SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Capital Allocators University Online

**Ted Seides** (0:06)
I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. I'm excited to share something we've been working on for a while.

**Ted Seides** (0:16)
We're bringing Capital Allocators University online. For years, CAU has been an in-person, once-a-year cohort of 25 or 30 professionals built around a set of disciplines that matter enormously for investors and investor relations professionals, but rarely get taught explicitly.
Hank and I put together a brief conversation to share more on what the course covers, who it's for, what we've learned from the past five years, and why we decided to move it on demand. If you want the full details, the modules, the pricing, and how to sign up, there's a link in the show notes, or you can head to capitalallocators.com and look for University. We look forward to having you involved and hope you enjoy this brief special announcement on our new online Capital Allocators University.

**Hank** (1:09)
Ted, these special announcements are always fun to do because it means we've been busy. Before we set the stage and give the background on Capital Allocators University, why don't you explain what we're doing as to not bury the lead?

**Ted Seides** (1:23)
Yeah, we're moving Capital Allocators University online. The course up until now has been an in-person once-a-year cohort. It was usually 25 or 30 people.
We decided to bring it on demand alongside of an attached annual gathering so that people can access it when they want and get the benefits of coming together.

**Hank** (1:48)
What is Capital Allocators University and how did it come to be?

**Ted Seides** (1:52)
The course itself is a series of disciplines that I think are incredibly important for improving investment results, but are not the things you learn in an MBA course or the CFA. There are things that I started picking up from doing podcast interviews, but weren't things I've been exposed to in my 20 years investing. You could think about things like interviewing techniques, something I've had to spend a lot of time thinking about the last nine years, and a bunch of other things like that, where they might be disciplines taught in most businesses, but they're not taught in investing.

**Hank** (2:29)
A lot of learning on the job from these types of disciplines.

**Ted Seides** (2:32)
If it happens at all, in most cases, it generally doesn't happen because they're not necessarily well-known of the track, the classic Peter principle that someone gets promoted to the point of their incompetence. A great investment analyst becomes a portfolio manager, becomes someone who's a chief investment officer.
That doesn't mean they've learned how to lead people and manage people. It's not part of the skill set that they got brought up in. So some of the people have never been exposed to it.

**Hank** (2:58)
To give a frame of reference, what are the six modules of Capital Allocators University?

**Ted Seides** (3:03)
There's interviewing techniques, public speaking, decision-making, leadership and management, time management, and there's one on modern investment frameworks.

**Hank** (3:17)
When we originally put the cohort in the curriculum together, who was it intended for?

**Ted Seides** (3:23)
We started doing it during COVID. It was virtual. And as soon as we could move to in-person, we did. And we didn't know it first. In fact, our first cohorts had everyone from a CIO down to someone just getting into the business. So we had the range of people.
And what we honed in on the right person was someone with several years' experience in the seat, because we weren't teaching the investment basics. And some of these things you can't apply until you're in a position where you've learned a few things. You're not going to lead people and manage people as a junior analyst, as an example.
We've had several CIOs come through it and get a lot out of it. So it does go all the way up. What we found was it was somewhere between five and 15 or 20 years of experience, which is the right range on the allocator side.

**Hank** (4:10)
Within each of these disciplines, how did we put together the curriculum for these disciplines that you've outlined?

**Ted Seides** (4:18)
In any liberal arts education, there's a certain set of fundamental principles that if you dive in and learn them, they become a body of knowledge. I always love that phrase, the CFA uses that for the body of knowledge of investing. The CFA course teaches all the basics of investing. Some of these are things that I picked up from other people. Some of them I picked up from practice, and some of them I connected the dots, and you start hearing the same thing over and over, and you realize that's a discipline. So as an example, decision-making practice, good decision-making hygiene is a relatively new body of knowledge.