YouSaid · the spoken record

Will Cook

lines on the record: 62
first: 2021-12-02
most recent: 2021-12-02
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

“The guy had the old black squawk box on his desk every morning, the broker I was working for. And the highlight of my day was the cell site analyst getting on in the morning and telling the brokers what stocks they were going to pitch to their clients that day. And that made me further interested in investing. And then after college, I was lucky enough to get a job at Morgan Stanley and didn't really want to be an investment banker, but it was good training. But one really interesting thing happened to me at Morgan Stanley, which is the group that was sitting right next to me in the next bullpen over, took Netscape Public about a month after I got there. So it's a pretty exciting time. This was 1995. And it made me really want to get involved in investing in interesting and exciting companies and was able to get a job at General Atlantic Partners, which was a lot smaller firm at the time, but a really wonderful firm that really exposed me to the buy side and investing. And then my career went on from there.”
2021-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Will Cook - Sunriver Management (Manager Meetings, EP.22) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, Ben, thanks, and it's great to talk to you as always. So I didn't grow up wanting to be an investor. I actually studied something called political and social thought and minored in philosophy at college and then worked at a law firm for summer and realized that studying the philosophy of law is quite different than the day-to-day grind of practicing law. And I became exposed to some of the undergrad business school classes being taught at UVA where I went and I was able to take a class security analysis class and spent a whole semester reviewing and analyzing Raytheon, a government IT services company at the time was making patriot missiles, which I thought was really cool, is around the time of the First Gulf War. And it really opened my eyes that, wow, there's a career out there where I can just learn about really cool, exciting companies for my job. And that made me interested in that. And then the next summer, I was able to work at a regional brokerage firm, which no longer exists called Wheat First. And my favorite thing about that job was literally”
2021-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Will Cook - Sunriver Management (Manager Meetings, EP.22) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We own them primarily for their alpha generation and particularly what we found attractive was this focus on the mid and small cap betweener companies. And so they're part of a broader portfolio of long shore equity, long only, and some other hedge fund strategies as well. And we have them in that small and mid-cap niche. And as I said, particularly what they're able to bring on the short side, I think differentiates them versus a lot of other managers that we own. So they play a valuable role within the equity component of our portfolios and particularly for clients that are looking for a high alpha orientated strategy.”
2021-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Will Cook - Sunriver Management (Manager Meetings, EP.22) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what we feel that we can opine on and assess is the process. And so we picked a couple of examples at random from Will and we said we're coming in the office, we're coming on site, we'd like to see the write up, but not only the investment write-up. And research the email traffic, everything printed off in the meeting room, and we're going to sit there and we're going to go through it all. And then if you could come in afterwards and let us outpine on it and tell you maybe where that's different from what you're saying in the pitch box, then that's what we're going to do. I would say quite testing. You know, not all managers are going to be up for that, but Will was.”
2021-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Will Cook - Sunriver Management (Manager Meetings, EP.22) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think there were a couple of things that we did with him that reflect that. The first bit is around reference checking. I mean, a lot of people do references. For us, it's really a thorough reference checking process. And so he had a lot of former colleagues that he'd worked with. And we spoke to many of them. We spoke to companies that he had previously invested with on the management team side. We spoke to research providers that he used. And we also tried to build a personal picture of him. So we went out for dinner with him and his wife just to get a sense for the human. I mean, ultimately we're backing people as well as a process. And so we wanted to see him in his kind of natural habitat with his wife. The other element, which we'll allude to was quite a bruising encounter, is that with long short equity managers in particular, we tend not to go toe-to-toe with him when it comes to individual stock knowledge. I mean, they're doing this day in, day out. We're not. So there's always going to be a big advantage towards them.”
2021-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Will Cook - Sunriver Management (Manager Meetings, EP.22) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you and your team at Cardano do have this reputation for very deep and very creative due diligence. And I'm curious if there are any examples of something that you did in particular with Will that come to mind in that process.”
2021-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Will Cook - Sunriver Management (Manager Meetings, EP.22) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I kind of want to be careful with what I say on this one, but I think that probably one of the differences between Will and maybe some of his peers was that we felt he'd been very thoughtful around how he had set the business up and not only who he partnered with initially, because we were early stage, we weren't day one with the Sun River guys. We came a little bit later. But we felt that Will had really thought about things and perhaps gone a different route to some of what his peers had and I felt like he'd also been a little bit more market friendly with some of his terms and a lot of his peers had launched with kind of three-year rolling liquidity, which we can do that type of structure, but the bar is very high. And so Will had gone down a different route, had a different back end. And we thought that he was in a stable position to really grow the business.”
2021-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Will Cook - Sunriver Management (Manager Meetings, EP.22) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shorting is not just a mirror image of the long side, there are other things that need to be considered. And I think one important area is the kind of sentiment market feel, which I think you need more on the short side than perhaps you maybe do on the long side. And so we're looking really for a combination of stock IQ as we refer to it and stock EQ.”
2021-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Will Cook - Sunriver Management (Manager Meetings, EP.22) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a combination really of quantitative and qualitative analysis. I think on the quantitative side, we really like to get our hands dirty there, doing a lot of analysis on hit rates, slugging percentages, really slicing and dicing returns and looking at where the manager has had success or not. On the qualitative side, there are a couple of things that we look at. What we find is that not all people are built to short successfully. And so there are certain personality traits characteristics that we tend to find in successful short sellers. And so that kind of skeptical nature mindset, they tend to be quite quirky individuals. And so it's really trying to tease that out in our underwriting and focusing on that as well as the process side of things. And I think that what we're looking for there is a recognition from managers that”
2021-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Will Cook - Sunriver Management (Manager Meetings, EP.22) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is left well trafficked in and really looking for guys where the environment can be a tailwind rather than a headwind. And so that leads us to managers like Will who operate in between the cracks mid smaller cap companies, maybe regions that are less well trafficked in like Japan has been an area where we spent a lot of time. So we think it definitely has a role to play in the portfolio, but it's select opportunities which lend themselves to Alpha generation.”
2021-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Will Cook - Sunriver Management (Manager Meetings, EP.22) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good place to start. We definitely see a role for long shore equity investing within our portfolios. But I think the managers that qualify for us are few and far between, we have a real focus on alpha. And we want to see managers able to produce alpha on both the long and the short side. And I think a lot of managers that we come across are very adept, consistent at generating long alpha, but those that can really generate short alpha are really few and far between. And because of the way that we're set up, we can access managers long only, long short, or other strategies. And so it's really alpha that's key. I think when it comes to long short, the other thing that I'd say we're focused on is not all long short is created equally. And so we are looking for managers that maybe operate in an inefficient area or an area that”
2021-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Will Cook - Sunriver Management (Manager Meetings, EP.22) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On today's manager meeting, Ben Cooper interviews Will Cook. Ben is the head of manager research at Cardano Group, a market-leading investment advisor for pension schemes in the UK and Netherlands that oversees 15 billion pounds of discretionary assets and advises on 50 billion pounds of assets. Will is the portfolio manager at Sun River Management, a fundamental longshort equity investment firm he founded in 2014 after a long tenure at Ziff Brothers Investments. Sun River focuses on underfollowed mid and small cap stocks. Before they get going, Ben and I discussed longshore equity investing, selecting Sun River, Cardano's exhaustive research process, and the fit of Sun River in their client portfolios. Great to see you”
2021-12-02 · Capital Allocators · Will Cook - Sunriver Management (Manager Meetings, EP.22) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source