YouSaid · the spoken record

Collette Chilton

lines on the record: 75
first: 2021-01-25
most recent: 2021-01-25
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

“I don't know, there's so many mistakes. There's so many mistakes in hiring in the portfolio and just like raising kids. I don't know. I feel like I've been so lucky in so many ways. You know, I think one of the greatest determinants of how your life is is who you're married to. And I feel very lucky to have my husband. And of course, we've made mistakes, you know, as parents. And I don't know. It's hard for me to single out just one because Ted, there are so many. And I'm not dodging. I'm really not dodging your question. It's just like, So many. All right. Let's.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that is just a fantastic book. It's fiction. It's written by a woman who's a historian and I can't remember her name right now. It was like one of those books where you're at work or you're working at home and you just want to finish working so that you can go sit down and read your book.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I keep track of the books that I've read in this app called Goodreads, which I love because I can never remember what I've read. And so I can go back in there and say, oh, I loved that book. So the book that I've been reading a lot during COVID and one book I read recently that I absolutely loved is a book called Circe. It's about one of the Greek gods who is a woman who is kind of thrown out and she goes and lives on an island with her son. And it's just fascinating. It's all about mythology and the gods. And that was a fantastic book. And I started thinking about other books that I like and they mostly have women protagonists. And they also are all sort of succeeding against the odds. I don't know why that resonates with me, but apparently it does.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, what are you seeing or hearing or doing? And it's kind of talking to each other about this actually isn't that different from pre-COVID? I mean, it's easier to say that now than in late March and early April, at which point we were all talking about liquidity and is your line of credit going to be there if you need it and that kind of stuff. But it's more just reassuring each other.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frequent Well, you know, it's funny, one of the things I really miss about not traveling is seeing all my friends because, as you mentioned earlier, you're in these investments with other good investors and you become friends with them over time. And when you travel, you know, oh, I'm going to this annual meeting, I'm going to see so-and-so, or we're all going to China at the same time. And I really miss that. And so when COVID started, a lot of people made more of a concerted effort to like regularly check in on the phone, not on Zoom. When I'm talking to my friends, it's sort of a reality check of we're going to get through this.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My usual response to that which my husband tells me is super basic and I can't say this anymore is work hard, check your work, do a good job. I think that's profound, but that's for right out of school. And we've had a lot of students working with us. So I know that that is not necessarily what students do when they get out of college, especially checking your work. And it's just like not that sexy or deep. That's like stage one advice. That's like, okay, you're your first year out of college. Just do a good job. Work hard. Check your work. Don't let your boss find mistakes in your work. I mean, it's going to happen, but, you know, and then later on, I think, and I don't know when the transition from stage one to stage two is, figure out what's the what for of what you're doing. You could be really good at spreadsheets if you're working in our office and you don't understand how important we are to Williams and why what we're doing matters so much and how that can influence your work. Figuring that out when you're still in your 20s.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's sort of tied to what we were just talking about, which was when something bad happens, it's going to be okay. You're going to get through it. And when I was younger, it would just be so upsetting. And, you know, you kind of get caught up in the drama of it being upsetting. And I think I wish I'd learned much younger that it's like, you know, it's okay. It's all going to be good. This isn't going so well right now, but it's all going to be fine. When I was forty that I had the confidence and the understanding of that, but I don't know how you get that life lesson any earlier than learning over time.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, why do managers do what they do? And you kind of just like, you know what? It's okay. We're going to get through this. And so being positive, that was like an incredible gift from my parents.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was with my family recently in California, and we were coincidentally talking about stuff that we learned from our parents that's really been impactful on us. And one of the things that I think was most important is to be positive. And it was something that my parents both were and my siblings are. And it's just, you know, life is so much better if you're positive. You know, bad things happen, but, you know, it was kind of like always, you'll get through this. It's not really Pollyannish, but, you know, the sun will come up tomorrow. There's another day. And in what we do, that's incredibly helpful because there's always something bad happening in our portfolio.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say my biggest pet peeve is people who lack humility and that's both in the investment business and in life more broadly. I didn't grow up thinking I was going to be in the investment business. I wasn't, you know, I didn't have my little stock portfolio as a teenager. I kind of landed here out of necessity and it's been incredible. I love it. But I'm also very humble about it and think, how did I get so lucky? You know, I get to go to China and India and meet all these people and support an amazing college. And I'm very proud of all of that and feel extremely humble about the whole thing. And you meet a lot of people in our business who are not that way. And so I would say that is definitely my pet peeve.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I would say the exercise, these jobs are great and they're a lot of fun, but they're super stressful, regardless of what's going on in the market, going up or down or sideways or things going on with your team. This has been such a difficult time for colleges, you know, closing, do we reopen? Williams reopened and has had great success with that. But there's just, you know, it's stressful. And so staying healthy and mentally, you know, on it keeps you calm and that's better for everybody on the team and at the school.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“hiking, running, my husband and I work with the trainer together and we love it so much that we bought our own sled and we have a bunch of we have a medicine ball and a bunch of other stuff and we keep it in the trunk of the car so when we were in Williamstown working out there for the summer we would like drive around to different parts of campus and do our workout and people would go by and laugh at us and it's great it's great it's something we can do together it's a lot of fun so that's I would say that's not really a hobby but it's something I like to do”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's what investing is, right? So I keep telling these guys you are the most well suited for investing or investment management. You don't need to go to Wharton or someplace like that. You guys have got it all going on here. So anyway, winter study is really fun. It's really cold and dark in Williamstown in January. And the other thing that we've done that's been a great success is we've brought some of our managers to Williamstown and they talk about what they do and they'll talk about a stock and the students will get some materials ahead of time and they'll have to talk about would they invest or would they short whatever”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“private equity is our provost who's fantastic comes in and talks about the finances of the college and how the endowment supports it and when you think that the majority of kids at Williams are on financial aid so they leave at the end of that month of January understanding why what we do is so important to what they're able to do at Williams and it's just fun it's fun to get to be with these students both in our summer programs and winter study and our full-time analysts we have a huge alumni base for Williams that's close to 100 kids who have worked in our various programs and they're all out in the world doing different stuff a lot of them in the investment world which is great coming out of a small liberal arts school that doesn't have anything business or accounting or anything like that but these kids come out and they learn how to think critically and write and make an argument and put a mosaic of things together”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my god, that is like one of the best parts of the year is winter study. And it's really sad because we're not doing winter study this year. We are doing something called the winter experience, but winter study is a month of the year at Williams that students can take one course and they're encouraged to take something that's not related to their major. Yeah, I think it's all pass fail. So people take knitting and winemaking and cartoons and stuff like that. And so we started teaching winter study eight or ten years ago and we started off bringing two or three students to Boston and having them work in our office five days a week. Then we realized that we could have more students involved if we did it on campus. So we do it on campus and we basically do endowment management 101. They read David Swenson's book. They learn what an asset class is. Somebody different from the team is there every day talking about. This is what a hedge fund is.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“where we spend our time. So, when you think about how you allocate your time and how important that is, because you never have enough of it. But I don't know if we're like the bleeding edge of innovation with regard to how we look for a manager or analyze a manager”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if we're like the thought leaders on innovation. We did one thing that was innovative, I thought, and saved us a lot of money and headaches is we moved away from a custodian and hired an administrator, which at the time we did it, nobody had done that in the endowment world. And not very many people have done it since then. But we got so crazy about not being able to understand what our managers were doing for 20 or 30 days after the end of the month. And so we went with an administrator and it's made a huge difference in how we look at the portfolio and can manage the portfolio and understand what our managers are doing. It's sort of like the plumbing underneath it all. We just tried to simplify. It's less expensive. I don't think that's what you're asking about, but it was something that made a big difference for us and our team.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think I'm a lot more comfortable taking risk. I mentioned that a third of our managers are first time fund or day one investor and if you ask me in 2006 when I first got here I would be like there's no way we're doing that and now I'm a lot more comfortable with that risk and can see 10 years from now why you want to be with that person today and it doesn't always work out but I'm much more comfortable with that kind of risk and meeting somebody and having a few meetings with them and understanding what they're doing and yeah let's take that risk and sometimes it makes my team crazy I think because you know I'm ready to step off that cliff before they are but that's probably for me personally that's probably the biggest difference”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, part of it's for me personally is instinct and if you don't feel 100% comfortable with a person, like even if all those people are doing it, or if you just don't get it, you know, sometimes people say, oh, you know, he's doing blah, blah, blah or she's doing blah, blah, blah. And if I don't get it, then we shouldn't do it. And there are definitely things that a lot of other people are in and have done fabulously well with and we're not in it in part because of That kind of experience, or you know, I've experienced this before in a different flavor or a different version. And sometimes it's like I'm glad we didn't do it and sometimes I'm really sad that we didn't do it.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely careful about who we invest alongside because that can drive the outcome, right? But you can be in things with other good investors and have a bad outcome. So we were in a hedge fund. Kind of forgotten about this, but you're making me like think of all these bad things. We were in a hedge fund where the guy at like five o'clock on New Year's Eve day announced that he was turning the hedge fund from a hedge fund into a publicly listed security that was a holding company for all these underlying investments. We had all been trying to redeem and he wouldn't let us redeem. And he said, you have complete liquidity. It's a security. But he was the majority owner of the security, so the only liquidity came from him. And that was a long, drawn out, really bad, expensive legal fees experience. And we were alongside some great investors. But there were also some large investors with just a different.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me personally, it's all your friends are doing it and you say this doesn't feel right to me, but all the cool kids are doing this, so we're going to do this. And that's never a good strategy. And there are some big things that have blown up that we haven't been in and there have been things that we would prefer to not have been invested in. It's funny because in pension fund law, there's some protection for investing in something that everybody else is in. Here, it's not like that. Like if I said the reason we invested in Ted's firm is because all these really smart people were in it. And even though we couldn't really get there, they're in it. That's like not a good answer.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, sometimes a lot of the best managers don't give you a lot of transparency on the way in. And it's a little bit of a trust me. And sometimes you just have to go with that and you do as much reference checking and talking to people who are investors and people who know that person or know the firm as you can. But there's a little bit of a sometimes you just have to step off the clip and hope for the best. And most of the time that's worked out for us and sometimes it just doesn't. And sell some of it's unknowable ahead of time. But if you are investing by definition you're taking risk. And so if you don't take risk, you're not going to have return.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one of the mistakes was you have someone who you think is a good advisor and they say something to you like run, don't walk to this manager and you do, and that is not necessarily a good thing to do. I mentioned earlier that we have sort of a slow, careful process for adding new managers and getting to know them. And sometimes when you move too fast and you don't do everything that you normally would because of not having the time to do that and that doesn't necessarily end up well.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, listen, we all make mistakes. You haven't asked me that yet, but happy to talk about it. Hiring mistakes, mistakes in the portfolio. I mean, you can't have one of these jobs without having a whole, you know, we could just talk about mistakes, which wouldn't be a lot of fun. Let's have that.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We definitely talk about should we move the target as the actual has moved, but then it becomes tempting to add more relationships and make bigger commitments and then you've gone from the current target to a bigger target to, you know, so we just stay the course and it's bigger than the target. But as you said, it will come back down hopefully for a good reason and not because valuations drop precipitously. So we're lucky to be in these amazing partnerships and we really value them and they are private portfolios have done really well over long periods of time. And we don't try and reinvent it all the time. Our venture portfolio is kind of barbell between these very longstanding relationships and then some new stuff. And that's been good to us because what was new 10 years ago now is very established and very successful.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all performance driven. So we really had some core relationships when I got here that we've been with for a very, very long time that have been great. And then we've added a few names in our portfolio, but not a lot. And mostly first-time funds in different parts of the world or here. But we haven't really added much as far as relationships. But when the funds do well, it grows. I mean, we saw the same thing with our private equity portfolio where our targets nine percent and it was well above that when buyouts were doing well and now it's venture's turn. The good thing is we have all these people on our committee who have seen it before, as have I and my team. So it's like this too shall pass.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money in our portfolio, and that's just really important to Williams. The endowment is here to support the college. The endowment is not just here to be a pool of capital to invest.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not a secret. Anyway, so between that and the private equity, it's 20 some odd percent of the portfolio. The allocation to venture and private equity haven't changed since I started with the college, and it really goes back to this need for liquidity because we support so much of the operating budget. So we spend a lot of time looking at liquidity and unfunded commitments and how we compare to peer institutions and how much they have in unfunded commitments and illiquid investments. So we are slightly less than the schools that have the best 10-year returns, but not very different. And we haven't really moved off of those targets because we have to be careful about our liquidity and we look at our unfunded commitment level moving around and what that means. We didn't get upside down in the last financial crisis and have to borrow because we couldn't get”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So our target allocation is 6%, our current allocation is like three times that. And we haven't done anything differently. We have the same managers and we commit the same amount of capital when a fund is raised. So we have terrific managers. And we look forward to them taking advantage of the IPO market and doing direct listings. and returning capital to us.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was before my time. There was so much debate that I think the outcome was really good. There was no sort of polite, oh, yeah, I agree with you. That's, yeah, I think that's good too. So, I mean, Paul was an incredible MIDI member and served for a long time. And he's not an alum. He has two sons who went to Williams, which is how he got involved and was an incredible non-alum volunteer.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“did he influence what was in the portfolio? There are a lot of good stories about what happened in those committee meetings back in the day.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredible at shorting, and you know, we have a small number and they all do different things, so we don't need to have three firms all doing the same thing in a much bigger portfolio.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the legacy of our portfolio was Andreas Halverson was part of the committee that started this portfolio, and there are a lot of Williams people who have worked at Tiger or Tiger family firms. And so what that means for our portfolio today is there's kind of this fundamental bottom-up kind of investing style. We have managers who were not part of Tiger, but there's definitely coming into Williams and never having invested in a hedge fund. I learned a lot from those people and the culture of Williams is one of incredible accomplishment and success and incredible modesty and humility and people really helped me when I got started. So when I look at our list of global long short, they're doing all different things and some move their exposures around and some do privates and some are”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“along the way. Obviously, the most important relationships and the trickiest relationship, but it's not like I parachute in when somebody's having performance difficulty and, you know, bring the hammer down. That's not how we do things. And I would say I probably do the least amount of talking when I go to meetings with my team and it's their relationship and they know these guys the best and then I'll hear them say something and ask a question. It's not a gotcha culture in our office. It's really like trying to understand what they're doing and is this what we hired them for?”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say we're very respectful of our manager's time. We like to see each manager at least once a year, if not twice, and many of the managers we have in our portfolio we've had for twenty years or something like that. Our practice is to see them at least once a year. My team definitely does that, and they're in touch with them much more by phone and that kind of thing, but we try to be LPs or clients who are not kind of overstaying our welcome. And I think that's worked out well for us because then when we are looking at a new firm or trying to get into a fund and they are doing their due diligence on us, I think that's what they hear about us is that we're not, you know, taking too much of their time. I meet every manager before we hire somebody. And then once they're in the portfolio, I travel about 50% of the time in normal times. And so I see a lot of people.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're having a meeting one on one, you can cover certain personal things that might not get covered as much in a meeting with, say, three or four of you. Managers have limited amount of time. They spend with each client. So how do you think about what are you trying to tease out and when over time in one of these relationships?”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be very different. They want to have like the notes in front of them and their iPad and taking notes and asking position by position. And that's appropriate, you know. I'm responsible for nothing and everything, and I've been doing this for a long time. And, you know, if we had performance that wasn't great, it's my responsibility, but the people on my team are the ones who do all of the work to get us there.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you ask my team, they would answer that one way. If you ask me, I would answer it a different way. So I've done one manager meeting during COVID. I was in San Francisco a couple weeks ago and I met with one of our managers out there. And we spent more time talking about everything but the portfolio. And this manager, they're fabulous investors. They're not crushing it right now, but I didn't really want to go talk to them like, can we go position by position? Can you tell me why this isn't working and why this is working? We talked about a lot of stuff. We talked about... The election and COVID and their lives and what's been going on. And I feel like I walked away from that knowing a lot more about how they're thinking about things without having talked about the positions.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody who's honest, somebody who you can trust, somebody who you're not going to lose sleep at night. What's important for us is understanding what our managers do and being able to explain it to the investment committee. So I've always sort of felt like if I can't explain to these guys what we're doing and why something went wrong, then I shouldn't be in this job. So as a result, we don't have a lot of black box macro quant kind of stuff in our portfolio. A lot of fundamental bottom-up kind of managers where you can understand most of what they're doing.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really meeting people, and does their strategy make sense for what they're saying they're doing and for their assets under management? And we've done a lot of investing with first-time funds or a day one investor, about a third of our portfolio. When I went back and looked, we were in fund one or invested with somebody who started. So a lot of times the track record isn't really. Available or the most important thing”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there are a lot of good investors in the world, right? And we don't need to be invested with all of them, but the ones that we have need to be really good. So that's how we kind of think about it. We do lots and lots and lots of meetings. We track the number of meetings. We do like 500 meetings a year between our current and potential managers, and we only will add a small handful of new managers every year. So part of it's just meeting so many different people that you start recognizing things. And I've been doing this for a long time, so you start recognizing things. And you also remember where people came from and what they used to do and when they changed the name of their firm so people wouldn't know what they were doing. That kind of stuff. So that's definitely helpful because years and years of experience. But some of its art and some of its science, you know, there's a lot of what my team calls desk work that you can do and that might tell you part of the story.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outside of the basics of you want to get to know the people and the strategy and how they go about it, what do you think are the most important aspects of a manager you're trying to tease out in the ones that do make it to the portfolio versus the ones that might be close but don't?”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It takes us about a year between the time we meet someone and recommend putting them into the portfolio. So we're pretty careful. Like I said, we really try to manage the number of relationships in the portfolio in part because we don't want to dilute away returns by having too many managers and in part because we're just this lean mean team here of not a lot of people covering a lot of the world. So we've gone back and run the numbers and it's about a year from I meet you and by the time we do all the work and we meet you a few times and make a decision about investing and then bring a recommendation to the investment committee. It's pretty slow.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's not like we said, okay, let's have 40% and go fill the bucket. We have these amazing managers and do we want to have a little bit more or a little bit less of that? We're not very tactical and we don't make a lot of changes in our policy portfolio. We look at it every year and review it with the committee. Maybe like a one or two percent change. It's kind of at the margin. You know, all of our value add is in manage or selection. It's not in calling the market or anything like that when we do the attribution work. It's all manager selection.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's mostly equity. It's almost all equity. We no longer have the fixed income that we had back then we still have some credit, but it's just all forms of equity. We have almost forty percent of our portfolio in hedge funds, and that is partly driven by just the hedge funds that we have. So it's kind of a bottom-up fundamental. We have great managers, and they happen to be global long short or what we call absolute return managers. The private part of the portfolio is about a third of the portfolio, I want to say. And then we have what we call global long equity. So we have frictional cash. We don't have fixed income or cash. We really need the equity to grow the assets to support the college.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just over sixty. So when I started, if you went through the portfolio and you said, you know, this private equity fund we've already passed on, so it's not active. But if you counted the active relationships, we're kind of at the same number as we were then.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The crisis, and so that was helpful. But then coming out of the crisis wasn't like we took this most liquid part of the portfolio and went crazy with it. We just, you know, like we have the whole time, just tried to find very, very good managers and not too many of them. You know, when I started, the pool was $1.5 billion and now it's $3 billion over 14 years. And we've tried to keep the number of managers the same as when I started. That was sort of our philosophy.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was an interesting time when you're, you know, it's a new office and you have longstanding relationships and you're trying to figure out what is going on here while the world's coming apart all around you. But coming out of that, what did we do? We really didn't do much differently. We had sort of core fixed income going into the crisis because of this manager who was kind of a balanced fund. So that was helpful. And we had added to that fixed income going into the crisis because you look at how much we support at Williams and it was like, wow, we might want to have some fixed income in here. So that was helpful. And then we also had put in some credit, not investment grade credit in the portfolio, not because we had any view on the market, but just had added that going in before the crisis. And that all performed like equities during”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coming out the other side wasn't like they said, okay, just like hang out here and wait for this to be over. So we're in the crisis. We had just set up our investment office. We had just moved the files from Williamstown to Boston. And I don't know if it was the weekend of Lehman or Bear Stearns. It was one of those weekends. And we're in the office looking for our contracts to see what we can do in the situation with all of these managers. We had some contracts.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wish it were as you described, Ted, that we got through the crisis and then we got to get started, but we were actually doing all of that starting in 2006 through the crisis.”
2021-01-25 · Capital Allocators · Collette Chilton – Humility and Loyalty at Williams College (Capital Allocators, EP.174) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source