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Breakfast in New York’s Sitting Room at the W New York with Luis Rodriguez, CIO, Columbian and MIT trained economist of highly influential Manhattan Family Office. This place is so cool and low lit that hard to see beyond the massive atmospheric screens. I discretely ditch the hip wheatgrass shot, and Luis cuts to the chase about what distinguishes family office investing from others’ investing in alternatives. What’s his biggest challenge? He says unlike institutional investors, family offices have to incorporating long only, private equity and hedge funds in a single portfolio with strict mandates over the proportions. “What makes it particularly interesting is testing new thinking about asset allocation. In a family office you have less constrained access to returns than in institutions. It keeps us at the cutting edge. “Most Influential Book? “One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez, because how can someone fall in love with the same person so many times for so long- isn’t that amazing? It’s what it’s all about”.

Jump Downtown to Old Slip to see Dr Bob Litterman, famed front man and quantitative guru of Goldman Sachs’s Asset Management’s internal quant hedge funds.  On the summer’s happenings, we discussed the extraordinary impact of the de-levering of the multi-strategy funds. The old questions remain about what are the real risks of investment? How much true transparency is there? A key academic research challenge, he added, over the coming months is to “understand how crowding, contagion, leverage and illiquidity conspire to magnify hedge fund risks?”  Coming full circle as the Stanford human biology major who turned to economics to understand better what drives societies forward;  Bob’s Enlightening Read of the moment is  “Before The Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of our Ancestors, by Nicholas Wade, a fascinating insight into what research in DNA tells us about human history and how we have evolved”.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 4:41 pm and is filed under risk, book tips, quant hedge funds, Bob Litterman, multi-strategy funds, Luis Rodriguez, Family Office. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.