Unlocking Investment Wisdom: A Conversation with Ted Seides, CFA

In our inaugural episode, host Sarah Samuels, CFA, CAIA, sits down with Ted Seides, CFA, founder of Capital Allocators, an ecosystem that includes podcasts, gatherings, and advisory. The two talk about Ted's career journey, advice for investment professionals managing their careers, his bet with Warren Buffett, and his overall investment philosophy.

 

Show notes

Ted Seides, CFA is the founder of Capital Allocators, an ecosystem that includes podcasts, gatherings, and advisory. Ted launched the Capital Allocators podcast in 2017. The show reached 17MM downloads as of September 2023 and has been recognized as the top institutional investing podcast.

 

Alongside the podcast, Ted created Capital Allocators Summits with friend and industry veteran Rahul Moodgal to bring together industry leaders to connect and learn. He developed Capital Allocators University to teach senior professionals non-investment disciplines that are essential to investment success. He also advises managers on business strategy and allocators on investment strategy.

 

In March 2021, Ted published his second book, Capital Allocators: How the world's elite money managers lead and invest that distills key lessons from the first 150 episodes of the podcast. In October 2022, he was honored as Citizen of the Year at With Intelligence’s inaugural Allocator Prizes.

 

From 2002 to 2015, Ted was co-founder of Protégé Partners LLC and served as President and Co-Chief Investment Officer. Protégé was a leading multibillion-dollar alternative investment firm that invested in and seeded small hedge funds. In 2010, Larry Kochard and Cathleen Rittereiser profiled Ted in the book Top Hedge Fund Investors. In 2016, Ted authored his first book, So You Want to Start a Hedge Fund: Lessons for Managers and Allocators, to share lessons from his experience.

 

Ted began his career from 1992-1997 under the tutelage of David Swensen at the Yale University Investments Office. During his five years at Yale, Ted focused on external public equity managers and internal fixed income portfolio management. Following business school, he spent two years investing directly in public and private equity at three of Yale’s managers, Brahman Capital, Stonebridge Partners, and J.H. Whitney & Company.

 

With aspirations to demonstrate the benefits of hedge funds on institutional portfolios to a broad audience, Ted made a non-profitable wager with Warren Buffett that pitted the 10-year performance of the S&P 500 against a selection of five hedge fund of funds from 2008-2017.

 

Ted writes a blog called What Ted’s Thinking and previously wrote columns for Institutional Investor, CFA Institute’s Enterprising Investor, the late Peter L. Bernstein’s Economics and Portfolio Strategy.

 

He is a member of the Advisory Council for the Alliance for Decision Education and a participant in the Hero’s Journey Foundation. Ted previously served as Trustee and member of the investment committee at the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Trustee and head of the Programming Committee for the Greenwich Roundtable, and an Advisory Board member of Citizen Schools-New York.

 

Ted graduated Cum Laude from Yale University and received an MBA from Harvard Business School.

 

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