Bruce MacDonald – The Playbook for Building a Mid-Sized Endowment from Scratch (EP.495)
Episode publishedPodcast: Capital Allocators – Inside th...Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
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When there's just five of you, you can't do everything. You have to make a choice about things to leave out. Because you're leaving out a lot, you really have to be focused on picking the right things to lean into. Our portfolio probably looks a little bit different in that there's a lot of things that we've decided to not spend our time on because we believed we'd be better spent spending time elsewhere. Things like private credit, China, Latin America, Africa. We decided to keep focused on other areas of opportunity. Market timing is a mug's game. As one of my old bosses said, endowments hav
I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's show is Bruce McDonald, the CEO and CIO of the Virginia Commonwealth University Investment Management Company, which runs 2 and a half billion dollars for VCU's endowment and health system. Bruce joined the university in 2015 and shortly thereafter had the opportunity to sell the portfolio and start fresh. Since being promoted to CIO in 2022, VCU has been a top decile performer with a team of just five investment professionals. Our conversation covers Bruce unconventional path from a religion major at Wesleyan to fixed income
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Bruce, thanks so much for joining me.
It's great to be here too.
Why don't you take
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