Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508)
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Ted Seides – Allocator and Asset Management Expert
4.7 • 842 Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2026
⏱️ 60 minutes
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Summary
Our 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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | 2020 was this manager's worst year. |
| 0:03.0 | He was down an additional 30%. |
| 0:04.6 | We thought 2019 was the worst year, |
| 0:06.1 | but it turns out 2020 was the worst year so far. |
| 0:08.8 | That led to a real moment of soul searching. |
| 0:13.2 | You have a drawdown that's starting to get close to 50% |
| 0:16.2 | at the trough. |
| 0:17.7 | Over the course of that year, I went back |
| 0:20.0 | and spent a lot of time with that manager. |
| 0:21.6 | I think I met with them at least seven or eight times, and this manager works out at Dallas. |
| 0:26.6 | It's very responsive, but really is best to meet in person. |
| 0:29.6 | No IRBD function, nothing like that. |
| 0:32.6 | And it was COVID. |
| 0:34.6 | It just happened to be that this manager got kicked out of his office because his |
| 0:39.0 | landlord wanted to do construction. This manager was between offices having a terrible run. Also, |
| 0:45.5 | I knew a lot of his other investors and about half the capital left that year. So I'm sitting down |
| 0:50.7 | with this manager at what ended up being our local spot. We'd sit there for two or three hours, talk to the portfolio, what's working, what's not working, how he's behaving. |
| 0:59.7 | And it gave me confidence to not quit. |
| 1:02.4 | This manager had no quit in him. |
| 1:05.6 | It was clear that even though the AUM was challenged, the business was not. |
| 1:10.1 | He kept saying, I really want to earn back your capital. |
| 1:12.6 | I want to reward you for your patients. |
... |
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