Ted Seides – A Deep Dive into Hedge Funds

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:46)
My guest today is Ted Seides. Ted was the founder, president, and co-chief investment officer at Protégé Partners, a multi-billion dollar alternative investment firm.
He is also the author of the very interesting book, So You Want to Start a Hedge Fund.
This was the most helpful and insightful conversation I've ever had on this topic. It will be useful for managers, allocators, and any investor interested in the world of hedge funds in general. For show notes on this episode, visit investorfieldguide.com forward slash Seides, S-E-I-D-E-S. And now, please enjoy my conversation with Ted Seides. All right, well, thanks very much, Ted, for doing this with me. I'd like to start, as I sometimes do, with something completely far afield from investing, which was when we were corresponding to set this up, it came up that we are both huge Joseph Campbell fans.
So maybe you can start by telling me how you discovered Campbell, and then maybe a little bit about the Hero's Journey retreats that you've turned me onto.

**Ted Seides** (1:46)
It's fantastic. Thanks for asking. A couple of years ago, I went through a period of my life with a lot of change and a lot of challenge. A good friend of mine had once mentioned something to me called the Hero's Journey. I didn't know what it was. It just registered in my brain as something that sounded cool and I wanted to do. When that was happening, I reached out to him and said, what was that thing you were telling me about? He told me next to nothing.
I ended up going on a retreat to the mountains in West Virginia, which was a week-long, completely disconnected, no phone, no email experience set up by a psychologist in Pittsburgh named Michael Mirvosh based on the work of Joseph Campbell and an experience based on the Hero's Journey itself. I don't like to say a lot about it because it's really something everyone should do if they get a chance and they feel the calling to do that.
It was really a transformative experience for me. I continued to go for the last, say, three years.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:44)
What would you say is the main, not getting into the specifics, obviously, because the whole point is that everyone's experience is unique and different, but at the archetype level, what can you describe what people are trying to get out of the experience or the basic structure of what you do?

**Ted Seides** (2:59)
Yeah. The aphorism that Michael used for the Hero's Journey, he calls it, be the hero of your own life.
It's really an experience designed around trying to get a deeper understanding of what it is you want and how to live your life really fully and be truly alive kind of every day. The experiences they create are there's some elements of nature and being there and some elements of just processing where you are in your life. The one that I've gone to, they have them for men and women, but it's just a group of men come from all over the world with no rhyme or reason to why they're coming at that point in time together. But it's an experience unlike anything I've done before.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:37)
One of the things that always struck me about Campbell, so basically what he did was study mythology stories through history and across cultures and found a very common, he called it the monomyth, like the same exact storyline that kind of is the undercurrent of all these major myths that you've read or heard about. Actually this was the basis for Star Wars. So George Lucas's inspiration for creating the story arc he did was Campbell's work.
And in the early phase of Campbell's kind of monomyth cycle, there's several stages to what heroes go through, is this idea of crossing a threshold.
And the threshold is basically saying, I'm going to leave something or some environment, some set of circumstances that's comfortable and basically step into an unknown world. And I really encourage everyone to check this out, whether it's going all in and actually doing the week in the woods, which for me with two young kids, it would probably be harder to convince my wife of that than it would be to start a successful hedge fund. But if you don't do that, at least read the book and realize the value of just stepping into the unknown, just jumping with blind faith. And that's coming from an empirical quant guy. So that's a very cool experience. And thanks for turning me on to that. Before we get into specifics around the current state of the hedge fund world, I'd love to hear your own backstory. So maybe starting with early days working at Yale.