Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street

**Nicholas Csicsko** (0:00)
2020 was this manager's worst year. He was down an additional 30 percent. We thought 2019 was the worst year, but it turns out 2020 was the worst year so far. That led to a real moment of soul searching. You have a drawdown that's starting to get close to 50 percent at the trough.
Over the course of that year, I went back and spent a lot of time with that manager. I think I met with them at least seven or eight times, and this manager works out of Dallas. He's very responsive, but really is best to meet in person.
No IRBD function, nothing like that, and it was COVID. It just happened to be that this manager got kicked out of his office because his landlord wanted to do construction. This manager was between offices, having a terrible run. Also, I knew a lot of his other investors, and about half the capital left that year.
I'm sitting down with this manager at what ended up being our local spot. We'd sit there for two or three hours, talk to the portfolio, what's working, what's not working, how he's behaving, and it gave me confidence to not quit. This manager had no quit in him.
It was clear that even though the AUM was challenged, the business was not. He kept saying, I really want to earn back your capital. I want to reward you for your patience. It was a different dynamic because what normally happens is assets down, performance poor, managers start this whole trope of, okay, well, I'm going to shut down and start a family office. That's okay to each their own, but this manager was going the exact opposite. So we hung in there. It doesn't always work out this way, but things started to turn in 2021, and from 21 to 26, it's been a 5X. So he's compounded significantly over this period.

**Ted Seides** (1:47)
I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators.
The CIOs of the largest pools of capital have jobs that require broad skill sets. They cover the world across asset classes and strategies, determine portfolio construction, and decide what goes into their portfolio. They're also leaders, managing people in an investment office, working with a board, and taking care of all their stakeholders, whether students, grantees, pensioners, family members, insured recipients, or sovereign states. It's a complex role that involves far more than just investing. But they don't do it alone. Behind every successful CIO is a talented team who focuses most, if not all of their time, on investing. We've spent time with many of these senior decision makers at our summits, and find they are closest to the action and deeply insightful about investment opportunities and the investment process.
This mini-series, Senior Decision Makers, features conversations with investors that have not yet ascended to the CIO seat. These professionals are the primary driver of decisions that lead new ideas into a portfolio or exits from a manager strategy and are at a fascinating point in their career. My partner and the CEO of Capital Allocators, Hank Sturmack, will take the mic and lead an exploration of the investment thinking and role of Senior Decision Makers.
Our first guest on the Senior Decision Makers mini-series is Nick Csicsko. Nick is a managing director at the Trinity Wall Street Endowment, where he joined CIO Meredith Jenkins at the founding of the Investment Office in 2016, and has spent the last decade helping build a young endowment inside a 320-year-old institution. Today, the endowment has grown to over $6 billion.
Nick's path into investing is a fascinating one. He studied composition and earned his Doctorate of Music at Juilliard. While there, he talked his way into an internship at Juilliard's endowment and never looked back. Our conversation covers the lessons he carried from music into investing, his investment philosophy, and the details of his process. Manager selection sits at the heart of his work, and he articulates what separates the relationships that endure from ones that don't. Nick is a remarkable storyteller and shares a number of real-life examples of manager relationships. Some that worked out well, some that didn't, and others with insights for allocators and managers alike.
Before we get going, The Bear has dropped its final season on Hulu and Disney Plus. If you're a fan of the show, you might already know that Will Gadara, author of the bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality and wildly popular recent guest on the show, is a consultant to The Bear. That's not a coincidence. The Bear is fundamentally about what happens when someone who's learned from the best tries to become the best. It's a theme you often hear from guests on the show. Translating what they know to the practice of investing and imparting that wisdom to you. So if you know someone who loves the Bear and hasn't found Capital Allocators, send them an episode. I suspect they'll recognize something familiar. If you haven't watched The Bear, you're in for a real treat. But if you don't have time, no need to stop you from spreading the word about Capital Allocators to anyone wanting to learn from the best. Thanks so much for spreading the word. Capital Allocators is brought to you by AlphaSense. Here's something for you. Most AI tools today are very good at sounding right. But can you actually trace it back to a filing, transcript, or specific passage that drove the answer? Or are you just trusting the confidence of the output? For allocators, that's not a minor concern. A missed filing, incorrect source, or context that gets lost somewhere in the retrieval chain, aren't edge cases. They're how decisions go wrong. AlphaSense is the AI platform built specifically for this. They own the content. Over 500 million curated documents, from broker research and expert transcripts, to filings and earnings calls. And they own the retrieval layer on top of it. That means every answer can link back to an exact, verifiable source. Because the answer is only as good as what's underneath it. And with AlphaSense, you know exactly what that is.