ALO31: What If the Illiquidity Premium Was Never Real? ft. Richard Tomlinson
Top Traders Unplugged
Niels Kaastrup-Larsen
4.8 • 712 Ratings
🗓️ 17 September 2025
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Richard Tomlinson joins Alan Dunne for a conversation shaped by experience, not theory. As CIO of LPPI, Richard is responsible for £27 billion in pension assets - but what stands out here is the clarity with which he navigates complexity. From the fading utility of labels like “illiquidity premium” and “hedge fund” to the trade-offs between cost, alignment, and control, this episode is about building portfolios that work in the real world - not just in a model. They explore inflation’s structural drivers, the quiet rise of fiscal dominance, and why some of the industry’s most comfortable assumptions no longer hold. It’s not about being contrarian - it’s about being clear-eyed.
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Episode TimeStamps:
02:14 - Introduction to Richard Tomlinson
07:07 - What makes Tomlinson and LPPI stand out from their peers?
11:52 - Who are LPPI's clients?
13:26 - The investment philosophy behind LPPI's work
18:06 - How LPPI's allocators work together
19:05 - Getting the allocation right
21:29 - Are they worried about the decline of equities?
23:37 - Tomlinson perspective on global macro
26:55 - Public vs private markets
29:05 - Their approach to allocating domestically
31:15 - How their allocation is distributed
33:51 - Is there a place for multi strategies at LPPI?
36:01 - Balancing growth strategies with risk
39:13 - How much would they allocate to alternatives?
41:22 - Their framework for thinking about risk
43:59 - How they approach commodities in their strategy
45:39 - How much focus do they put on ESG?
48:15 - The challenges of high fees in the hedge fund space
50:36 - Is it best to keep managers in-house or external?
53:41 - How they create a strong team of managers
55:37 - The right way of evaluating success and performance
58:41 - Advice for others investors
01:00:19 - The structural themes and trends that are likely to continue
Copyright © 2025 – CMC AG – All Rights Reserved
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | There's a lot of change coming there. There's a lot of inefficiency in the financial |
| 0:13.0 | intermediation or in the way that the plumbing of the system. And I'm not smart enough to know exactly |
| 0:18.7 | how it plays out, but to see that, you know, whether it's stable coins or tokenization of assets, I think that's coming. |
| 0:24.6 | And I think that could lead to certain businesses more precisely just disappearing. |
| 0:28.6 | Just suddenly the reason to do is this just goes. |
| 0:31.6 | Because if you can directly own assets via a token, well, that might change things. |
| 0:34.6 | Imagine spending an hour with the world's greatest traders. |
| 0:40.1 | Imagine learning from their experiences, their successes, their successes, and their failures. |
| 0:44.6 | Imagine no more. |
| 0:46.5 | Welcome to Top Traders Unplugged, the place where you can learn from the best hedge fund |
| 0:51.3 | managers in the world, so you can take your manager, due diligence, |
| 0:54.8 | or investment career to the next level. Before we begin today's conversation, remember to keep |
| 0:59.9 | two things in mind. All the discussion we'll have about investment performance is about the past, |
| 1:04.7 | and past performance does not guarantee or even infer anything about future performance. Also understand |
| 1:10.7 | that there's a significant risk of financial loss with all investment strategies, |
| 1:14.6 | and you need to request and understand the specific risks from the investment manager about their product |
| 1:19.7 | before you make investment decisions. |
| 1:22.1 | Here's your host, veteran hedge fund manager, Nealz Kostrup Larson. |
| 1:31.6 | Thank you. and hedge fund manager, Niels Kostrup Larson. Welcome and welcome back to another conversation in our series of episodes that focuses on markets and investing from a global macro perspective. |
| 1:39.7 | This is a series that I not only find incredibly interesting, as well as intellectually challenging, |
| 1:45.8 | but also very important given where we are in the global economy and the geopolitical cycle. |
| 1:53.0 | We want to dig deep into the minds of some of the most prominent experts to help us better |
... |
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