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Nicholas Csicsko

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73
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2026-06-29
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2026-06-29
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  1. “Don't always work out this way, but things started to turn in 2021 and from 21 to 26, it's been a 5x. So he's compounded significantly over this period. And so it turned into can we stay? We should have added to constantly trimming this manager to manage a position overall. What was funny in that whole rhetoric of I hope to reward you for your patience is he started going down a different path of saying someday I've become my capital in the fund continues to compound and I'd like to get it over 50% and someday you think I should just have a family office. As we've been trimming, there's been the interesting dynamic where we would trim X amount and he would call two days before that redemption was going to happen and he'd say, hey, do you mind if I send two million more dollars? He was doing the math for himself. And then he was constantly looking at, hey, what do I want to own versus my AUM? And if I want to own things that my AUM doesn't work for, I'm just going to send money back.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “In hindsight, I wish we would have added more, but in those moments, you feel challenged and you feel paralyzed sometimes. What I could tell myself is that I believed in the underlying holdings, this manager had no quit in him. It was clear that even though the AUM was challenged, the business was not. He kept saying, I really want to earn back your capital. I want to reward you for your patience. And it was a different dynamic. Because what normally happens is assets down, performance poor, managers start this whole trope of, okay, well, I'm going to shut down and start a family office. That's okay to teach their own. But this manager was going the exact opposite. So we hung in there.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The worst year so far. That led to a real moment of soul searching. You have a drawdown that's starting to get close to 50% at the trough. Over the course of that year, I went back and spent a lot of time with that manager. I think I met with him at least seven or eight times. And this manager works out of Dallas, very responsive, but really is best to meet in person. No IRBD function, nothing like that. And it was COVID. It just happened to be that this manager got kicked out of his office because his landlord wanted to do construction. This manager was between offices having a terrible run. Also, I knew a lot of his other investors and about half the capital left that year. So I'm sitting down with this manager at what ended up being our local spot. We'd sit there for two or three hours, talk to the portfolio, what's working, what's not working, how he's behaving. And it gave me confidence to not quit.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Do with that information. This manager is the type of manager that closed outside capital when he was about 300 million in assets because he didn't want to be over 500, 600 million and had that logic that's not there with most folks that is I should close about half of my capacity because I want to double the money before I'm returning capital. This was all good. The setup was good. But 2019 was this manager's worst year in the firm's history. They were down 14%. We spent a lot of time that year talking about what was going on. The short book is really getting tested and it was challenging him in extreme ways. Down 14, that's not the world's worst year. Coming into 2020, we added to this position. I still remember he came to our office. We came out of that saying this is the time to add. It wasn't the time to add. 2020 was this manager's worst year. He was down an additional 30%. We thought 2019 was the worst year, but it turns out 2020.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I'll give you an example of a fund that I would call an old school long short fund. This manager just cares about investing, loves shorting, has an innate ability to short, and has made a lot of money shorting over the years. This manager started their business in 2008. They've had a great long-term track record. But I would say that some people have just periods of meh and other people have real periods of stress. We invested with this manager in 2017 and the first few years were good because I'd known that manager for a long time, we had a pretty high level of transparency. Every fund's going to be different. Every fund's ability to share what they're doing, what they own, how they own it is going to change over time and it's going to be bespoke. This manager specifically was very open about sharing his whole portfolio to the extent that he would just, he still does, sends his entire portfolio in an Excel file to me monthly because he doesn't have any concerns about what we would do.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “That we look for our partners to be great. We want to be great to our partners. If we can be perceived as a top quartile or potentially even top decile partner, we will reap those rewards over time access to the manager themselves or unique opportunities that present themselves along the way.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “We want to behave and we look for our partners to behave with the mindset of being prepared for those moments so that if you imagine yourself in your worst moment, that's how you behave in the good times. It serves as this baseline for how you want to communicate, how you want to treat your partners, how you want to be. In that case, transparency builds stability and duration into relationships. And it's tested during periods of stress. The normal reaction for people when they're challenged is to put their guard up, is to become defensive. A lot of times I've found the opposite is the most successful in investing. If you let someone in and they understand where you're coming from, what you're struggling with, the decisions you're thinking to make, you can have a lot more success. In that way, all of a sudden, capital stops being fungible because it's no longer just money, it's a partnership. I want to be clear that this is a two-way street.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Start with the disclaimer that everyone has their own style. I don't think they're right ways. There's just a lot of wrong ways. With the base condition that investing is hard. Luck and skill plays a role in everything everyone does every day. I'm convinced that every investor will have rough batches. The basic condition and idea is that you want to prepare for those moments in advance. If relationships are always going to be tested, then you're”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Has a lot of stakeholders. The first thing we dealt with was trying to understand their needs, their concerns, meeting them where they were. Our first line of defense was let's know what we own and let's really know who we partner with. That skewed us towards fundamental managers. We certainly have diversifiers that have different approaches in some quantitative and systematic strategies. But by and large, it pushed us towards managers that were transparent and managers that often concentrated in specific holdings, all to be able to more easily speak to our stakeholders as to where the capital was and in what kind of businesses Trinity invested.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Trinity as a whole is a very warming, welcoming place, and that's certainly the ethos of Meredith. I'm not sure I was setting it. I was following. I embraced it from day one. We wanted to bring what we think the ethos of the institution is into our relationships as investors. We started with that and we started with a lot of relationships we had and folks that we could trust to get going because we had a pool of capital to get to work right away. We did inherit a portfolio that was fully invested. So it was a combination of getting to know that.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “We had to figure a lot of things out. We had to set an internal culture, decide what we wanted to be, start to meet the world, and say we existed. Trinity has a unique story, so it was a fun story to tell. I had previously seen National Treasure with Nicholas Cage, and that was my conception of where Trinity's origin story was. It was a bit off It was fun from day one. It was even more learning. We've ramped from then, and it's been a decade of fun.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Been at Sloan for almost five years. I had the opportunity to meet Meredith Jenkins. She happened to be building a team at Trinity, and Trinity was this new endowment inside of a 320-year-old institution. She took a shot on me. I took a shot on her. We started building Trinity out in 2016.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Investment meeting for someone who doesn't speak the language is like sitting through a foreign language class. Things go by that you miss as you start to come up the curve, things slow down. You start to understand what's going on. I had great people around me that were willing to talk me through things. Some of my best friends in the industry today, I met around that time. I still remember folks taking me through what a DCF is. I had endless questions of why people own gold and there's a sitting CIO who knows who he is who's been really kind to me through all these moments of my development in life that's been there. I was fortunate enough to stumble into some great relationships and folks that really helped me.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Everyone senses if you're being authentic. Everyone senses if you're being true to yourself because that just comes through. And when it is, people open up and people say, oh, that was great. You touch someone and then they react. The best investors I meet know themselves and they spend their whole life trying to be that authentic version. And it's really hard with investing because you get all this feedback, positive and negative and all this noise. And the whole time you're just trying to figure out what kind of investor I am. Who am I, and then not lose sight of that?”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “To make the harmony work. You often hear the top and the bottom of a piece of music, the melody and the bass, but that stuff in the middle is really what drives great music. And that's also, in my mind, what drives a great portfolio. The last thing is pretty basic, but if you're going to be a musician, if you're going to be out there,”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Would highlight three is that relationships matter. When you're doing anything that involved in music, you're working with ensembles. You have different components. You might be the composer. You're going to then work with the ensemble. And then you're going to have to deal with an audience. You have all these stakeholders. Your relationship with all of them becomes critical in terms of the output. From day one, I realized that truly everything is relationship business, certainly music is. This other element is a bit trickier, but every great composer is balancing the horizontal, the melody, the line of the music, and the vertical, which is the composite, what it creates, the harmony. And I think about that between managers and portfolios. The best composers make the least amount of sacrifices or the most graceful things in the compromises they make on the horizontal or the melody.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I don't remember, but I remember the moment I got the call. I did one of those cliche fist pumps to myself because I felt like I'd accomplished that unpaid internship was real something. Candidly, I was in the system. I was already student teaching. I met the background checks to be in the building. And so they said, if this doesn't work in a week, we can rotate down to one of the MBAs that's applied because the job market was tough. So I grinded and they let me stick around.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Was entered in this different world of trying to figure out why businesses do what they do and then how that applies to economies as a whole, countries, geopolitics, and it was fascinating. I've always wanted to just keep learning. And it turns out that investing is one of the best ways to learn about everything. I got hooked.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “This whole job ended up through a bunch of steps meeting my first real mentor and a gentleman named Bill Peterson, who was the CIO of the Sloan Foundation. Let me have a shot. I joined the Sloan Foundation, took it from there.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Music brought me to New York to study at the Juilliard School. During my master's, I was studying composition, trying to make ends meet, working a lot of jobs. Then all of a sudden I stayed and joined the doctoral program at Juilliard and it was free. And the doctoral program came with a stipend. I didn't know what to do with that stipend because I was working and paying rent and doing the things people do. I put it in a brokerage account and started buying stocks. It was a whole experience. It was 2007. I felt smart for a little bit, then 2008 happened and I felt the opposite. But it was certainly volatile and I fell in love. And I didn't know why, but I wanted to figure things out. I started reading and listening to everything I could. That drove me to try to become an investor. I talked my way into Juilliard's endowments investment office. I was their first and only intern at the time it was in-house. It's since been outsourced. The gentleman there at the time gave me a shot and I started to learn about.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “First guest on the Senior Decision Makers miniseries is Nick Cisco. Nick is a managing director at the Trinity Wall Street Endowment, where he joins CIO Meredith Jenkins at the founding of the investment office in 2016 and has spent the last decade helping build a young endowment inside a 320-year-old institution. Today, the Endowment has grown to over $6 billion. Nick's path into investing is a fascinating one. He studied composition and earned his Doctorate of Music at Juilliard. While there, he talked his way into an internship at Juilliard's endowment and never looked back. Our conversation covers the lessons he carried from music into investing. His investment philosophy and the details of his process. Manager selection sits at the heart of his work, and he articulates what separates the relationships that endure from ones that don't. Nick is a remarkable storyteller and shares a number of real-life”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Even though the AUM was challenged, the business was not. He kept saying, I really want to earn back your capital. I want to reward you for your patience. And it was a different dynamic because what normally happens is assets down, performance poor, managers start this whole trope of, okay, well, I'm going to shut down and start a family office. That's okay to teach their own. But this manager was going the exact opposite. So we hung in there. It doesn't always work out this way, but things started to turn in 2021. And from 21 to 26, it's been a 5x. So he's compounded significantly over this period.”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Was this manager's worst year? He was down an additional 30%. We thought 2019 was the worst year, but it turns out 2020 was the worst year so far. That led to Of soul searching, you have a drawdown that's starting to get close to 50 at the trough. Over the course of that year, I went back and spent a lot of time with that manager. I think I met with him at least seven or eight times. And this manager works out of Dallas, very responsive, but really is best to meet in person. No IRBD function, nothing like that. And it was COVID. It just happened to be that this manager got kicked out of his office because his landlord wanted to do construction. This manager was between offices having a terrible run. Also, I knew a lot of his other investors and about half the capital left that year. So I'm sitting down with this manager at what ended up being our local spot. We'd sit there for two or three hours, talk to the portfolio, what's working, what's not working, how he's behaving. And it gave me confidence to not quit. This manager had no quit in him. It was clear that”

    2026-06-29 · Capital Allocators · Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source