Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. Welcome to China Charter Chat, a podcast hosted by CFA Beijing Society. Today, we are thrilled to welcome Jeremy Heer, the Managing Director at University of Illinois Foundation. Jeremy has a wealth of experiences in investment management, having held key roles at the University of Chicago, UBS, and Morgan Stanley.
His expertise spans asset allocation, private market, and endowment investing. He is also a CFA and CAIA charterholder and the chair of CFA Society Chicago. So in today's episode, we will explore Jeremy's life journey in the finance world, his insights on managing endowment portfolio, the evolving role of alternative investment, and how AI is reshaping the investment strategies.
So without further ado, let's get started. Jeremy, how are you? Thank you so much for taking your time for the podcast. I know it's already very late for you. Really appreciate it. Oh, no worries at all, David. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Let's talk about your career first. So your career has spanned from trading and portfolio management and the leadership roles in the most prestigious financial institutions. Would you please maybe talk us through the highlights of your journey and what led you to specialize in endowment management? Well, I would start off by saying that most career paths tend to be, you can often have a direction that you take, but most of the time it's kind of a
random moments in time where you have to make decisions with random amounts of information, right? And so oftentimes you just have to make the best decision you can at that time. And that's true about everything, right? Life is probabilistic, not deterministic. And so a lot of the decisions I made over my career, and we'll get into that in a minute, were really just me making, you know,
The best decision I could with the information I had at the time. And oftentimes you get more information later and you think back, wow, what if I had done things differently, right? You had the information you had and all you can do is hope you did the best at that point in time. So I went to the University of Illinois and majored in finance. I worked full time in a McDonald's while I was there. I paid for a good portion of my schooling that way.
It was hard work, 40 hours a week flipping burgers. And I also ate two meals a day, five days a week and didn't gain that much weight somehow. Back when you're young, you can eat more, of course. I also met my wife there. We're still together today, married 30 years.
Well, yeah, college was great. I graduated in 1993 with kind of a middling grade point average. And I decided I wanted to go, you know, make a million dollars in the stock market. And so I moved to New York City. I took a job there as a stockbroker, which sounded like a great gig at the time. It turned out to be my first job in New York turned out to be more of a Wolf of Wall Street kind of situation. Look,
Back then, there was no internet. You couldn't check information or anything. And so people would do high pressure sales. And so you'd get leads and you would call people and, you know, you would try to sell them stocks. And I did that job for several weeks and kind of decided it wasn't for me pretty quickly. And so I quit and I didn't have another job lined up.
But about a week later, I found a commodity brokerage firm that hired me and I started out as an order clerk for them. And so I took commodities futures orders and I placed them to the to the exchange floors. So people would call and I would write down tickets and I would pick up another phone and I would call them to the pit and place an order and execute. I did that for a while.
I then went down to the floor and I kind of was on the other end of the phone in the coffee futures pit in New York, in the World Trade Center. And that's a very exciting atmosphere. It was really interesting. You know, I learned a lot in a short amount of time and then kind of decided that wasn't for me either. So I went back upstairs and I had some supervisory duties managing this order desk. And after a while, I looked around and I said, you know, it's funny. I'm working really hard, but I'm not making a ton of money. And so I think I really should go somewhere.
I have more career potential, more upside and so on. Now, by then, my wife was working at Morgan Stanley in New York and she was working for the head of equity derivatives in the Americas. Really nice guy. And he and I had a long chat and I gave him my resume and they started passing it around and they eventually found somebody to hire me into Morgan Stanley. So that was fall of 1996.
I started out in derivatives operations in their Brooklyn office. That office doesn't exist anymore, actually. I think they moved it to Baltimore. But it was in Brooklyn at the time. And I started out doing reconciliation work.
using a 10 key adding machine, very, very kind of menial stuff or basic operational work that needed to be done. And I kind of worked my way up through Morgan Stanley's operations groups, leaned on the guy that had gotten me in the first place and a couple of other people to get me recommendations. And I got into New York University, the Stern School of Business. And there I double majored in finance and statistics while I was working full time at Morgan Stanley still.
I was working in these operations groups and I was, you know, I was constantly trying to learn new things. And so one of the things I decided to do was learn how to write code in order to automate some of these back office process. As it turned out. Very impressive.
Oh, thank you. Yeah. Well, you know, it's one of those things. You do the same thing every day. You punch the same keystrokes every day. And sooner or later, you look at it and, you know, this not only would be much easier for the computer to do this for me, but there's also probably much less chance of errors if the computer does it and it's not the human doing it. Right. And so I've kind of kind of taken that with me in other places. One of the things I learned early on was that automating processes was very helpful. So.
In the year 1999, I took a brief detour from Morgan Stanley and I went to Cargill Investor Services. That was a Futures Commission merchant here in New York. I was running their New York clearing operation. I had 11 people reporting to me. It was a difficult job and not a great cultural fit.
But I kept in touch with my friends at Morgan Stanley. And so then in mid 2000, they said, hey, do you want to come back and work at Morgan Stanley? We've got this great role in this middle office risk management group. And I accepted. And so I came back to Morgan Stanley. And one of the things you should learn in this business is you don't want to burn bridges. Right. You always want to try to leave on good terms. And that's why you just never know. Right.
And so this role was very heavy coding, database programming. I was using, there was a lot of Unix-based stuff, so Perl and Cornshell and
I was doing like Sybase databases and DB2, writing stored procedures and creating end user reports for the equity divisions risk managers, basically saying, here's the exposure to a given counterparty across the entire firm. And then we created exception reports that would say, here are all the counterparties that have exposure over $100 million or whatever the numbers have to be that the risk managers wanted. But what it ended up being was this kind of database programming work. And one of my colleagues there,
was doing the CFA. Okay. So I finished my MBA. I was, I was there writing code and hoping to move into a front office job, like probably in trading was what I was thinking at the time. And a colleague was doing the CFA. He had just finished level one and he said, you should really look at this. And I agreed. And so I went and took level one in 2001 and passed that.
I kept going and in level two, I took 2002. And then, you know, after I'd taken level two, I had, I got an interview with the equity derivatives trading desk and I thought, here's my shot.
This is it. And I interviewed 14 times in one day. And, you know, I thought things went really well. And they did. I came in second. But of course, there's only one job. So I didn't get the job. But that actually made me really do some soul searching, thinking, you know, hey, am I really meant to be doing this? Or are there other things that I can do in this business? Then I got my level two results and those were really good. And I said, oh, wow, maybe investment management is what I should be doing.
So I started looking, Morgan Stanley Investment Management's job board. And after seemingly a few days, this role asset allocation analyst pops up on the board. And it basically is an analyst, an investment analyst in asset management who can write code.
And I was like, wow, that's perfect. It's exactly what I want to do. Yeah, that's you. Right. You know, there are a few places in my career where I just kind of have these serendipity moments. And it's why I talk about life being probabilistic. Right. You just you can say you can skew the probabilities. You still have to wait for the opportunities to come. Sometimes they come quickly and sometimes it takes a while. So I moved into Morgan Stanley Investment Management in the beginning of 2003. That was the asset allocation team. We were running several billion dollars in global balanced mandates.
And I was working with a very, very talented team of people. And probably the best known name in the group was Barton Biggs. He ran the division. He was the founder of Morgan Stanley Investment Management. I learned from Barton for a little bit, but he was absolutely a force of nature. And I really enjoyed working with him. Very, very no-nonsense, very high-energy guy. Anyway, while I was there...
I was really enjoying my work. And then my dad got Alzheimer's, Alzheimer's disease, which, of course, is a very bad disease that can take a very long time to run its course. And so I started thinking, you know, here I am in New York and my dad is in Peoria, Illinois. And so I need to move back and be closer to him. So I started looking around Chicago because I knew there was nothing in finance in Peoria that I was going to be interested in. And so I eventually found my way to UBS.
A friend of mine was working at UBS and he said, Jeremy, you're an asset allocation analyst. UBS Global Asset Management is looking for an asset allocation analyst in Chicago. So there's another one of those moments, right? And sure enough, I go through the interview process and talk to them. They fly me out here a couple of times. They hired me in April of 2000 and I moved to Brookfield, Illinois, in the suburbs of Chicago. I'm still in the same house today, in fact.
I may have made it a little bigger and stuff, but that was, you know, it's a great place, a great place to live. I really like it. So that was the global investment solutions team. And we were running at the peak in 2006, about $220 billion in global balanced portfolios. Had a huge team, probably 100 people globally in a dozen locations all across the U.S., Europe, Canada. In Asia, I remember we had Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore covered.
It was truly a global team. We would have a global asset allocation meeting every Friday, a video call. And in, you know, 2004, that was kind of still kind of a big deal. And so, you know, that was, that was a wonderful place to learn and,
to how to function within a team like that, also to function within a global organization and kind of learn how people in other cultures, other places do things. So it was really a fascinating time. Basically, the gist of the portfolios is that we would make kind of asset allocation bets where we would be over or underweight different asset classes. We would then, so say we wanted to be in U.S. equities. We would then give the money to UBS's U.S. equity team and they would go out and pick the stocks to buy.
And then on top of that, it was a global mandate or a multi-currency mandate. We would put on a currency overlay. So we had three different sources of alpha that were theoretically uncorrelated. It was a great, I loved the business model. I loved the philosophy and process really taught me the value of having a, like a disciplined process and sticking to it. Things went really well there for a while. And then,
Well, we went through some organizational changes, which happens over time. The guy who ran the division left and he started up a global macro hedge fund about a year later. And he, you know, he talked to several people at UBS and he eventually got to me and I decided that it was time to do something entrepreneurial and make a change. And so I went with him and this was the summer of 2009. This was a macro hedge fund roughly based on the same idea that we were doing at UBS, the asset allocation and currency overlay parts of it anyway.
Basically, we would come with the intrinsic value for an asset class. We would compare that to its price. And if the price was below the intrinsic value, we'd be long or overweight. And if it was above it, we'd be short or underweight. That was the basic idea. It was a great, I loved the product. I thought it was a really interesting summer of 09. I thought it might be a good time for a macro funds.
I figured there was plenty of macro volatility and we'd have a good opportunity set. We had a really great team. We had great technology. We didn't really have a great sales or any sales or distribution, which meant we didn't raise a ton of money.
I had ownership in this place. I was doing the trading. I was doing operations. I was building models. I was on the investment committee or the asset allocation committee. It was a pretty great place. And I love the people I work with there. In fact, I see them all the time. I actually just right before I was here, I actually saw a couple of people I worked with there. So it was pretty great to see them again. We still keep in touch. But, you know, I got a call in the spring of 2010.
from the woman that had hired me at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. She had just got hired on at the University of Chicago to build a new team, the strategy team, to do asset allocation and strategy work for the endowment, for the pensions, and for other pools of capital at the University of Chicago. And since it was a new team, she needed a portfolio manager. And she asked me if I was interested, and I was very interested. And
So I went and interviewed with everybody kind of in one day, the whole senior management team, and things progressed pretty quickly. And in August of 2010, I started at the University of Chicago. I worked at the University of Chicago for 12 and a half years, give or take. And it's a wonderful institution, very, very prestigious, very rigorous. The people there are all, I mean, super high caliber, just a wonderful team. They're all, I consider them all to be my friends to this day. And, you know, I really treasured my time there.
But, you know, I did some time in the private equity group. I helped to run a sleeve of the hedge fund portfolio for a bit, doing low beta diversifying hedge funds. We started looking at doing some thematic investing, some opportunistic investing. I started looking at the, you know, managing the picking managers for the pension funds and things like that. But, you know, after a while, you look around and you start to...
in a place like that, nobody ever leaves. And if nobody ever leaves, at some point you kind of run out of opportunities. And I started to kind of feel that way. And during COVID, I really kind of, you know, COVID gave us all a chance to really kind of re-examine our, you know, where we were in the world, right? And that was definitely me. So I looked around and I said, well, I'm going to have to be senior portfolio manager of strategy for the rest of my career, or I'm going to have to go find something else to do. And so I,
I made my, I made the decision to start, you know, looking around and seeing what was out there. Fast forward to,
April of 22, April of 2022, the University of Illinois Foundation hired Travis Shore. He'd been the deputy CIO at Vanderbilt. I talked to him his third day on the job. I approached him and, you know, what are your hiring plans? And, you know, he had already had offers out to a couple of people he worked with, but he said, we talked a bit more. He said, I've got this other position and I think you're good for it. We should definitely talk more. And we talked about it in some detail and I agreed.
And we spent several months getting to know each other better. And for me, he didn't get to know the rest of the team, the new people he had hired, as well as the few people he had inherited. And for me to get to know them too, and make sure it's a fit because, you know, when you're hiring into that kind of a senior level, you need to make sure that it, that it makes sense that for both for me and for UIF, we need to make sure that both made sense. And so we eventually came to an agreement and I started in February of 2023 and
I've been the University of Illinois Foundation for almost two years now. I'm managing director of investment research and engagement, which is a unique role. I don't know anyone who does the things that I do specifically. We have this whole kind of learning research and engagement function where we're really trying to be creative. Learning and research, we have a deep dive research process. We have
regular research meetings where I lead the discussion and create materials. We talk, topics bubble up from everybody and we talk, you know, for example, the first project I did was 101
I think 120 slides on energy, like the entire energy market, how money gets made in it, what are the different energy sources out there and so on. And the idea of all this is to make everybody a better investor, but also to maybe have one or two investment theses fall out of the work every year. And then we would have something targeted where we would either go out and it was something new for the portfolio.
Go out and add it. If it's something already in our portfolio, maybe we gain more conviction and we add to it. Or maybe we go and we do some research and we find out that there's something that is in the portfolio we don't want, and so we get rid of it.
So it's meant to be very complimentary to the rest of the team. The other two managing directors are one of them does kind of growth and venture income statement oriented investing. The other one does more balance sheet oriented. So credit and value and buyout and those sorts of things. So they're more traditional, you know, manager selection and due diligence and instrument selection types of managing directors.
So we're technically a generalist model. We all work on every deal. But, you know, each of them has their piece that they're ultimately responsible for. And my job is to help them, you know, find ideas and things like that. And then that leads me to the engagement piece, which is very unique. I've met directors of research, but I don't know anyone who has engagement in their title. And so engagement is basically put us one point of contact away from anyone in the world that we want to talk to about anything.
And that could be it could be managers. It could be other endowments or foundations or other institutions. It could be government officials. It could be service providers, bankers, brokers, CEOs, founders. There's also a big University of Illinois alumni piece to this. I'm supposed to engage the University of Illinois ecosystem wherever I can. And as an alumnus, I can kind of pull those levers. And, you know, so when we have things on campus, oftentimes I'll go down and do presentations down there and things like that.
So basically, I have this kind of combination role of kind of, you know, figuring out where to hunt and helping with the hunt is kind of the shortest way I can think of. And it's a wonderful role. And it's the best job I ever had. And I'm really, I'm really enjoying it. It's great. Endowment investing is a very, it's a very different, I hate to say the word game, but it's a very different game than a lot of the other pieces of the investment ecosystem. Anyway, I'll stop there. I think that's, I just gave you my entire career in a reasonably short amount of time.
Having listened to your stories, for me, it's basically like watching a movie. All these different scenes just come to my mind. Lots of questions, right? Yeah, exactly. But I just want to chat with you because during your more than 30 years of career, obviously, you have experienced quite a lot.
a lot of different areas. For example, you mentioned that you started working in the 90s, which is basically like the movie of The Wolf in the Wall Street. And also you have experienced the dot-com bubble and also you experienced the global financial crisis. And now you have also experienced the COVID time and things are quite different now. So I just want to ask you, how did you navigate this kind of drastic change in regards to the world environment and also the different skills that require?
required to the practitioners. Of course, you keep learning, which is very, very impressive. But you learn to code and learn finance and your trading experience is from commodities and the truth to equities and to asset applications. What's your secret? And how did you navigate this kind of... How can you be successful during all this period? There's no secret, right?
And oftentimes when you're going through it, you don't even realize, right? You don't think, well, this is my strategy of how I'm going to get to there. Oftentimes it's just day to day. You're just firefighting. You're just getting through the next day and thinking, you know, do I want to be doing this in a year? Not what do I want to be doing in 10 years, right? Especially when you're younger off. I found it harder when I was younger to really think long-term. And I would say that that's one of the lessons that I really got out of that is that I really wish that I had
you know, taking the time to learn more about the investment and, you know, finance and investing ecosystem rather than saying, I want to be a trader.
I'm going to put myself in places where I can be a trader and that's it. Right. I really, if I had opened myself up to other things, you know, I might've found an interesting career paths earlier on. It's all turned out great, but you know, that's, if there was a piece of advice I could give to my former self, that would be, that would be it. I did try to be forward looking in the skills that I picked. Coding is a great example of that. I knew that not only would it help me in the job that I was doing,
but that it would be applicable to all sorts of things. And I used my coding skills at UBS. I used my coding skills at University of Chicago as well. I haven't had to do it too much in the role I'm in now, but it's a bit different. I've had to use my understanding of the concepts and things like databases and how data comes in and so on for implementation of systems and things like that.
But that's a different thing than having to go and, you know, write a bunch of MATLAB code to do Monte Carlo simulations or, you know, write a, you know, a giant query or a stored procedure or anything like that. Those are those are different things. But my point is, is that trying to be forward thinking in terms of the skills you need, that is helpful for sure. The other piece of advice I give to everybody early, especially early in your career.
You almost want to collect skill sets and credentials. Okay. And that was my thought when I was getting, when I, when the CFA came around, the worst thing that happens is I learned a bunch of stuff and I have this thing that I can use for the rest of my life. Right.
The best thing is, of course, is that the CFA turns out to be something that has a whole professional network attached to it. And so I've made some lifelong connections through the various entities of the CFA Institute, CFA Society of Chicago and so on. So, yeah, so it's collect skills that people, you know, hard skills and, you know, find places where you can use them and apply them and always be networking and collect credentials. Right. I think it's I think that those things.
Oftentimes, when you're applying for a role, you'll see CFA preferred. It'll be a tiebreaker, things like that. Okay, well, great. I've got that. That's kind of how my mindset is with that stuff. But you always want to be trying to take the things that you learn
Whether it's coding, whether it's things you learn in the CFA or whatever, and apply them somewhere. Otherwise, you're going to lose the stuff that you don't apply. It's like trying to speak a foreign language. I used to be a decent Spanish speaker, but I don't ever use it anymore. So now it's a basic language.
So, you know, I barely speak English well enough now, right? Well, you don't know. Maybe the next investment is in Latin America. Right. Well, you know, I'm hoping to learn Mandarin. I'm working on it in Duolingo, but it's just really hard. It's so different. And there's the different, you know, the different vowels and pronunciations. It's very hard, right? And it's funny, depending on who I talk to. Some people say when I say things like, right? Some people say, right?
Yeah, right. Some people will say it's good. And then some people are like, Jeremy, what are you trying to say? No worries. Just to keep talking. For next podcast, I will do this in Mandarin. Okay, deal. Okay, thank you for that. This is a very insightful live lesson, I believe, to all our listeners. Just want to talk more about the endowment. Because the concept of a university endowment and its operating approaches and the investment philosophy might be a little bit unfamiliar to our Chinese listeners. At the local market, it's quite different here.
So can you maybe elaborate more about the uniqueness of managing endowment? I know you have already touched that for a bit, but maybe just dive into a little bit detail on this compared to the traditional asset management model. And how did the University of Illinois Foundation balance the liquidity needs with the long-term investment? Sure. So endowment management, endowment, you have a basic trade-off.
You are basically an endowment is a port is basically a perpetual institution. It's meant to last forever, but it also pays out periodically a certain amount of money. Right. So in most of them, it's around five percent. And there's, you know, sometimes it's four and a half. There's different schools have different spending rates or different institutions have different spending rates. But the point is, I have to pay that out where the markets went up or down.
Okay. And so you have to build a portfolio in which you are able to continuously pay out this up to 5% a year without becoming a forced seller of risky assets, which everyone knows you don't want to crystallize losses, right? So you need to design a portfolio that has enough growth characteristics to meet that 5% payout plus inflation.
Because that is kind of how you achieve intergenerational equity, which means that the institution, the endowment,
benefits every cohort equally from now until the end of time. So the way that you do that is by making your spend rate plus inflation over time. Okay. You don't ever want to let it shrink in real terms. So you have to, you know, if you think about a portfolio that has a 5% spend rate and you think inflation is going to be, you know, two or 3%, well, Hey, I've got a seven or 8% return I've got to make nominally. And you know, it could be more than that. Right. But
So if you think about a portfolio that's got to make 7% or 8% nominally every year, that's going to have to have a decent slug of equities in it, no matter what. But you're also going to have to have some kind of ballast, and that's probably going to be some sort of treasury bond or government bond.
Those are the two most basic building blocks of any endowment portfolio. Having a perpetual time horizon means you can also invest in other things that have a long horizon as well. And so that's when you start talking about private markets, private equity, venture capital, things that have a 10-year, 15-year life.
As long as you do them, as long as you do it correctly, as long as you do the right amount of it, you don't do too much of that. Then those, they can often have much higher returns in public equities. And so oftentimes there's a place for them in institutional portfolios. But it only makes sense if you have a long enough horizon that kind of matches that. So I think endowments and foundations are ideal for that.
And so that's why you end up with a lot of endowments and foundations with a decent sized private markets program. The trick, of course, is to balance that with your liquidity needs. The way that we do it, we manage illiquidity at the total portfolio level. We have a basic model like everybody else does, which means we have a model that says this is how much we need to commit each year in our private markets. And we stress test it against prior market regimes and big market falls and things like that to make sure we're not going to get too far out over our skis.
You know, and as far as risk-taking is concerned, our asset allocation targets are actually based on beta factors rather than on traditional asset allocation buckets. And there aren't a ton of places that do that. Most people have asset allocation buckets traditionally. So you'll have global public equities and private equity and capital.
Real assets maybe and hedge funds maybe and maybe a private credit bucket. And then you might have a fixed income bucket. Right. That's pretty typical. The way we do it, and in each of those buckets, by the way, you would go out and you would hire managers to run pieces of each of those. So if I had a public equity bucket and I had to have 30% of my portfolio in public equities, I might go out and hire 10 managers. Each of them does 3% of the portfolio. Or I might do 20 managers in each of those one and a half, depending on how diversified I think I need to be and so on.
The way we do it is we look through to the individual stocks, bonds, loans, deals, each individual line item that each manager or fund or strategy is going to give us. And we map the dollars in those to beta factors, equities, interest rates, cash, credit, commodities, and real estate. And then you sum up the dollars by beta factor. You divide that by your NAV, and that's your asset allocation. And so we have a very healthy equity target, around 62.5%.
We have a big range around that, though, so we can be very opportunistic and go after what we think are the best opportunities for equities. Our range is 45 to 80. We also have interest rates we consider to be so when markets go down and we still need to make our payout, well, that's where you're going to get your money from is out of that.
Also, when markets go down, hopefully your treasuries make money and then maybe you can sell some of those and then redeploy that into risky assets when the prices are depressed. And then when they go back up, then that's the basic rebalancing idea with those. So treasuries kind of serve that purpose. And for us, it's about 12 and a half percent, which is pretty good. It's a pretty high number for an endowment.
And then we have no cash. We always carry a little bit of cash. We can carry more of it depending on how we feel about interest rates because cash is just short-term interest rate, really. And then we have credit commodities and real estate. And we consider those to be tactical or opportunistic. We have 15 credit target of five commodities, five real estate. It's very...
But those all have big ranges around them, too. We really don't want to ever have to say, well, we just found this great deal. We think it's going to return 10 times our money, but we can't do it because our target for venture capital is 7% and we're at 7.2%. Right. We don't ever want to be in that situation.
We don't want to be everyone to miss something like that. And we don't want to become for sellers just because of temporary market moves. And so we have these kind of big ranges which allow us to really kind of go out and try to own the best businesses and own them for long periods and let them compound capital internally. That's our basic philosophy there. That's what we're really trying to do. The other things are sources of independent return and then risk reducers. That's kind of how we basically think about portfolio construction.
On top of my head, I think endowment management is, compared to the traditional financial institutions, it's a bit like insurance companies. Usually they have an investment with a relatively longer duration, for example, including like the real estate and private equity, like you mentioned. But I think the detailed asset allocation approach is also useful.
You both have your own uniqueness. You're right. It's insurance companies. That's very true. They often have, it depends on the kind of insurance too. They oftentimes still have a big slug of corporate bonds or corporate credit because they have interest rate matching. You have to do duration matching, right? We don't have as much of that, but yes, you're right. Argument is very similar for those two types of institutions.
You also mentioned that during your applications, you also have the beta identification process or the beta factor for the specific individual investment line. But I just want to check, do you select the betas by different sectors or by different markets? For example, by specific industries or by specific markets like the emerging market or developed market, do you have a separation of that?
We don't. We obviously think about the world that way. We'll often want to know, hey, what's our exposure in China? What's our exposure in Japan? And we have systems to do things like that. It's the same systems we use to figure out what our beta factor exposures are as well. It's not that we ignore those things. It's just in our asset allocation model, it's for governance purposes. We really just have the beta factors. When we talk to our investment policy committee, we'll often describe the portfolio in other ways too. They'll ask, you
You know, how much, you know, energy exposure do we have or how much tech exposure do we have or how much China exposure do we have? Right. And so we have to answer those questions. It's not like we ignore those things. It's just, you know, you have to be cognizant of those sorts of things when you're managing a global portfolio for sure.
Not only in terms of, you know, I mean, really, it's really in terms of opportunity sets as well as, you know, risks. Investing outside your own country, there's always currency risk, for example. And then oftentimes with emerging markets, this is something I found over the years that you get excited about emerging markets because they often have high levels of GDP growth. And then you look and you see those high levels of GDP growth that have been there forever.
don't ever translate into equity market returns, right? So then, you know, you have to, it's one of those things you have to monitor, right? Are economic gains accruing to equity? I always find that a fascinating research subject. Yeah, it makes sense. Thank you. But we have, in short, we have a global mandate. We don't rule things out necessarily anywhere. We'll look everywhere. But obviously, if it's, you know,
The underwriting bar is going to be different for a technology company in Vietnam versus a consumer products company in the United States. They're very different and they'll be treated differently. I think based on what you mentioned from the world perspective, I think one of the common traits, I think you also mentioned that, would be the emerging of AI and also other technology trends or other technology companies. So just want to check with you about the standpoint for the AI on technology investing.
I think you used to mention that AI is not just an investing opportunity, but also is a tool to enhance the internal process for the institutions where you are. So what kind of AI-driven investment do you find the most promising? And how do you maybe separate the market hype from the genuine generational investment opportunities?
Yeah, I mean, obviously, AI is a hot topic and we're all, everybody who is in investments is trying to figure these questions out, right? This is, you know, if I told you I had all the answers, boy, I'd do it. That's not, you know, but so yeah, we're trying to figure that, all that out like everybody else. We do venture capital investing. We pick partners that invest in technology and, you know, some of the stuff they do is AI related.
We are trying to figure out whether we need to do more thematic investing in the space, but we haven't done any AI-specific investments or anything like that. You know, I suspect that we will run into those things at some point. We've also done a lot of work around the implications of AI. Everybody's talking about the data center themes, right? And there's a whole bunch of themes around data centers.
You need the real estate for it. You need power. Where are you going to get the power from? What's it going to do to energy prices everywhere else? You've got to cool these things. What about new technologies? There's liquid-cooled versus air-cooled. So there's technology companies that are trying to solve that. And then there's cybersecurity. You've got to worry about it. There's all these different kind of offshoots of it. And we're trying to explore all of them one piece at a time because that's kind of how you have to do it. As far as tools are concerned…
I mean, we definitely use AI tools somewhat now, even as simple as using, you know, ChatGBT or Perplexity. We've recently done a whole pilot on a product called AlphaSense, which kind of has an AI chatbot within it. And it's really good for doing kind of not only the search that I like to do. It's great. I can go in there. I can say, tell me about...
All the nuclear energy companies that create boiling water reactors, as opposed to pressurized water reactors, right? And it'll spit out all that for me, like without, in an unstructured format. It's really cool. So, you know, we just did a pilot of it. We like it. We're coming to terms with them on an agreement soon. And then that's going to really kind of
Probably speed up a lot of the research that I do because I don't have to use Google and perplexity and chat GPT anymore to try to find out what I need to find out about things.
I mean, I think that you see rapid adoption across the investment management industry. There's a really great paper put out by the Purdue University Foundation about this, about how, you know, asset owners should be using AI tools to streamline things. We have not only investment applications for those things, but there's also this whole due diligence part of it. AI tools are great for kind of digesting documents. So, yeah.
You know, a big part of what we do, we have every private market investment we do has a whole ton of legal docs in it, right? AI is really good at picking those things apart, digesting them, putting them into our documentation system and so on. And so that's another application. There's other things like, you know,
We take a ton of meetings. We meet with managers like all the time. And, you know, there's automated note taking for those things. Right. And so we've looked at a couple of those. So there are just so many different things. It's a very exciting time right now and things are moving very quickly. And so we think, you know, I would say that in the end, I don't see it. AI tools as replacing humans. I just see it as changing what they do.
Right. I don't I don't think you can get rid of the people part of this business. Investing is still a people business. But I think that you can definitely change business.
What the jobs are, you know what I mean? And how you do the jobs that you have, even if the jobs, even if the job stays the same, you don't portfolio manager and have to pick stocks, right? The way that I do that now is vastly different than I would have done it 20 years ago, which was vastly different than I did it 20 years before that. And so another 10 years, it's going to be really different again, because we're going to have a new set of tools and we'll have found new ways to think about this.
And so, you know, staying abreast of this stuff and being a constant learner, a continuous learner is absolutely essential for like future success across the investment industry. Yeah, exactly.
Thank you for that. I think you're right on that. In the market, there are indeed a lot of excitement for the AI-related industries, whether it could be the semiconductor or could be the application sectors. But just want to ask you a question that many of our listeners are quite interested because you have experiences quite a lot. And you have also experiences at GFC and also .com bubble. But in today's AI market,
market. Do you see that it is like genuine opportunities and keep going? Or maybe we have already seen some similarities between the current market with the dot-com bubble. So what do you think? Yeah. I mean, obviously the hype cycle is real. I think this is where it gets hard, right? Just like in the dot-com bubble, right? Everyone remembers it as, oh, wow, everything was overpriced and then everything went down. And that's kind of true.
But things like Amazon came out of the dot-com bubble, right? And now Amazon is the market leader. So I think that there are going to be companies like that. There's going to be companies where they actually come up with the thing or the things that get adopted by people. But I think that for every one of those, there's going to be probably 10 that have problems, right? And they're all very highly valued right now. So it's a very, very difficult market, I would say.
be trying to pick the winner or winners in something where technology changes so quickly and it's all about finding that breakthrough. I think that that's fraught with peril. I don't often, you know, for a lot, for people who aren't really deep in the weeds on this stuff, you almost have to take an index approach where you just own everything. I've seen a lot of studies that talk about seed investing that way, you know, in venture capital, where they say,
that so many of the seed deals fail. There's one seed deal that's a 10,000 X. So you basically just have to own all the seed deals because otherwise you have a chance of missing the one that made all of it worthwhile.
So I think of it a lot like that in the AI world. I think there's going to be a couple of companies in each of the kind of subsectors that's going to turn out to be the one or ones. There's going to be a lot of winner-take-all kind of stuff going on or winner-take-most. And so I feel like it's almost too early to tell what those are going to be. And so it
Be very careful projecting out very far with this stuff. Thank you for that. Let's keep moving to the other assets classes. Besides the AI and technologies, real estate and the different kind of real estate-related assets, I think, also plays a key role in the many institution portfolios. But I think you also mentioned this before, that the fee structures can often make this investment less attractive.
in regards to the endowment. So how does the University of Illinois Foundation approach the real estate investment? And what type of real estate assets are you mostly interested in? Well, it's interesting. As I mentioned before, real estate is one of our kind of opportunistic or tactical beta factors. So the way that we describe this is we only do credit commodities or real estate when we think we can get an equity-like return.
So therefore, any risky asset, we kind of view it under the same underwriting lens. OK, the other principle is that we think that if you're going to lock your money up in a drawdown fund where you have no control for 10 years.
then you better get a lot more than you would if you were going to invest it in something where you had liquidity and control. And so the way we look at private funds is that we say, we want to have the base case be three times your money in 10 years. And that's a bar that is pretty high. It leads us to a lot of kind of lower, lower, lower middle market, individual deals, and venture capital stuff is what you end up seeing that can do that. Real estate,
Most private real estate funds are generally kind of, they'll generally get you to two times your money in 10 years. And so that's kind of below our underwriting hurdle.
And part of that is just the real estate doesn't move the same way equity does. And part of it is that there's some interesting fee structures like we talked about where you have, you know, you go out and you, but if you're a real estate manager, you go out and you buy properties. Well, you've got to have somebody to manage that property. And oftentimes you'll have a joint venture partner or an operating partner and they're getting a piece of everything too. No, for pretty soon, everyone's got to getting a fee and you're not, and there's not that much left for the end investor.
which is us. And so we care very much about net of fees investing across the board. So, you know, most private real estate funds just don't hit our underwriting hurdle. So that means that if we're going to do real estate, it's most likely going to be there's REITs, right? And then we would look at those the same way we look at public equities in terms of return expectations.
high teens, low twenties. And then the other way we could do it, it would be for private deals that are, you know, they're more targeted, very, very opportunistic things, right? That's kind of the way we're thinking about it right now. These things, of course, part of my job is to challenge our priors. And so, uh, you know, you can bet that I'll be doing that in the coming months and years, uh, you know, kind of re-examining these things and making sure that our hurdles make sense, but I sure think they do right now. That's for sure. So, yeah. Um,
I think that that's kind of where we are in real estate for sure. And then there's other tangible assets and we have the same kind of problems there, mining or energy or things like that. How do you underwrite the equity returns in those things? So we're still figuring that out. So I would say that I think you prefer maybe it's more like a security-type form of real estate because it's a better liquidity and better valuations compared to the traditional direct ownership.
I don't know if I would, I don't know about the valuation argument, but I do know about the liquidity and the fact that I can get out of it every day and the fees on REITs are pretty low. Those are really the main arguments. For valuation, I mean that, for example, if the assets have better liquidity, you can see the valuation of a specific factor could be more transparent and the big asking prices could be, the big asking price could be relatively narrow compared to large. Then yes, we agree. Very good.
Thank you for that. And let's keep going. Many of our listeners are quite interested because they heard about Harvard, they heard about Yale, and both of these famous universities also have their own endowment, which is in a large scale and also has its unique way for asset allocation and risk management.
So I want to ask you, how does the University of Illinois Foundation's investment strategy compare to the peer institutions? And are there any elements from other peers that already influence your approaches? Can you maybe give us a short comparison? It's funny, right? Theoretically, peer comparisons are fraught with peril. Every institution out there has a different history.
A different level of access to managers, a different risk tolerance, a different liquidity tolerance and profile. Right. And so that makes comparing returns between peers difficult. Plus, the fact is that our investment decisions, they take years to work, to play out. Yeah.
So looking at one-year investment returns is also fraught with peril. We have a theoretically infinite, but realistically very long time horizon. And so we really, you know, anybody who tells you that they're excited about their one-year number, I mean, yeah, it's always great to have some short-term success, but they're thinking, well, you know, what does my five-year and my 10-year number look like? Because those are probably more important. And then, you know, 20 becomes more important and so on. So anyway, with that in mind, right, thinking about how peers tend to do things,
Now, you know, I haven't worked at Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Stanford, right? So I don't have firsthand knowledge of this stuff. But to my knowledge and from things I've been able to glean, most of these places tend to have somewhat of a traditional asset allocation approach.
where they'll have buckets, okay? Yale publishes their investment reports every year. Fascinating reading, by the way. I would highly recommend reading those if you're really interested in learning about endowment management. They publish a lot of stuff and they'll go through and they'll go asset class by asset class. They'll say U.S. equities and this is what our U.S. equity portfolio did. And sometimes they'll even tell you, this is what our forward-looking expected return is for this asset class.
So you can get an idea of how they do things and how they think about it. That's how most places tend to do it. From what I've seen, there are some that take an approach that's kind of like ours, where there's kind of either really big buckets. I've seen one where there were only kind of three buckets. There's global equity, fixed income, and then diversifiers.
Each of those had a target. So those are, you see there, you have a lot of flexibility like we do, because those things can mean lots of things like global equity, of course, included public and private equities. So there are definitely a bunch of different ways to do it. There's no one right way. But I would say that our approach is definitely not very common. You don't see it very often where people actually base their asset allocation governance around a beta factor levels rather than asset class weights, traditional asset allocation approach. Thank you. Thank you for that.
I do agree that each university is quite special and unique in managing its own endowment. But I think in general, because the universities need the funding and also you mentioned about the relatively fixed payroll. This is quite common, not only for the Illinois, but also for other universities. The ultimate goal is to maintain the relatively fixed payroll to meet the target, to meet the goals. The payout. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, you're right. It's true. You know, each of these institutions, they have their kind of, you know, risk appetite.
And one of the things I used to do at the University of Chicago was do some peer comparisons. And we would, you know, our risk team would prepare, like, equity beta estimates for each of the peers as well as for us. And, you know, we would compare those and we'd use that as a, you know, when you were comparing us against peers, we'd say, well, we're running a beta of 0.8. And, you know, someone like Yale is running a beta of 1.0.
If Yale beats us by 200 basis points, doesn't that kind of make sense because we're running less risk than they are? So that's why I was saying that comparing the raw return numbers or asset allocation without knowing more about the institution is very, very difficult to do. Thank you for that. And I want to talk to you about the market and also the macro landscape that we are currently in.
So I think there is a lot of discussion that in the past two years, especially I think in the U.S., the equity market and also part of the bond market is doing extraordinarily well. And we can see that there are 20, 25 returns in 2023 and almost 25 returns in 2024. And now we are marching into 2025.
And we have a new administration and also the market is currently under a lot of volatility. And also there might be a little bit uncertainty for this hype or for this trend to continue to go.
So I want to check with you. What's your view on this? And are there any, like you mentioned, the rebalance or any change of portfolio to navigate these possible challenges? How do you manage the future risk? We're really long-term investors. And so we view volatility as opportunities to find cheap stuff, to find businesses that we can buy and own for long periods of time. And if you're truly a long-term investor, that's the way you want to think about it.
When there's market volatility, if your program is designed properly, then those should be opportunities for you to sell out of risk-free assets and redeploy capital into things that are at very, very low prices. And that's, you know, that's kind of really how we think about it. We try to make sure that we don't get too overextended in the good times.
So that when the bad times come, we have a little bit of dry powder that we can use and we have some liquidity we can use to redeploy and buy things that are really cheap. Again, remember our main goal, own the best businesses for long periods of time, let them compound capital internally. And that doesn't ever really go out of style, I don't think, per se.
OK, you just have to make sure that you have your, you know, the rest of your program designed properly. You know, how much do you have in unfunded commitments to privates as a percentage of NAV? We try to keep that pretty low. How much do you have overall locked up? How much liquidity can you get to in a short amount of period in a short period of time in your marketable securities? Those are things those are things that we always have to be keeping an eye on and making sure that.
If we get some serious market volatility, rather than being a time to be defensive and shore things up, it's more a time to take advantage of the opportunities. I think it was Buffett that said, buy when there's blood in the streets. That's kind of the way to think about it. When markets are really getting beat, when risk assets are really getting beat up, you want to be able to step in and buy.
And so part of our job, and that's really the hard part, is deciding when to do that, isn't it? Also, you need to ensure when the opportunity is in front of you, you need to have sufficient cash to take this opportunity.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, cash. And, you know, cash and treasuries are really kind of our risk reducers. Okay. And so I kind of think of those as being very similar. So yeah, you need to have cash. Treasuries, I can get cash the same day for treasuries. So that's basically the same thing to me. So those are really the risk reducing pieces of our business. I see. I see.
I think what you mentioned is quite valuable. And I think I also remembered a similar statement made by other fund managers and other professors in different universities. I mean, they have all experiences different times in regards of the market up and the market down. And instead of just predicting
predicting the future, predicting the market, I think it's better for, they all mention that it's better for institutions just to maintain a good governance of the risk profile and a good management of their risk practice, just to make sure that they could be ready. Whatever happens, and also they can just take the opportunity with sufficient resources at their hand.
And so there, you know, that's a really good point. And so there, I find that there's sort of a parallel between being a financial advisor and being, you know, working and managing an endowment. In the end, your investment management is always for a client, right? And in this case, most endowments foundations will have a board of directors or a board of trustees, and they'll have an investment committee. We call ours the investment policy committee. You know, that's who your client is. And so you have to have them, you have to communicate with them
What your plan is and you have to, you know, stick to that plan. You know, Travis is very fond of saying I'll never surprise you. And I love that. Right. And he says that to the board and they can take comfort in that for something like like what we're talking about. If they know that our plan is to is, you know, markets drop 20 percent, we're going to be buyers. Right.
It's a whole lot easier to have those conversations when the market's down 20%. This is what we talked about. If you didn't talk about it, you didn't establish that bond, that trust with the committee, with your client, then it's a whole lot harder to have that argument where like, oh, man, everything's going to zero. The sky is falling. That's not the time to be saying, oh, no, we have a plan. They need to know that you had the plan when the market was up. Yeah.
So that's a whole, probably an underappreciated side to being a chief investment officer, to managing an institutional portfolio like this is communication with the board, your relationship with them. I think that the investment committee, the board of directors, they have a huge impact on returns and a huge impact on the program over the long run. And you've really got to make sure you cultivate that side of this if you're the guy in charge. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Yeah. I totally agree with you. I mean, communication is quite important in regards of not only investment management, but also all part of the work, all part of the life. Like communication is a sort of way to align with your views, not just your clients, to different stakeholders. And this can fundamentally, I mean, shape the actual results for whatever you are trying to do for your portfolio or for the initiative you are trying to work on. This is quite important. Yeah.
That's well said, David. Thank you. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you for the very detailed introduction of your work and what you're doing for the university endowment, which is very helpful. But I think that's a circle back to you. I think you just mentioned that you have more than 30 years of different work experiences. Your career path is quite successful. You inspired us a lot to the whole
the whole classes of the audience, whether the audience could be the students or could be the practitioners. I just want to ask you this, because outside your daily work, you have also mentored different financial professionals and also actively contribute to the CFA communities. And obviously you're very busy, but you also take time to be the chair of the CFA Society in Chicago.
Can I ask you what advice you could give to the younger generations of professionals who want to build a career in finance as well? We talked about some of it, right? Continuous learning. Be willing to do...
There were times in my career where I had to be willing to do stuff that other people wouldn't do sometimes in terms of like tasks. You know, some people would say, oh, I don't do things like that. I was like, well, I'll step up and do it. I need to learn. I want to learn. I want to find out about how, you know, how these things work. Right. So I'll do it. I think having that kind of a can do or attitude is very, very important. I talked about collecting skills and credentials and, you know, and always being networking. I think those are really, really important. And
I still think it's somewhat underrated how much of a people business this is. It really is. We all have spreadsheets and models and we all have, you know, technology and AI and all that. But in the end, it's still people that are ultimately making decisions. And you still have to learn how to, you know, connect with people. I think that's really important. I also think it's really important to not completely lose your life outside of work.
Okay. Work comes first, right? My career has always come first. However, I always made sure that, you know, I was involved in my kids' activities and that I had things that I did.
I took up ice hockey when I was 37. I played until a couple years ago. I was 51-ish when I hung up my skates. I'm 53 now. You know, I've done some community theater work and music's always been a big passion of mine. So I play nine different instruments and mainly guitar, bass, and piano, but there are a bunch of others. And I do some singing and I'm playing bands and things like that. I think it's, you know, those sorts of things, not only they help you kind of stay grounded,
So that when you do have to put in the all-nighters and the weekends for work on occasion, that it's in my, the way that I think about it, I feel okay about it. You know, like, you know, yeah, I'm not always on, right? I'm not always on for work.
But I'm never off either. Right. So, you know, if I get an email tonight or a message tonight and I got to do something, I have to do something. That's fine. Right. But, you know, you can definitely still have a life. And I think it's important to have that. And I think it's important to, you know, not only from just from becoming a more well-rounded person and being able to use your brain in different ways, which I think is important. And obviously, physical fitness is really important because it helps you do your job better, frankly. But, yeah.
I also think that when it comes time to make connections with people, if you have interesting things to talk about, you have interests, if you have things that you like to do outside of work and outside of the office, well, hey, sometimes that actually helps you connect with people in a way that you wouldn't otherwise connect with them.
You know, if I'm, if I'm at a conference and I'm trying to talk to people, you know, and I'm at a table and, you know, I want, sometimes I want them to remember me. And if I want them to remember me, I've got to have an interesting story or something. And I've got a few of those. So, you know, I can connect with somebody else who happens to be a scuba diver. I learned to scuba dive last year and it's the first time I'd ever done it. And that was phenomenal. I'm going to keep doing it, but you know, don't be afraid to try, you know, stuff outside, outside of work at least. Yeah. Um,
You know, a lot of it is just about, a lot of it is about the attitude you have going in. Oftentimes how you frame things will very, very much affect how they affect you.
And so, you know, oftentimes I just say, you know, okay, got the work to do. I'm going to get it done. I know it's going to get done. I'm just going to get down and do it. And I do it. I need to do this hour long workout. Okay. I go and I do the workout and, you know, boom, I got it done. I do a lot of visualization. I do a lot of, you know, just trying to be as positive as I can because there's plenty of negative in the world, you know? Yeah.
I think this is super helpful, and especially for our listeners in Asia region, because the culture here in Asia is a little bit different compared to America. I mean, not for certain, but in general, maybe students or younger generation in America is that they have more like a can-do attitude, and when they want to do something, and they just go out and do something. But in Asia, the culture is relatively conservative, and people, of course, they have aspirations, but maybe...
in appearances, they could be a little bit shy or a little bit reserved when trying out new things and trying to break the wall. I understand. And it's hard. I wasn't always like this. There's always going to be different levels of it. I think the
Sometimes you just have to take that first step, right? You have to talk to that person rather than just walking past them. You have to say, hey, I've got an extra 30 minutes today. I'll read this book or I'll read this article or I'll listen to this album I've been meaning to listen to for a while or whatever it is, right? I think it's really important to keep that in mind. And I know that there's different amounts of free time. There's different amounts of energy levels and things like that that you're going to have.
But, you know, I think if you just even just reserving a few minutes a day for kind of self-care is really important. And I think everybody can do that. Yeah, but I just want to check with you because, you know, you mentioned that you do hope, of course, you have great passion and also you have great aspirations. But obviously, you are very busy in regards of the time because you also need to balance your family and your work. But when you try to balance different kind of work streams or different kind of initiatives, did you just like switch on and off?
Because you mentioned you are not always online, but did you just like that, switch on and switch off, or you have some magic or some secret? Well, yeah, I mean, time management is a skill in and of itself, and I don't claim to be any better at it than anybody else, frankly. Sometimes I procrastinate like everybody else. I read a really interesting... So I have this application on my phone, and it is called...
I have this application on my phone where it does micro learning and there's a time management section of it that I was going through. And there's a quote there, you know, that basically said, if you get assigned a task that you can get done in under 10 minutes, you should just do it now, basically. And I'm trying to live that way because otherwise these things all just pile up and then things start falling through the cracks. If you can get it done in just a couple of minutes, you know, when it comes to you, it
Oftentimes that'll be me making an introduction or, you know, me sending an email to somebody reminding them about something. You know, we have we have like required training we have to do at work. And so, you know, so that's a little longer. But, you know, you can't put those sorts of things off. Right. I think that you basically have to develop your own method of triage, you know, triage, evaluating things.
You know, the things with the tightest deadlines and the most importance you do first and so on. It's the only way to really handle something like this in a role like mine where you have all these different things coming at you all at once. You really have to get good at curating it.
And figuring out, you know, what can I work on right now? What can I work on tomorrow? And what can I work on in two weeks? Right. And, you know, I find that using a calendar and writing down daily lists of things that need to get done is also helpful with that. I mean, and these are very basic things, but you'd be surprised how few people actually do things like that.
Sometimes people just continuously live in the moment and they just kind of, you know, whatever gets thrown at them, that's what they do. And they, you know, you know what I mean? And it just piles up. There's just a lot of self-discipline involved in these things. And again, I'm not always the best at it, but, uh,
So, you know, sometimes I guess I guess I do all right since I've managed to get as much done as I do. I think you're quite modest. Our listeners, I think, really appreciate your sharing and tips. And I think our listeners like so much to learn from you. Thank you for that. Thanks. I appreciate it. I really do feel that way. I often I tell people I always try to be, you know, the dumbest guy in the room or whatever. And, you know, yeah, I know I'm sandbagging that a little bit, but it's true. I always try to I always think that there's things I can learn from other people.
So, you know, even if I walk into a room of people and, you know, I don't know any of them and they're doing something that they do something that's completely different than what I do or whatever, I can always learn something. I can always carry on a conversation with somebody. So, you know, this is kind of how I approach it. This world has a way of taking you down a peg pretty quickly if you get too excited about how good you are at something, right? Exactly.
Well, thank you for the live lesson to the listeners. And I appreciate your time. And I know it's very late for you. As you know, next week would be the Chinese New Year or the Lunar New Year, which would be celebrated by the Chinese community. Just want to say, I want to check, do you have any specific message for our China listeners? Well, at least now I'm saying Happy New Year in Chinese. How do you say that again? Doesn't sound... 新年快乐
Oh, that's good. You know, I tried. Yeah, that's the easiest message. You know, that's probably, I feel like that's the appropriate message as we approach Lunar New Year. That's a big one. I'll be helping them the week after next. I'm actually going to the Association of Asian American Investment Management, AIM. I don't know if you're familiar with this organization. They have a Lunar New Year celebration. I'm going to go help them celebrate New York in a couple weeks. I see. I see.
Yeah, quite impressive. Basically, we have come to the end of our podcast. Jeremy, thank you so much for sharing your insights and experiences with us today. Your perspectives on the global and, of course, on Asia-focused investment has also been incredibly valuable to all of us. We look forward to seeing how your leadership continues to shape the University of Illinois Foundation's investment strategy. Thank you.
And to our listeners, if you'd like to explore more topics from today's episode or connect with Jeremy, please feel free to reach out to China Charter Chat and stay tuned for more conversations from leaders in the finance world. Thank you for that. Thanks.