YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephen Gilmore

lines on the record: 78
first: 2026-02-09
most recent: 2026-02-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Probably about what you've already asked. How have things gone at Culpa's? I would like it to be a story of success. I would like it to be a story of fulfilled potential. I would also like it to be a story of using my leisure time better and doing the things I enjoy.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tune out very differently. If you'd asked me when I was a teenager what I was going to do, I thought I would work in the wildlife service. I wanted to spend time outdoors. I didn't think I would be living in other countries, so quite differently.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really like walking in the mountains in the bush, being with nature. From a professional perspective, I like seeing people grow. It's great seeing people you're working with or people who work for you do well. They make you look good. I really get a kick out of that. I like solving puzzles. And of course spending time with friends and family.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that got me thinking more about finance. I went from there to the Reserve Bank. Then when I went traveling, I picked up a job at Chase Manhattan. That was a bit of a risk. I'd come from a central bank. I got parachuted into derivative structuring. It was Sykes Wilford, who was one of the senior people at Chase who took that risk with me. That was great. IMF, same thing. Moving from FX options to IMF, I had that central bank background. it wasn't such a leap going back to the market same thing pupil at future fund dave neal took that risk hiring me it's those sorts of people who've been prepared to take someone who's come from maybe a non-linear role”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who know me know that I don't stick to the script, so I'm not going to mention just two people, the people that have had the biggest impact have been folks who've taken a chance on me. I did a master's degree in economics. Normally people in New Zealand who did that with golf and work in the treasury or the reserve bank did the reserve bank later. I was offered a job at the treasury if it didn't go there. I was sort of fit a job at one of the universities in New Zealand to lecture on finance. I hadn't studied much finance, but they wanted an economist. I thought, oh, that's good, I'll do that. So that was Lyle McLean, who was the Dean of Finance, Accounting of Finance at Otago. He took a risk on me. I enjoyed that. And I got to spend some time with Simon Beninga. He wrote one of the standard texts on financial engineering. He was teaching us option prices.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first pay job was a student job. I was a laborer, doing all sorts of manual work. That job brings back memories because I remember my first day on the job. Group of us started that day. We were given tools like crowbar, peck, shovel, and we were asked to dig up a road. It was a metal road. It was hard work because we only had these tools. At the end of the day, I went home. I had seven blisters on my two hands. My father looked at me and thought I needed toughening up. He got some denaturalized alcohol and just poured it on my hands because that toughens up the skin. It stung. From that time, I wasn't sure whether they were testing us as new joiners, but it got easier after that. I enjoyed doing that manual work.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like the purpose. It was quite meaningful. We're investing for 2.4 million members. There's something about these asset owner roles that I enjoy because you get to work in the markets, which is intellectually interesting. You get to think about the economics and the politics. You get a seat of a table. You get involved in interesting conversations. It's a privilege to be able to do this. particularly if you're doing it for a good cause. Intellectually, it's great to keep learning. When you're dealing in the market, you have to keep learning. It's also good to solve problems. It's that combination of things that appeals to me.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would be a success if we were more fully funded. It would be a success of people thought that Copas was using its potential better in terms of the asset and the mandate, the talent we have. It would also feel successful if people thought this total portfolio approach has worked.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five or ten years from now, I hope we're more fully funded than we are at the moment. A lot depends on what happens in the market. I would like to think that we have improved information systems, those regular scenario tests, and that we're comfortable with the range of outcomes. I would like to think that we have a greater range of diversifiers within the portfolio. I would also like to have a more systematic dynamic allocation process in place. I would like to think we've got more of those things that would fit between the buckets in NSAA type environment, because I think that's an advantage for us now.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it does, you're more likely to do it. Now it could be an opportunistic bucket in an SAA, but it fits more neatly in the total portfolio approach because you can think about cost of capital on a consistent basis across asset classes, those sorts of things that might have formed between the cracks are things that will be more relevant for us now given the way we're moving.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are quite a few things that might be just the right fit in the sense of they are something that aligns with those advantages that we have, things like our time horizon, size and so on. There are times when we can negotiate economics which we think are favorable to both sides. We have done some of that on private equity. The thinking with the total portfolio approach is more around is this a good investment if we think it is it's less important where it sits. So if you're sitting there with a strategic asset allocation and you've got all these asset classes, it could be that you've got a hybrid. Where does it sit? Or there could be something that's new and you don't have a bucket for it and it's hard to do with a total portfolio approach. You look at what are the return and risk characteristics of this investment and does it make sense to the portfolio?”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We used to do this at New Zealand so far. I sprung a stress test on folks at Future Fund back in 2011. We've probably done less of that at Culpas, but recently we had a great little exercise, which was initiated by the team, and this was a liquidity shock. When you design these things, you have to make them realistic. You want to get engagement from the team. I think back to the one we did recently, people came in on a Monday and they don't always do that because the core workdays for us are Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. We had all these people in the room. We had Treasury team, the ops people, the various asset plus kids and the total fund people. And we had the shock that was designed by the people overseeing some of our liquidity management. We made it so that certain key people were away. It worked really well. A lot of lessons from it.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you put together a series of stress tests, how do you think about what historical scenarios you want to populate it with or what future economic scenarios you put in that are enough but not too much?”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Controls. But that's quite possible. So we need to think about those sorts of things, things that haven't been in play for decades. They were in play back in the 80s.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, a lot of those entities, asset owners outside the US, are conscious of the great exposure they have to US assets because the size of US capital markets, the performance of the U.S. equity market, and so on, there's a desire to diversify away from the US. That's probably going to be difficult because the other capital markets aren't as deep. The entrepreneurialism in the US is a standout, but it is going to be a theme over the next period of time. There's also going to be more thought about other regulatory interventions. I know that some regulation has been scaled back. Issues of national security become more relevant, whether that's security of supply chains. I can imagine there are possibly going to be more natural security related factors to be thinking about when it comes to the financial markets. One thing that I wouldn't like to see would be forms of capital.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Allocators often think about the past and project forward. There's always a theme. There was a Yale model. Maybe it doesn't work so well now. Then there's a Canadian model. Maybe there's some issues with that as well. Now people are talking about TPA. It has to be fit for purpose. Going forward, TPA will get more attraction. But is it hard? Because you've got to have that collaboration. There's going to be more thinking about the privates versus publics because you can see the efforts to try and give retail access. Interested in how that all plays out.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a hard one because I don't know that I can necessarily excess all the data that would be relevant. We were early investors and private equity. It would be great to be able to look at the lessons that were learned early on, but I don't know how accessible that information is. There are probably missed opportunities. Going forward, we can build information systems to capture more than we have in the past. That's an area where we should have a true advantage given our scale, given the connections, given the access that we have.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a continual process. We've spent a lot of time working on liquidity analysis, the analytics there. One of the things I did when I first came in to Kelpers was to say that New Zealand, I could see the portfolio on my phone, I could see lots of different reports. We couldn't do that was when I arrived. But now I can see a lot of reports on my phone. The team have seized that. So really good initiative to make that work.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I look at our portfolio, you're exposed to growth? I would like to have a greater exposure to diversifying strategies. Those things are things in the back of my mind. In terms of what causes me to lose sleep, it's probably there being some unfortunate event and it's hard to forecast. You hope that you have the maturity to look through that and to take advantage of those unfortunate events. It's probably a function of behavior. How do we react when some adverse event occurs? I think about that. Do we have sufficiently strong governance arrangements to have gotten through that pro-cyclicality that's been a challenge for us in the past?”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely essential. Internally, we have what is called a total fund management committee. We meet Fort Lightly. We also have a similar committee that looks at the underwriting of deals, but those will only be the largest transactions. Those people get together fortnightly on these committees.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of us delegated down to the heads of the various teams. We raise the biggest questions to an internal committee of the various asset class heads. Ultimately, it typically is the head of the asset class that makes the call up to a particular size.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same framework for assessing that opportunity cost, then you've got a model for making those investments. The tips will go out and try and find good opportunities. It may be that when you look across all the different opportunities that there are some relatively good ones in some areas and some that are less interesting, and we should be able to discuss that as a team and upsize those ones that look more attractive.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Key is to make sure that you've got the right blend of bottom up, input and top down. When I think about the top down, you're thinking about the overall risk levels of the portfolio. You're thinking of the active risk budgeting and the way that gets allocated. From the bottom up, you're wanting to make sure that you see the ideas being socialized and being shared across the organization. In the end, if you're deploying capital, you want to be confident that it's going to be the cost of what you're selling to invest it. You need that consistent framework for thinking about that. If someone wants to invest in infrastructure, we're going to effectively have to sell some equities and bonds to do that. If it's infrastructure, it's probably going to be a liquid. There's going to be some charge for that. The investing teams are going to have to be thinking about what's the opportunity cost of making this investment. And if everyone is looking at this.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reality is FutureFund does, and if you look at the TPA adherence, they tend to have a bigger exposure to private markets. So there are a lot of misunderstandings because you've got to look at the organization where it's relevant advantages are when thinking about the asset allocation. There's been an education process, Q&A, listening, discussion, and it's ongoing”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the things we've done at the level of the leadership team is to call out collaboration when people are assessed for performance. Collaboration is one of the key leadership competencies. We've heightened that in terms of how much focus we give to it. There's focus on communication, outreach. We've had lots of questions and answers and discussions. When you do that in the big forum, people don't feel that comfortable speaking up. There's been a lot of outreach at the team by team level. Early on there was some discomfort in the private markets because people were thinking New Zealand.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably smaller teams that are in a better positioned. In our case at Kelpa's, this is a larger team, but we had some of the enabling conditions. We had the alignment in terms of the compensation, the improvements in terms of liquidity management, and we've got a cable team. Those things are all helpful. The fact that we'd embarked upon a data and technology transformation was also helpful. To make it work, you need to have good collaboration. That's a key thing. Having people that speak with one another are aligned with the ultimate objective.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When more and more people are thinking about total portfolio approach, where have you found that others are well positioned to do it that may not, or where they're really not going to be able to replicate it?”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that stands out is aligning the act of risk to the level of conviction. If you've got lots of silos by asset class, you don't necessarily do that. Back to New Zealand super, I used to describe the active performance of New Zealand super and baseball terms. If you look at all the different investment strategies, when I first looked at the analysis, I thought, well actually the hit rate, or the banning average is pretty ordinary. That's not that unusual. But the slugging average was amazing. The areas that it did best in had had a lot of risk allocated. Those areas that had performed best in were areas of highest conviction as well. That was something that has been a feature. That's something that's important for Kelpus to think about where our advantages are and to make sure we're allocating capital proportionately.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“True, the nature of the boards are different, the boards in Australia and New Zealand, the ones I dealt with comprise investors. There's a different type of conversation. But Kelp is the board. It was the ultimate governance body. Our move to a total portfolio approach pays attention to that. It's a management team that has the investment experience. We should be accountable for it. It becomes clearer. The board has the overall oversight, the asset liability management, bottle remains the same. We've just moved to a reference portfolio, and we define the active risk a little differently. Ultimately, there's more clarity around who is accountable. It's the management team that has the investment experience. The board has the governance experience.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The governance board's guardians, New Zealand, Australia are thought of as very sophisticated investment pools of capital, and in the public pensions in the US typically the people serving on the boards do not come from finance backgrounds. How has that changed how you thought about approaching the portfolio?”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Given our scale, it's hard to make small investments because they don't move the tile. Some of these emerging managers can be outperformers. You want to take advantage of that, so you need to find the right framework and mechanisms for getting access to those smaller emerging managers. The reality is that the bulk of capital is going to be invested through larger managers because of the size of our portfolio”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've decided there's a particular opportunity where it makes sense to pursue active management. How do you think about the size of an active manager, their assets under management as a fit for the CalPurse portfolio?”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Team and Set Poll because you can cover more ground and you can get access. You can't necessarily scale in the same way. On Net, it is an advantage in an area like that. There are going to be some places where it's a disadvantage because you can't scale.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Size helps a lot when thinking about the cost of transacting. You can improve your negotiating position because your size. You can have very strong partnerships with economics works for both parties. I see the benefits to that. We've been taking advantage of that in recent years in our private equity portfolio. There was a period where we were underinvested in private equity and the strategy has changed. It's been particularly successful since 2022. The focus there has been on relationships, having that partnership, having that alignment. A key part of that has been getting more co-investment. There are economic benefits to that. That partnership works when you get better information flow. We've done a good job of selecting managers. Those things more likely when you've got a somewhat larger”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kelp was in the past, the equity team, the fixed income team had been good at generating good information ratios, but it hasn't been scaled, which I found interesting because there have been constraints on the active risk that can be taken and subconstraints. I look at this and think, well, these are great information ratios in some of these strategies. Why aren't we doing more? Then there's the question as to how far these can be scaled.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of reference portfolio, example, that's passive. You will want to take active risk when you think you're going to get paid for it. It's as simple as that.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually some sort of runway or plan over multiple years. The target portfolio has to take that into account so that the teams have decent planning horizon and so they can manage relationships.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't see any difference. Future fund, New Zealand Super would be rebalancing. Typically, what you would do with the forms of total portfolio project I'm familiar with is you would have a target portfolio anyway. You would be aiming for something where you've got a reference portfolio. You're rebalancing the risk back. The reference portfolio level, if you're the future fund and you don't have a reference portfolio, you'll still want to think about equity equivalent exposure and they'll want to rebalance back to that. It will be similar. In terms of the privates, that's an interesting one because with private market exposure, you can't move that anytime you want because they're illiquid and the relationships involved, the investing teams will need to have clarity over a multi-year runway. In the organizations I've been in, there's usually”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Among the tried and true principles that have worked for a long time for some of the strategic asset allocation models rebalancing and private market exposure always comes up. How does the concept of mean reverting rebalancing work within a TPA approach?”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is important. Let's take a simple example. Equities and bonds. Do they diversify? Is a bond exposure going to diversify an equity exposure? Well, it may. It depends on what's happening. Take the example of an inflation shock. If inflation goes up, nominal bonds are going to be hit. Equities are probably going to be hit as well. If you have a growth shock, it's going to be the opposite. Equity is going to benefit. Bonds are probably going to be hit. So bonds are diversifying there. You need to look at what's driving the event rather than simply looking at historical correlations. One needs to be thinking about multidimensional scenarios and to think about how the portfolio behaves given those scenarios.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want the sizing to relate to your degree of conviction in the investment, you're also going to be looking at the overall portfolio characteristics. Typically, any individual investment isn't going to make that much of a difference at the whole of portfolio level.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or possibly it could be a lot better and the team should be doing a lot more. You could be underinvested or overinvested depending on the relative attractiveness. If you've got a 10% allocation, you're probably going to look to diversify that portfolio. You don't want to have a too concentrated an asset class portfolio. But when you're thinking about its contribution to the whole portfolio, you should be much more comfortable in having a more concentrated asset class portfolio because I guess diversify it away at the whole of portfolio level. Those are some of the differences. It's also one of the reasons why it's hard to hold an asset class as accountable in a total portfolio approach because the asset class may have been asked to do something for whole of portfolio considerations. The assessment of the contribution is really the contribution to the whole portfolio.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With an SAA, the asset class is probably thinking about how additive that investment is given the asset allocation. Let's say it's an asset class with a 10% allocation. They'll fill the bucket up to that 10%. Now it could be that it's suboptimal. It could be that the return from the marginal investment and the asset class is less than it could be in another asset class.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A strategic asset allocation model, that incremental investment is probably someone's assessment of better alpha. If it's a new manager and public equities, we think that manager's better than the manager we have, maybe in the construct of what we're trying to find, what might the similarities and differences be in that incremental investment in a TPA approach?”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conceptually, yes. The practicality, of course, is difficult to compare, every single investment with every other one, but if you have that common language, it can approximately do that. You've also got to look at the investments that are already in the portfolio. There's not just a new ones. Even the ones that are in the portfolio now continue to have to earn their place.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shock or given an inflation shock or given a real rate shock or a risk premium shock other structural changes, scenarios will play a more important role as we go forward. The reality is you cannot immunize the portfolio to all these different shocks because then you won't generate any decent return. It's more about understanding what might happen, being prepared for those. And if there are some outcomes that are unacceptable, then you can do something at the portfolio level to mitigate those risks.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of the portfolio risk is going to be dominated by equity risk, the 75 equity, 25 bond, reference portfolio. That simple construct will do a good job of approximating what our actual portfolio looks like. So you can stress test it. It may be that some things have a stress beta which is higher than what you might get with the 75, 25. Some things might be lower. What's most important is to be thinking about how the portfolio performs under different scenarios. People have looked at historical scenarios. They've looked at actual events. But of course any of these shocks that you're going to experience is probably going to be different from the past. There may be similarities, but you're not going to get an exact repeat because people have learned. Market structures are different and so on. Quite important to understand how the portfolio performs given a growth.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data and analytics are hugely important. One of the things we have been doing at Calpers is embarking on an effort to simplify some of the systems we're using to get that better hold of portfolio view. That's a multi-year exercise. You essentially want to be able to aggregate in a common language. Historically, we've tended to have best of breed applications by asset class. That can be great for a single asset class, but it's not so good when you want to combine everything. So you've got to be thinking about the right trade-off between that asset class functionality and the whole of portfolio. Bias is to try and have a better view at whole of portfolio.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a corpus perspective, we do manage some of the public liquid markets internally, but it's more difficult to do that in the private markets. It relates to skill sets, the size of the team, the breadth of expertise. I don't anticipate that we will be particularly active, direct privates apart from co-investment. But I expect that we will become more active in the public markets, given the balance sheet management and our improved liquidity management.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got to think about what is the market value at a point in time. And these things are infrequently marked. There can be a lot of discussion and debate. In the end, you want to get something that's reasonable.”
2026-02-09 · Capital Allocators · Stephen Gilmore – CalPERS' Total Portfolio Approach (EP.486) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source