Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508)
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Release Date: 06/29/2026
Interviewing: Interdisciplinary Skills – The Art of the Interview
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
This week’s Summer Series is a highly atypical episode, where I appear as the guest. Matt Breitfelder from Apollo asked to interview me about interviewing, something I learned far more from hosting the show the last nine years than I ever did while interviewing managers for 20. The conversation has been sufficiently popular that it made the Summer Series on investment process. Any leader should see for themselves the benefits of elite coaching. Try ALEX: . Learn More Follow Ted on Twitter at or Subscribe to the Access Transcript...
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WTT: The Anatomy of a Blow-Up
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
This What Ted's Thinking brings Situational Awareness to the underlying causes of hedge fund disasters. Read Ted’s blog Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant ()
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Decision-Making: Interdisciplinary Skills – Annie Duke (2022)
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Our Summer Series kickoff is with one of the all-time greats, Annie Duke. The former world-class poker player has become a noted academic and practitioner in the art of decision-making. Her best-seller Thinking in Bets is a one-of-a-kind set of tools and tips to try (emphasis on try) to get past our embedded behavioral biases. And her follow-up works How to Decide and Quit pull different threads in the decision-making process. Since writing Thinking in Bets, Annie has consulted several investment organizations to apply her insights to investing, including becoming a Special...
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Decision-Making: Interdisciplinary Skills – Annie Duke (2018)
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Our Summer Series kickoff is with one of the all-time greats, Annie Duke. The former world-class poker player has become a noted academic and practitioner in the art of decision-making. Her best-seller Thinking in Bets is a one-of-a-kind set of tools and tips to try (emphasis on try) to get past our embedded behavioral biases. And her follow-up works How to Decide and Quit pull different threads in the decision-making process. Since writing Thinking in Bets, Annie has consulted several investment organizations to apply her insights to investing, including becoming a Special...
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Building Durable Real Estate Portfolios at Morgan Stanley – Lauren Hochfelder (EP.514)
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Lauren Hochfelder is Head of Global Real Assets at Morgan Stanley, where she oversees a team of 300 investment professionals across 13 countries, managing $80 billion across real estate, infrastructure, equity and credit. Lauren joined Morgan Stanley as an investment banking analyst directly out of Yale 26 years ago and has spent her entire career at the firm, helping build one of the industry's leading platforms. Our conversation traces Lauren's journey from analyst to Global Head and the evolution of Morgan Stanley's real estate business before, during, and...
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Rebuilding the NYU Endowment – Michelle Knudsen (EP.513)
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Michelle Knudsen is Chief Investment Officer of NYU, where she oversees the university's $8 billion endowment. Michelle joined NYU two years ago, after fourteen years as an allocator at Partners Capital and the Mellon Foundation, with a mandate to build a best-in-class endowment from a clean sheet of paper. Our conversation traces Michelle's lessons learned working at Goldman Sachs, a growing OCIO, and a foundation that shaped her investment philosophy and views on portfolio construction, risk management, and manager selection. We...
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Senior Decision Makers: Luis Laboy, Hewlett Foundation (EP.512)
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Our next guest on the Senior Decision Makers series is Luis Laboy, Director of Public Equity at the Hewlett Foundation, where he's spent the last decade running the public equity book alongside CIO Ana Marshall — a mentor and colleague he first met nearly thirty years ago. The foundation's assets stand at roughly $14 billion today. Luis spent fifteen years as a direct emerging markets investor at Everest Capital before crossing to the LP side, and our conversation digs into how he’s leveraged that experience as an...
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Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511)
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Frank Danieli is Head of Global Credit Solutions at MA Financial Group, an ASX-listed alternative asset manager that oversees A$15 billion ($10 billion) across a broad range of private credit and lending strategies and A$179 billion ($125 billion) in a lending ecosystem platform. Frank began his career in restructurings, the self-described ‘dark side of credit’, and has used the lessons from special situations and distressed loans to build a performing credit platform across asset backed finance, direct asset lending and corporate private credit. Our conversation discusses what...
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Economic Growth, Governance, and Capital Allocation – Dambisa Moyo (EP.510)
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Baroness Dambisa Moyo is a global economist, author, board member, and investor who sits at the intersection of public policy, corporate governance, and capital allocation. Dambisa serves in the U.K. House of Lords, sits on the boards of Chevron, Starbucks, Condé Nast, and Oxford University's investment committee, is Chair of the Economic Club of New York, and oversees Altered Trajectory alongside her husband, Jared Smith, the family office formed after his sale of Qualtrics in 2018. Our conversation traces Dambisa's journey from growing up in Zambia to becoming a leading voice on global...
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WTT: 5.5 Lessons at 55.5
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
This WTT, 5.5 Lessons at 55.5 reflects on what five-and-a-half decades of investing, podcasting, and mistakes have taught me about people, markets, and myself. Read Ted’s blog . Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant ()
info_outlineOur first guest on the Senior Decision Makers mini-series is Nick Csicsko. Nick is a Managing Director at the Trinity Wall Street endowment, where he joined CIO Meredith Jenkins at the founding of the investment office in 2016 and has spent the last decade helping build a young endowment inside a 320-year-old institution. Today the endowment has grown to over $6 billion.
Nick's path into investing is a fascinating one. He studied composition and earned his Doctorate of Music at Juilliard. While there, he talked his way into an internship at Juilliard’s endowment and never looked back.
Our conversation covers the lessons he carried from music into investing, his investment philosophy, and the details of his process. Manager selection sits at the heart of his work, and he articulates what separates the relationships that endure from the ones that don't. Nick is a remarkable storyteller and shares a number of real-life examples of manager relationships — some that worked out well, some that didn't, and others with insights for allocators and managers alike.
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