YouSaid · the spoken record

Ash Williams

lines on the record: 107
first: 2025-08-11
most recent: 2025-08-11
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

“How much I don't know, and the more you know about the world and I consider myself a lifelong learner and I'm interested in just about everything, I'm always asking why and how does that work and what's the history and how that policy get the way it is, all that sort of stuff. And the more of that you do, the more you realize you don't know. And when you're young, think about it. Anybody who's ever been a parent knows nobody knows more about the world than a 16 or 17-year-old kid. They know everything. And if you try and tell them anything, you're just... No, you're wrong. So that's pretty important.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, you know, if you've got a minute, we were in our offices in Tallis. I said, if you've got a minute, we can walk around the corner. I'll show you a row of offices with our lawyers in them who work for salary. And frankly, we can tie you up for the next 15 years if you'd like. And the incremental cost to us is nothing. And by the way, I could also show you the list of outside firms we have in New York and other places who would be happy to make your life miserable if we'd like them to. So if you really want to go there, you can. But I don't think that's a great opener for you. I think we need a peaceful resolution. And I can remember my mother saying, no, that's self. Great”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are several things I think of that I can hear my father and mother saying, two from my father, one from my mother. My dad used to always say to me when I was yammering on about one thing or another, the empty vessel makes the most noise. Very true. How many times have you met somebody and they're just off into the acronyms and basically sing in their own tune over and over and over again and you just think everything you're saying is based on a phony premise. You should listen to this. No, it's just wrong. Cut it out. So that would be one. And another one would be, which I think was attributable to Roosevelt, walks softly and carry a big stick. And there's a lot to be said for that. And particularly if you have an institution like ours, there are times when you get into some sort of potential conflict. I'll never forget one time somebody was threatening to sue me as sue.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that I could point to a single thing maybe as just the more I learn about the whole cyber risk area. That is truly terrifying. And I don't know that we've got our arms around that as a country. I don't know that we can.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the thing there would be the constant barrage of inquiries and pushes we get from people who've obviously taken no time to know who we are, what we do, what we're interested in, what we've signaled we're not interested in. Think about the message that gives a potential investor. You are out here recruiting for business and you're either so, shall we say, unmotivated, that's more charitable than saying lazy, or your research skills are so poor that you're writing me a letter or an email saying, Dear Miss Williams, or you're proposing something that we just don't do and would never do, and we've all spoken about it publicly, why on earth would we do business with you? Just do your job, will you?”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this thing that bothers me the most right now is I think social media is creating a generation of people who are grossly underinformed and very subject to manipulation. Nobody seems to read newspapers anymore, really understand issues in real time. And I read a lot of newspapers. I read a lot of books. I read things like the economist and other barons and stuff that comes out weekly. And if you read enough and you understand the nuances, you really understand the world around you. And the number of people I know, and I see this in my own kids whose idea of understanding the news is whatever their Facebook feed tells them, that's scary.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't have a single thing. I would say if I looked at where most of my time goes, it involves food and wine. I cook a lot. I have all my life. I collect wine. I love to entertain. My wife and I love to entertain. And I like to play with an idea for a themed dinner for a long time and put it together and figure out the execution and match the wines and get a nice group of folks together and do that. You can't live where we live and not do a little hunting and fishing. I also like live music and enjoy the fine arts and with the university right in our backyard and all the trips I take to major cities there's ample opportunity to indulge those tastes and lastly I have a motorcycle and I love riding out in the country in the quiet of a weekend morning nothing better”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the actual memo authorizing the completion of the docs, and then the next thing is the docks themselves all along the way. They're going to be business points that are going to come up. There are going to be terms that are going to come up. There'll be scaling issues, constraints, all that kind of thing. And once in a while, you will have a barrier in the form of It could be you've gotten some intelligence somewhere or somebody does something that was inappropriate. I mean, I remember a case years ago where we were looking at a fund and an item appeared and I think it was the New York Post on a Monday morning where somebody who was a principal of a fund had had a fit at a social event out on Long Island over the weekend. And the behavior just, we just thought, you know, if that's what's under this individual Life's”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sign all the documents and nothing gets done without my okay and if we have an objection to something and there have been things that I've held up before, our process is such that the checks and balances are constant and they're both internal and external and the transparency is very high. So we have simultaneous compliance participation and oversight. We have an internal investment memo that's written at the inception of an idea, say to propose the harvest volatility fund or something like that. We'd have an initial write-up on why this strategy makes sense and the principles are good people and we think it would complement our portfolio. And on the basis of that, and I've got to sign that, we go forward with due diligence, with some rough idea of what we might put into it, pinning the diligence and negotiation of terms, and that if it comes out the back end, it could be a year later with an investment member.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, most of them are made pretty much at the Asset class level, we make broad decisions in terms of characteristics that we like, areas that we want to emphasize at a given point in time, and then the different asset classes all have depth and existing manager basis. And we do annual work plans where we take the time at the asset class level to really think through what is our current pipeline look like vis- ⁇-vis the portfolio today, how do we envision the portfolio evolving as we go through this pipeline over the next 12 months, what resources are we going to need, what capital flows are there, what are going to be the flows in and the flows out. We're a mature plan. So our private equity programs largely self-funding. Strategic is largely self-funding.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we pull out of any given fund, we're automatically going to repurpose that capital into another fund sequentially. It could be that we'll repurpose that capital into something altogether different that may be a different investment format.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, we're patient. I mean, chasing performance is the bane of any successful investment existence. So we tend to be very patient. We tend to listen to people. We've been through iterations with firms where they've had an overseas office and a New York office, and they've decided to close one or the other. They've moved people around. We tend to be patient through things like that. Could be they come up with a structure as a gesture of good faith after a period of sort of being under satisfying to their investors that is attractive. And if we still have confidence in the group, we might take advantage of something like that. Sometimes there'll be a unilateral offer to change the terms to our advantage as an acknowledgement of, look, we've disappointed ourselves. We know we've disappointed you, and we want to reflect good faith, so we're lowering your fees, or we're going to do this or that or the other. So we tend to be patient with things like that. And I wouldn't say that if...”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you have a market headwind like that, particularly saying long short equity, which is sort of commonly known. To what extent do you look at an individual manager that you thought deserved a place in the portfolio, hadn't delivered for a while, and you're placing with another who maybe has delivered? And how do you make that determination?”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think a lot of those strategies have not distinguished themselves of late and the common reason it's given is this strong equity tailwind and you can't keep up, et cetera, et cetera. I suspect hedge funds. Will venerate themselves when the market cycle fulfills itself. That said, there are a lot of them that have disappointed in the interim and we've made changes in our lineup and we are constantly searching for folks that are doing things that are different.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How about hedge funds? I know hedge funds are absolute return are not a line item, but if you do go through manager by manager, there are a number of them in the opportunistic bucket. How do you view those strategies?”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have an exact answer for that, but I think the majority of them we would have some superiority in terms. And the reason I think that's a pretty safe statement is there's some things that are required under Florida law that are inconsistent with most GP's documents. So, for example, one thing we can't do is indemnify people. Any GP agreement will have an indemnification provision. And if we can say, look, it's Florida law, and most MFN provisions, most favored nation provisions and partnerships will have some sort of provision about applying to similarly situated investors. And if we can say, okay, we're a state fund, this is a function of state law. If you have other state funds with other state laws, you're going to have to accommodate them. Otherwise, as well, because they just can't give you money otherwise.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then how's that breakout across your portfolio if you were breaking out the, take the private equity relationships as a whole, what percentage of them do you think are kind of market terms best in breed managers? And what percentage of them do you think because of your size, they may also be your perception best in breed, but you're able to get better terms.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are definitely times when something is a scarce commodity that's always oversubscribed and getting any allocation to it is a good allocation. And in those cases, you take the terms. And frankly, the reason you don't feel bad about that is net of whatever the terms are, the performance is so good. That's why there's a line out the door. That's a high class problem. I always tell people the fees should not be your first focus. The net result should be. And if the net risk adjusted result is tannalizing, go for it. If the result is mediocre and the fees are cheap, Is that appealing? The analogy I like to give people is, listen, I'm very picky about food and drink. And if I go to a restaurant and the food's not very good, I don't care what it costs. I'm not going back. Period.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your size, I imagine you're one of the few people in this ecosystem that has the possibility of being somewhat of a price maker in some of these relationships. Now, at the same time, there's so much aggregate demand for private equity. It's not clear that that would be the case. Where do you come out across your portfolio on just finding the funds you like and other people like them and accepting the price compared to doing something off market?”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In early days there, but we've done some things I think are fairly innovative where we've partnered with a private equity fund of funds that were well aligned with and have good co-investment relationships with. And they in turn have found tremendous GPs for us. And it's worked out beautifully. And we've done similar things in the venture space.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if we were in three funds in a given space, now we're more likely to be in one, maybe two. We've also taken up more specialty relationships of various kinds, funds that distinguish themselves by a very strict focus, by capsized geography, industry, region, things of that nature or some cross-cut of those sorts of screens. We've also made an effort to be more international in our private equity through actually partnering with people who have European focus, for example, or likewise Asia, where that gets more problematic is when you get, particularly in Asia, where you're dealing with China, India, Southeast Asia, differences in law, differences in culture, a whole lot. Of things make that infinitely more complicated. So”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we've done an awful lot in the private equity space over the past five or ten years to sort of refine the portfolio. And what I mean when I say that is rather than putting a whole lot of money with big U.S. mega LBO-centric funds that have lots of products that cover the world, we think we've been smarter to really dig deeper and understand where the persistent ability to add value is in organizations and how has their focus remained? How's their asset growth been? Have they just gotten geometrically bigger because they could and proliferated products or have they stayed focused? We've sort of tried to concentrate relationships with the best players.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turn to your thoughts on private equity and hedge funds. Private equity is an important component and has been for a long time of what you're doing. How do you think about in the context of portfolio and how do you decide who you're going to partner”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“a video connection to the rest of the group that will be in Israel, Cinderella, scrubbing the floors of the castle, while everybody else is at the ball. But anyway, we'll talk about that. And the Israeli government is keenly aware of this and very appreciative of the outcome. So once again, you do well by doing good.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After he was elected in 17, he asked me if we were aware of Airbnb. And had Airbnb had issues involving the boycott divest and sanction Israel movement? And I said, as a matter of fact, we're very familiar with that. And we've been in contact with Airbnb already. Here are the issues. Here's how our process works. Happy to work with you on it. He was stunned. You actually knew about that one little company that's not even publicly traded. Roll the clock forward. We engaged Airbnb. They have done a 180 on the policy that they were pursuing in the disputed territories. It was announced publicly about two weeks ago. The governor and cabinet of Florida are doing the first cabinet meeting ever in Israel, I think later this month. And one of the items on the agenda is going to be this Airbnb thing. So I'll be in Tallahassee on a satellite connection.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, back in the 1980s, Florida was one of the founding members of the Council of Institutional Investors. So Florida has a high profile in governance circles. And much the way we've done other things have figured out ways to automate proxy voting processes and use a limited staff internally that's levered through using third-party service providers as extension of staff to do exactly the kind of monumental job you just sketched out the idea that you could vote proxies in, I don't know, 50 or 70 different countries that number in the tens of thousands, it's mind-boggling. But on any given thing, no, we actually know these things. And if somebody calls and says, what about Airbnb? We had one of the earliest things that came up with the new governor. I first met with him in December of 2018.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The answer to that is reflective of so much of what we do. We accept the value of voting the proxy and valuing the vote. We actually financed a study at Harvard Law School a few years ago called Valuing the Vote that quantified the value of fiduciary participation in the proxy process and ensuring that companies did the things they should to enhance shareholder value.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things you think about in these plans is the concept of governance. We've talked a lot about how you've worked with the trustees. The other side of that is the whole issue of proxy voting. I remember reading in your report that you filled out last year 11,000 proxies.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Compensate people in reasonable ways, in positive ways. And third, because of our size, you can come to work for us. And on any given day, you might have recently we've had Kusong Lee in to visit us. We've had David Solomon twice in the past couple of months, new CEO of Goldman Sachs, Larry Fink comes to see us. People from all over the world make the tract to Tallassee because they're good relationships of ours. And, you know, we were reciprocated and helped them here whenever we can.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we have a true learning culture. I think the team we have in place is an extraordinary team. We've turned over fully half of our top management over the 10 years plus that I've been back. Every one of our asset class heads is super solid and capable and young enough that they've got plenty of runway in front of them and they've all built deep teams. And again, this fits into what I was saying earlier about compensation. If you're going to keep capable people who are young enough to go anywhere they want to go in the country, you got to give them a reason to feel valued and motivated. So we offer a work culture that's a very flat culture. They'll have direct access no matter how junior they are to everybody on the team up to and including me. And that's motivating because most big asset management firms can't offer that. Second, we compare.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honest and therefore trustworthy, as simple as those three characteristic sound, as frequently as people always say the most important thing is character, and that's why you should partner with us. We've both been around long enough to know the vast majority of people. In a situation of real stress, can't necessarily be counted on. And if you've ever been through a real jam with a partner and worked it out in a way that reflected honesty and empathy and integrity, Just humanity. That's a gift. You reward that by doing more with them.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, or a lot of managers, but there's concentration among them. We have a lot of managers wearing a lot of products with them. That comes back to something else that's a fundamental. The most important thing, I think, and I sound like I'm quoting Howard March, you know, he wrote the book, the most important thing, and every single thing in that book, and there are like 30 of them, you can make an argument is the most important thing. And that's the whole point. It's all important. And any one of these things can blow your legs off if you're not careful. But I think there's no substitute for character. And if you can find relationships in life with people who are competent.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Single asset in the scheme of two hundred billion dollars can't possibly amount to much. So, how do you monitor so many different portfolios transparent? You can go on, you can go and look at the annual report. And there's just lots of managers there.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frankly, if the equity market falls off the end of the planet tomorrow, people are still going to use their mastercard, and MasterCard is still going to need a tech backbone to run their system and maintain their security. So that's a good thing.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The real estate is a lot of it. We're renovating a building just down the street from here right now at 155th Avenue where we bought a 120-year-old building some years ago. We've had some sort of routine tenants in there, and we had a music company in there. And their leases run out. We're redoing the building, and we've pre-leased it. This is all public information has been in the press, so it's not out of school. Pre-leased it to MasterCard. Long lease with good provisions from our perspective, and it'll be MasterCard's tech department. And this is in the area of Manhattan around 20th Street that's as hot as a pistol right now in terms of where young people want to be. It's the same region where Google is. There's a lot going on down there. And a building like that, if I've got somebody like MasterCard in a 15-year lease,”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we are not in a position to do transactions directly other than our real estate area. And I don't think we ever will be. That's the province of the Canadian model, and you're just never going to see that here. But what we can do is partner with people who have deep and broad capability and then if, and this sounds easier than it is, we don't have many of these things, but if you can create a structure through mutual agreement and a deep partnership that creates great alignment. Of risk and reward the shared. You can do things that are highly unusual. And I think in times like this where assets broadly are highly appreciated. Having investments where you really understand where the cash flows come from, what the quality of those counterparties is. Why those cash flows should be resistant to broad market dislocation. That's golden.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you turn to these opportunistic strategies, you started by saying, okay, you want to be tried and true to your asset allocation, but then you've got these opportunistic strategies that will flex. How do you go about that piece of the puzzle?”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There will be a flight to safety, which will be fixed income. That will be the liquid asset that will be appreciated at the time, and you can rebalance into equities while they're down and make benefit payments out of liquid assets that are appreciated. We have negative cash flow to the tune of $700 million or thereabouts a month. So the explanation I gave to try and make it accessible was, listen, if you've ever been on a private airplane or a boat, a yacht, space is precious. And tying up a lot of space with life rafts and parachutes is just intrusive. It's no fun. If that craft ever gets in trouble and you need the parachute or the life raft, it's going to be the best use of space you could ever conceive of. And you're going to be grateful that you took advantage of it. That's why the fixed income needs to be there.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said, Wait a minute, you're expecting an intermediate-term return on fixed income of negative 3%. Well, as fiduciaries, we should have own bonds. We need to eliminate the asset class. You can't knowingly lose money. And we said, that's not how this works. It's not each ingredient. It's not every egg and cup of sugar and bit of flour. It's the entire totality of the recipe that makes the cake. And here's what the fixed income is for. It's not to get the marginal negative 3%. It's there because if the bottom falls out of the equity market,”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the good news is, to the extent there have been downtrafts, fourth quarter of 2018, great example. That was a miserable period in global equities, and we took a beating like everybody else did. But in a time like that, then people understand, I mean, everybody has a portfolio, and these are people who are smart enough to say, yeah, I took a beating too. You can run, but you can't hide. We can do well relative to benchmark, but doing well in an absolute sense is very different from doing well relative to a benchmark. So I think we're good on that. And I think we message things too that diversification is our friend. And we've put a lot of thought into doing things that are helpful when the equity wins are negative, or we had a spirited discussion several years ago. We had a member of our advisory council who, when we did our little annual checkup on our asset class return expectations,”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mentioned this consistency in so much of investing. Can have the right process that works over time, but in shorter term periods, you might not have the right outcome. How have you navigated that inevitable times when maybe this pocket or that pocket underperforms because you're being very transparent about what the benchmarks are, when you have so many people with a shorter term focus and a political mindset that want to point fingers?”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's no ambiguity about whether the schools got better or got worse with us. With us, it's did you beat the benchmark or not? And if the answer is not, and it's persistently so, you have an issue. If the answer is yes, you did, and it's by a lot, and it's very consistent, and it's also very strong relative to your peers, people like that. My sense is in humankind, just like all animals, we've all read the stories about how the weak animal in the litter is likely to be pecked to death by its own siblings or parents or something, people are the same way. If you show evidence of weakness, you will be set upon and eliminated. And if you show signs of strength, persistent signs of strength, and a willingness to be a voice of wisdom and a steady hand, and you have the advantage of having done that for years and years and years and knowing generations.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Public pension funds because they're big pots of money that are in a position to be diverted for bad things. There's plenty of U.S. history, whether you look at the coin scam that happened in Ohio some years ago or the pay-for-play scams that have happened in other jurisdictions or all kinds of irregularities over the years. Those kinds of things earn funds a bad reputation and put them in a weak position. But if you have in the environment you operate in, the jurisdiction you've operate in, if you have earned trust and credibility through consistently telling the truth, delivering the results you're supposed to deliver. And unlike most other parts of state government, we can tell anybody on a given day out to two decimal points what our performance is and what our benchmark is and what the difference is between the two. And we have audited financial numbers every year that are part of the state's financial statement.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not gonna have the money Because it's not like you're dealing with a board of directors of fill in the blank, Goldman Sachs or an organization like that that values excellence and is willing to pay for it. And in our case, our budget is under our trustees, and we're self-funded. We operate as a fee on assets, and the fee on assets, although it's ridiculously low, the assets are so big that we just need the trustees to authorize every year what we need. And we have developed a lot of credibility. I think what the whole thing comes down to is”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you did an analysis of pension funds, I'll bet if you looked at pension funds and answered the question, Are you under the state legislature for your budget or are you under some separate body of trustees? If you're under a state legislative body, any politically derived body, chances are you're going to be suppressed for compensation, for resources, including travel, training, materials, systems, risk controls, everything.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are several areas of natural friction with public pension funds because in a political environment where optics are everything, the truth of it is most legislative bodies these days are under term limits so somebody's got two or three two-year terms to make their bones and move on to the next highest office you can't raise money constantly and move on and keep your name in the press to get free media without regular sound bites. And if you can make a sound bite by grousing about something that some public employee did that the average taxpayer might take out of context and see as an affront, you're going to do it. That's just the reality. That is it. So in a lot of places there are travel restrictions, et cetera. What is that derived from? The same thing on what they pay people and how they're resourced. Key thing there is governance.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's pretty easy. So that's not a complicated thing. What we do is we think, first of all, how much should be active and passive. We're really good at the passive part, and you can do that in scale for if you look at the what the compensation packages cost for our traders who execute this, even though I think we pay them in a manner that they're happy and motivated and it's reasonable and competitive, that compared to management fees on a similar amount of money, it's practically free, in which case you've got a huge advantage. And then you do the active in the parts of the market where you're going to get paid for spending the money and taking the extra risk, which is generally going to be as you move out of the US into non-US equities, and the further afield you go into emerging markets and eventually into frontier markets, then the attractiveness of active versus passive becomes”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a big part of it. And the other thing is scale, better team, better terms, better fees, very powerful. I think those are the main things.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do the equivalent of buying the recipe? Don't buy the cake. Buy the recipe. Go bake the cake yourself. And you can bake as many cakes as you want from that recipe without painting any more money. That's powerful. So we do that. One of the great powers we bring is our low-cost operating environment. We have been the lowest cost provider for three or four of the last five or six years per CEM. Our costs on average are about half those of our peers.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Index doing those two things will get you enough marginal revenue that you can beat the index pretty consistently in a passive fund. Well, that kind of tastes great less filling, isn't it? So what we've figured out how to do, and I give our global equity team credit for this, it wasn't me, was buy from some of the factor investing firms instead of buying their services in a traditional asset management relationship.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source