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Nicholas Csicsko

lines on the record: 73
first: 2026-06-29
most recent: 2026-06-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Never going to know, so it's okay not to know, meaning the more comfortable you can get with not knowing the answer and being okay with that there is no answer, the better investor you can become. It doesn't mean you don't have to do a bunch of work to try to understand what it is you're doing, but to think that there's a spreadsheet or a co-pilot answer is just not a thing.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As an industry have a lot of expressions. I find some of them to be really hard. I would love us to find new ones. Whenever there's an executive summary, I'm always wondering if there's a regular summary or if a consultant just added a word. I don't believe that any baby has ever been thrown out with a bathwater. So let's find a better one. And then one I think we really should stop using as decimate. It literally means down 10%. It was referring to Roman soldiers losing their lives. And so it was emotional. And so maybe emotional decimation, but it doesn't work when you say a stock was decimated because that's a price movement. And I think 10% in my head.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was an art model? It turns out that you could work in the cafeteria or you could make double if you were the art model for your peers in art class. Apparently I thought that was the economic choice. I learned that that can be embarrassing, but it's character building. I also learned that standing still or striking a pose for extended periods of time is very hard for me.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working to become what's called a master mason, and that's in the dry stone wall category. It has a four-level track. I'm preparing for my second level test. It feels like one of these baking shows because you have to build a component of a wall in about eight hours. You're being judged as it goes. It's like when the cooking shows, when they say there's 10 minutes left and everyone starts running, I have fallen in love with stacking stones.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adjacent to AI. But then if you start to talk about an investment thesis, or what is our exposure to AI, or how do we get more AI in the portfolio, you're probably having the wrong conversation. You have to go a layer deeper and understand what that means. It's life-changing. It's pivotal. It's going to be defining our times.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, it's important, it's meaningful. Who's not excited? There's a great market character named Marco Popich, who loves to say that the eleventh commandment that Moses dropped on his way down from Mount Sinai was all capex cycles and in tears. You see something like the railroad, whom you look back and you go, well, that was silly. Why would you need three railroads to one location? I don't know what the right parallel is, but the more you look at periods like that, you realize it made sense to the people at the time. They didn't get silly overnight. There was a logic to it. It would be great if I knew where this goes wrong or where the hiccup is, but I don't, and I don't think anyone does because it's usually the thing you're not expecting. That being said, the thing I'm most worried about is everything being called or becoming AI. Everything is.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard to look at a private market that's struggling to produce the liquidity that investors are hoping to see in a public market near or at all time highs, you would think now is the time, then you start to go on this path of if you can't sell now, what does that say about Marks on a broad basis. What did we do to ourselves in 2021? That was euphoric time in the private markets where funds came back to the market instead of at the third year, maybe at the 12th month. I don't have an answer in terms of what comes next, but it's not binary. It's cautious. And at some point, there'll be a great opportunity to partner with groups that have a little less demand than they're used to, and also partner with new funds that are going about it the right way.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard not to be skeptical at this point because private markets have, and this is dangerous to generalize, but gotten a pass in a way that the public markets don't. Being someone who lives more public, you deal with the day-to-day vault, you envy the private seat that says be patient. We do discuss and say that privates are not essential, meaning we should choose to have them because of the return we believe they will deliver over time. And that return needs to be in excess of what's offered in public markets. It can be a diversifier as well, but it needs to be a real diversifier, not just because of quarterly marks or some other kind of laundering of capital. We are questioning the path forward. We will certainly have private exposure in the future. We were excited about the partners we have.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time. At what point are we going to see some really amazing vintages because of where the market's going? The other side of that is have too many companies waited too long to go public. That's what's going to be really interesting with the next few quarters and the market dynamic we see and how the public market digests IPO volume 2x, anything we've seen in history.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're in an okay position because we started building our private portfolio in 2016, so we have a meaningful private allocation, but it's not as illiquid as some. Liquidity across the industry has been rough. Liquidity doesn't seem to have a clear path in a lot of cases going forward. There are some large IPOs coming through. That'll be its own interesting dynamic with record size will be something to watch and learn from. In many cases, it's slowed down the deployment of additional capital into privates, but it's also changed the dynamic of the conversation. You pair that with a public market that's vastly outperformed, the broad private market measured on, say, a Cambridge index level, and it's causing most people I know to have very difficult conversations around what is the future path of private allocation in our portfolio. And the contrarian says, at what point is it going to be a great”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because of the concentration, then it's also your under overweight to the top holdings of the benchmark, thinking about how you want to address that”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Public equities have been a tough place to be. Managing tilts has everything to do with starting with a risk framework around what would we accept in terms of over underweight the US, over underweight something. You need to do that in reference to your benchmark. Going from there, it's also knowing the toolkit and the speed at which we can operate. It starts with portfolio construction because we're not making a lot of mid-month adjustments to exposures. It's a long-term goal and it's a moving target. It starts with a discipline around do we need to add exposure to country X right now because we already are overweight that benchmark. Then it becomes we have 2x the acquise exposure to country Y, we need to be trimming there. It's just on the margin, but it really matters over time because investing is hard. Benchmarks have been especially hard in recent years.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Volatile months like we've experienced recently, it's very nice to know where you are in real time, not where you were at last month's end. That changed the dynamic around portfolio management, but it doesn't really change the end goal. It's simply, what are the aggregate risks? We need to be making bottom-up manager selection decisions that build, and then we have to manage those tilts because our managers have no idea what the aggregate portfolio looks like. Specifically in a long-only portfolio, when you're much more benchmark aware, it's managing the aggregate tilts in a way that allows you to not be out of bounds of the benchmark in a way that wouldn't be long-term advisable. Because the thing you definitely want to check is people in our seat making too many top-down calls because we do not have the tools to do that, nor are we experts.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we benefit from the level of transparency we've worked very hard to get with our managers is we have a better sense of say daily P&L. Now, in our seat, you should do nothing with that because you need to stay long term. However, that also allows for a much better sense of where exposures are, be it geographic sector or otherwise on a mid-month basis when we have”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that you've already mentioned is the importance of portfolio management in addition to the manager selection process. I'm curious how your relationship forward transparent approach to manager selection ultimately informed the portfolio management and asset allocation of your book?”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working, we should maybe trim so that if it stops working, we could add. Needless to say, exit decisions generally need to happen faster because they always feel gradually than all of a sudden. When that happens, you wish you'd already made the decision one quarter year earlier.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trinity, we have internal discretion. We started with working with our board on every decision. The goal there was to make sure they understood what we did and what we're doing, to have real support. Over time, the first thing that was passed on to not need approval was exit and trim decisions. The logic there is simple. If you lose faith, you should be out. Those generally happen faster. When a manager is struggling, we will do what we call a formal review. These happen periodically regardless, but they get pulled forward if there's a moment of pain. This is a way to get everyone on the same page in something in prose effectively with, of course, a bunch of data in there to understand what's going on. You basically have three choices, sell, hold, buy, but it's great when the team is challenging and saying, hey, look, if we're not adding here, why are we holding this? The opposite is when something”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try to be a momentum shop. But when you start to go between the two, you set yourself up to always miss the bus stop, if you will. I don't think anybody could get 10 out of 10 calls when a manager is having a tough time right. But if we can get six to seven to eight of those calls right, we end up being rewarded significantly because even if you got six out of ten, those six will probably have much more meaningful returns on the upside than the four that petered out from there. Because usually by the time you're at that point, you're already somewhere towards the trough of that drawdown.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, any improper behavior, you're done. Anything illegal is game over. There's a lot of gray area that when the partnership starts to be not prioritized, there's better things to do with your capital. There's plenty of times you move on from manager because the portfolio has different needs. There was a time where manager A did something and manager B did something different. Now both managers are doing something similar and you have to make a choice. And that's okay too. The hardest thing to understand in these periods of stress is if the manager has the grit to keep going. These are often well-off individuals. Sometimes they decide it's not worth it. That distance to high watermark matters, the direction of AUM matters. The reality is you need to be consistent. You need to say, are we the type of team that's going to generally favor mean reversion?”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Portfolio. Statistically, you could see that the turnover was increasing. Our conversations led to uncovering a real self-doubt that was creeping into everything he was doing. We felt the fund would shut down. We felt it was time to leave. This is someone that I'd gotten to know for four or five years and felt was just a great human and great investor, truly, despite the period of rough luck. This manager happened to be in Singapore. I had other reasons to be there but flew out to Singapore, let him know what we were doing in person, face to face. It was the way I'd like to do this side of the business because ultimately Have to recognize how difficult that is in their seat today. We still have a good relationship. The irony in most of these situations is what that manager owned in today's market would be doing incredibly well.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In hindsight, we exit too late, in most cases because when something turns and doesn't improve, you look back and say, well, we should have left earlier. I gave some examples of where we were rewarded for patients. The main difference is that there need to be a few factors to have patients. That's stability of business, grit in the manager to keep going, and a belief in what they own inside of that is watching for style drift, watching for erratic behavior, all kinds of things that are telltale signs of someone truly doubting themselves. If you've ever experienced a thirty or fifty percent drawdown, you'd be insane not to doubt yourself, but it's balancing that. We certainly do part ways with managers. We try to do it in the best way possible. I can think of a story of a manager that has since shut down in hindsight, he started flail in terms of what he was doing with this.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Invested with the manager, you're maintaining relationships, you've talked about the importance of transparency. Let's talk about the situation where the relationship and performance has soured and you need to exit. How does that happen?”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can often get the same amount of airtime at an internal investment committee meeting. That's not necessarily the way it should be, and it's certainly something that we continue to try to frame. When you just say dollars, you probably should also say percent. We try to not say, hey, it's X million dollars. You say so many basis points. That just reframes things. All these things can matter. And a 10x on a small position can be just as meaningful as a slowly or meaningfully compounding big position. balancing that is hard.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The difference between public and private is private is a lot less reversible. The irony is that private funds generally don't allow you the same access that publics do. And they generally show up and say, hey, we're closing in a month. Are you in or are you out for the next 10 to 15 years? The strategy there is to be spending time with managers when they're not raising, to request as much time as possible so that you feel okay with that relationship. Some of our best private relationships come through spending that time for the same reasons that applied on the public side. The big difference is you don't have all this noise. You don't have Mr. Market in all these erratic moments being euphoric and then depressed. There's less decision points, but it's really hard at institutions to wait your time in correlation to the size of investment and or its outcome. A 5% position and a 5 basis point position.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before you go into the investment, because you need to be able to make the investment such that if that manager has that rough patch that we've talked about in the first year of your investment or the first three years of your investment, you understand why. And you're hopefully there dick through it and maybe even add. Every case is different. But if you don't have that conviction from the start, you shouldn't make the investment.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An institutional momentum that starts to be its own type of inertia, being able to fight that is very important. There was a PM that I used to run Central Park with and he had big, well-known endowment, spending a lot of time with him. On one of our runs, I just said, hey, how many hours have you spent with this organization? He said, oh, 70. And I said, oh, they're going to invest. That's not always the case, but there is this correlation of time. I don't say that to say that that's the way it should be. I say that because that's just this bias that we always have to check. You need to be willing to turn away at any point if for some reason it doesn't fit the portfolio the way you thought. They aren't who you think they were. For us internally, we have a tight process of how things bubble up into our internal IC. Those conversations are robust, lots of different perspectives. That's the design. You want to be challenged.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“30th fund that does the same thing that you're looking at as potentially your investment it's really hard to say that to say there might be an indifference point here that goes back to portfolio construction and how that matters so much different managers end up giving you unique betas and those betas are very important but how they work together is your responsibility not theirs Of course, you're always looking for the idiosyncratic alpha, etc. However, it's still got a huge beta component. You need it all to work together. That's where the art and science come together of all of this work because everything you do quantitatively is backward looking and it's very important and it informs decisions, but you need a sense of where you think that manager might go and what that does to your aggregate portfolio.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In our seat, we're constantly being challenged with requests for our time, when a lot of times having space to think and do deskwork would probably be more valuable. That said, when there is someone you want to partner with, there is no amount of time that isn't well spent. When you start to think about five to ten year plus relationships, you really want to spend time with these individuals as humans. It's balancing that time. It is a battle for everyone that does this job because it is easy to go chase a shiny thing. You have to know when is enough. The best investors we work with can take 100 data points and tell you the one to three that they think matter. That's a skill that we're trying to hone and work on. You absolutely need to do a com set analysis. You absolutely need to know what else is out there. But I'm not sure there's a lot of value in looking at the”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you've determined the portfolio fit, you've determined you need to pursue this particular area, how do you then structure your time effectively to uncover all of the rocks that you could uncover in that particular area?”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being willing to take a cold call. But at the same time, you can't take all the cold calls. It feels a lot like hit and miss, but when someone stands out, it's usually because they're exceptional in a way that seems so basic. And it's just that they are themselves the authenticity comes through, the curiosity with investing, the fascination with investing. Then it starts to become, okay, they're a great investor, but what role do they serve in our portfolio? And it's having discipline around saying, you know what? We already have exposure to biotech. How much biotech should we have? We can't only own biotech. There's different sections of a portfolio. You're going to be more benchmark aware in your public book than you're going to be maybe in your hedge fund book. It needs to be constructed for diversification. You need to have portfolio effects that are meaningful. Sourcing absolutely matters, but it's just one piece of the puzzle.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Critical, but it has to start with what are the resources of the team too often some of the large organizations are looked to in the same way that a small organization thinks it should behave. If you don't have the resources, you can't meet every manager and you have to be careful with your time. Much of our industry is focused on finding the best managers and then hoping for the best in terms of what it does in creating a portfolio. Everybody wants the best managers, but more than half of the role in sitting at an institution and investing its capital is being a portfolio manager, is optimizing the team you have and working every day to make sure your money weighted return is better than your time weighted return. It sounds so easy to add to what's not working and subtract from what is. Sourcing is being willing to be out there. Sourcing is using your network to meet great people.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every firm is different and they have different needs, so I don't ever want to prescribe one path. But a lot of it seems to start with egos. And yes, the investment team, the PM is driving the P&L of that firm, but it's more than that because it's about communicating. When you view your IRBD as an ancillary function, you're missing a really big resource that is your front line, that is your time saver, that is so many other things for your firm. It's very hard for anyone to check their ego and try to be a partner with everyone at their firm. But if you can get every resource on your team optimized, it really pays.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it works. And I see this manager getting better every year, every day. And their mentality is such that all they want to do is improve. Along that same time, it was the depth of COVID. This is also where their performance turned. Another friend of mine asked me to have a phone call with their CIO to convince them not to fully redeem out of this manager. It was one of those testable moments, but the crazy thing is that you look at the fund now and everyone says, oh, well, they're just a great firm. The run since 2020 has been a 6x. The returns have been great. It's because they were battle tested early and built. And they haven't lost that culture.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of doing things that are pretty exceptional. It's a public hedge fund cross cap structure, but mostly equities. And they have an annual meeting. At that annual meeting, every one of the analysts spends time with investors. You end up spending the day in groups of five, six people rotating rooms, and you're by yourself with the analyst that's covering oil and gas or the analyst that's doing something else. And there's no script, there's no prompt. They just show that they trust their people. They're not trying to overcrypt it because they're trying to be authentic to who they are. I still remember this firm had this really meh period of returns for the first five years. And I remember a phone call I got from a friend who was looking at these returns and said, why are you in this fund? I was getting similar push from our team and it was a fair question. It was, we don't have a lot of exposure to this area. There could be a day.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sense inception shorting in their 11th year. But because of that period in the beginning where the firm was tested, it was tested in a bunch of ways. They lost a partner early on who challenged the PMs, everything from identity to choices. The now COO was critical in becoming everything from a product specialist to managing relationship in a way to everyone understands what's going on. So yes, that's being transparent about holdings, but it's also, say, it's a short book and you don't want to be talking about each specific short, it's making sure you communicate that at a level, say themes or sectors or anything so that someone can understand and support it, mostly because of his personality, but I also think because of how he was tested early, he listens to her and they challenge each other. I would argue they come to the relationship as equals, even though he's the PM and it's his firm. They set a culture.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a great COO PM team that's produced great results. The COO started as the IRPD person. Earlier I spoke to this idea of when a manager has a rough patch, shapes the way that they, I think view themselves and how they talk to LPs and often how they interact with their team. This individual spun out of fun that we had a relationship with over time and we backed him at launch. He was a manager who didn't have any kind of acute underperformance at inception or in the first few years, but had a string of subpar years. It was mostly due to his cyclical focus. He was in sectors that were out of favor. The first five years had this muted return, mid single digits when the market was chugging along at high single, low double, but he was generally outperforming his sectors and the security selection was there. Another trait that I liked that's so rare is he's a great shorter. This fund has made money.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simply, how do you know enough to understand the individual, what they're doing? And then that leads into understanding when they start to stray from that path, from who you thought they were, when they start to flail”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seat. What the firm's done as it's grown is figured out a way to keep that kind of connectivity and transparency. It's never just, hey, I need to know what you own at all times. It's help me understand what you're doing so that I can tell that message so I can understand performance so that I can be your advocate and I can also know when to lean in. This specific firm has found a way to navigate that path and it's especially hard because a fund of this side is often in the press. They have to be careful and guarded about what they own, but they've come up with pretty unique ways about getting LPs together, be it group dinners or otherwise, and then they built out a robust team of IRBD individuals that fill in that gap. Because we started at one place, I still feel that there's this connection with this individual. It's not about my feelings in this relationship. Just to be clear, I don't need to be everyone's best friend, but it's simply”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a real bias, and we try to address it. We work to try to be diversified on the age affirm, the size of firm, not to look away from large funds because some of those funds are absolutely great. And where you want to be, there's a specific example with a very well-known spin out of another well-known fund. I sat down with this individual when they were launching and they said, we really like to have relationships. I don't think we could ever have the relationship that would work for me, but I find what you do compelling and it could serve a great role in our portfolio. It's interesting because somehow that seemed to resonate with him and he took the challenge on. They said at over $30 billion in assets today. Certainly then it's evolved as he's had more demands on his time than he took the challenge, full hog. We had phone calls. We were texting. This was a very different relationship than I expected from someone in that.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that comes to mind from these examples is the potential bias for smaller managers, given that they might be more transparent than larger managers. I'm curious if that's true. If that comes to fruition as one of your potential biases, given the emphasis on transparency.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He is very capital conscious and only likes to take capital when there's Still remember, of course, she's spending time with lots of people, but I run into him and we're having a conversation. And I say, do you think we should talk about potentially partnering? Then he says, don't you think we should spend more time getting to know each other? I so appreciate that moment now, but I was so focused on investing. And he was very focused on what I've learned matters the most. So I really appreciate it.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone's different. We want to know people long enough so that we're ready to commit to them and stand by them. There is a great manager that we work with that only has a handful of investors, manages a meaningful amount of money for them, he prioritizes relationships more than I've seen anyone else. He's a very unique manager in that way. He has this annual meeting. I spent about six years getting to know him. He enjoyed all the conversations. And over that period, his returns were extraordinary. You watch those returns and you say, wow, I wish I was in this fund. More importantly, you get to know the person and you say, this is just a really great person, this kind of person I want to spend time with. He's a really great investor. He has this annual meeting. It's a fun get-together. It's like a mini Berkshire in some ways. It's over the weekend. You travel to get there. I went for my second year. I've now, I think, gone seven or eight. We still weren't invested, and it was certainly on my mind.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His compass around call it ethics or just the right way to be drove everything he did. I still remember getting off that call and turning to my colleague, she asked me, is he not good at managing people? Does he have a deficiency? We had to keep talking about it and we said, no, actually he's just more transparent because it's framed to us that all these firms are perfect and professional the way we want them to be. But inside of them are humans and humans are complicated. A window into that gives us more empathy and understanding and support for this manager long term, but it was a real risk to share that much with us. We ultimately appreciate it. It's a fine line to balance.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's hard to normalize for transparency. Every situation is different. We had a manager we worked with for a long time put together a great track record. It's a long, only shop and he let us know that one of his employees had departed. What you normally get is some kind of story and that's it. That's the industry and that's okay. We should protect individuals mostly. He felt compelled to tell us what happened. And effectively without getting into too many details, the analyst lied to him and he called him out on it and then he lied to him again and he basically said at that point you can't work here anymore because we don't lie. We don't lie to each other. That's not what we do. We had this conversation with all the details and of course he was embarrassed to share the story and he wasn't happy because he invested in this person time, money, everything and he believed in this person. But what he showed us was”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Institutional base, the team, the investor starts to doubt the relationship, the patience just disappears. In that case, it was a, we need to move on from this relationship because there's not the ability to survive that path. The interesting thing here is the manager is still at it. I think they have a great chance of performing in the future, but with a very different investor base, I'm not exactly sure they've learned the right lessons from that experience for themselves. But again, each person has to figure it out for themselves and everyone has their own path.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly had those two there's this weird phenomenon that if I had to lay the course of a business, it would be for a PM to have one of their rough patches early in the fund's life. Hopefully not in the first year, but within a relative short period of time because there's so much learning about oneself and a team in those moments. The example I'd speak to is someone who had a great 10-year run. And then things started to falter. They hadn't built that muscle or prepared for that moment. Instead of sharing more with their LPs, they started to tense up and not share. They ended up doing some non-LP friendly actions in terms of liquidity. And otherwise, it made that moment that we were just speaking about in terms of how do you survive the path with the team, not tenable. The moment that the”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There. It all worked together in this example to allow us to survive the path. And where we started is that's why relationships matter, because you have to prepare for those moments. You never know when they're going to happen, and you rarely can predict them. That groundwork was laid with our stakeholders and our board.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult. I don't want to leave the impression that I do it perfectly, nor do we always make the right choice. Generally, once you're already in that period of underperformance, that drawdown, I certainly think it can get a lot worse. But if you can limit some of the left hails, you probably experience most of the pain. Then it's what's next. At the team level, it's a lot of meetings. It's a lot of conversations. And an example like this, we will often bring in a colleague. So one of my favorite colleagues on the team joined me in a lot of these trips down to the restaurant in Las Colinas. She was a great check on my bias. That also helped build towards a consensus on the team to be patient. Fortunately, we have a board that is less focused on that kind of volatility, the line item level. They certainly care and they certainly ask, but we've been able to build a relationship where there's real patience.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because of his skill on the short side, because of the types of holdings he had, I was able to zoom out and say, this has been painful, but we don't have anything else like this in our portfolio. This is a hedge if things get a lot worse in certain areas. Because remember, 2020 and 2021 were these really euphoric years, then all of a sudden we had 2022. In a lot of ways, this manager's longbook recovered in 21 and then the short book thrived in 2022. The message to the team, because as you get further away from that manager, the team has more and more questions. And it's reasonable. That's there to check your bias. They just look at the numbers and go, this is terrible. Why do we have this? It wasn't just that I believed in the manager. They weren't going to quit. And I liked what they own. It was they served a distinct role in the portfolio. And that was worth fighting for.”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my role, I'm always going to have a view on the securities held, but I also have to balance that with my roles to pick managers and to trust them, to check my own bias if we just had a portfolio of things that I thought were good, we wouldn't end up with a diversified portfolio. When I zoomed out on this manager,”
2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source