YouSaid · the spoken record

Wayne Wicker

lines on the record: 84
first: 2018-03-19
most recent: 2018-03-19
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

“I used to have discussions with one or two of my board members that have a very strong focus on passive. And he said, well, you know, Wicker, you're an active guy. You ran active strategies all throughout your career. You focused on alpha. So I'm the passive guy, and I want to have this argument with you on which is better, passive or active. In the role that I play here, we offer both active and passive within our product lineups. And I think they both serve a purpose. And, you know, you can get a lot of cheap exposure in certain asset categories. And I think that's probably really beneficiary, especially in an industry where cost containment is critical. But then there are areas where I believe active management can certainly add value on top of that.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that is it frustrating? I would say it's a different set of challenges. And recently we went from being a 40-ax structure to one that is more into collective investment trusts. And I would say that that gives us a number of freedoms that we did not have when we were in a 40X format. Ironically, I think that I actually was the most attractive candidate for this job back in 2004 because I came to them and said, you know, you're pretty black and white in terms of your asset allocation here. It seems like you should have some alternatives. And the CEO said, great, put them in. And then I met the SEC.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, your background before doing this, you started on the corporate pension side, you worked for a long time for Howard Hughes, Hospital Endowment before going into the direct side. Does it frustrate you to have a more finite universe of investment options for your constituents?”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that in the broad array of what we're doing today currently that would be the case. We do have our corporate balance sheet where we go in different directions, but we really spend most of all of our time publicly talking about what we're doing with the milestone funds.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a little fairly simple actually, and I think we could probably thank the folks at Morningstar to a certain extent for that, Ted, because given the fact that we have such a wide number of participants, it really is something that you need to be able to provide education in a straightforward manner for people of various degrees of sophistication when it comes to investments. And so when I came in back in 04, we decided that one of the best ways to do that was not to think about funds relative to their Lipper universes, but to think about them in terms of Morningstar style boxes, in terms of a way to convey that for retail investors and Morningstar spent so much money on that education process putting our product lineups within those style boxes seem like The most efficient way to convey different types of strategies.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So ICMA stands for International City Managers Association, and we're the retirement arm for essentially thousands of people all over the country that are international city managers and public employees. So the District of Columbia, where we are today, they happen to be a client of ours. And we focus exclusively on defined contribution plans and helping those employees manage their retirement funds.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'd brought in somebody from a large insurance company as a CFO, and then they brought in the compliance folks from Frank Russell. So it was all people that I thought had a lot of integrity and knew very experienced. And so when I arrived, I was about $13 billion in assets. We had roughly 12 folks on the team. But it was a different kind of job than what I did at Cadence. You know, we were now managers of managers. We were overseeing the types of portfolios that I had previously run. And so it's a different skill set once again, right?”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 457, just public sector. Yeah, just public sector. Think of it as similar to what Tia does for college professors. We were founded by the Foreign Foundation just like TIAA was. And their role as college professors, ours was city managers. And we've subsequently over the 45-year period broadened that out to really serve not only the public sector, but we are now branching into investment only on the private sector for some of our products. But it was a really great mission. I really liked the folks that she was bringing in. I mean, I thought that she really had gotten it in the fact that here this was a not-for-profit organization, but she was bringing in all Fortune 500 executives to run this pool of assets. The head of sales was coming out of my old alma mater at IDS American Express.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Along the way, there were a couple of bumps, like Pimco was acquired by Allianz. And so we became even a smaller component of that whole Well, that's not an asset management firm. Isn't that a not-for-profit organization? And I kind of knew them because we had subadvised assets in the mid-cap space for those guys. I said, but I'm not quite sure that's the role for me. I really like running portfolios and the recruiters said, well, you know, why don't you just spend a day? It's just a day. New CEO is in place and she's building out a new C-suite of folks and she really needs somebody to build out the investment team. And what do you have to lose? And so I said, fine, I flew down and I met with Joan McCallan, who at the time was the CEO, and she was a very progressive woman. And I really liked the concept that she said, you know, I need you to think about how you would build this pool of assets out. So it was an organization that it's a not-for-profit that was initially established to help city managers run their fora.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, you know, ultimately, I think that you'll probably take on one of the portfolios. And it's yours to lose. Now, when somebody says it's yours to lose, I have to think really hard why I shouldn't go do this. So I moved up to Boston with cadence, and as Dave promised, he stepped back from the business within a couple years, and I was assigned the lead portfolio position to run the large cap pool of assets. And we were more of a boutique. I mean, we were about six billion in assets, and the large cap, Pimco Capital Appreciation Fund and the separate account management accounts that we had, which were all institutional. It was about $2.5 billion of that $6 billion. And so I gave up some of my research responsibilities to the other analysts that we brought in and spent all my time over the next seven years really focusing on the Capital Appreciation Fund.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I didn't go become a CIO somewhere. I ended up at the end of my three-year period of time deciding that while it was a really great run, it was time for me to move on. And there was a firm up in Boston by the name of Cadence Capital. And when I was at Dayton Hudson Corporation, I was basically either the first or the second client that Cadence ever had. We gave them $10 million, and they were being funded initially through PIMCO, and they were built out of the PIMCO brand. The gentleman who ran Cadence and had started it was a guy by the name of Dave Breed, and Dave had given me an offer that I couldn't review. He said, you know, why don't you come up here? I want you to follow two or three different areas. You're going to do telecom and you're going to do newspapers and you're going to do some other technology fields. And I'm not going to be around for a long period of time.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, you know, Ted, I would say that we probably had 20, 25 people, and those were the days where before you had so much electronic information, we had a dedicated librarian staff of three people just in this think tank library that would get you any research report, annual report, whatever you wanted. So there were lots of resources available that I probably never would have dreamed of at Target Corporation. So that allowed you to not only have greater access to some other folks to talk things over with, but it also gave you the ability to, because we ransom much money internally, to develop certain strategies like hedging that you could do internally, you know, trading futures and that type of thing, which obviously I was not set up to do at Dayton Hudson Corporation.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the first thing is we had a lot more resources there. So I went from being really a staff of one to a staff fully staffed of equity analysts and PM. And then on the 16 income side of three and a PM and Ellen Sapphire. And then we had some folks that did real estate ultimately and hedge funds.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was a blend. I think that we were always on the hook because you had corporate shareholders with the pension fund to make sure that you were trying to hit that actuarial assumption and to make sure that those liabilities were paid off at the lowest cost. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, you didn't have that same kind of pressure. It's a private organization. the neighbors around the neighborhood didn't even know what this place was. And so you really just reported into a, while we had the investment committee, then you had a larger board. They ran that in a much more closed-end fashion. So there wasn't the same kind of pressures, in my opinion, that you had to hit these liability payments every year. You knew you had to be fulfilling grants, but there was a pretty significant pool of assets there to do that.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's kind of an interesting dynamic where on the one hand, if you just looked at assets and liabilities, you could say, okay, at the corporate pension fund, you have actually already to return, but maybe that was, I don't know what it was at the time, six, seven, eight percent. The hospital is spending 5%. So, yeah, there's a difference about how much of what drove the difference in the investment profile came from the structure and how much came from kind of, as you intimated, a difference in the understanding of the governance board.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was very different than internal corporate executives. Here we had a very select number, maybe three folks on the investment committee, folks that Ted, you know, and David Swenson, who was there from Yale. We had the CIO from General Motors and the former CIO at IBM. So there we had a very decentralized focus on that. And I think it provided us with greater latitude to explore some of the things that I think we ultimately put into place in terms of balancing out some of the risks that you have when everything is managed by a centralized pool of portfolio managers.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as a medical research organization, Howard Hughes was really run as a pure endowment. So you didn't have liabilities in the same manner, the target corporation, or Dayton Hudson had, so we didn't have to have actuarial assumptions. I don't think that we had the same types of liability payouts. You know, we were responsible for making sure that we were able to provide grants of about 4% to 5% a year. And for those that know about Howard Hughes Medical Institute, if you're in medical research to get a grant and become an investigator at Howard Hughes is like hitting the lottery. And it's a great organization for what it does. And so we were really just responsible for building up the corporate in order to sustain all these investment research projects throughout the country. I think that in addition to that, the type of investment committee that we worked with”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is why Washington, D.C. And they said the firm is Howard Hughes Medical Institute. And I had never heard of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, but like Howard Hughes, it flies below the radar screen, and it turned out that it was a wonderful place. It was the second largest medical foundation in the world besides Burroughs and then build out the hedge fund side of things. And so I went there on a three-year deal, and at the end of the three years, the institute agreed you can either stay on or will help support you find another CIO role somewhere. Sounds like a great call option to me. And so that's what happened.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were some changes that were occurring at Target Corporation. The CEO Ken Mackey was essentially moved out of that role. I had an office not that far from Ken's on the same floor. He was moved out and another gentleman came in as a CEO. The individual that I had reported to was asked to move out of the organization. And I had a pretty great relationship with him, even though he wasn't any longer involved on the investment side. And about the same time, I got a recruiting call that said, you know, we'd love to have you come to Washington to think about working for a firm there. I said, great. I'm from the Seattle, Washington area. I said, no, wrong Washington.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And for the months of September and the beginning of October, that was a very painful trade as bonds are selling off and stocks are rising. And then October 19th came, and I think we made 1,700 basis points in a day, which was great. You know, the Wall Street Journal highlighted us on their front page, and we got a lot of recognition for that. But in retrospect, I think after we walked through that, we thought, you know, we can narrow those bands. We can win and play another day. We don't need to take that kind of risk. So I think that's probably one of the biggest lessons I learned there.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the biggest investment lesson I learned was you don't have to be dramatic in some of the bets you take to win over time and the lesson was really crystallized for me in the 1987 crash that occurred where one of the dynamic strategies that we were using was a tactical asset allocation and we had internal models that Jim had built and I was following and we'd used derivative overlays on the entire core of the pension fund. Now in the summer of 1987 interest rates were rising but the stock market was rising even further. So we made a decision because we felt that the spread between the 30-year treasury and the S&P was wide enough that our model was suggesting we go full on into treasuries. at that time so we took a 100 hedged exposure against equities and in the core of the portfolio so about 50 of the pension fund”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three to five minutes, very progressive. And I think they felt like they were going to give Jim and I enough latitude to kind of go as far as we could. The third leg of the stool is, you know, someone who you know, which was brought in by the board to help kind of oversee some of what we were doing, which was a gentleman by the name of Dick Jensen. And Dick was running first bank systems trust area there. It was brought in by the Dayton family to help provide a professional and outside professional view of some of the activities we were doing. And as time progressed, it really became Dick and I as a team evaluating lots of things. And I used him as a sounding board. And I learned so many things from Dick over the years. So that combination really worked very well to accelerate me up a learning curve over a decade there.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boy, you know, sometimes you just get lucky. And this was one of those times I was very lucky because not only did I work for a gentleman who was very bright, guy, the name of Jim Eckman. Jim was a CFA and was really somewhat introverted, but a really quantitative and thoughtful individual. I had board an investment committee that was extremely progressive for a number of retailers who represented a number of the operating subsidiaries, including what remains today, which is Target Corporation. I think there were five people on that committee, four of them all were Baker Scholars, and the other was in the first class of women to graduate from Stanford Business School. So those five people, you could talk to them about multi-period immunized bond portfolios. And even though they were retail executives, they pretty much picked up on it within”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So our pension fund was about a billion dollars and our savings plan was similar in size and then we had the Dayton Hudson Foundation and so that was a you know for the time that was a reasonably good size pool of asphalt.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I ultimately became, after my boss was promoted into a shareholder relations person, a staff of one following 14 asset classes. It was the best education.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But ultimately it turned out to be probably the best investment job I ever had. So in the following 10 years, that was such a progressive organization. And at age 28, 29, I had the ability to be leading the charge for both the pension fund and savings plan, investing in a range of things back in the 1980s and early 90s that were probably on the forefront at the time. Investing in timberland and investing in timberland, not just domestically over down in Chile, over in New Zealand, investing with folks like Sam Zell in distressed real estate, guys like Luunders, who was the epitome of value investing, having a very deep relationship with folks like that. Quant investing was something that wasn't really well known at the time, but we had the opportunity to work with folks like Battery March. So it was a very broad-based role.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I went over and I applied and I talked to these folks. They said, yeah, we're looking for somebody to help run the pension fund along with this other individual. And I said, well, you know, showing my naivety, that's not a real investment job, but it might be something that bridged the gap until I can get back to the West Coast.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so that samurai moved to Minneapolis and started at IDS Financial Services. It was an interesting time there, though, because IDS was going through some transitions, obviously being newly acquired and cultural changes, and there were a lot of defections and bringing in new people. Harvey Galla was really changing things up. And so about a year into that role, I was supposed to move into a research position, equity research position. And Mike Ducar, the research director at the time, said, I'm not taking any new MBA types here. And so I thought, boy, I really need to figure out a different avenue. And about that time, there was a firm in town, no longer in existence in its former form called Dayton Hudson Corporation. It was an old line retailer, and they were looking for an investment analyst. And I looked at that job.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What then? So I was ultimately in getting a position with the firm American Express asset management. And they were going to move me to the Shearson office into a new program, management training program in New York, which I thought was great. And gosh, about, I don't know, about a month before I was supposed to start, it was May. I get a call from the HR folks, and they said, you know, Wayne, we just acquired this new organization called IDS Financial Services. And there's this gentleman by the name of Harvey Gallop who's going to be the CEO. Harvey's going to be taking some of the MBAs that we've recruited, and he's going to start this same kind of rotational program in Minneapolis.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love journalism. I love communications and advertising. I ended up going to second degree. And at the end of those two years, decided to go to work for of all places, the Boeing Company and spent a couple of years there because I knew that in those days to go to business school, I always knew you had to work before going to business school. And then an MBA was the real next step into trying to get into a Wall Street position. And so I worked for a couple years to build up some capital and ultimately ended up going back to school to get my MBA.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Folks and said, I'd like to buy some stock. And my mom and dad didn't know how to do that because musicians don't have that kind of money and that's not their focus. And so they linked me up with an elderly gentleman who was an old-fashioned stockbroker at a firm called Burr Wilson, which was headquartered out of San Francisco, and they sent me down to his offices. And this were in days where they still had a ticker tape in the front lobby. And he gave me my choice. I had about $900 and I could buy one local stock, which was Boeing, or another stock, which was Pacific Car and Foundry. Well, I bought the 100 shares of Boeing and held on to it for many years, and it helped ultimately to pay my freshman year's tuition. So I originally went to school and at the University of Washington and picked up a degree in marketing and finance out of the University of Washington. My fifth year, though, I decided to go an extra year because”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I didn't get that from my family upbringing. My parents were professional musicians. And I was pretty industrious and had a lot of lawn mowing jobs and I had accumulated some money. And one day I went to my”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business. Ted, I've always had a real strong appreciation for what's going on in the stock market. I think I started out by my first 100 shares of Boeing stock when I was in seventh grade.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My guest on today's show is Wayne Wicker, the senior vice president and chief investment officer of ICMA Retirement Corporation, an asset manager that oversees fifty billion dollars across more than a million retirement accounts of city and county public sector employees throughout the United States. Before joining ICMA in 2004, Wayne had a distinguished career as an allocator and manager, starting as an allocator at the Corporate Pension Fund of Dayton Hudson, now Target Corporation, in the 1980s, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute endowment in the mid nineteen nineties, after which he moved to direct investing in large cap growth equities for seven years at Cadence Capital Management in nineteen ninety eight. Our conversation covers Wayne's career path, multi asset investing, and the ins and outs of managing defined contribution plans as a fiduciary and as a business.”
2018-03-19 · Capital Allocators · Wayne Wicker - Managing for Millions who Matter (Capital Allocators, EP.44) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source