Beyond Stocks And Bonds: Investing In Innovation With William Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association

 

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In this episode of the Seven in Seven Show, Zack Ellison sits down with William J. Kelly, the President & CEO of the CAIA Association, to dive into the world of investing innovation. William brings decades of experience from his time as CEO of Boston Partners and as one of the founding partners of Boston Partners Asset Management. Together, they discuss how alternative investments are reshaping the financial landscape.

In this episode, Zack and William discuss:

1. Are You Truly Diversified? The 60-40 Portfolio Misconception
2. Choosing the Right Venture Debt Manager
3. Why Baby Boomers Should Embrace Innovation in Investments
4. Ideal Principles For Investing

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Beyond Stocks And Bonds: Investing In Innovation With William Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association

Introduction To CAIA And Alternative Investments

Welcome to the show. I have with me Bill Kelly. Bill is the CEO and President of the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst Association. This goes by the name of CAIA, and the acronym is CAIA. You’ll often see this designation behind the names of many of the best investors in the world. I think of the CAIA designation as very similar to the CFA except it’s focused on alternative investments. We’ll talk about what alternative investments are, but think of them largely as everything that is not stocks or bonds, private credit, venture capital, private equity, real estate, commodities, digital assets, and all the cool stuff.

All the stuff that makes you a lot of money. I should mention also that I’m a member of the CAIA Association. I’ve been a charter holder since 2015. I’m also on the board of the Southwest Chapter of CAIA in Los Angeles as a member of the board since 2019. I’ve done a lot of work with Bill and his team at CAIA. I’m just really impressed with what they’ve brought to the industry. They’re really the leaders in global alternative investment education. Bill’s really the spearhead and face of the entire organization. Bill, thanks so much for joining. It’s great to have you here.

My pleasure, and thanks for all that you do, Zack. It’s a pleasure to see you in this forum. Thank you.

You’ve been very successful in this business for 40 years now. I’d love to hear how you got here and how you built CAIA into the leader in the space.

I think you give me great credit just from the get-go. I appreciate that, Zack. Longevity maybe means something. Forty years sounds like a long time and it goes by in a New York minute where I’m from originally. I’ve set myself up for success not really knowing anything about CAIA because it did not exist 40 years ago, but I got out of college, got my CPA. I bought into professionalism long before I knew anything about CAIA and even CFA for that matter. I think that may have set the stage for the latter stages of my life but I progressed through the buy side of asset management for maybe the first 25, or 30 years with a short stay in public accounting.

It got me to understand how to read a balance sheet, how a business works, and those skills have always served me very well. Throughout the course of my career, certainly, maybe I learned this at Pricewaterhouse, that every decision that I made as an accountant, every decision I made inside of asset management, there was a client on the other side.

This concept of what it really meant to be a fiduciary, I was living and breathing that before I really had any appreciation of what that definition meant. I think that is an early underpinning as well. Then being incessantly curious, understanding how things work, asking questions, asking follow-up questions, never being afraid to appear stupid. I think the further you get on in your career, nobody at my age wants to look like we don’t know something, but the pace of change, and we’re going to get into this, is happening at warp speed.

I think we as professionals have a constantly challenge, understand, and follow up. Ultimately, this last decade at CAIA, I think might’ve been destiny. It was not part of a grand plan, but I feel very honored to be entrusted in this role by members like you, and by the board of directors I serve. Ultimately by all the countless investors that may never know CAIA, they may never know me, but hopefully, the work we’re doing is going to give better outcomes for them.

I can tell you the CAIA designations are really grown and prominent. When I was first looking at it and learning about it roughly ten years ago, before you started as president and CEO, almost nobody had heard of it. I was very much looking for other ways to learn about alternative assets and there were very few options out there. At the time CAIA seemed very interesting to me. I started studying for the exams and wound up getting the designation in 2015. Back then, almost nobody knew what the CAIA was, honestly.

They knew what the CFA was, but they didn’t know what the CAIA was. Now, it seems very, very prominent. I spoke at about 50 investment conferences last year, and at every single one of them, there were marquee speakers who all had the CAIA designation. I’m seeing a lot of folks that larger institutional investors, in particular, pensions, endowments, large family offices, big asset managers.

They’re all getting the CAIA credential. You’ve done a great job in terms of building it, and it’s so different today from what it was ten years ago. Before we get into the seven key questions that we’re going to ask, I wanted to just get a sense of how you built it, almost as an entrepreneur in a sense, you took something that was there, but you built it into something so much bigger. What were the key principles that went into building it?

Maybe a few things, not to sound overly deferential, but I’m standing on the shoulders of a lot of giants, a lot of allocators like Mark Anson at the Common Fund, and Jane Buchan, who was the founder of PAAMCO. These were early members of the very first class of CAIA. A lot of big global asset allocators, asset owners, pension consultants, then a lot of professionals in the last decade, folks like you, Zach, that were there.

I think you folks were early, but maybe you could almost argue maybe early, but on time in that, you look at the evolution of the endowment model while it’s 50-some-odd years old today, really institutional adoption of all outside of the big university endowments didn’t start happening to the late 1980s, early 1990s, and then CAIA came about. I think we were starting to see this transformation about greater efficiency in the public markets.

Smart asset allocators say, “If the duration of the call in my assets is going to be very long, why not line that up against a longer duration investment arising around private market investments like private equity, venture, venture debt, real estate infrastructure, etc, and off to the races. While we’re small, if you look at the AUM pie globally, all on an asset base is probably 16%-ish. Revenue-wise, it’s almost 50%, and we’ll probably get into some of that in a moment.

If you look at the per capita of AUM for the almost 14,000 members, we have a CAIA versus the per capita at the CFA. There’s probably not as much of an imbalance as one might think versus name recognition on the street. We’re going to be talking more about diversification. I like the place we’re in. I think the world is moving toward us because professionalism and education matter to the end client. I think all we’ve done is push on that gas pedal as hard as we can to raise the spectrum around why professionalism matters.

The Importance Of Diversification In Investments

Let’s dig into the seven core questions. The first is what are alternative investments and why are they oftentimes superior to traditional investments in stocks and bonds?

Some of my colleagues, Zack, give me a hard time when I say this, but I think it’s a very simple way of describing it. When I spell allternatives, it has two Ls in it, Allternatives. Why did 60/40 come about? The 40 and the 60 were uncorrelated. All your eggs were not in one basket. We saw in 2022, and that might’ve been an aberration when there was a high correlation and you were not protected, the conversation shifted toward 60/40 dead or alive. We’ll come to this. I don’t necessarily like that approach, but are there ways of getting broader diversification so you don’t have all your eggs in one basket?

I think if we could discuss and maybe explain to the end client the importance of diversification over the long term, I think that’s 90% of the battle, so to speak. We’re going to have a discussion around, whether you understand public equity or understand public debt. Let’s take a little bit out of those two buckets and create this third bucket called alternatives. What are alternatives? It’s opaque, it’s got high fees, it uses leverage, but you’re going to get a lot of upside return over here. I don’t like that narrative. I like the narrative more about now I can get better risk-adjusted returns for the long term.

Long-term investment success is about one thing: diversification. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! Share on X

Even with a high net worth individual, a mass affluent, let’s have a discussion as if I were talking to the late great David Swenson at Yale. Let’s look at the liability side of your balance sheet and what are you saving for. If a big part of your savings today, regardless of the size, is retirement and you’re 25 years old, let’s try to get that invested for the long term and try to find optionality around some of these private market investments.

Democratization Of Alternative Investments

If Jim Cramer or some other talking head on CNBC says something crazy about, “The US is going to default, go to cash.” Don’t worry about it. Just go for the long term. I think it’s a combination of defining what an alternative is, which maybe as you said earlier, Zack, is anything other than public equity and public debt. I think any investment is an alternative to something else. If you’re getting something that’s not correlated to something you’re already holding, you get a better risk-adjusted return for the long term.

You hit on a really important point in terms of diversification. A lot of people think they’re diversified because they have a lot of stocks and a lot of bonds in their portfolio. The reality is that’s actually a very small percentage of the investable universe now and they’re very highly correlated and they happen for over a decade. Stocks and bonds oftentimes are going up and down together in risk-on, risk-off type moves. A lot of that is behavioral in the sense that people tend to get exuberant and fearful at the same time.

How do they enter exit investments? It’s usually through public stocks and public bonds because that’s what’s liquid. That’s what they can trade on the screens. Ultimately, I think that if people are interested in a diversified portfolio, which all investors should be, that’s principle number one in terms of long-term performance, you need to have a diversified portfolio. They need to actually diversify across other asset classes.

That includes real estate and it includes private credit, private equity, venture capital, and commodities and digital assets which are emerging, for instance. I just think there’s this misconception that you can have a well-diversified portfolio while being in a 60-40 portfolio. You can be well-diversified within stocks and bonds, but that doesn’t protect you against these macro moves.

The other thing that I think that oftentimes investors miss is that being in alt might mean that you’re giving up some liquidity because real estate and private equity and private credit tend to be a lot less liquid, of course, than public securities. You’re also protecting yourself against selling at the lows and buying at the highs. A couple of my previous guests have taunted me about this in the sense that being in private assets and alternative assets actually enables you to just sit tight and be invested through the cycle and not be your own worst enemy in terms of buying and selling at the wrong times. I’m curious how you think about that.

I absolutely agree. I think these are strategies that are meant for the long term. I don’t know if many investors understand an illiquidity premium or complexity premium. We talk about these words as if they’re very important and this is the sum total of your gain or your possibility for gain over above the beta, so more alpha. I think it’s Hamilton Lane did a very interesting study on this. I think this is the most compelling reason I saw for the private markets. They looked at every company they could find data on that had revenue north of $100 million, public or private.

I think they came up with over 20,000 companies. Then they said, “How many of these companies are private versus public?” 87% were private. The real value proposition is capital formation and value creation is happening in the private markets full stop. If you want to be where the growth is, put aside illiquidity premiums. You need to be in that market where the U.S. equity markets. It’s not only become more of a mature market, it’s become very efficient and I’m not anti-active management.

87% of companies with over $100 million in revenue are private. The real value creation is happening in private markets. Share on X

This might be a year with volatility where active management and maybe focusing a little bit more on value versus growth makes some sense, but it’s very hard to beat an index. At the point you made before, Zack, the S&P 500, that’s a cap-weighted index. It’s a bet on just a handful of stocks and a big technology bet based on how that index is constructed. I don’t know if many investors really understand and appreciate that. Maybe to sum this up, I mentioned 60-40 debt or alive, I think to the point you just made.

I think about the 60 bucket. The equity risk premium is equity risk premium. Can I get some very cheap by buying some form of really diversified beta in the public markets? Yes, go ahead and do that. Can I buy equity risk premiums in the private markets? Yes, you should go ahead and do that. Can I hedge some of it? Yes, you can get a hedge fund. If I want to access it through commodities, I can get exposure that way too, and the same with the 40. I think we’ve got to think about a broader aperture for getting access.

Maybe to sum this up, I don’t know if this is still in question one or not, it’s going to be a long 45 minutes. If you think about what the investor wants when it comes to investing, liquidity, liquidity, liquidity, that’s what they want, but is that what they truly need? Instead of explaining what you truly need and why and talking about time horizons, it’s so much easier to create an interval fund or a daily liquidity fund, slap a private market label on it, and off you go. I think by doing that, most likely, you’re going to rinse out the value proposition. You’ve left a back door wide open for the investor to sneak through when they get very nervous. I think you’ve sapped the very best part of the value proposition by doing that.

Invest in innovation or risk being left behind. The future belongs to those who embrace new asset classes and tech. Share on X

Investors want liquidity, but what they need is higher risk-adjusted returns. The reality is they’re never going to utilize all that liquidity anyway. It’s funny, I was talking to somebody the other day about interval funds, which offer more liquidity than closed-end funds and nobody ever actually accesses that liquidity. You’re basically paying for liquidity that you don’t need. I used to think about this a lot when I was at Sun Life, we were running 25 billion in our portfolios and we would always look at the liquidity of an investment. The reality was we weren’t going to retrade that investment for probably 5 or 10 years anyway.

That liquidity fades over time, certainly in the bond world where a newly issued bond has a lot of liquidity because it’s called the on-the-run bond and it’s basically where investors are transacting but once that bond is no longer the new bond and there are other bonds that have been issued It becomes a liquid. Why would you give up yield to have a quote liquid investment? That’s ultimately never going to be traded and when you do want to trade it won’t have liquidity. It’s amusing to me but I think it’s one of the things that investors fundamentally do wrong. Do they have no idea how to manage liquidity?

Warren Buffett, one of my favorite quotes in Buffett is, his favorite holding period is forever. Now, does that mean he holds forever? No, but he goes in and he buys companies. He doesn’t buy stocks. There’s a very important distinction there. Buying a company connotates long-term investment, even though he could trade out on T plus 1 or 2. I think that mentality. Very easy thing to explain, harder to grasp, but unless we get the client to focus on that, I think investing in alternatives is bound to be suboptimal for them.

What are the themes you’re seeing in the alt space now in terms of where investors are gravitating and how new investors are getting into the space?

I brought a concept, democratization. It’s hard to go to a conference or pick up an industry publication and not talk about the rise of more retail investors. I mentioned before that the global AUM pie, I think this is the Boston Consulting Group puts out this annual report, which I find to be very good. They have a separate pie in there about the dominant asset owner. I think it was just last year when the institutional asset owner was eclipsed. The retail investor was 51-ish and the institutional investor 49.

You think about when was the last time we minted a new defined benefit plan. I don’t have one at CAIA. I don’t think you have one at ARI. We’re now all responsible for our own retirement. If that’s the case, why should we just have access to public equity and public debt? If you think about the GP, there are no dummies themselves. They’re saying, “If the flows from these big DB pools are in gradual but secular decline, I need to find access to the more retail-oriented investor.” We’ve seen that the DOL may be indicating an easing off on the illiquidity component and target date funds.

The SEC has been tinkering with the definition of an accredited investor. The camel’s nose is definitely in the tent around democratization. Where do we go with this? On the one hand, I feel you and I and everybody, all you listeners, everybody out there needs to have broader access. Who’s doing my due diligence for me? If you look at performance dispersion from the medium to the top court trial and virtually any one of these alternative asset classes, it’s enormous. You’ve got to not only say, I want to put, not to write vernacular, I can go back to this, but I want to be 5% exposed to private equity.

What does that even mean? 5% exposed to the median manager? Don’t bother. If you’re going to think about this space you ought to have a partner that’s thinking about, “How do I get that access above that meeting? How do I get closer to that top quartile or quintile manager?” That’s where you got to be thinking. If you don’t have a partner and a trusted due diligence agent there, it’s going to be very difficult to be happy at the end of the day.

How do smaller investors get access? What I see in the RIA space is a lot of crappy products, frankly, in the alt space. It’s total garbage for the most part. You’ve got a lot of RIAs that are either offering their clients 60/40 and charging them 50 basis points, so 125 basis points a year to put them in something that they could get access to for three basis points, which to me is a scam in its own right. You’ve also got folks that are in alt accessing really crappy strategies that ultimately aren’t going to perform. Certainly, there are very few top quartile managers are accessible. What’s an RIA to do? They need to get access to ALTs, but the access they do have is oftentimes mediocre access at best.

There’s maybe a smart lawyer out there that can unionize them, Zack. I would hate to be an RIA right now. I think they’ve got a very difficult challenge. They’ve got clients who may not be happy with the current state of play in the 60-40, they have expectations of returns that are going to be maybe north of what that index can deliver on a real basis. Nominal with inflation, who the hell knows where inflation is going to sustain? I don’t think it’s 2%. There are a lot of challenges there. I think the client’s saying, “Go get me something that has a higher yield. You cannot really go and manufacture that and you cannot go and dial up the next private credit offering necessarily either without doing your homework.”

If you compare those wants and needs to the good old days when there was a very smart sovereign wealth fund, there might’ve been a pension consultant in the middle, and then there’s a GP on the other side. It was a very narrow group of very, very smart people making very important decisions. If you and I, as individuals, want to have that same access to the other end of the pipe, we’re going to an RIA maybe directly, but that RIA does not have that product on that shelf. They don’t have the depth of due diligence resources that Cambridge Associates might have, yet we want them to deliver for us a highly diversified, highly skilled manager.

Very hard to do. I don’t have a crisp answer for you other than the fact that these RIAs are going to have to invest in education, invest in professionalism. I have more CAIAs, hiremore CFAs. This is part of why CAIAs created this unified platform, which is going to be a series of micro-bandages because the thought of an RIA running a very busy practice, and taking time off to study hundreds of hours for high-stakes exams is not going to be practical either. We’re hoping through these first two launches, we did one private credit. I think you were proudly featured, I went through it.

I got the certificate myself. I saw your smiling face on there. Also, we’re doing one on digital assets as well to at least raise the awareness quotient for the RIA space. It’s going to take a village. I think CAIA is trying to do its part, but I think if we’re all focused on, yes, the client needs better outcomes, but we’ve got to think about how we’re going to get there and think about value creation, not asset gathering. I fear that we’re in an asset-gathering phase because the LPs want access to these investors and whether or not they’re going to get the end result they’re looking for, we cannot leave that to chance. We’ve got to make sure that we’ll be leaning into that very hard.

I think you hit on the key point which is finding good advisors that are well-educated and that have experience in the space. It’s not a magic bullet per se. There’s not one specific thing folks need to do to find good alternative investments and to get good access, but it all starts with people who know what they’re doing, who understand ALTS, and a lot of that comes from CAIA and going through the curriculum and accessing the other additional resources in addition to the designation. To me, the designation is just the starting point.

There are so many more offerings that CAIA has where you can continue to learn. Finding advisors who are continuing to learn, who are intellectually curious, who have experience in these strategies. If you want to find a good venture debt manager, find somebody who’s focused on venture debt. You want to find a good private equity manager, find somebody who’s worked in the private equity industry for a long time, is successful, etc. It starts with that education. I think it’s also incumbent upon the asset owners, whether that’s an individual, high net worth individual, or an institution to really find advisors and institutions that can work with them and meet their specific needs.

In the RIA space, I advise people to find advisors that offer access to alternatives that have experience in the space that are able to diligence managers and find which managers are good. As you said earlier, a mid-level manager isn’t really going to provide access returns, but you get that top-quartile manager and it’s going to be great for your portfolio. Ultimately, those are the RIAs that are getting inflows right now. I’ve seen a lot of RIAs that are just losing assets because they’re having a hard time explaining to their clients why they’re charging them 1% to lose them 20% in a 60/40 portfolio.

To me, they should just refund everybody’s money. Again, if you were in a 60-40 portfolio last year and paid for it, you should get your money back. Your fees. I mean, you should not be paying for that. I just don’t believe that anything was gained by paying for that type of access. Now, what you should do is go find a manager or an RIA that’s earning what you’re paying them. That’s earning that through differentiated access and through access to quite frankly better managers.

I think this therein lies the challenge because some of these clients are in the 60/40, maybe they understand everything they need to know from a base-level case for alternatives and have actively decided with their RIA, that they’re not comfortable being there. That’s the case they’ve made the decision with eyes wide open, but the RIA has got to be smart enough to be able to talk about the opportunities and the risks. I think what makes this even more complicated is when you get to areas like digital assets, or even if we want to go there to cryptocurrencies, where if the answer is, “No, that’s toxic waste because Charlie Munger said it is.”

That’s not good enough. You got to talk about the huge volatility and huge risk components of it, but put aside cryptocurrencies. I think having some portion of your long-term portfolio in innovation because there’s a lot that’s going on that we don’t know about. That might be earlier stage VC as an example and less on the crypto play, but maybe as they say, the picks and shovels around the plumbing, distributed electric.

There could be a lot of very interesting things going on in this space. I think you’ve got to make sure that the client’s going to take the cue from you the RIA, and you want to come to them with information and be able to listen and help them make smart decisions or know what their risk tolerance is and help make them smarter about what the opportunity set is. I think that’s a hard job, but we’ve got to invest in it. Otherwise, the end client is going to be left in a bad place or suboptimal place.

You hit on the key theme of investing in innovation and that’s what we do at ARI with our venture debt fund. I’m curious. What are you seeing in terms of the innovation space, and where do you think that’s headed over the next couple of years?

I think if you look at some of these developments in generative AI, more formally known as chat GPT, and I just saw something. I know this is a timeless podcast, Zack, but Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan just put something out last night that I saw talking about they’re creating a JPMorgan, a gener of AI bot that’s going to provide investment advice. I posted this on LinkedIn before I went to bed last night. I think it has 20,000 views in about 8 or 9 hours. People I don’t even know are weighing in and most of it is very negative.

Maybe back to the point at hand, there’s still a lot of sorting out that has to be done. The first mover in the internet face of the market, Web 1.0, if that’s the right way to describe it. The dominant players don’t exist anymore, but it went through iterations and we are where we are today and most of us don’t know a world without it. I started my working career without even emails. I would send memos to people, and think about the inefficiency of that. A couple of things. With all of this machine learning, natural language processing, and generative AI, there are a lot of very interesting things going on there.

To not be in that game, you’re shorting it to some degree because you’re along something else that is maybe more tied to traditional finance. Then I think the other aspect, and I’m on the tail end of this having been born in 1960, I’m on the very last legs of the baby boomers. Baby boomers think they’re going to live forever. They think they’re going to be relevant forever and they do everything they can to push that narrative and to think that they’re going to check into a nursing home in their mid-sixties and claim bingo and marja the rest of their life.

That’s not going to happen. I think around healthcare and health tech and innovation. There’s a lot happening there too. The beginning of that hype is early-stage VC and to be involved in that at some point in the portfolio recognizing that not everything’s going to be a home run. You may strike out once or twice, but having a diversified manager there, I think having that innovation in your portfolio, it does make a lot of sense for most investors.

I consider innovation an asset class in and of itself. One of the things that’s really driven a ton of demand and interest in venture debt is that it provides access to innovation as an asset class by providing loans to the top of innovative companies that are VC-backed and it does it in a safer way. I’m curious from your perspective CAIA has included venture debt now in its curriculum and in its private credit curriculum. What are you seeing in terms of what’s driving interest in venture debt and why it might be a safer way to invest in innovation?

This is your space. A lot more about it than I do, Zack, but I think in this space, I think with venture, you get some yield, which maybe de-risks the portfolio. The holding early on. Oftentimes, there are some conversion features, so maybe you can get a little bit of an equity play as well. It’s a smaller part of the private markets by a wide sum. If I think about sourcing alpha anywhere, what are the hallmarks of alpha?

Rate and efficiency and smaller size, that you want to be fishing in a nice little pond with nobody else around versus having these big haulers with nets next to you. I think that describes the buyout space. It describes maybe the public equity space where everybody’s chasing the same idea and stuff is being bid up and how are you going to end up there? I suspect that you probably in some of the deals you’re doing don’t have a lot of competition and you could take a closer look at this company and be a little bit more thoughtful and maybe have a bigger say in terms of covenants and protections.

I think these all yield better outcomes for the end investor. I think also feeds this innovation pipe. If we get that turned off, and I know there have been fundraising challenges across the private market spectrum coming out of last year, but we cannot afford at this stage to shut the innovation pipe off. I think to the extent that you could find opportunities there with the right investor.

Innovation As An Asset Class

Innovation ultimately is what’s driving value creation. That’s not going to change. The stage you play at and the types of structures that you’re involved in, it was your choice. Ultimately, you have to be involved in innovation or you’re going to miss most of the upside. Ultimately it’s usually the earlier-stage companies that are driving more of that value creation and also have a lot more upside potential. Sometimes they have a higher risk, but the risk-adjusted returns are higher in venture equity and venture debt than they are in public market securities. We’re almost out of time, but I wanted to talk to you about the core investment principles that you live by and things that you’ve learned over 40 years that work for you but should work for everybody.

I would say maybe first and foremost, and it’s been a theme throughout this last 30 or so minutes, Zack is long-termism. I hardly ever sell anything. I have some holdings that I bought back in the early part of my career. Over the long term, things generally work out. Have I laid a few eggs? Absolutely. For the most part, even some of these better investments have, worse investments have a tendency to do better over some period of time. I also have been invested with trusted partners and having been at the Boston Company and then a founder of Boston Partners.

I’ve had the benefit of working very closely with a lot of very smart investors who also happen to be friends. I’m not saying every investment cycle has been great, but that has served me very well too. Finding trusted partners is critically important. I do work with an outside firm too, so I’m very careful about who I choose there as a partner and I listen to them because they have access and visibility into things that I don’t really see all that much. I think a lot of it comes down to pillow comfort too. I think that I was probably, as I look back, over the last 40 years, maybe slightly more conservative than I should have been as I sit here today.

I have five kids and they find many ways of attacking your balance sheet even when you’re sleeping at night. Being more liquid was helpful there. I think thinking about the long-term, thinking about diversification, I think if you can get those two things right, I think it solves a multitude of concerns and challenges. As opposed to, I think many people are trying to market time the way to better outcomes and constantly be trying to hit that double or triple and occasional home run. If that’s your approach, I think you end up striking out more often than not and maybe hitting a rare single or double, maybe you’ll find a home run, but going to be very tough to do.

Bill, it’s been great having you on. I really appreciate you coming on and love what you’ve done with CAIA.  I just think it’s such an incredible resource and encourages everybody to learn more about CAIA and get the designation. Certainly, look at their other resources and get involved in some of the local chapters. Bill, you’re very accessible on LinkedIn. You’re always posting really interesting stuff. I encourage people to find you on LinkedIn as well and get into the dialogue around alternative assets and don’t miss out.

Great advice.

Thanks, everybody. See you next time on the show.

 

Important Links

• Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst Association
• Twitter – CAIA Bill Kelly
• CAIA CEO Bill Kelly on the Portfolio of the Future: Allocation, Democratization, and Education (virtual) Article
• Educational Alpha: What Baffles Me Blog
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• LinkedIn – Zack Ellison
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• DISCLAIMER – 7in7 Show

 

About William Kelly