people, making mistakes, and learning from them. So it was a combination of that clearly learning about it in business school, doing a lot of reading and talking to as many people as I could.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a lot of fun. I was at JPMorgan Asset Management on the buy side, and it was a great privilege because you got to meet with CEOs of the largest companies and was relatively young and relatively uninformed and got to ask them.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The opportunity to be constantly learning is something that's always attracted me. I'm endlessly curious, I think. And I am actually fascinated by businesses and what makes them tick. So it was a combination of that. Also, I'm pretty balanced in terms of quantitative and qualitative skills. And so it incorporated both. So it was that package that made it really very compelling”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So before business school, I worked for a number of years in a number of small businesses in New York, doing mostly marketing type stuff. And then I also took a year off and traveled. So did an around the world trip, which was really a lot of fun.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was at a party actually in New York and met somebody who was an equity analyst and thought to myself that is the coolest job in the world. I was already into Columbia Business School and after that party I was like, that's what I'm going to do at Columbia. And it just turned out that that was actually a pretty good place to do equity analysis. So I got lucky there.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To query all our transcripts, go to capital allocators.com. Thanks so much for spreading the word about ChadGPT. Please enjoy my conversation with Anne Marie Fink. Anne-Marie, thanks so much for joining me.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anne-Marie joined Swift to lead its external manager efforts four years ago, following a career that spans both direct and fund investing. Our conversation highlights Anne-Marie's path, applying the skills of picking stocks to assessing stock picking managers, the history and governance of SWIB, its unique payout structure that creates alignment, and their investment approach across portfolio construction, internal and external investing, asset classes, and risk management.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guest on today's show is Anne Marie Fink, the head of private markets and funds Alpha at the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, or SWIB, which manages $140 billion of pension funds in the state. Swib is not your typical US pension fund manager. It invests with outstanding governance, alignment with beneficiaries, delegated authority, a competitively compensated team, and cutting-edge strategies, all of which have contributed to a fully funded plan.”
2024-06-03 · Capital Allocators · Anne-Marie Fink - Cutting Edge Pension Investing at SWIB (EP.389) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source