Future Fund CIO Ben Samild on Building a Resilient Total Portfolio

One key area of focus for us has always been working with our clients to help them address the vulnerabilities in their portfolios and engineer greater portfolio resiliency. We wanted to bring you into what that actually looks and feels like by sharing a conversation with one of our clients who’s at the forefront of this type of research: Future Fund, Australia’s sovereign wealth fund, which manages $300 billion AUD.
Through our 15-year relationship with Future Fund, we’ve found that we speak a very similar language, particularly when it comes to looking at portfolios holistically in order to make them as resilient as possible. So, we were delighted to bring Future Fund CIO Ben Samild into a discussion with our own co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour, Head of Strategist Group Atul Lele, and BDO Deputy Editor Jake Davidson, to talk through how Ben and his team think about building an asset allocation using their total portfolio approach.
The conversation covered a number of the most challenging questions facing institutional investors, including:
How does the total portfolio approach work in practice?
Are benchmarks relevant, and if not, how do you assess the quality of your choices?
How can allocators design an organization with the right culture and the right incentives to get the outcomes they want?
Where is the macro environment headed (and what changes is Future Fund making as a result)?
How can investors get inflation protection in a portfolio?
How should institutions determine how many illiquid assets to hold, and what are the trade-offs? We hope you enjoy the discussion.
Editor’s note: the views of external guests do not necessarily reflect the views of Bridgewater.