YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Gitlin

lines on the record: 78
first: 2026-01-05
most recent: 2026-01-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, the personal side my oldest is going to get married next year. So no pressure if he's listening to this, but hopefully it means grandkids as well and entering that stage of life on a personal level for me and my wife. On a professional level, that will take us really close to our centennial and the culmination of our strategic plan. And hopefully as a leadership team we can look back and say we left the organization better than we found it.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we talked a lot about empowerment. Empowerment is empowering not just for the folks that you're empowering, but it's also liberating for that leader who's willing to empower them. I think that's super important. I've learned that. It's taken me some time, but I've learned that.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our retired president and Phil D. Toledo gave me advice that when I joined in my mid forties, no matter what stage you are in your career, you can always get smarter, always get better if you're willing to learn. Good advice from Phil.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“McDonald's, and I learned not to give away free food. You're going to get fired. When you're 16 years old and someone orders a hamburger and they end up with fries as well, that's not the best plan.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to walk. I like to walk more than 10,000 steps. So I'm doing a half marathon in January to force myself to train for that. I just love walking with no headset on and just taking in what's happening in the outside world.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have to execute the long-term strategic plan when Tim retired and Rob stepped off our management committee and we added some new members. The first thing we did was work together across the organization for the long-term strategic plan. Once you have that document and we reassess it every eighteen to twenty four months to make sure it's right and if it's not, we'll tweak it. But man, when you have that document and you have that strategy and you have empowerment, execute it, stay out of people's way and leave the organization better than you found it for the next people to write the next strategic plan.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you combine it with the question you asked on public profile being up a bit, there are some benefits to being under the radar. When you're on the radar, you get in the news cycle and the news flow more than you had in the past. Not all of those stories are going to be perfect. We have to condition ourselves to know with a higher profile. You're going to be in the news more often. That's different for us. And to make sure internally that it doesn't distract us from the mission at hand. The news story was out there. Most of them will be good because we're a calm good long-term enterprise. But maybe one will be a little bit noisy and to remind our folks internally focus on the mission, let the news cycle run its eight hours and keep moving.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if our partners in the wealth in the institutional space, if you walked into their office and said, Who are your three or five most important partners that can do virtually anything for you and are super important to you? We'd be on that list. With so many of our partners we're in that position today, but how do we continue to invest the resources that our clients need us to to make sure we're on more and more of those lists of adding value to our partners? That may be from investment. That may be from business management. We have the ability to have the resources to deliver to them, to be that partner of choice. If globally more and more folks say that because we're impacting their business in a positive way, that would be a really good outcome.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are raising our profile. Our clients are happy to see our name out there more as you're a global asset management company and not just a US asset management company using some of those dollars to raise brand awareness outside the US is important. You'll see more and it's intentional. Even folks from 30 or 50 years ago, I read one internal document from nineteen sixty three, and it talked about always evolving so we don't risk obsolescence. That was 1963. We've always evolved having a stronger brand approach and profile as part of that evolution in the world has changed. Social media has changed. Brand awareness focus has changed. All that's changed. You could sit there in your shell and say it's all changed and we're not going to change with it. Or you can break out of your shell and say we're going to do it in a capital group way.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you would have asked people 30 years ago, they definitely would have bristled at a higher profile. We were under the radar intentionally. And at that stage of our evolution, that was okay. Let the investment professionals focus on managing money. We had an incredible client-facing team doing their work in the field. Let our work speak for itself. To a certain extent, that still happens every day. And our clients are asking us to have a larger profile. And as you launch new vehicles, ETFs, separately managed accounts or SMAs, strategies outside the US, you need to use the capital brand, not the American funds brand. And so linking them and having them both elevate together helps. We do it in a tasteful way. It's more than we've ever done. I wouldn't suggest that we're going to be on the front page of every publication tomorrow. That's not our ambition.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Public market, big, liquid, transparent, relatively inexpensive, ten percent annualized returns during that 30-year period. If you look at MSCI All Country World and you do it in euro terms, I think it's about eight or eight and a half percent return. These are great returns. So can people benefit from alternatives? Absolutely. Can they use them absolutely? Is there diversification benefits and return benefits over time? Absolutely. But let's not, as an industry, disparage something that's worked incredibly well over the last hundred years and is likely to work incredibly well over the next hundred years.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What has been lost in this conversation is how big the public markets are and how well they've done. Whenever I get the private markets question, I have to remind people of the facts. Look back thirty years and someone will say, well, why are you using nineteen ninety five? And I'll say, because I wanted intentionally to bring in two 50% bear markets. In the dot-com bubble and the global financial crisis, both times the S&P 500 fell 50%. Let's use a time period that includes both of those. If you look over thirty years, the S&P with dividends reinvested has annualized about 10% return. That is super good. If you look at the growth of the size of the public markets, in 1995, the US total market capitalization of the stock market was five trillion. Today it's sixty five trillion. That's just the US. And the U.S. is about sixty-five percent of the world index. That's a hundred trillion dollars.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It for many folks who haven't used alternatives before, you have to start with education. It's so important you're not trying to sell a product. You're trying to deliver an outcome. You can't do that unless you talk about what's the outcome likely to be and what your own risk profile. We just won two awards on education in private markets. I'm much more proud of that than any unit of something we've quote unquote sold. We're not trying to sell a product. We're trying to educate and deliver an outcome. That's in the alternatives world the more successful adoption of alternatives will be is how good the education is.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The alternative space has expanded tremendously. The question is, can alternative managers with money flowing into their asset classes continue to generate after fee outcomes for their clients? At the base of what clients are looking for, they want you to beat the markets after fees in a less volatile way. Can you do that? What people feel about alternatives is the fees are higher, the competition is growing every day, but there still is an opportunity for diversification in a portfolio if you're using alternatives in the right way. Some institutions have long used alternatives, some too much, and they've had a borrow against some of those holdings recently to meet liabilities, but others the right amount, and individuals who've been closer to zero are moving up to something more than zero. What's the right way to do it?”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to figure out how to be relevant in the future. Our clients are seeing their asset managers in this state of flux. And they're trying to find reliable, consistent partners. They want us to help them with thought leadership. They want us to help them with their enterprise and best ideas and practices. All of that is important to them. It's hard for them to look out five years and assume the folks they're working with are going to be the same because they know they're going to be different.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is this consolidation in the asset management industry. They are seeing it as super noisy. They are looking at their partners and it's like trying to hit a moving target because their partners are morphing. They're buying different companies. They're changing their strategy. And they're wondering, are those asset managers still focused on my money and managing it well? I had an institutional client meeting in Asia last year. And I remember sitting down with a CIO and I said, look, think of us as a constant in a sea of variables. We're focused on managing money the right way. We're not buying companies. We're not selling ourselves. We're hyper focused on managing money. Bang the table in this super positive way and said, thank God, thank God, because everyone else is coming in telling me why they just acquired this, why they're changing this, why they're cutting resources here because of their own expense base and trust.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He launched something called Career Hub. You can think of it as internal LinkedIn with AI. Not every single job at Capital Group today will be the same in three years, five years, ten years. Instead of just acknowledging that as a truth, let's figure out how to make sure that we know what our associates want to do in their career, regardless if their job's going to change or not. They may have a different idea of what they want to do. Create your profile. Here's what I do today. Here's how I came to Capital Group. Here are my skills, and here's what I may want to do in the future. You also have managers before they look externally. Look into Career Hub to see if there's a match of someone internal before they go external. That's an example of investing in culture in the associate experience is create that internal network and web for people to be able to develop their careers and take a different role internally. As you're out,”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Down a lot of the overly complex system that can exist in any company, by the way. It's not just capital group. Most companies have way too much structure and governance. And in some ways, that becomes job justification and it doesn't allow people to have the ownership of their own plan. Everyone at Capital Group, all of our entities took our long-term strategic plan for 2031 and made it specific to their group. Once they have that and we've approved that, you don't have to report back to us every twelve minutes. We want to get out of your way and let you execute.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How many committees report to management committee? How many committees report to the capital operating group? The number of committees that report to both of those oversight groups is down fifty percent in the last handful of years, intentionally saying you don't have to climb up the mountain and come to capital group management committee and have us bless something. We trust you. It's through empowerment, through structure and governance. We instituted this saber process. Come in semi annually. Don't come in with one hundred eighteen pages. Come in with two pages. Tell us what's working well, what's not, and how can we help? Let's have a conversation. Don't go plate a PowerPoint presentation for us. Let's engage in a dialogue. We'll have oversight of the overall budget of capital group, obviously. But once we've made those decisions and we have this long-term strategic plan, do your thing. So that empowerment takes down.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and generate those outcomes and how you're operating in your business. How can we be helpful in how you manage that day in, day out? Both of those things really fits that evolved mindset.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is keep enhancing the capital system, keep focusing on generating differentiated investment outcomes. It's the core of what we do. Evolve with clients. Another one is simplification and scale. How do we operate this entity of thirty three offices around the world nearly ten thousand people, three trillion of assets? How do we operate in a simplified manner? We're using technology as a tailwind to just being more efficient. The last one is invest in the associate experience and our culture. There's a reason our attrition rate is half the industry. There's a reason people come and stay. How do we keep doing that and not rest on our laurels so we can make the culture even better? Those are the four pillars, but this evolve with clients has been so powerful because it says we are going to be your partner of choice in investment services and business management. How we provide solutions to you?”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unlock for us is let's just make our intellectual capital available. If you look at our strategic plan and we have these four pillars, one of them is evolve with clients. This is that. This is saying this is what our clients are looking for. How do we deliver it to them?”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mindset of our whole leadership team is we have this intellectual capital. At the base, that's what capital group is. How to deliver it for clients in the way they want to consume it and not be judgy about that. It's this vehicle of choice mindset. What's the right investment vehicle? Depends on the tax position of the client, where they live. For us, it was getting over the fact that we would have a multitude of vehicles, because that does create time and energy and noise in the system when you have more and more vehicles available for clients. Once you cross that Rubicon, once you're able to say it's all about the client and how they'd like to consume our intellectual capital, it's liberating and it's ETF's collective investment trust separately managed accounts institutional separate accounts, mutual funds. It's not about the vehicle, it's about what's inside.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Digit and high single digit, it's going to be a case by case conversation with a financial advisor and a family. For us, when we put together the pieces of the puzzle, we're not pushing anyone to do anything. We're offering choice. That's what's the biggest change is the mindset of offering choice.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The private markets are large, and the question is not as much the size and the growth of those, but in the world of wealth management as we see the democratization of private markets. What's the right allocation for individuals who typically haven't had access to private markets? From a portfolio construction perspective, it's dependent on the client and their needs. This is why we always say individuals are best suited through financial advisors, because that's a very particular discussion for a unique family. Is it five percent? Is it 11%? How'd you arrive at that? And what are your liquidity needs and what are the expenses? And what are the outcomes you're looking for and what are the diversification benefits? All of these are not generic. They're customized. Over time, as you see the world of wealth utilize the private markets and go from low single digit utilization to”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better at them by the way, why are they going to be better at the public markets than we are? We just had to believe that we found the right culture, the right partner who could generate the right investment results, put it together with what we're doing, and deliver a holistic solution. The only thing we had to do to be willing to partner is give up the fees. And that was okay for us to be able to do. So that's how we ended up there. But it started from a investment solutions and client outcome perspective and ended up with the decision to partner as opposed to buyer bill.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super disruptive. So he said we didn't want to do that. Building it ourselves, we have 3.2 trillion of client assets and $400 investment professionals focused on that and them, taking some of them out to do something entirely different wouldn't be great for our existing clients. Then you'd have to say what about bringing in teams of people? And again, you run into the risk of cultural disruption, which wouldn't be good for our existing clients. So it left us with partner. The only reason you wouldn't end up at partnership is if you wanted to retain 100% of the economics. If you're buying or you're building yourself, in both cases, you keep 100% of the economics associated with the fees. We weren't optimizing for fees. We were trying to deliver the best solution. When we launched public-private credit and we did it with KKR, KKR has done this for fifty years in the private markets. Why are we going to be?”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Don Valentine had worked at Capital Group before founding Sequoia, and it was determined at the time that it was best housed outside of the four walls of Capital Group to keep the focus on active public management. We don't really have a different view today than 50 years ago from that perspective. When we announced our partnership with KKR, it surprised a lot of people around the world who were looking at that announcement. And they were trying to figure out what are they doing? Why don't they just do it themselves? The answer is we looked at it. The three options we had at the time were very simple. Buy something, build it ourselves, or partner. It took us eighteen to twenty four months of diligence to investigate and research what we would want to do and what would be best for clients. Buying something is hard in our culture. Integration of another entity into the capital group culture.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a long history. I mean, say back to even the founding of Sequoia, of some knowledge of private markets in the capital ecosystem. And then as it's exploded, they haven't really participated in that. I would love the thought process around that.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The active managers have not formed a union of active management, some do not beat the benchmark over the long term, so you don't want to be in that cohort of charging higher fees than passive and not beating the market after fees. If you look at our equity strategies since inception, over 80% of them have beaten the market after fees. When the world of active, passive, and alternatives, we're trying to be an active at the core partner to our clients, acknowledging they will use passive and some will use private markets, and some will also ask us from a solutions perspective to put the pieces of the puzzle together in the right parts and deliver that as an investment solution. The markets clearly evolved from that perspective. Our focus is generating differentiated results that active at the core and then wrapping in passive and private markets in the right proportions to the right climb.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look at what generally both wealth and institutional clients are looking at, they're looking at three components to a portfolio, broad level, active, passive alternatives. In general, and this is why I'm”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look at your period of time coming to this leadership seat at the highest level of public investing, been a big move to passive, a big move from mutual funds to ETFs. I'm curious how you thought about what was many decades of tailwinds turning into headwinds.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what you have to do and what you want to do to be your partner of choice. They're going to shrink those lists our client group is set up to be the partner of choice everywhere where we operate around the world. And it's a heavy resource load and it's intentional.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can be too noisy and hasn't necessarily generated better outcomes. So they are shrinking the number of partners they use. And when I say they, wealth, institutional, US non US, everybody. I love seeing clients. Annually I see somewhere between 200 and 250 clients. Not a single one of them is expanding the number of asset management companies they are working with. They're all shrinking them and they're shrinking them and trying to say we need more from you. And that is part of our entire strategy of how to be the partner of choice to clients because they want thought leadership and differentiated content. I was with a client. They held up one of the reports that we had put out in capital ideas when I went to visit them and they showed it to me and said, this is different. I have a little tear in my eye because differentiated thought leadership and content, how you translate it around the world into the language of where the client lives, how you can add value and portfolio construction.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have segments, we have our North American client group and our Europe and Asia client group. In both of those geographies, you have your wealth management group that serves financial intermediaries think financial advisors who serve their end clients, and you have your institutional business where you're looking at sovereign wealth funds to find benefit plans, define contribution plans and their plan sponsors, public funds. So wealth, institutional, North America, Europe and Asia, in all of those, you make sure they have the resources that they can bring to bear to the clients. That is super important. There is in our industry today the race to relevance. How to be relevant to your clients? On the client side, they have unlimited noise coming at them. What they have found almost bar none in recent years is dealing with a multitude of asset management companies.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good for the client, and can we add value? And is it long term? If those things are checked, that box, all of them, there's a likelihood something's launched. If you're failing at any of those, we'll let somebody else launch that.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of things. We're trying to be more efficient in how we do that, but the hurdle is high for a reason. You have to go through our strategic product development process. Is it good for the clients? Is it sustainable or is it a fad? Do we have the resources where we can add value relative to benchmark and other active competitors over the time? You have to answer a lot of questions before you get there. It's the reason why we'll have 3.2 trillion in a certain number of strategies that in all likelihood is less than all of our major competitors because that hurdle is so high. I don't think we're going to be lowering that hurdle anytime soon. It should be hard to launch a new strategy. Sometimes folks launch them just to raise money from clients without thinking, are we going to be excellent at it and is it for the client? For us, we start there, and that's not a sales pitch, it's our DNA.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will launch a multitude of strategies, and if it works great, and if not, they'll close them. That's a lot of trial and error on somebody's life savings. We'll want to do that. We'd rather manage in scalable strategies where we can apply our investment resources and our smart folks and put them towards that effort as opposed to the launch it and close it type of thing that can happen in the industry.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way in which we've thought about it is how do we serve as a core of a client's portfolio? In a client's portfolio, whether it's a wealth management client or an institutional client, there's core and there's satellite. We're at the core. And the core global stocks, global bonds, how you think of them and putting them together, what we've tried to avoid are fads, super thematic strategies that may be a satellite. That's not where we would add our best value. But taking this very large world of global equities or global bonds and finding a subset that can beat the benchmark and other active competitors over the long term is where we add the most value, we'd rather sit at that core. We'd rather put our resources towards that core and let others float around in the satellites. That's just been a strategy of ours. We don't want to practice on our clients' money. There are some that”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have all of this vestment DNA. It's been interesting over the years that capital hasn't had a lot of different products. I'd love to hear about how you think about taking the investment DNA and packaging it into something that investors participate in.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. You can ask a lot of questions now and get quicker answers preparing for a company meeting. What were the last twenty quarterly earnings reports like? What were the meetings asked in the analyst meetings thereafter? What are the kinds of questions I would ask this time relative to my history and what's going on at the company? That kind of thing, you may take the suggestion you may not, but the starting point is so much better. Structuring that data, it's not just one of those things of how are you using AI to make your business better. These are real things that are happening. You ask questions of your own style in this kind of environment. What mistakes have I made in the past? When we're trying to think about which portfolio managers and how many of them to be in different strategies like we discussed before using that information to make better decisions, at the end of the day, we're still having individuals pick, credits, pick stocks and construction.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our technology team has done an incredible job building something called Capital Connect. We've also digitized all ninety-four years of our written physical library. Now, if someone wrote a report on ExxonMobil in nineteen fifty seven, it would be in the system. Structuring that data has been important. Capital Connect being that system that takes the whole history of capital group in 94 years in that proprietary information and makes it available to you in a usable format just makes you smarter. It's also been put on a desktop with other functionality along with trading and position sizing so the whole technology stack that our investment professional have is so evolved over the last decade in particular.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We travel a lot. Our folks do. They travel to see companies last year they did twenty one thousand company meetings. twenty one thousand That is a huge amount of company meetings to do around the world in one year. You have to travel, you have to travel together. When you sit at the table with a company management and you hear each other's questions, it makes everybody smarter. So you travel not just to see the companies you own or may own, but also to see your colleagues and travel with them, to build rapport. We have retreats where people spend time together. We have people who do meaningful office.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment dialogue. How many analysts do you have in the group? How many portfolio managers in the group? How many traders in the group which are an important third leg of the stool? How do you make sure the communication moves the way around the globe to get the best ideas on the table so that they can be scaled in the portfolio? That's really important. A lot more than 100 people makes it hard. It's just something we found over time. If we ever needed to add a fourth equity group because assets were such and we had to again reinvent ourselves to stay small, we would do that. We're not at the stage to do that today. But would we do that in the future to make sure we can generate the same or better results? Absolutely. It costs more money. It takes organizational effort and time, but it's worth it to stay small so ideas percolate to the top. What are some of the ways you found to make that communication work could be in one of those organizations around the world?”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a Chinese wall. They can't see what the others are doing. It is formal disaggregation, but they also have an environment where they can sit around an actual table and add in the virtual table with our offices around the world and have a smaller conversation than you would be having if you had 300 people as opposed to 97. It was intentional to disaggregate, to make sure that as assets grew, we can continue to stay small in the investment discussion. There's not too much noise. How did a hundred professionals become the right size to then start the second organization or the third? I wouldn't say we know for the next 20 years if around a hundred's the exact right size. I don't think we know what that will be. What we have found in the last twenty years is somewhere between eighty and a hundred is the right number. And it's about the”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of environment, you have this kind of data, it helps you size people right in the strategies they manage in, and then you let them run. You let them pick their best ideas. If you do that well, you're going to get good outcomes. How do you manage that around what's become a very large organization in the last 10, 20 years to make it work at increasing scale? You have to stay small when you're big. What the company has done over time with that, we do have one fixed income unit that manages about $625 billion. We have a solutions group that manages about $625 billion. In the equity group, we have three separate entities now. One of the reasons we did that was so that as assets continued to grow, the investment culture and communication stayed small. There's about a hundred investment professionals in each of those three equities.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Construct portfolios are that bottom up, either the analyst, the portfolio best ideas, and then a model or something telling you this is how we're going to deliver the optimal outcome. Our results have always been driven by bottom-up best ideas. And we can structure data so much better today than we could 20, 40, sixty years ago, knowing how people tend to invest, knowing their strengths and weaknesses, knowing how they do in different environments helps you size them in the portfolio. They're not emotional about it because we don't pay people on the level of assets they manage only on their results. It's unemotional in terms of how much money you allocate to them to manage. You're just asking them to do a great job on what you've asked them to manage. So when you have all that data about how they've done interest rates or at a certain level, they're coming up, they were coming down, market valuations are X or Y over the last twenty, thirty years. How is this investor done in that?”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coordinating group. They're the ones who decide who's in what portfolio. It's not happenstance, they have a ton of data based on people's past history of investing what kind of investor they are. We have a sizing of the research portfolio. What's the right size in a given strategy? Is it ten percent, fifteen percent, twenty percent, twenty-five percent? We have so much data that we create portfolios in two ways. One is who are the participants in the portfolio? How big's the research portfolio? How many portfolio managers and what are their styles? And then bottom up, those people expressing their highest conviction. So if you think of that top-down, bottom-up mixture, we make sure the right folks are in the portfolio and those right folks make sure they're choosing the right securities in that portfolio. It sounds like there could be a quantitative overlay that puts all this together. How much of the way you...”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Names make their way into the portfolio. You have portfolio managers, five of them, ten of them, whatever the mandate would be, all expressing their conviction, all seeing what everyone else is doing, all using the research that we have internally, all having their own individual conviction, what you end up in a portfolio is everyone has the same mandate, but you have the strongest convictions of individuals not being left with any of their lower conviction ideas. Think of it as a multiple portfolio manager and analysts run best idea portfolio as opposed to such a broad diversified one person's strategy. How does that come together? You can think of a strategy in terms of number of positions, positions, sizing. We prevent chaos. We have this down after sixty seven years in all of our equity and fixed income and solutions groups. We have an investment.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd love to dive into the capital system and the investment model. How do you describe how this comes together with analysts managing portfolios, portfolio managers managing portfolios? It can sound complex, but it's pretty simple. No investor should want to be with a company where you're left with a single individual's three hundredth best idea. That's what happens. When you're a sole practitioner in a strategy and you're managing a lot of money and you're diversified, you could be left with someone's less high conviction parts of the portfolio. The bottom 25% of their conviction names, why would you want those in a portfolio? You have analysts who are subject matter experts in a certain sector, and they have high conviction. You want those stocks in the portfolio. Your analysts who have conviction in their subject matter expertise? Great.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source