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 mugs game, as one of my old bosses said. Endowments have an unfair advantage

in that we work with the smartest

investors out there. It's not necessarily market timing when your expert in emerging market

internet companies comes to you and says, my companies have never been cheaper. We are seeing

opportunities we have never seen before. That to, is backing good investments. Historically,

endowments have done a great job of that, but in the last 10 or 15 years with the obsession

of private assets, that tool has been taken out of the toolkit. We part ourselves in keeping

that tool in the toolkit. We have abundant liquidity to stay in, step into dislocations,

either at the manager level or at the market level.

I'm Ted Seidies, and this is Capital Allocators.

My guests on today's show is Bruce McDonald, the CEO and CIO of the Virginia

Commonwealth University Investment Management Company, which runs $2.5 billion 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

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