21 Top Traders Round Table with Jake Barton, Trent Webster, and Steven Wilson – 2of2

Published: March 1, 2019, 7:06 a.m.

"There's a lot more data in some ways, but there is also a lot less interesting information that is differentiated." - Jake Barton (Tweet) Welcome to Top Traders Round Table, a podcast series on managed futures brought to you by CME Group and the Managed Funds Association, where host Niels Kaastrup-Larsen continues his conversation with Jake Barton, the Senior Portfolio Manager at Promus Capital, Trent Webster, Senior Investment Officer of Strategic Investments at Florida State Board of Administration, and Steven Wilson, Senior Portfolio Manager at Teacher Retirement System of Texas, which took place at the MFA's Network 2019 conference in Miami. Listen in to learn when our guests use investment theory versus data, new standards for management fees, and what our guests look for in maintaining a reliable team for their investors. Subscribe on: In This Episode, You'll Learn: When to use investment theory versus data, and how you know when you have chosen correctly How the guests review their managers and analyze their results What organizations of different sizes can do to prepare for a crisis "In the end, I'll make anyone a deal: I will always admit you're right if I can have the money." - Trent Webster (Tweet) How Steven sees the new fee structure for hedge funds, that TRS helped develop, as more reasonable than the standard 2&20 How a race to the bottom for management fees can remove much of the creative energy from the alternative manager space What excites Trent about the BBB section of the investment grade bond market "It's almost unbelievable that it's 2019 and people are still paying performance fees on beta. How did that happen?" - Steven Wilson (Tweet) What is new and upcoming in the hedge fund space The reading that our guests never miss inside and outside of the investment space This episode was sponsored by CME Group and Managed Funds Association: Connect with our guests: Learn more about Jake Barton and Promus Holdings Learn more about Trent Webster and State Board of Administration of Florida Learn more about Steven Wilson and Teacher Retirement System of Texas "Data will always challenge the theory. No theory works if it's wrong financially. You can have the greatest theory in the world and if you just keep losing money for clients, you have to throw in the towel or the money will all disappear." - Jake Barton (Tweet) Full Transcript The following is a full detailed transcript of this conversion. Click here to subscribe to our mailing list, and get full access to our library of downloadable eBook transcripts! Niels Welcome back to Top Traders Round Table, a podcast series on manage futures brought to you by CME Group, and the Managed Funds Association where I continue my conversation with Steven Wilson who is a senior portfolio manager in the Public Markets Group at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas; Trent Webster who is the Senior Investment Officer of Strategic Investments for the State Board Of Administration of Florida; as well as Jake Barton who is a Senior Portfolio Manager at Promus Capital which is a multi-family investment firm. I hope you enjoy the conversation.  Niels I want to bring you back in, Jake, but I want to shift the topic a little bit, but still relating to this, and that is the investment theory versus data. When do you know if you’re wrong?   So I’m sure that within your teams you rely on a certain amount of investment theory in your investment decisions, but I’m not so sure that there aren't times where you want to say, "If the data doesn’t support the theory, the data must be wrong." How do you go about deciding when to rely on the data, and when to stick to the theory?  Jake That’s a very good question. I may need to think about it for a little bit. One of the nice things is that there is more and more data available now. I think data was one of the things that could be your proprietary edge for a while.   Really when you think about...