Kristof Gliech - Choosing Managers

The Business Brew

Kritof Gleich, President and CIO of Harbor Capital Advisors, stops by The Business Brew to discuss his views on picking managers. Kristof has over 20 years of investment experience with stints at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and BlueCove Asset Management (which Ares purchased a stake in). Harbor Capital Advisors spcializes in partnering with boutique investment managers in an effort to create superior investment outcomes.

Kristof has spent a lot of time developing a “factor framework” for evaluating a managers’ skill. You’ll hear Kristof say that our starting premise/hypothesis is to assume all managers’ historical excess return is due to luck and then look to reject that hypothesis (or not) by using deep analytical rigor. This stems from his physicist background to continue to understand subjects more deeply. Recently Kristof has been overseeing Harbor’s expansion from a factor framework to introducing “behavioral analytics”.

We hope you enjoy this conversation.

Sponsorship Note

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Detailed Show Notes

5:52 – Kritof’s background

11:55 – Picking managers that can handle scale

18:55 – What Kristof is doing to transform Harbor

30:10 – A discussion about banks

42:52 – Passive vs ETF and why they might be different

47:40 – Will the 60/40 portfolio do well going forward?

52:40 – A case study about providing an inflation “solution” and some of the complications investors can run into with commodities

1:07:10 – Picking good managers

1:22:05 – Behavioral finance based investing