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

This episode is sponsored by Daloopa. Daloopa is founded by a former hedge fund analyst to bring simplicity into the investment process. Daloopa offers an AI driven single source for all company reported data, and allows for investment teams to make the most informed decisions in the shortest amount of time.

Daloopa scales the velocity of an investment team’s idea gen. Analysts spend less time locating and manually inputting meaningful disclosures into Excel and more time synthesizing in the minutes after the print. Daloopa captures data from all company reported sources, including from footnotes, MD&As, and investor presentations. Our data sheets include GAAP to non-GAAP adjustments, guidance, and all company specific KPIs. Each datapoint is auditable to the source for easy verification and accuracy. Daloopa’s Excel plugin can also update your existing models for the latest quarter in just a single click. Bulge-bracket banks and major multi-managers are trusting Daloopa for use in initiating coverage, building and maintaining industry dashboards, and keeping their models up to date. Visit Daloopa.com/BusinessBrew to create a free account and learn more about how Daloopa can help increase your team’s speed to differentiated insight.

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

Katie Reicher on the path to your dream job