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Ellen Ellison

lines on the record: 64
first: 2017-10-02
most recent: 2017-10-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“direction and I marvel the guts and the speed with which the board did this and they did a total outface. We're going to do a national search and we're going to find a CIO to build a brand new team. Prior to that the CIO and a very small team had been embedded in the foundation offices in Urbana which is in central Illinois about two and a half hours south of Chicago and when I was recruited I tried to explain how important it was to recruit investment professionals to a great city like Chicago. And that is in fact what we've done. So you're seeing me at the end of the startup entrepreneurial phase where we're now a growth equity investment office as I say.”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The University of Illinois is a very big and terrific public university with a relatively small endowment, as is the case with many public universities. They had relied quite happily on state funding. And when I joined the state of Illinois was in slightly better financial shape than it is today, but they were providing about $650 million or 11% of the total budget of the university. The endowment when I showed up was around $1.2 billion, and it had been on track to be totally outsourced. And I think that the board of the foundation realized that if one was going to really emphasize private philanthropy, having our own investment office with our own brand would really go hand in hand. So they said, you know what, we're changing strategic.”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I like to do research. I learned from a lot of other smart investors. I had a very strong consultant at the time whom you know. Mike Miller explained a lot of stuff to me. He was very, very helpful. Talked to other CIOs. And also, the more exposure you have to managers across the asset allocation spectrums, I really feel that especially today I learned the most from my actual managers.”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I was recruited by the University of Miami, and I was there for six years, and that's really when all the learning had to occur above and beyond long-only global strategies. You know, I added hedge funds and the private equity, then venture capital, then private real estate. So, you know, I'm always amazed when I see people under age 40 who are CIOs because let's face it, it takes a long time to get reasonably good at all those different asset classes.”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I view it as you can be the best. It's kind of like painting with one color. I think you don't realize that's a big world out there and there's lots of other things you can do within a portfolio above and beyond single stock, fundamental research investing, which is what they were very good at. So that is one difference, having many, many more choices during overmarket cycles and also not having to worry about taxes I think is a huge advantage in the endowment and foundation world.”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This notion of seeing a portfolio holistically. And it didn't have the pieces in my repertoire yet to do that, but it was, I think, between Swenson, value investing, and then Jeremy kind of put it all together in terms of wanting to ultimately see how does one become a CIO. Loved managing money. I think direct management of portfolios is a wonderful training for someone who ultimately becomes an allocator because you get used to pulling the trigger, you get used to being wrong and having to extricate yourself from mistakes and understanding the nature of your mistakes. And you get used to working with successful, highly opinionated people, which is an important part of one's job dealing with trustees. I was recruited to be the CIO of a small family office in Miami.”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I worked for fiduciary trust international to build an investment team in Miami, and they had just bought a trust company in Miami and they wanted to build a significant subsidiary there, both for New York retirees in Florida, but also to see if they could figure out a way to get access to more international high-net worth investors. And I really grew up at fiduciary trust over a 13-half-year period. Jeremy Biggs was the chief investment officer, and he really mentored a lot of people, mostly women. That's kind of the Biggs family investment dynasty. As you know, they're all pretty brilliant. Jeremy and Barton's father was an investor, and then obviously Fiona was an investor also. So I do think there's something really good in the big genes. But Jeremy was very tough on me, but I realized that I liked”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Columbia after he came from Harvard and Bruce Greenwald is one of the best people you could ever meet in academia or in the business profession and he really just decided that I was good. He's very supportive and this is now 20 years out and he has been a wonderful mentor to me and really formed the basis of my eventually becoming a strong value investor.”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I figured out I only lasted a year. I figured out that it would be much better to be on the asset management or the buy side. And so that's kind of been the rest of my career since my early Smith Barney days. I joined Merrill Lynch on the sell side. And then finally made my way back to graduate school at Columbia Business School. I really needed to round out my brain and get good at”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you're looking at her. So this was in the early 80s. I joined Smith Barney. They hired kids right out of undergraduate liberal arts institutions. And so no one had a particularly strong counting or finance background. I really had maybe one statistics course. And it was a fairly fallow period in the market, and there was not that much to do, although they kept this there very late, not doing very much. I used to have to sneak out through the ladies' room on Friday afternoon to catch the train to go visit my then boyfriend. And since then, husband, so that there's something with investment bankers and bathrooms.”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Studied in Europe. I'm fluent in a bunch of languages, first French, then German, then Spanish, but I certainly saw myself in some kind of international career always. I figured out about my junior of college that my acting and directing skills, though decent, were not enough to make it professionally. And I really didn't want to starve. So I did the next most logical thing, which was to become an investment banker. I must have been the world's worst investment bank.”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great Well, on paper looks very rational and linear, but obviously living it didn't quite seem that way. I grew up, I was born in Glen Cove, I moved a lot as a kid. My dad was a naval architect and marine engineer and worked for the American Bureau of Shipping. My brother was born in Japan and they moved back to Glencove before I was born, but I grew up surrounded by a lot of Japanese culture and art and have over the years developed a really strong interest in Japan. But I've lived pretty much everywhere in this country and also in Europe. So nomadic and very adaptable by nature and by design. Let's see. I wanted to be an actress. I was a theater and French literature major at Mont Holy Oak.”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Ellen's career path and dives into the challenge of starting an endowment investment program from the ground up, including establishing governance practices and figuring out when to put cash to work when markets feel pricey. Her favorite opportunities in the market, including a long discussion of agriculture investing, offers a very different take on the world today. Please enjoy my conversation with Ellen Ellison.”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guest on today's show is Ellen Ellison, the chief investment officer of the University of Illinois Foundation, which she joined in 2013 as its first leader of the now 1.7 billion dollar pool of assets. Ellen restarted a program and a portfolio from scratch at a time when longer-established university investment offices already had their chips carefully placed in the markets. Yet with a small team, she built a clever portfolio and is starting to reap its rewards. Prior to joining Illinois, Ellen was the executive director of investments at the University of Miami for five years, the leader of a small family office for a year, and a 13-year veteran of fiduciary trust company. She's a graduate of Mount Holyoke University and Columbia University Business School and currently sits on the investment committee for Mount Holyoke. Our conversation starts with”
2017-10-02 · Capital Allocators · Ellen Ellison – Playing to Your Strengths (Capital Allocators, EP.27) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source