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Sandra Robertson

lines on the record: 100
first: 2020-04-13
most recent: 2020-04-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So, our biggest single equity manager is about 8 or 9% of the total portfolio. So they would probably be anywhere between sort of, I would say, 50 basis points to 1%”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that might be somebody who's just exceptional, might be super young, who just is really highly regarded by perhaps people that have mentored them. They're trying to figure out how to run a business and a book and deal with investors. And so we'll put a little bit of capital with them. And the hope is that over three years, we'll see really if they can make it or not and if they can hopefully that would be a good replacement for perhaps one of our more established managers because some of them retire or sell out or whatever.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'll be with people who have demonstrated that ability in the past. So like everyone else in this business, there's areas where you just know if somebody comes out of a particular shop with particular training. They've got the right pedigree. And so that, I think, is quite important for us to know and follow. But we also have a little part of our portfolio which we call the farm team.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get the understanding of whether a manager can do that through cycles, that almost lends itself to an organization, or at least individuals who have been around for cycles. Does that mean that your investments or your new investments tend to be with established organizations?”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think, to be honest, it's much different from a lot of our peers. I think that's why we all sort of end up in the same groups. We really want people who We think to have what we would call sustainable competitive advantage. And that doesn't mean they're doing the same thing all the time. But just through their culture, their processes, their ability to adapt, we think they're great investors through various cycles. We really like people who own their own businesses and who have substantial amounts of their capital in their businesses. We think the alignment of interest there is great. And we like people who take a long-term view. And I think that that's actually quite hard to find.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that Venn diagram then goes immediately into this question of talent. And it's what everyone struggles with and what everyone tries to identify what have been those sort of key criteria that you and your team use to try to figure out who you want to partner with?”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perhaps most top of mind for a lot of endowments and foundations is China. I mean, these markets are so inefficient. You've got to have the right managers to make money in these markets. So that would be two areas where we think about this inefficiency.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one that's really exciting, I can't actually tell you because there's not much of an opportunity set and if capital comes into it, it won't be inefficient. But I watch this space in a couple of years' time. It just plays brilliantly to everything that's gone on at the moment and our long-term advantage. But two areas I can talk about. One in the UK is long-term holding of what we call strategic land. And that is taking an asset that is currently used for, say, industrial use. And in particular in large metropolitan areas in the UK, huge pressure on housing. And so you can see that this industrial use, where it is today through increased transport links or just better transport links, will eventually become housing. Now that might be a 15 to 20 year play, but for us, for the endowment, we can hold on to that.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then as you walk through those sort of three lenses, talent, themes, and inefficiencies, let's start at the bottom with these kind of inefficient places. What's the most recent example of something you've been excited about that fits into that particular group?”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we very much luckily now we have a 10-year track record and so we would say okay our investment objective is to annualise at 5% rail over extended periods of time and we've done that There will be absolutely periods where we look like geniuses and periods where we look like frankly look like idiots but how do we calibrate I think is more of course you have the total return of the fund but we go through each position quite regularly so okay what do we think the expected return or outcome of this individual investment can be for the next three to five years and sometimes the opportunity site just disappears and distress credit has been one of these areas it's been so tough for managers”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Judgment, experience, the opportunity set can we make more by investing money today? What is the expected return of this investment? What is the risk? What is the liquidity you're going to have to take for this versus actually keeping it in cash or short-term bonds?”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now that day to day sounds a lot different from a more structured asset allocation where there's rigorous rebalancing around a long-term target that gets revised. So how do you sort of find what that true north is if it's not stuck on a certain number that you've thought about for a period of time?”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You probably find it moves around more over a year. It hasn't moved around recently that much because what we do when we have inflows, that tends to be where we say actually we're going to keep this in cash or add it to the public markets, depending on the overall environment. So we don't swing it around too much.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you don't really have the luxury of private equity of being able to trim it. So about private equity sort of varies anywhere between 20 to 25%. And so the rest tends to be a risk appetite. It's probably more reflected in the public equity exposure of that. So our public equity today is around 50, I think 52, 53%”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So start at the top, equity is 45 to 85 is a fairly wide range. So does that mean that you say, well, actually 65 is our number because it's right in the middle? And if not, how do you decide sort of where you are in that range”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then, of course, we have bonds in cash. And then we have on top of that liquidity guidelines. So we manage the portfolio, what we would call holistically as one. So when we look at our US exposure, we look through the whole portfolio. We don't say we want X in US public equity and Y in US large cap buyouts. That's not tend to be. If you think about how we allocate capital, it will either be we're back in talent, we're back in an investment theme, or we're trying to get access to really inefficient market. And if they all meet in the Venn diagram, that's fantastic.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way our asset allocation today is we don't have a policy portfolio, we have a group of broad asset groups we call risk assets and we have ranges around which we can move them. So we have equities and that can be anywhere between 45 to 80% of the whole portfolio. We have credit and then we have property.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Write letters to investors, turn up to investors, investment committees all while trying to build out this portfolio and our business. So it was an interesting time. So very much equity focused, absolute return focused. We knew we were going to have a big slug in private equity and venture capital. And then with our equities as well, we really wanted to have smart managers whose interests were aligned with our own and who were not there trying to outperform random market indices.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's evolved over the years. As you can imagine, because it was really only Fay and I at the beginning, we started to build up her team early 2009. Jack Edmondson came on board. He's our deputy CIO. And then we've just grown the team over time now. There's 24 of us in the business. But not also did we have to build out our portfolio, we had to figure out how to market to investors.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so very much focused on absolute return, very much focused on equities, if trying to grow at least 5%. Compounding over time in real terms, so you have to have an equity, exposure. We could be liquid, so we had a lot of experience in private equity and venture capital, so we were very favourable. We spent a lot of time in that area. I wanted to have a team of generalists, but also most importantly, I wanted to have a simple portfolio that was pretty concentrated in terms of names as well.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we had to hilariously mainly UK index tracking funds that would only trade on a Thursday if there was enough interest because it was a charity product. So I got so fed up with it that we sold most of them in August and so I'd love to see I was smart, but my god, I was lucky. And in September 2008, we were mainly in cash. And then, of course, it was all at a bank. And I thought, holy molly, I don't know if I feel that safe because the bank's, of course, at that point. But we were lucky. And we'd also been putting some money into some of the managers I knew well from Welcome. So we had quite a big dollar exposure at that point. So we survived, we were down 12% that year.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so my colleague and I really wouldn't like to relive 2008, but we had phenomenal help. And I must also say at that point, the Rhodes Trust, well, not a college in Oxford at that point had gone through quite a period of reorganisation. And one of its trustees. And Mike had heard from Mike Moritz what we were doing, and he phoned up and he said, Sandra, we want in and his team at McKenna were fantastic in helping us think through the documents and lock-ups and how people can come in and leave. And also we had a lot of help from Jack at Harvard as well because they were the last big endowment to consolidate. So huge amount of people just on our side who really wanted to make this work. So we opened the oxygen endowment fund in January the first 2009.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to pool perpetuity capital and have external investors, how to get regulated by then the financial services authority now the financial conduct authority. Figuring out what assets they had, figuring out an investment policy, and do all this while the world was going to hell in the hand basket.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know you were an Oxford alum, which was quite foolish of me, given that we'd been a big investor in Sequoia. And Mike was absolutely determined that if he was going to give money to his old college and to the university, it had to be properly managed. And so therefore any donation he was going to give to his college had to be managed by me in our new business, which is not actually that straightforward because Oxford is a very different system from most universities in that the colleges there's 38 of them are all separately entities. So they're sovereign bodies in their own right, they all have their own endowments, they all have their own investment committees and they all have their own what they call governing bodies and trustees. So we spent 2008 trying to figure out”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we were starting all of that within about two months. I was called to a meeting. And it was with the Vice Chancellor and then one of the colleges and it's very public and Mike Moritz of Sequoia I said hi Mike, how are you?”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was really interesting So there was no infrastructure at the university. It had been done by a committee and a treasury team. And one of the wit things that Oxford has done is we've actually set up a separate investment management company. The first thing I did was hire my chief operating officer from the Wellcome Trust, and I did have to go and beg forgiveness from Danny for stealing her. But I wanted somebody I knew trusted. She'd been fantastic at Welcome. She understood all the various asset groups. She was a chartered accountant. really needed a good right hand person, right-hand man, but she's a woman. So what did we do? Well, we set around trying to figure out actually what assets the endowment fund owned because in a university that's not always quite clear there can be a little bit of fudging that goes on between things that have been gifted that they can't sell. I said nothing can be in the endowment pool that I can't sell. So there was a little bit of organisation that way. We had to put a custodian in place. We had to put a separate banker in place.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, No, I'm not going to come because you're not going to pay me any money. You're not going to give me any resources. And they said, look, you are involved with the university and I've been involved with the college. Why don't you just meet the new chairman of the investment committee and see what you think? That's always dangerous. And the way that they had thought about it, that they were going to structure it, the role of the CIO. Was going to give me the opportunity to effectively build a business as well as an investment portfolio. And I looked at the portfolio Oxford had at that time and I thought, oh my God, this is arguably the world's best university and look at its investment portfolio. Its endowment at that point was four hundred million pounds after a thousand years that was not good.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weirdly, it was my CIO, Danny Trill, who sadly passed away last year, but he had come from Goldman. And one thing about they develop their people. And so that was very much Danny said to me, I don't understand why you didn't go for my job as CIO. I said, well, I don't think I was ready. And he said, no, I think you're ready to be a CIO. The team was bigger, it was more mature, and we'd stopped that phase of fast growth. And we were into a little bit more period of consolidation. I was About one role in the UK to start up an office for another university and I said no it's not for me. And then Oxford came calling and I had vague connections with Oxford but I didn't go to Oxford University and I said no about eight times but they kept coming back”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It got harder with venture, and this was the days before the full stack venture funds. And that was hard, you know, one of the first venture investments we made was the guys at Benchmark were in their first fund, I think, well, we had $10 million in that. They didn't grow their funds very much. But I think that was tougher in terms of just venture. It was harder to back smaller venture funds into $50 million tickets or do a small co-investment with $5 or $10 million. That was tougher, yeah.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was there a particular time at Welcome when there was a called funky investment opportunity that you either loved in the portfolio or were looking at that you realized that? Just can't do the search. It's not going to be material.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It had to be really had to make a difference to the bottom line. And that's tougher as you get bigger because your check sizes are bigger as well. And so that sort of takes you out of some parts of the market.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was growing different types of investments. Great thing about Wellcome was we tried everything, we tried co-investing, direct investing, emerging markets, very emerging markets, markets that never quite merged. We did hedge funds but never really thought of them as an asset class. We were always encouraged to look at new things, very much focus on the amounts, millions you could make as opposed to outperform a benchmark. And we always had that freedom and it was fantastic. But going from two and a half billion to 15 billion means that some of the funkier stuff we did was just that little bit harder and to make we always focused on contribution.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when I started, we had two and a half billion pounds when I left it was about 15. Yeah, we had a great journey, built a great team as well.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my goodness, I think under different CIOs it changed quite a bit. I mean, we've changed at Oxford, our levels over the year, you tend to find we have periods like this, we would hedge less of our overseas assets.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, when you're investing long term money, it's quite difficult because the instruments you've got to hedge currency are very short-term, whereas you're hedging long-duration assets. There was never a correct formula to be honest. It was a lot of our CIO's judgment”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you're never trying to guess what's going to happen to the dollar on a daily basis, but directionally you can tell in a risk-off environment, the yen and the dollars are going to strengthen against the pound, so you have to be very aware of that.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was very much then it's morphed now that it's much more, I think it might be half and half, I'd have to check with the investment team there, but it's much more international today.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so ingrained in what you do that whenever I think about the US, sterling or cable as it's known in the UK is one of the biggest impact on our portfolio. But what you have to understand for a sterling investor in times of stress, it's good to own dollars. It's not good to hate your currency because a big cash”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of my peers in the US is that Currency, currency hedging, currency volatility has always been part of our playbook because really sterling, although it's an important world currency, most hedge fund managers don't get paid in sterling or venture capitalists. So we've always been super international in everything we've had to do. So that's perhaps just a little bit difficult. We didn't have the big home market that our peers in the US have had.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I thank for welcome we always did our own thing and we were always comfortable doing our own thing because we were the only one. So it was lovely to meet people out at Limity Partner meetings who were doing similar things to us, but we never looked at somebody else's asset allocation and said, oh, we should have that. It was very much a bottoms-up. These are great groups. We really like this area. And it was very much about absolute return investing before that was its name, but also about backing talent and individuals as well. And that was one of the things that came very much through our investment committee, I suppose, because they're all experienced investors. So we probably had a lot more in UK property, and we always did that directly at Wellcome. Done that at Oxford as well. We were always very international. So one of the things that I'm quite”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pension funds have come under a lot of pressure on regulation, and so the way they invest today is very different from perhaps the way they invested 25 years ago, which was a little bit more similar to ours, but not quite the same. So with venture capital, it was Jim that introduced us to this whole idea. And one of our governors had himself been a venture capitalist, so he thought it was a splendid idea that we did this stuff. So, you know, Sandra, go out and find some groups.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So our chairman was at that point at Sir Roger Gibbs very involved with the Getty family and the Getty Foundation and through that had met Jim Bailey, one of the founders of Cambridge Associates, who at that point had one office in Winthrop Square in Boston. And Jim and his team said, look, you're very similar to a US foundation endowment. Let us work with you, introduce you to this group of people because there wasn't anyone like us in the UK. At that point, Oxford and Cambridge weren't managing their endowments in this way. And there was really only pension funds.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I realise people used all this stuff I'd learned in university for a start. So that was a bit of a surprise to me. I had fantastic teachers. The Wellcome Trust. Was hated by scientists, and to get to the top of your field in science, you have to be a little bit of a maverick. And our investment committee, they put together, were all very entrepreneurial. And so I had great people to learn from. It was all about how to make money, not outperform your peers or outperform a benchmark. This is money, this is not pension fund, there's no money coming in, you're not matching liabilities, you actually have an asset. And this trust has been charged to exist in perpetuity. So how do you do that? We invested in venture capital, and I must confess, I didn't really know what it was, but we'd make trips to the valley in Boston and we were the only UK investor at that time, so we were novel. Private equity, before these were industries. And we just had great fun because we were encouraged by this investment committee who...”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In pharma in that area. But the chairman of the Wellcome Trust father had been a trustee of a Trust called the Nuffield Trust. It used to be one of the largest in the world. And of course, you know what happened to that. So he was determined that the trust and the other governors around the table would diversify its assets. So IPO 1996, I think, and then a large share placing in 1992. We had this money. How were we going to invest it? So it was myself and my boss. We began the journey building up the Wellcome Trust portfolio from then.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I went to meet, and it turned out, was the Wellcome Trust. They didn't have an investment team at that point. They'd hired in somebody from Civil Aviation Authority who used to manage their pensions. He wasn't quite sure how he's going to do this. They literally had $2.5 billion in the bank and a blank sheet of paper. There was nobody like them in the UK. And a little bit of background about welcome was that when Sir Henry Welcome, who was an American, died in 1936, he left the company to the charity. So the company was actually called the Welcome Foundation. And the charity was called the Wellcome Trust. And the trust really did learn lessons in terms of having all your eggs in one basket. Their sole asset was the Wellcome Foundation. Of course, it was a farmer company. Fortunes were rising and falling.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That didn't quite work out that plan because I got down and I registered with a tempe agency, as we all did in those days. And I was going to actually start JP Morgan in the SWAPS department. It was fantastic, it was full of in those days, London was full of Australians, Kiwis, South Africans who would all come over, work really hard and then go off travelling. And particularly in the swaps department those days, you know, you were working 12, 15 hour days. So I just could see the money in that. But before I started there, I was phoned up by the agency and they said, we've got this charity. they don't really know if they need somebody full-time, but they really like your CV. Would you go and talk to them? And I was like, oh no, how much are they going to pay me an hour? I don't really want to work for a charity. Bearing in mind I had this goal of going off to travel. And so I was only really interested in how much money I could earn.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it was a temporary role. It wasn't a graduate possession. And I really enjoyed that. One of my favourite things was I was in the International Czechs Division for a couple of months. If you ever tried to get a bank to cash a check in a different currency and it sort of disappears into the system, well, it could be in a tin somewhere in a cupboard in the International Czech Department. And honestly, I did find a biscuit tin full of checks that people had just found too difficult. It was great. You know, I was phoning up Italian banks. It was just investigative. It was lovely. It was, and again, a lot of satisfied customers. So that was great. But then in 1993, I left Edinburgh, decided I would go down to London. I was going to work for a year and then go travelling”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was when at that point in the UK there was a lot of systems changing so it was going from old ledgers essentially handwritten notes as to what their clients owned onto some system. I can't even remember what it's called and I came into the office. It was all male dominated. There was no women in this office and you could smoke in the office which was to me just appalling. I couldn't believe this. probably spent about three or four months just actually trying to figure out what their clients owned and their clients would be so grateful when I figured it out it was wonderful but it was only a temporary position and I didn't want to stay in that environment for my health more than anything else but you know I worked really nice smart people but I just knew that environment wasn't for me and then I went to work for a bank in their international banking division”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wasn't somebody who read the Financial Times growing up. I actually wanted to be a ballet dancer. journalist I did a general degree in business, did a lot of theory, capital asset price and model, absolute convinced myself that nobody used this stuff and when I graduated the notes all went into my parents loft like everyone else but I really fell into I bumbled into investing. After I graduated graduation 91 was pretty rough time in the UK particularly for graduates there weren't many roles I was in Edinburgh at this point worked for a short time for stockbroker a very old fashioned stockbroker doesn't exist anymore it's been emanated out of existence but my goodness that was an eye-opener for me”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guest on today's show is Sandra Robertson, the CEO and Chief Investment Officer of OU Endowment Management, a subsidiary company of the University of Oxford that manages the $4 billion sterling Oxford Endowment Fund. Simply put, she is one of the most respected endowment managers in the world. Our conversation covers Sandra's start at the Welcome Trust in the mid-90s, her arrival at Oxford in 2007, Oxford's investing lens across inefficiencies, talent, and themes, decision-making, behavior and actions in volatile markets, private equity fees and alignment, and ESG. Our conversation took place at the very beginning of March's market volatility. Tune back in on Thursday for an update on how Sandra is operating in this new environment. Please enjoy my conversation with Sandra. Roberts. Sundra, thanks so much for doing this.”
2020-04-13 · Capital Allocators · Sandra Robertson – Oxford's Queen of Endowment Management (Capital Allocators, EP.130) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source