Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404)

9 Sep 2024 · 58 min

Ask about this episode

Ask anything about it. ChatGPT or Claude reads this page and answers with the times it was said.

Connect VO and ask about every podcast you hear, including the moments you saved. Add to ChatGPT · Add to Claude

In short

Podcast Summary: Capital Allocators – Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404)

Overview In this episode of *Capital Allocators*, Ted Seides interviews Jase Auby, Chief Investment Officer of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas (TRS), which manages a pension fund worth approximately $200 billion. The discussion revolves around Auby's background, the organizational structure of TRS, competitive advantages, investment strategies, and his accomplishments as CIO.

Episode Highlights

Guest Introduction

  • Jase Auby: CIO of TRS, overseeing a significant pension fund serving over 2 million public education employees in Texas.
  • Known for engaging with emerging managers and innovating fee structures.

Background and Career Path

  • Auby began his career with a passion for computers, starting from high school yearbook staff due to access to Macintosh computers.
  • Studied electrical and computer systems engineering.
  • Worked at Goldman Sachs in fixed income and progressed to Lehman Brothers, becoming a key player in the cash flow CDO market.
  • After 12 years on Wall Street, Auby returned to Texas, engaged in entrepreneurial ventures, before joining TRS.

TRS Organizational Structure and Approach

  • TRS is the fifth-largest public pension fund in the U.S.:
  • Highly diversified portfolio with significant allocations to public equity (40%) and private investments (35%).
  • No allocation to credit, which is atypical for public pensions.
  • Employs a risk parity strategy, leveraging about 4% of assets.
  • Risk Management Philosophy:
  • Focuses on efficiently deploying risk rather than catastrophic risk management due to its unique unlevered structure.
  • Engages with risk providers to model and understand risks in both public and private markets.

Investment Strategy

  • The fund is structured to own a market portfolio with tweaks for added value.
  • Emphasizes the importance of understanding private market risks and creating proxies for risk measurement.
  • Has shifted from absolute return investing to PME (Public Market Equivalent) investing in private equity.
  • Engages in energy investments, leveraging Texas's energy resources while adhering to fiduciary responsibilities.

Talent Acquisition and Team Structure

  • Auby emphasizes a collaborative, decentralized decision-making structure within TRS.
  • Initiatives to empower teams and promote horizontal views of the organization.
  • Addresses talent acquisition challenges amidst the "Great Resignation," focusing on the mission of serving Texas teachers and the intellectual challenge of the investment role.

Innovation and Emerging Managers

  • TRS has an established Emerging Manager Program since 2005, focusing on performance, diversity, and creating pathways for graduation to core portfolio positions.
  • Successful completion of this program has yielded several graduates into major allocations.

Fee Structure Innovation

  • TRS initiated a movement in hedge fund fees from a 2 and 20 structure to a 1 and 30 structure.
  • Focus on aligning fees with performance benchmarks, particularly in light of rising cash interest rates.

Governance and Global Strategy

  • TRS stands out for having an international office in London to capture global investment opportunities, particularly in private markets.
  • Governance structure supports innovative strategies that other funds may avoid.

Future Insights

  • Auby predicts a shift in global investment leadership, highlighting India as a potential leader in the coming decade.
  • Stresses the importance of innovation for sustainable alpha amidst increasing market competition.

Key Takeaways

  • Investment Philosophy: TRS’s approach is centered around long-term, prudent risk management and leveraging Texas’s unique advantages.
  • Team Empowerment: Auby believes in devolving decision-making authority to enhance agility and responsiveness.
  • Emerging Managers: Focusing on performance and diversification to ensure the sustainability of the Emerging Manager Program.
  • Fee Innovation: Continual reassessment of fee structures to align with market environments and performance metrics.
  • Future Trends: Emphasizes the role of innovation and diversification in navigating an increasingly competitive investment landscape.

Conclusion Jase Auby's insights provide a compelling look into the operational strategies of a major public pension fund, highlighting how effective governance, innovation, and a focus on long-term performance can navigate the complexities of institutional investing.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Hear the part that matters, and keep it.Open this episode in VO. Double tap your headphones to save a moment as you listen.
Get VO free

Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:01Capital Allocators is brought to you by my friends at WCM Investment Management. To outperform the markets, you have to do something differently from others. In my 30-something years investing in managers, there may be no one I've come across who does that as clearly and as well as WCM. I've seen it up close as an investor in their international growth strategy for the last five years. WCM is a global equity investment manager majority owned by its employees. They believe that being based on the West Coast, away from the influence of Wall Street groupthink provides them with the freedom to live out their investment team's core values, think different, and get better.

0:43As advocates of integrating culture research into the investment process and advancing wide moat investing with the concept of moat trajectory, WCM has delivered differentiated returns while building concentrated portfolios designed to stand out from the crowd. WCM is committed to defying the status quo by dismantling outdated practices, believing in the extraordinary capabilities of its people, and fostering optimism to inspire each individual to become the best version of themselves. To learn more about WCM, visit their website at wcminvest.com. And tune into this slot on the show to hear more about WCM all year long.

1:26This testimonial is being provided by Ted Seides and capital allocators who have been compensated a flat fee by WCM. This payment was made in connection with capital allocators testimonial and production of podcasts and does not depend on the success or level of business generated. The opinions expressed are solely those of capital allocators and may not reflect the opinions of others. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principle. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Please visit WCM invest.com for WCM's ADV and further information. Capital allocators is also brought to you by Morningstar.

1:55What if data wasn't just a bunch of raw numbers, but a clear and decisive language to help connect investment strategies with long-term investor needs in a constantly evolving market landscape. Morningstar created that language, bringing order and utility to insight-rich data so you can prepare for your next opportunity no matter the asset class or market. Visit wheredataspeaks.com to see what Morningstar data can do for you.

2:32Hello, I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation. Through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. You can join our mailing list and access premium content at CapitalAllocators.com. All opinions expressed by TED and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

3:11Clients of capital allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions in securities discussed on this podcast. My guest on today's show is Jace Aubie, the Chief Investment Officer of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, where he oversees the$200 billion pension fund that's the fifth largest in the United States. TRS manages assets that support the retirement security of over 2 million public education employees in Texas, and has long been known as a thought-leading steward of capital in the pension community, including engagement with emerging managers and innovation in fee structures. Our conversation covers Jace's background and path to TRS, including his early working with computers on Wall Street and entrepreneurship.

3:58We discuss TRS's organizational structure, competitive advantages, and investment approach, and close with Jace's role and accomplishments in his tenure as CIO. Before we get going, you've heard it before, and now you'll hear it again for the last time. My latest book, Private Equity Deals, releases this week. It contains an overview of the industry and a dozen case studies, as told by some of the top private equity players who spend every day, to take a phrase from Hamilton, In the Room Where It Happens. You'll enjoy reading some or all of this book if you like learning about how private equity works, or if you like stories of businesses across industries ranging from garage doors and industrial parts to sports teams and private ski clubs.

4:48And you'll want to share the book with a key person you really need to inform about what private equity is, whether that's a board member or a member of your family. Have a look and tell a friend. And if you do that, I can guarantee we'll sell two copies. And who knows what happens from there. Thanks so much for spreading the word about my latest book, Private Equity Deals. Please enjoy my conversation with Jace Aubie. Jace, thanks so much for joining me. Yeah, absolutely, Ted. It's wonderful to be here. I've been a longtime listener, first time podcast participant. There we go. Well, why don't you take me back to coming out of school, how you first got involved in finance?

5:32Sure. I really started loving computers a lot. And so in high school, I was all in for computers. I joined the yearbook staff in 1984 because they had Macintosh computers. I had no interest in the yearbook staff, but I really wanted to get my hands on those computers. Got to college, majored in electrical and computer systems engineering. And at the end of that time, I thought, okay, I've learned how computers work, but now I really want to use them. Didn't necessarily want to design and build them. Also really wanted to come to New York too. So it was very destination focused. Got a job at Goldman Sachs.

6:07Goldman at the time was really interested in technologists. I shouldn't say really interested because they're actually much more interested now. I heard a statistic saying they have 12 ,000 developers now at Goldman, which is just an astronomical number if you think about that. But it was nascent days. So I got my first job at Goldman in the fixed income division. What was that initial experience like for you? It was really interesting because it was that transitional period. It was only a couple years removed from people being able to smoke on the trading floor. Old school relationship, everything done over the phone, all that sort of thing.

6:43So as somebody who was computer oriented, arriving there, technology-oriented. It was still a little bit of the idea of computers are like the typing pool. People go off and do something with them and then they come back. But I was able to be productive almost immediately with just some things that we would call very basic tools today, running a database of data instead of using an Excel spreadsheet, that kind of thing. Early days, that was an innovation. How did you see that progress into what became products that used computers over your time on the street? Well, that progression definitely predated me because liar's poker.

7:18I mean, computers are what really did drive the MBS market and kind of started everyone down that path. But at the time, it very much was still a relationship business. I was in fixed income, but we dealt with the bankers a lot. And the bankers, it was about the size of your Rolodex. And it was literally the size of your Rolodex. They had these foot diameter rolling Rolodexes. And whoever had the most number of those on their desks was probably the most important, I guess. And that was really important, that old style relationship banking. But you started to see it. You started to see the technologists start to take over some of the more quantitatively driven products like derivatives, all those sorts of things.

8:00And I haven't been connected with a place like Goldman in a long time or Lehman in a long time. But my understanding is technologists are all over the trading floor now, and they're really on the ascent. What was your progression? My progression is I spent three years at Goldman, and then some folks left Goldman and went over to Lehman Brothers. I really wanted to focus on doing deals, doing transactions. I was in a more research-oriented role at Goldman. One of the great things about being young is whoever's hiring, that's where the innovation is. That's the next market. So when you're 18 years old, you're not necessarily thinking, I want to be a CDO banker, but at age 24, I was a CDO banker at Lehman Brothers.

8:42And that was a brand new market. It was a lot of fun to do that. I ended up being the number two guy in the cashflow CDO business at Lehman and built the first Lehman Brothers CDO model. And just was there at the beginning as that whole CDO, CLO industry took off. How did you find your way from building models for early CDOs to where you've ended up? Yeah. So that was a great nine-year run. Started out in modeling and then just became a full-fledged banker, structuring deals, closing deals, selling the equities, placing the debt, moving across different asset classes, high-yield bonds, levered loans, investment-grade bonds, CDOs of mortgage-backed, asset-backed, then CDOs of CDOs, did it all there.

9:27But I was from Austin, Texas, and I always did want to move home. So in total, I spent 12 years on Wall Street and I wanted to move back to Austin, my hometown, and had two children in Manhattan. And my wife and I decided it was time. And so moved back to Austin, did some entrepreneurial stuff in Austin, had fun doing that. It wasn't particularly lucrative at the end of the day, but it was good enough, and I'm glad to have done it. And then I circled back around and decided I wanted to be back in finance, be back in investing and got a job at Texas Teachers. So what did you learn from those entrepreneurial experiences, even if they didn't end up having the mega payouts that some dream?

10:08Yeah, that's really interesting. Your partners are really important. So my first entrepreneurial experience had some good partners. Ultimately, it probably wasn't a business that had legs long term. The second entrepreneurial thing I did was I really did want to circle back to my computer past. The internet had happened without me while I was on Wall Street. So I did a very small internet startup and learned a lot about being an entrepreneur. I mean, all of my experience before then had been at these big, huge banks and being part of a big underwriting machine. So it was fun to just be an entrepreneur for once.

10:44What did you find that was different from being in that entrepreneurial seat than you might have imagined from the outside or viewing it as someone on Wall Street? This is very obvious, but you have to do everything. You're the, this is a cliche, maybe I'll say it anyway, chief cook and bottle washer. So you're getting the company incorporated and figuring out whether you need a lawyer or not to do that, whether you want to spend that money because the money is yours. It's coming out of your pocket. In technology world, just making a lot of technological choices. So at the time, I had to choose between Ruby on Rails or Python.

11:18Python Django was the choice. And I spent a lot of time on that. I thought, this is a really important decision. I don't want to get this wrong. And then I got it wrong because I chose Ruby. And I'm sure Ruby's doing fine. I'm sure there's lots of web stuff out there built in that. But having moved on to financial services since, I mean, Python has certainly taken over everything that we do on the finance side. Even at Texas Teachers, I mean, kids show up and it's not necessarily just Excel anymore. It's Python programming. So when you finished that chapter and wanted to move back into finance, how did you find yourself fitting in to TRS?

11:55So the global financial crisis had just happened and large public funds, funds that had the resources said, wow, it sure would have been nice to have had a risk group in place through the global financial crisis. So they hired a few folks to start risk groups and Texas Teachers was no different. And then everyone said, well, what does a risk group do exactly? And it had not been defined. And one of the reasons why it hadn't been defined is a good reason. It's a pension fund is not levered. So it's one of the only pools of capital on the planet that doesn't actually have balance sheet leverage.

12:30So you're talking about public pension funds, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds. These are the unlevered pools of capital. every other financial entity is levered. So a bank or an insurance company, they all use leverage, and that's a tool that they can use. But that's why they need very sophisticated risk management at those places. But when you're not levered, you can weather nearly any storm. Combine that with having, we have a 26-year time horizon at Texas Teachers. You can really weather that storm. So it was thinking about risk in that context. What it shifts from is not so much catastrophic risk, not so much existential risk, run on the bank type risks, it turns into more how do you most efficiently use risk, most efficiently deploy it.

13:15And so that ultimately is how we added value at Texas Teachers and we continue to do in our risk group. Are there any sources of uncompensated risk in our system? Are there risks we're taking that we don't understand? Let's make sure we understand it. And it's not so much that it's going to tip us over. We are very strong hands, a massively liquid, unlevered pool of capital, but it's just making sure that the risks we take are prudent and compensated well. I'd love to hear about TRS as an organization, the pool, how you go about running this big portfolio. Sure, absolutely. So 200 billion approximately right now, very large pool of money.

13:56It's the fifth largest public pension in the United States, It's 2 million members. So one in 20 Texans is a member of the fund. So just a very important fund to the citizens of Texas. When you have a fund that big, it's going to be highly diversified. So you're going to end up pretty much owning the market portfolio with some tweaks here and there. And you hope that those tweaks can add value on the market portfolio. But we're in every asset class. So public equity is the cornerstone. That's 40 % of what we own. Privates as another 35. Within that private, we have real estate, private equity, and energy, natural resources, and infrastructure.

14:36We have U.S. Treasury bonds. And then we also have, which is pretty interesting, we have zero allocation to credit, which is a little bit unique. Most public pensions have some allocation to credit. We don't have any. We also have risk parity. 8 % is risk parity. And finally, we are levered about 4%. So we are up to 104 % of assets versus 100 % of NAV value. And I also did not mention the stable value hedge fund portfolio, 5%. When you think about tackling that type of lens of looking at the pool, you have to think about measuring the risks and then deciding what choices you're going to make. When you got there, what were you looking at measuring to roll up and understand before you could even decide, are we taking the right types of risks?

15:24The first one is obvious. It's vol. So arrived there and figured out how to calculate vol. And as so often happens in a quantitative world, there was a rudimentary risk system up and running, but everyone said there's no data for private markets. so we're going to solve out the risk of public markets to the penny but for private markets we're just going to wing that one that might have been valid at the very beginning when private markets was four or five percent but over time texas teachers at our height we were 42 percent private versus a 35 percent neutral or down to about 38 percent private versus still versus 35 percent neutral now and it really became tail wagging the dog because there's more risk in private markets than there is in public markets.

16:10And if you're kind of winging the private part and solving the public to the penny. So we really had to think a lot about how to proxy risk and think very intelligently about how we were modeling that risk. How'd you do it? That was all developing proxies. So we worked with our risk provider and thought about one example is private equity and just thought about what's the most appropriate public market proxy. Do you proxy by industry? Do you proxy by geography? How do you adjust for leverage? All those sorts of things. You can get as granular as you want. Some private equity firms actually do this where they will build a public markets proxy for every investment that they own and they'll track it through time like that.

16:52And you can use that for your PEME, your public markets equivalent, to manage performance over time. Once you got your hands around a better fine-tuned metrics around the private portfolio, integrating that with what you're already doing on the public side, what did you find that might have been similar or different than what you could have expected before you had been able to do that granular work? We knew we would find this, but it was really about unpacking the smoothing in private markets. So everyone knows of the smoothing. There's one type of smoothing in that evaluations don't occur as regularly as you do in the public market.

17:33The other thing that occurs is everything's lagged as well. So both of those things are going to show you to be more diversified than you actually are. And so we knew that when we public proxied everything and you basically reversed out all of that smoothing, you would have a completely different risk picture than otherwise. What kind of adjustments did you make after you had done that work? We really did convert ourselves to be PME investors on the private equity side. That was a big difference. Prior to that, everyone was absolute return investors. So you would just have a return hurdle, 20 % for some of the more risky private equity, for example, a little bit lower for less risky.

18:18And we just converted fully to that PME idea and measuring managers versus PME we calculated and comparing notes with them if they have their own internal PMEs. I hesitate to emphasize this too much because I think a lot of people have since done this, but we did it 12 years ago and it's something that really has helped us out over time. And you can do the same thing on the real estate side with REITs, for example. Energy, natural resources, infrastructure is tougher, but you can figure out ways to do it there too. So if we look at some of that diversification, that real return bucket, you mentioned energy, you're sitting in Texas.

18:52How have you thought about the debate and how you've gone about your energy investing? For us, it's a real advantage as other types of investors globally are prohibiting or withdrawing from investing in energy. I mean, we're very much open for business and we see it as a crucial opportunity for us. So we've leaned into that. We have that 6%, we call it ENRI, Energy Natural Resource and Infrastructure Portfolio. To our knowledge, it's the only dedicated strategic gas allocation portfolio of any of our peers. And so we're able to use that 6 % to go where others are divesting and be there. Very much aligned with Texas.

19:32Texas is number one in pretty much every form of energy you can name. So number one in oil, number one in gas, number one in solar, number one in wind, number one in batteries, I just read the other day. So we're obviously an energy state that prioritizes that. And to the degree to which people are withdrawing from traditional forms of energy, we're there and it's an advantage for us. And obviously it's a local advantage for us. How have you thought about that bucket under the lens of climate change? We are very much of the mindset that oil and gas, it will be needed for a very long time and that people have goals for climate change and that people really want to invest in that transition.

20:13People want to invest in that solar. They want to invest in wind. We don't necessarily see it as our role to invest in that solar. We will, but we'll only do it on a straight return, you know, maximized return, strict fiduciary basis. We'll do it if it's a good investment, but we find that others want to invest in that space. That space has become a little bit crowded. invested in that space. There's a reliance on innovation there that does amp the risk up a little bit, which makes sense. These are new forms of energy, but somebody needs to invest in the existing forms and the innovation available in the existing forms is there as well.

20:49And we're there to do that. I'd love to dive into this stable value piece. So you mentioned hedge funds, you mentioned no credit. How have you thought about delivering that component of the portfolio? So there's two components of the stable value portfolio. One is U.S. Treasuries, just holding U.S. Treasuries outright. Can be a diversifier, although there are times when it's not a diversifier. But probably the more interesting one there is our stable value hedge fund portfolio. So we have 11 % of our portfolio in hedge funds. And that's in addition, by the way, to that 38 % of private. So total alternatives is 49%, which again is quite high for a public pension, but quite low versus the endowment community.

21:30We have two hedge fund portfolios. One is stable value, which has zero beta. So zero market risk. It's in things like equity market neutral, the platforms, some macro funds, some CTAs, that sort of thing. And then we also have a separate portfolio that does have some beta in it. So equity long short, credit funds that have residual market sensitivity and risk. And so we measure that stable value hedge fund portfolio versus a cash-like benchmark plus a spread. Then we measure that directional portfolio versus a full beta long-only equity benchmark. And so we overlay that portfolio with derivatives in order to achieve that full beta.

22:10But we feel like that's the fairest way to measure hedge funds because so often hedge funds get muddled. It's a complex thing to explain to a board, to explain to your members. But by having two separate portfolios, one of which is easily measured versus cash, and the other is easily measured versus full beta equity has really worked out well for us. So in that stable value bucket, we have that 5 % stable value hedge fund portfolio. How have you thought about the degree of leverage to put on the portfolio as a whole? Other financial institutions are much more levered than we are. So we're kind of in that stage where we just want to have some leverage.

22:51So we have 4 % leverage, So we're at 1.04 levered. If you own your own home and you have an 80 % mortgage on your home, you're levered four to one. And so that's kind of what we're doing. We're not at 400 % leverage, like someone buying a home. We're at 1.04 % leverage. So from our perspective, we're at such a low level. It just makes sense to have a bit more at this point in time. And it's a journey because public pensions have been unlevered for a very long time. So we want to do it in a measured, slow way. But at this point, it probably stands that we could have a little bit more leverage even.

23:27You mentioned this diversification. You also hinted at a 26-year time horizon, so like a very precise number. What are some of the other tenets of how you philosophically think about managing this pool? Yeah, the 26 years just comes from the length of the liability. Texas has the longest liability of any teacher fund in the United States, and that's because Texas is a high growth state. So we're hiring a lot of teachers. So we have a lot of younger teachers. And so our liability is amongst the longest 26 years. But some other hallmarks of the fund, I'd say we're large, 200 billion. There's positives and negatives of that.

24:03Lightly levered that 4%. Public pension funds are some of the most liquid pools of capital in the world. And there's a lot of implications for that. You have liquidity at the times you need it. You can go in liquid when illiquidity is being rewarded. Well, let's dive into some of the advantages and challenges of size. What do you see as the competitive advantages? The competitive advantages are relationships. Most folks out there are going to pick up our phone when we call, and they're usually going to call us actually before we even call them. So we have access to nearly everything we would ever want to invest in.

24:39And that's an incredible resource. A, it gives you access to just interesting investments, but B, it just gives you educational access and market intelligence to everything out there. I mean, that's actually one of the biggest challenges we have is just processing this massive flow of information and knowledge we get. From an employee perspective, it's one of the major links of the value proposition for our employees is this intellectual challenge of having the smartest investors in the world walk through our front door and want to spend time with us and want to talk to us. That's a real value.

25:13Some of the negatives of being large, it's hard for us to penetrate smaller markets. So venture capital, for example, can be difficult for us to ask because the gating item for venture capital is oftentimes not capital. We have lots and lots of capital, but if someone has a$500 million fund and we say we want 200 million of it, they're going to say, you can't have that much. And so that's a little bit of a limiter there. What are some of the ways you've been able to lean into the relationships to take all that flow of information and turn it into hopefully value add for the portfolio? One thing that our investment relationships have is they have lots and lots of smart people who are just oftentimes waiting to be asked.

25:58And you can commission bespoke research projects. You can be thinking about entering a market. you can call up five partners and ask them about that market and really understand it. Folks have resources they want to give you. And it's up to us to actually accept those and put them into our system, which can be tough because we have 240 people and$200 billion. And so we've got a lot more information coming in than we can process at the end of the day. And then also just having liquid capital that we have ready and able to invest in vehicles we've set up previously with our manager relationships so that when they really need us, we can be there with principal investments or co-investments and all those sorts of things.

Read the full transcript

26:41How have you organized your team both to winnow through that huge funnel and then to execute? So the standard verticals are obviously very important. So there's a private equity team and a real estate team and an infrastructure team on the private side. And then we have internal fundamentally managed public equity, internal quant equity. And then we have an external public equity group. They also do hedge funds as well. Then we have a risk team that manages half of our risk portfolio externally and half internally. So just standard verticals. But one thing that we do really pride ourselves on is being able to consider an investment that doesn't fit exactly into a vertical.

27:24And that's really based on the idea that sometimes the most attractive, interesting investments are the ones that most of your peers said no to because they all said, well, is this a private equity deal or is this a credit deal or is this a real estate deal or is this an infrastructure deal? We don't know where it fits, so we're not going to do it. We work really hard to do that, to do those deals and figure out a way to make it fit in the portfolio. One of the ways we're able to do that is we have a group called our special opportunities group that that is a big part of their mandate is if someone goes to our private equity group and it doesn't fit in the portfolio for risk reasons or return reasons or any reason, they can pass it over to that group and that group can consider it.

28:03How do you decide what to manage internally and what to give to external managers? So 100%, we always prefer to manage internally. For obvious reasons, fees obviously much lower when you hire your own people and empower them. But the key thing is to really be clear-eyed about whether you have skill in that particular area. And if you don't have skill, we will not hesitate to go external. And so we have external relationships in every single asset class that we invest in. How do you find the competition for talent on what you can bring in internally compared to what you can hire externally? The war for talent is tough.

28:44In 21 and 22 to combine those two years, we lost 25 % of our staff, which was one in four folks walked down the door, the great resignation. But our longer term run rate and our current run rate is five or 6 % a year, which is at a healthy rate. So we've been able to attract and retain staff with the exception of that two-year period. Our board understands that challenge and they've really helped us with compensation and benefits and those sorts of things. And we have a very clearly articulated value proposition as well for people that come to work at Texas Teachers. So it's a rank-ordered value proposition.

29:23Number one is the mission, serving the teachers of Texas. And I like to articulate that and say, how do we serve the teachers of Texas? And we're in the wise decisions business. So we have dollars of capital and we are investing them solely for the benefit of those teachers and solely to maximize the return on those dollars. And there's a purity not only in serving the teachers, but there's a purity in that investment challenge as well. Our members are our customers, but on a daily basis, we don't have customers. We're not trying to design products to suit customers. We can just invest in things that are actually going to meet that core goal.

30:01So that's the first thing that attracts people to Texas teachers. Number two is the other like-minded folks who are stepping up to that challenge. Number three is that intellectual challenge. That's what I love about my job more than else is the breadth, just being a mile wide, knowing something about every asset class we have in our portfolio, being able to think intelligently about venture capital and private equity and hedge funds and everything else. I enjoy that challenge. You don't want to be a mile wide and an inch deep. So I like going as deep as I can in that area. So that intellectual challenge is there.

30:33And then the fourth value proposition is Austin, Texas. And so that's been really helpful for us because Austin's been a destination for quite some time, but it's really picked up the pace post-COVID. People want to be in Austin and they seek out ways to be there. Working from home has hurt us a little bit, actually, because people can now, for example, work from home for an employer in New York City and then move to Austin. And so they don't need to necessarily change employers. And folks can leave us and join a firm in New York City and still live in Austin. But we'll see what happens with work from home over time.

31:07We may go back to something, what we had, and that issue won't be there for us anymore. You stepped into the CIO seat a couple of years ago. What was different in how you spent your time compared to how you had previously? Something to always keep in mind when you get promoted is you can really fall back and spend 80 % of your time doing what you were doing before. For example, if you're the head of the private equity group and you become a CIO, you got to watch out and make sure you're not spending like 80 % of your time talking to your old private equity contacts because you got a whole other portfolio to manage.

31:39So I had to do something similar to that. One of the reasons why I became CIO was because I had a horizontal view on the whole organization being in risk. I did not come from a vertical. and so to me the analogy is when you have a CEO of a company and that person maybe even built the company or founded the company or were there for a long time and that CEO leaves when the board says well who should we make the CEO well there's the CFO sitting right there and it's because the CFO is one of the few people that has that full horizontal view so that was a real analogy to what happened to me I was the chief risk officer CRO and when we started talking about succession I had that full horizontal view and the board ended up hiring me to be CIO.

32:20So I went from spending a lot of time building that horizontal view to actually getting more vertical. It was really leaning into the relationships. So spending a lot of time in New York, just going out and meeting our external relationships where they were. I didn't spend a lot of time doing that before when I was in the risk group. And really prioritizing when people come to Austin, being there as well. Sometimes I actually don't like to travel because there's so many people coming down to visit us in Austin that you end up missing meetings down there. But facing externally has really been my focus.

32:51And that's not something I've done for a long time, maybe since my career back at Lehman Brothers. I learned a little bit of those skills. Another big priority I really made when I became CIO was making sure we were not a top down organization, not a command and control organization, not an organization where decision making was monopolized by, say, a CIO. The final call was made in the CIO's office. Not that we were that way, but just to the extent we were, I made us less that way. So for me, it's all about pushing authority and autonomy as far down into the organization as possible and as is appropriate.

33:25The exchange there is true transparency into what's actually happening and just making sure we're building really strong trust so that when we delegate that authority, we know it's being used well. But one thing we did was to make sure that we had one internal investment committee that approved all investments for the entire fund. And now we've put investment committees into each vertical. So now there's a private equity investment committee, a real estate investment committee. Larger stuff certainly goes all the way up to the top one, but we've pushed that authority down to the teams. People responded well to that.

33:56And I think we get better decision-making that way. One leader at the top thinking in black and white terms is not as good as lots of folks considering shades of gray down below. We're going to take a quick break in the action to tell you about SRS Aquium. Want to make sure your M &A processes aren't stuck in the past? Partner with a company that's been defining the future of dealmaking for nearly two decades instead. When it comes to M &A innovation, SRS Aquium has reshaped the way that deals get done, streamlining processes for maximum efficiency and minimum headaches. Professional shareholder representation, online M &A payments, digital stockholder solicitation, SRS Aquium pioneered each and continues to set the bar for game-changing innovation.

34:48So leave the days of disjointed deal management behind and define your future with SRS Aquium, the smartest way to run a deal. Learn more at srsaquium.com. That's S-R-S-A-C-Q-U-I-O-M.com. And now, back to the show. So a lot of people in your seat, particularly when you're talking about letting things come from the bottom up, you get a very qualitative view of managers, and yet you came at it from a quantitative, horizontal view of risk. How have you put together that quantitative view with the qualitative judgments that are coming from the bottom up? It really is setting up those boxes of authority.

35:33When you ask for transparency, oftentimes what you're getting is a lot of quantitative. We have the fund fully modeled out quantitatively, and we know the risks that are being taken. And the qualitative manager by manager decision, it really is embedded down with the teams. And for folks like me, it's more of an explanation of the strategy they've taken and how they consider those qualitative factors and a lot of questions back from me. but they're making those decisions. How do you think about the cross comparison of asset classes across these different groups where if you have that vertical specialty in private equity, it might be harder for them to think of how attractive the incremental investment is compared to something in the stable value portfolio.

36:14That one doesn't come up as much that private equity versus stable value because they're just so different. But one example might just be data centers, which is something that we're investing in in private equity. We're investing in it in real estate. We're investing in it in infrastructure and we're investing in it in debt. And then there's hybrid securities between all of that, something that's got both debt and equity attached to it. And so we make a working group actually on something like that, where all of the verticals are interacting with one another and thinking about those risk issues in a unified way.

36:48And then you figure out where it best goes into the portfolio. If it's a good investment, we'll always find someplace for it to go. As you look back on your first couple of years in the CIO seat, what do you say are the different hallmarks of how you've made your mark on the plan? Absolutely. That inversion of pushing authority autonomy downward, that's been the core of it all. Focusing on people, focusing on development of them. That was a really big deal, especially in that 21 and 22 period. Also, this is a little more obscure, but thinking really hard about what it means to make a wise decision.

37:26So just going back to that first principle of we're in the wise decisions business, the mechanics of decision-making. Decision-making is all about information. It's about having the right information. Make sure you don't just have the easy information. You actually go out and got the hard information as well, because you could end up with a very different decision. Thinking about structure of committees that make decisions, they tend to be conservative committees. So you want to think about making sure that you're not just turning down too many investments because there's a vocal person on a committee.

38:01Just thinking about the mechanics of decision-making has been really important. And that really goes into the idea of continuous improvement and something that has been termed, I think AQR I came up with this term craftsmanship alpha, where you're just getting better and better and better at the processes that you have in place. You're minimizing trading costs. You have the best process. You're using your people wisely as well. What are one or two examples of how you've incrementally improved the decision-making process? Pushing it down to those asset level and investment committees was crucial.

38:36They're processing so many more investments and they're able to react much speedier to our external managers and we become easier to deal with, which can be really important. External managers are human. You do build relationships there. And when you're able to talk to someone with a professionalized, very well thought out process that can give you a quick yes or no, the motto, no slow maybes, that can be a real advantage. So yeah, just setting ourselves up to be quick, but prudently well thought out in what we're doing. And how about the decision-making within one of those committees? So the size of a committee is very important.

39:16You want it large enough that you get a very diverse set of viewpoints, but you don't want it too large because then there can be a real free rider problem, actually, when you have a committee that's too large and you can know when people feel less vested in the result. I like a committee size of five to six. I think that's important as well to have a chair who's spending a lot of extra time thinking about the process and thinking about the quality of the decisions and also thinking about the merits of the decisions, but just thinking about the quality of the process itself is important to an empowered chair, articulated guidelines, getting together periodically to consider the decisions you made and how to improve.

39:54I'm curious how you think about innovation and the impact of innovation on your portfolio. Innovation is deeply important. We've had a lot of success in the real estate area, for example. And real estate has been all about finding the next niche. And if you're not finding that next niche, then you can still have a good return, but you're just going to have a core level beta real estate portfolio. And the history of real estate in the past several decades has been about asset classes that were not originally thought of as core assets that became core assets. So did you get into multifamily early?

40:35That's a pretty old one. Now today, did you get into single family? That's been a big success and important. Did you get into industrial? That's now solidly a core asset class. In fact, in the most commonly used core index, the Odyssey Industrial, which Amazon warehouses, that sort of thing is 34 % of the index is the largest part of the index. Nowadays, when someone says to you, think about commercial real estate, what do you think of first? Everyone still thinks of office buildings, but office buildings is, last I saw, just 21 % of the commercial real estate market. So 79 % of the commercial real estate market has nothing to do with office buildings, which is quite interesting if you think about it.

41:14So it's all about finding those niches. Success in that asset class is 100 % about innovation. The other thing to say about innovation is it's rare you truly come up with an original idea. Given our information flow, it's almost always true that we've seen that idea before. So someone will oftentimes come to me, particularly an internally managed portfolio, and they know now especially, but my first question is going to be, well, who else does this? And sure enough, almost always, even if you came up with the idea independently, there's somebody else out there doing it and they'll talk to us because oftentimes that actually could end up with us investing externally in something that we actually end up doing internally as well.

41:55Then there's a symbiosis there. Innovation is absolutely the key to alpha. That's what makes alpha sustainable. You will not have alpha if you don't innovate, even at our level, even at the$200 billion level, but you've got to be innovating. Alongside a lot of core relationships of size, you've long had this emerging manager program. I'm curious how you've thought about it, what's happened with it, and how you continue to think about it going forward? Yeah, huge success with our Emerging Manager program. Started it in 2005. So it's a 20-year program at this point in time. We've funded 190 Emerging Managers at this point in time.

42:36And the reason why it's been successful and sustainable is we have clearly articulated goals. The first one is performance first. So if something's not performing, it's not going to be sustainable. No matter what your objective is, your objective could be a climate goal or something like that. It's not going to be sustainable over time if it's not outperforming. And so that's number one for us. Number two is diversity in that portfolio. And that really springs intellectually from the idea that diversification is the only free lunch in finance. And it stands to reason the diversity of thought and diversity of people is valuable as well.

43:14So So that's our number two priority there. And then number three is graduation. So at a firm, our size, if we're making emerging manager program,$25 million,$50 million commitments, that is not going to move the needle. And we probably shouldn't be putting too much resources into that. But if we give a path to graduation to come up to a full size allocation in our portfolio, then that will end up really helping the portfolio. But especially that focus on performance and return has given us probably the most, I'll take it that far, the most successful emerging manager program in the country. Certainly the longest lived without any interruption.

43:52How do you measure the success of those returns with that many different strategies? It really is just using the same benchmarks as what our larger portfolio uses. So private equity, it's got to beat the SSBEI for us, State Street Private Equity Index. and real estate's got to beat the Odyssey and public equity, public benchmarks. So we can just measure the alpha, the regular old ways. Something else is we have identified what we think does not work. So for example, we don't allocate to venture capital in our emerging manager program. And there are a lot of emerging managers in venture capital, but we've not had success there.

44:28And if we want this program to be sustainable, we have to acknowledge where we can have edge and where we don't. And so we've just been very clear about that. And we've gotten larger in the asset classes where we've had more success. We've had more success in PE and real estate, and we've gotten actually smaller in areas where we have less success. So long only is smaller than when we started, for example, and hedge funds have been pretty steady. What are the criteria for graduation into a core position? We want to make sure that early on we are building a relationship between emerging funds that are succeeding in our core portfolios.

45:04As a general rule, we'll do three funds with an emerging manager, and then we have to make a decision. Do they graduate or are we done with this relationship? Because at that point, we no longer consider them to be emerging. And so building that relationship with the larger portfolios, and then just putting up a lot of pretty strict numerical criteria around outperformance on the private side, MOIC and DPI and things like that. DPI can be particularly difficult in emerging manager portfolios. So that's something we've absolutely focused on. What's the success rate been? Of those 180 managers that we funded, we've had 12 graduate to full-fledged allocations in the portfolio.

45:46That means that you were successful through three funds on average and that you've added value over a long period of time. Another point of that too is it takes time to go through three funds on the private side. So there's definitely a pretty big time lag on that. But we've had 12 full-fledged allocations to the funds over the years, which we're very proud of. So part of one of the advantages of having this kind of scale is you imagine having some pricing power in terms of terms and fees. We'd love to hear the experience from the original innovation of 1 in 30 to how that's played out in the portfolio today.

46:21Yeah, for sure. We were able to press fees in every external relationship that we have. every asset class. And that's one of the advantages of being large. So back in 2016, we launched an initiative in the hedge fund industry to convert folks from a two and 20 mindset, which is a 2 % management fee. And in addition, you pay 20 % incentive fee, convert that to a 1 % or 30. So if you think about it, you're not necessarily changing the quantum of fees. Hedge funds are still getting paid a lot of money. You're just tilting it away from that certain management fee and giving them more of that incentive fee 30 instead of 20.

47:01That was a very successful initiative. And when we launched that at the time, one or 30 is a little bit of a brand name. You can say that. It's easy to remember, but what it really was, was one or 30 over a appropriate benchmark. So if you have a 0.3 beta long short portfolio, you want to make sure it's over a 0.3 beta benchmark. In our directional hedge fund portfolio, we have near 100 % achievement of that one or 30 over an appropriate risk benchmark fee structure. And then what happened more recently is we started to think about our stable value hedge fund portfolio. And back in 2016, an appropriate risk benchmark for a zero beta portfolio was near zero.

47:41So we're a lot less focused on putting cash benchmarks into hedge funds. But now with cash at five and a quarter, we knew that this was important, but it's come to be more important. So we've launched a second initiative this time, and we have 60 signatories to the letter we put together. And it's the idea of in a zero beta portfolio using cash, paying fees worth a cash hurdle. What follow on have you seen among the signatories and their ability to get particularly existing managers in their portfolio to institute some cost capital hurdle? So the first one has definitely been successful. Every hedge fund that we're investing in knows that one or 30 is something that they should be offering their customers.

48:21They're certainly offering it to us. And then the cash hurdle, I mean, people have been pressing cash for a long time. I'm sure we'll see more adoption over time. How have you thought about covering a truly global portfolio with your team? Obviously we're in Austin and we thought about opening foreign offices. We realized we did in fact need a foreign office in London. So we are the only public U.S. fund that has a foreign office and we have our office in London. The Canadians and others have offices all over the world. We did actually investigate opening another office, perhaps somewhere in Asia.

48:59But what we realized was what we're using the London office for is primarily private markets, having boots on the ground in the same time zone. And there's a lot of managers in London. You can unlock a lot of Europe just from London. But in Asia, we don't do as much private investing in Asia. So you didn't really need that private office as well as it's not as concentrated. So it's really hard to just pick one city in Asia. And Asia is a big place too. You can't cover all of Asia from one city. You're flying to Australia, you're flying to China, you're flying to Japan. So the reasoning behind that office was less clear.

49:36But the London office has been a really big success for us, just being local. What is it about the governance structure at TRS that's allowed you to invest in a London office when, let's say, there are four larger retirement plans that don't have those offices abroad? It's that innovation drive and it's having the will to do it. It's building an articulate case to your board, your state government, to your members. But for us, it really is the board. Having a board that you've built a lot of trust with over time, that understands exactly why you're doing the things you're doing and is ready to support you in that decision.

50:15We touched a little bit on energy investing and climate change. I'm curious, living and working in a red state, how you think about the whole ESG lens on the portfolio? We are very much in that strict fiduciary mindset where we're not thinking about the the climate lens in particular on the portfolio as a lens separate and distinct from just thinking about risk and return on a portfolio. One of the examples that folks always use when they think of climate risk is they'll always mention, we were building a building on the beach in Miami and we realized we had to think about climate risk. And for me, that's not really a new risk.

50:59The catastrophic risk industry has been around for one of the original investment industries there are. I'm not an expert on it, but let's call it 500 years. People have been thinking about cat risk and that industry is very, very good at, and they build very good models to model that sort of thing. So that idea that you're putting this top down lens where you suddenly have a brilliant idea, hey, everyone needs to think about climate change. It's like, no, no, we got this one. We're investing in an office building in Miami. We actually know to think about that. Another way it comes out is proxy voting.

51:31We use a proxy service and proxy services, they really do try to reflect the consensus amongst all of the folks who subscribe to their service. And we have noticed over time, we're much less activists at Texas Teachers. Like I said, we're a strict fiduciary, maximized value. And we noticed that there was more activism seeping into those proxy guidelines. And so several years ago, we went to our proxy provider and we said, we're going to need you to come up with a new benchmark policy for us that takes out these more activist types issues. And we suggested they call it the strict fiduciary policy.

52:06And they actually ended up calling it the global board aligned policy. And so the idea is that when there's more activist positions that go before a board to do certain things, that we're just going to vote with the board on that. So if it's a valid idea, we're sure that the board as fiduciaries will go ahead and adopt it. And if it's not a valid idea, it's not consistent with the corporate board's fiduciary responsibility, then we won't. Obviously on other things where you have a conflict with the board, like pay or board terms or something like that, we're going to vote differently. But on these activist types of issues, we now vote alongside the board.

52:44And I'm really glad we did it that way, where we went to the provider rather than try to build a custom policy ourself. First of all, it takes a lot of people to build a custom policy yourself with. There's thousands and thousands of votes a year, which is when we only have 240 people at Texas Teachers. But also we've been able to convince other states to adopt this. And so there's other folks who are thinking along these strict fiduciary lines and less about more activist type issues. You mentioned at the onset when you first got started in Wall Street that you had these computer skills and sometimes you could just see the trends by where people are hiring.

53:16Using that lens, I'd love to have you look out and say, what are you seeing today? AI is obviously really interesting. I'll attempt to be original there. We identified data centers three years ago as our number one idea, and it crossed several different portfolios. And we had identified that as our number one idea before AI showed up. And then AI showed up, and so now it's just totally turbocharged it. So looking forward, I see data center demand for a long time. People have started to contemplate what it might mean to have a bubble in a data center. But investing in a data center, from my perspective, is similar to investing in land.

53:57Usually when you're investing in farmland, you're not actually buying the land. What you're really buying is access to water. It's more about water than it is soil. And so data centers is the same thing. It's about access to power. Looking forward, it's this very boring sector, the power sector. It's suddenly a lot of people are very, very interested in it. We know a lot about that at Texas Teachers with our focus on every kind of power you can imagine. And we're big power investors. So I do think AI has legs and that it's going to be transformative for our society. Any others you're excited about?

54:33This is going to sound a little bit defeatist, but alpha is going to get harder and harder and harder. It already has gotten harder. AI is going to actually speed up that as well. And so as investors, thinking about beta is going to become more and more important over time. and having the best beta you possibly can. We're 8 % investors in risk parity. Risk parity is all about having the best beta. Literally, when you put together a risk parity portfolio, you ignore alpha altogether and you take out a blank piece of paper and you say, if I was to build the most diverse portfolio I possibly could, how would I do it?

55:12Different providers have different answers to that question, but you're trying to maximize diversification. The idea of putting leverage on our fund while maximizing diversification, That's a prediction I would make. I would say that that's going to become more important, especially as we've seen one asset class, U.S. large cap equity dominate for quite a long time. I like to think in decades, which major country is going to win the decade? The U.S. won in the 1950s coming out of World War II. We were the factory to the world. Europe was rebuilding in the 60s. The emerging markets in the 70s with the commodities.

55:51The Japanese clearly in the 80s. US again in the 90s. Emerging markets again in the 2000s. Who is it? Well, it's India. India is the top performing major market in the world. And I call it a major market because they have such a huge percentage of the world's population. And I don't think the US is going to be the dominant market in this decade. At this point, it's probably going to be India. All right, Jason, I want to make sure I get a chance to ask you a couple of closing questions. What is your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family? We all have a lot of our favorite Munger Buffett quotes.

56:27This is a Munger quote. In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time. None, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads and about how much I read. And that's my hobby. I read a lot and I enjoy it. When I'm at home, I sit in the center of my house because I like to sit and read. And then when my children come home and they want to engage, I'm there and ready for them. It's a lot easier to engage with your kid when they want to engage with you than when you go knock on their bedroom door and they yell at you to go away. But for me, my favorite hobby is reading and then being there for my kids.

57:03What's one fact that most people don't know about you? So I play soccer on the weekends. I was a horrible team sports athlete as a kid, but I absolutely loved team sports. I had to play tennis as what I specialized in, But here I am, 54 years old, playing old man 11 on 11 referee soccer. And we run real slow and we limp a lot. But one last bite at that team sports apple for me is something I really enjoy. What's your biggest pet peeve? When you look at lists of advice that people give, you can do like, what are your top 10 pieces of advice? Think about it for yourself. What's the number one piece of advice that's common to all those lists?

57:45and that piece of advice is do what you say when you say you're going to do it. It's a cliche. So my biggest pet peeve is when people don't do what they say and they don't do it when they said they were going to do it. Even worse, they come to you a day before something's due and they say, well, I did the easiest 80 % part, but that hard 20 % was just really hard. I don't even know what to do there. And you're like, okay, come on, man. So that's definitely my biggest pet peeve. All right, let me turn that around then. What's the best advice you've ever received? I got this about 10 years ago, and it's when I realized that there's two kinds of people in the world.

58:23There's people who ask for permission and ask for forgiveness. And I thought long and hard about what kind I was, and I realized I'm a permission person. If I was left to myself working somewhere, I would be a cog in the machine, and I would just sit there and wait for somebody to come give me work. And then I would do the best I could to finish that work. It's realizing that in yourself and then challenging myself to go out and be more entrepreneurial and go out and think of things to do. And so the advice is if you're a permission person, break that mold. But also if you're a forgiveness person, break that mold too.

58:58If you're a forgiveness person, maybe ask for permission a little bit more too. Which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life? So definitely my wife, Susanna, for sure. We talk about her job. We talk about my job. I learn a lot giving her advice on what she does. And I learn even more getting advice from her on what she says. That's just been super important over the years. And then I had an early mentor at Goldman Sachs who taught me the way. You come out of college bright at and bushy-tailed, and they just set you straight. They tell you a lot of things. and one he told me we were in the fixed income.

59:37So you only have a AAA rating once. Once you lose your AAA rating in life, you'll never get it back. Maybe you can come close, but you'll never get that AAA rating back. Naivete is a great tool in an ethically challenged situation. So if someone's coming to you with something that's maybe ethically challenging, and if you ask why a lot, and you're like, well, why does this make sense? And why is this helpful? People just go away. They're like, oh, this guy just doesn't get it. That's important. No one cares about your career more than you do. That's something he told me, which is very important, especially for a permissioned person like myself where I'm sitting there waiting for somebody to come tap me.

1:00:17And then the best one ever, the one that nobody can ever follow, but I've spent a lifetime trying to, is compare and despair. So don't compare yourself to others. There's always somebody who's smarter or made more money than you or whatever it is you value, they have more of. All right, just last one. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life? As I've become more senior, it's paying a lot more attention to the feelings of the person around me. What are their hopes and dreams? The people that you work with, what do they prioritize? What are they worried about?

1:00:50When you're putting together a team of people, how is that team going to interact? What type of people they are? And when I was younger, that kind of stuff was not on my mind at all. I mean, I was an independent actor and we're all just getting together and hashing things out. And that perspective of thinking more than just yourself, that's a hallmark of being a good leader. And I do wish that I had learned that a lot earlier. Jace, thanks so much for sharing your path and approach to managing this important pool of assets. Thank you very much, Ted. This was absolutely wonderful. Great questions as well.

1:01:23So thank you.

1:01:54Thank you.

From the publisher

Jase Auby is the Chief Investment Officer of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, where he oversees the $200 billion pension fund that’s the fifth largest in the U.S. TRS manages assets that support the retirement security of over two million public education employees in Texas, and has long been known as a thought-leading steward of capital in the pension community, including engagement with emerging managers and innovation in fee structures.


Our conversation covers Jase’s background and path to TRS, including early working with computers on Wall Street and entrepreneurship. We discuss TRS’ organizational structure, competitive advantages, and investment approach and close with Jase’s role and accomplishments in his tenure as CIO.


Learn More
Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides or LinkedIn
Subscribe to the mailing list
Access Transcript with Premium Membership

More from Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

All 348 episodes
Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404)Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry · 58 min
Listen in VO