May 18, 2025
MacroMinds…A Dynamic Investment Symposium
In two recent LinkedIn posts on the MacroMinds Foundation project, I’ve emphasized our commitment to facilitating industry collaboration through a mission-driven symposium that supports student education. There is significant value creation that results from the promotion of industry connections. In my more than 3 decades on the sell-side, I’ve come to believe strongly that our industry is one in which participants – be they colleagues or competitors – uniquely benefit from interaction with each other. Ideas can be exchanged, perspectives shared, and rapport built. Relationship building, I say, is a strictly in-person undertaking.
One Constant…Change
In addition to fostering collaboration in support of educational causes, the MacroMinds Symposium is very much about the content. Each of our programs has been designed to explore critical aspects of the complicated trade-off between risk and return. And if there is one constant in markets, it is change. To wit, since our first symposium in 2021, the 10-year yield has been as low as 1.2% and as high as 5%. The “VIX for rates”, the MOVE index, has been as low as 37 and as high as 200. Wow! These huge ranges speak to the need for investors to both understand and react to change.
A Thoughtfully Designed Program
Because the risk environment is highly dynamic, our symposium programs are as well. As the 2022 conference was to take place, inflation was peaking, and the Fed was viewed as considerably behind the curve. What would an aggressive tightening cycle mean for stock and bond correlation? What would it mean for the interaction between rates and credit spreads? We hosted an amazing conversation with Jim Keenan, CIO of Global Credit at BlackRock and John Zito, Deputy CIO of Credit at Apollo.
The following year, after a period of significant under and then outperformance of the value factor, the 2023 MacroMinds event featured AQR Founder and CIO Cliff Asness. In a one-hour discussion, Cliff shared not just his substantial insights on quant investing in theory and practice but also his view that the illiquidity of private credit had become a feature rather than a bug of the asset class. To top it off, he also shared his work and simulations on why hockey coaches should pull the team’s goalie earlier than they typically do.
What Wayne Said…
With hockey in mind, legend Wayne Gretzky once said to “skate where the puck is going.” As I start to think about the 2026 Symposium, I do so with an eye towards anticipating the key challenges investors will likely be facing. We live in an environment of both great promise and peril. The pace of technological change is breathtaking, with vast implications for how we live and how we invest. Who could have imagined taking a ride in a car without a driver? Who can really envision and price the potential productivity dividends generated by AI?
Risks Aplenty…
And yet, the world – and markets as well – feels unsafe. The geopolitical chess pieces are being re-ordered at a pace that increases the risk of an accident. And on that front, US government debt, the bedrock asset class of markets globally, is no longer risk free. In fact, it may be the source of the next volatility event.
World Class Investors…
As we begin to put the 2026 program in place, bringing the “content” sits alongside “collaboration” and “causes” in making MacroMinds a truly differentiated symposium. We are already having discussions with world-class investors ready to lend their time and insights to the project. We have been fortunate to secure the participation of some of the most important voices in markets in our efforts to support student education.