How I Invest with David Weisburd - E294: Endowment Model vs Total Portfolio Approach: The Real Trade-Offs

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

How should families think about portfolio construction when traditional diversification breaks down? David Weisburd speaks with Michael Phipps about building New Republic Partners, designing portfolios around growth, income, and diversification, and why open architecture matters in multifamily offices. Michael discusses common portfolio mischaracterizations, the role of alternatives and co-investments, and how families can better align risk, liquidity, and long-term objectives.

What is the simplest way to explain New Republic Partners and what problem did you see in the ecosystem that you wanted to go after? For New Republic Partners, we are a multifamily office founded by a group of seasoned investment professionals and two prominent multi-generational families here in the Southeast. And really our aim is to offer clients the expertise, the resources and scale of a multi-billion dollar family office. And we started that multifamily office because there was a shared appreciation of, of the advantages of an MFO between the founding team and those two families where we could offer customization, minimize conflicts of interest, and also attract some top tier professionals. While maintaining and getting that scale that's necessary to access institutional quality investment opportunities and have a deeply resource team and infrastructure, which we didn't

think at the time was in the industry, where if it was out there, I think we would have sought it as a single family office and we sought to create it at New Republic. Give me a sense for where New Republic Partners sits today at an AUM level. So New Republic today sits at about $2.5 billion in assets under management. Two-thirds of that is discretionary and mandate. Third, non-discretionary.

And as a firm, we're headquartered in Charlotte with offices across the southeast. We have 27 employees as a firm today. You said you wanted to minimize conflicts. In what ways are other multifamily offices conflicted? Talk to me about that. So for MFOs or RAs more broadly, we're seeking to stand apart from the mix by being open architecture in our investment platform. We don't have proprietary products or vehicles that I'm insented to put a client's portfolio or family's portfolio in.

I just think, we just think, it's a tough argument to hold to say that you believe you have the best growth equity or stock picker in-house. And therefore, we should have our clients, growth equity or U.S. equity allocation only go through those managers. That's just a tough argument to make. And so our platform is open architecture, open scope, such that we are seeking, searching for the best managers and to get the best execution and talent in a particular asset class or subasset class. Sounds simple but not easy. You say open architecture. Does that mean that any of your clients can send you a fund and say due diligence on this fund? What does that practically mean?

If you think about how we look at kind of the pipeline investments, we're trying to keep the top of the funnel as wide as possible. And so, yes, we were open in the sense that we would be doing searches in a particular asset class to kind of fill the top of that funnel. Also, it would be the case if our clients or families had brought us different managers that they had seen. We would be looking at doing the diligence on those managers too. So completely open scope in that regard and really trying to aim and find those great managers within specific sub-asset classes and, you know, broader asset classes. Maybe you can walk me through a case study of a $200 million family comes to our small foundation. How would you go about building their portfolio? With each family, we design portfolios that match that family's risk tolerance.

It also aligns with their investment time horizon, income and liquidity needs. Because as you've heard, if you've met one family office, you've met one family office. All can look very different based on how their capital base was built and their journey when exiting the family business and moving into a family office format. So after establishing those risk, liquidity, income, and time arising parameters, you know, the cleanest way I can bridge to a model portfolio construction for that family is to think about their investment portfolio really in three shades. Growth assets, your income assets, and diversification assets. And when I talk about growth assets, that's the span of liquidity within that bucket. You have global equities, long-only equity on one side, and then private equity venture on the other. And then even in the interim, you have hedged equity, which we view as an asset class unto itself.

Within income assets, you have traditional fixed income on one end all the way to private credit. And then diversification assets, it includes real assets and absolute return hedge funds because it's meant to act like a counterbalance to the other two pieces of the portfolio. So let's say putting it all together for that family that has a payout need of three to five percent and a risk tolerance that matches up. up with a 6040 stock bond benchmark, you would end up having 65% in growth assets, 20% in income assets, and about 15% in diversification assets. And on a look-through basis, that private allocation would be in the zip code of 15 to 20% of the total portfolio. In our view, that's the construct that we would have in order to meet what is the core needs of that family to deliver strong risk adjust returns that exceeds that spend rate or that payout that they might have plus inflation.

and how we would think on and translate for them, how we think about putting together that model portfolio construction for a family. What's the most common mistakes that other multifamily offices make? And what are some misnomer's that you see and some errors being committed all the time? Mischaracterizing certain assets and expecting an outcome that, you know, historically, you would think, act in a more diversified way than it does. And so let me put an example on it. One aspect that people have always tended to lean on just because of the recent history over the past, you know, call it even 20 years or so, that if you just had a more traditional portfolio of 60, 40 or 70, 30 stocks and bonds, there's an expectation that that fixed income component of your portfolio can act like a diversifier when the equity side of your portfolio kind of falls out of bed in tough market periods.

call it in the GFC or even more recently in 2022, even back in COVID as well. And I think the argument that we've been pressing is for people to think about that fixed income, that income asset side or portfolio a bit differently because the aspects about having both income coming from your traditional fixed income and diversification, don't believe that those elements will persist going forward or there's no guarantee of that. And so that's why we dedicate a piece of a client's portfolio to diversification assets. Because in a period like 2022, you had stocks down mid-teens and you had fixed income down mid-teens as well. And you needed that ballast in your portfolio, those diversification assets, to show up for you and also give you a place where you could draw from to kind of take advantage of different opportunities and be opportunistic with that capital during that time frame.

And so I'd say that's one area where I'd say from a construction standpoint, I think family offices are need to be thinking a little bit more broadly of how they define what is a growth asset in their portfolio, what is an income asset and diversification asset such that it can act how you want it to in a portfolio given different market scenarios. One of the hardest things of investing is seeing what's shifting before everyone else does. For decades, only the largest hedge funds could afford extensive channel research programs to spot inflection points before earnings and to stay ahead of consensus. Meanwhile, smaller funds have been forced to cobble together ad hoc channel intelligence or rely on stale reports from sell-side shops. But channel checks are no longer a luxury. They're becoming table stakes for the industry. The

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500 million premium sources, from company filings and brokerage research to news, trade journals, and more than 240,000 expert call transcripts. That context turns raw signal into conviction. The first to see wins, the rest follow. Check it out for yourself at alpha-sense.com slash how I invest. They use the fixed income part of their portfolio, both for income as well as diversification, and sometimes it only really provides income. It's not really truly diversifying. Correct. And it's one where there is a need for those income pieces of your portfolio to be in there to deliver what you're asking of the portfolio. But you just need to dedicate a portion of your portfolio to something that's truly diversified. These diversifiers, oftentimes they're hedge funds and they're these mysterious, there's these mysterious black box strategies. Take me through the terrain of these diversifier funds. What are the different types? What are some common use cases and what are some best practices when picking? diversifiers. So what we'd like to do is to separate out, I'd call it, more of your hedged equity or your directional long short managers from everything else within hedge fund land

because I do feel that oftentimes as a grouping, people will just bunch them all together and take that 6040 portfolio that I mentioned before. On the 40%, they'll say, okay, I'll do 60% in equities, 20% in fixed income and then 20% in alts. But the alts are all together in one big bucket, even though there's kind of a, you know, 31 flavors of different types of hedge funds underneath. And so first off, I want to separate out those hedged equity managers where they do take some market direction, have some higher net exposure in the portfolio. And we put them in that growth assets bucket. And then I'm pairing that with what we view as absolute return hedge fund strategies that

can take on different shapes. But when putting them together, they have qualities such that they are lowly correlated to one another and make for a great diversifier. So that can include everything from your larger multistrat pod shops for one in that bucket as well as distress credit, market neutral equity, relative value credit as well. And if you're within the right sizes, kind of marry those together. One that I had forgotten as well would be discretionary macro, systematic macro managers that you would include in that bucket, that when taken all together, you get a portfolio. exposure that ends up being lowly correlated to stocks and bonds, which is the aim, but yet also still

has an expected return that's more in the zip code of kind of a mid-single digit to low double-digit return. And so that's additive to the portfolio, not only just from a correlation standpoint, but also from a contribution from a return standpoint too. So that's one thing that I key in on typically and try to separate because people just throw hedge funds all into one bucket, but there's a different purpose. It's such a good and underrated point in that people put these labels on their portfolios that either serve no purpose or actually confuse the purpose of their portfolio. And putting into growth, income and diversifiers, then you're forced to say, why am I in this asset? In other words, if I'm in a hedge fund, that's long short and I'm paying two and 20, do I want

to be in a hedge fund or do I want to be in the index fund? Because they're both taking the same level of concentration in my portfolio versus saying, well, this is a hedge fund structure. This is an index structure. It's almost like the wrapper around the strategy is much more trivial than actually what it's doing in your portfolio. Agreed. It's really answering the question of like, why do I own this manager or why do I have this asset in my portfolio? What's its core purpose? And then I want it to compete against other managers or other assets that have that similar quality, such that there's a tradeoff in competing within them. I know there's this whole discussion that's occurring about taking a kind of a total portfolio approach versus the endowment model style and getting to,

ingrained on asset classes and sub-asset classes. I certainly have come up in the school from the endowment model and still lean in that strategic policy portfolio way of management, but I think there is a bridge between those two in the sense of you're just trying to loosen up those buckets and not be so dogmatic about the asset classes specifically, get at what that ultimate purpose of that strategy or that manager is in your portfolio and make it compete. And so for growth assets, there's a trade-off of having long-only equity exposure versus locking it up and having a growth asset type exposure but doing it in private equity or adventure. One's locked up for 10 years plus, ultimately. But that means you need to raise the bar as to what your expectation is from a

return standpoint. But I like that, we like that way of kind of putting those asset classes and those assets and those buckets because it makes it compete. Ultimately, I'm always thinking about what the opportunity cost is of trading off one versus the other within that. Taking to the extreme, just as a thought experiment, you could be 60% in long equity, 20% in junk bonds, which are correlated to long equity, and 20% in quote unquote alternatives, but really when you double click on it, you're in long, short hedge funds, which are also correlated with your equity portfolio. So it seems on outside, you're 60, 20, 20, but you're really 100, zero from a correlation standpoint. There's an element of kind of a growth allocation that

you've just wedged into all three of those buckets without, you know, polling. I would take that 20% that you had in hedge funds and actually I'd put that more aligned with that equity bucket that you had at 60% for long only equity. And the same for high yield. Just let's take it today. Ultimately, you know, I know it's the case that rates are higher than they once were, but you're really not getting paid much from a credit spread standpoint and taking that extra credit risk within high yield or investment grade today. And so you need to be cognizant about what valuations look like and how you're stepping into each of those three buckets as well because you could be susceptible to that risk that you just outlined there,

where you're taking very similar risk across those three buckets of feeling diverse pod. I had the XCIO of Northern Cross Thomas Swaney, episode 224, and he double-clicked on this whole concept, which is people, the 60-40 portfolio, in order to get more gains in that 40, investors would keep on going down on the risk spectrum to these junk bonds. And they found out the 60-40 portfolio, some of these portfolios with a lot of junk bonds were highly correlated to each other. And instead, his strategy was to take treasuries and essentially put synthetic leverage on it so that they're truly negatively correlated to the stocks.

And one of the points that he made, which I think is extremely underrated is one of the main reasons to diversify is when there's that once in a decade drawdown. It's two. One is to avoid taking wrong action. So you don't want to sell at the exact wrong time. time, which is like the most predictable and the most common behavioral finance mistake. But two is actually as your stocks go down, your bonds go up and you're able to systematically rebalance and actually buy the dip. It's a way to kind of systematically buy the dip without having to take heroic action. And I thought that framing on building a portfolio for diversification, because the question is why diversify? You're not supposed to ask. It's supposed to be

solved out. But one of the best answers to why diversify is when things, things go down, you don't make a mistake, and you also can be opportunistic. To say it a bit differently, too, that's core to how we measure risk appetite for a family when they come on board. We're asking, or I'm asking them perhaps directly, in a meeting of what kind of portfolio peak the trough of drawdown can that family tolerate? I want to calibrate the portfolio such that it matches up with that risk tolerance so that we can be opportunistic when drawdown periods occur, which they will occur. And we also want to make sure that we build in those portfolio exposures like the absolute return oriented hedge fund strategies that can act as a

counterbalance or a ballast and drawdown periods. The only piece that I would quibble with your guest earlier before was just saying, I think it's tougher to be able to say that your long bonds today can act in the same manner that they have in the past. Like was the case, as I mentioned in 2022, where it actually hurt you during that period when rates went the other way and the Fed had kind of push things up. Your long bonds actually didn't end up acting as that ballast. And partly you could say it's a commentary on our fiscal situation and ultimately that there needs to be some type of further premium that needs to be jammed into the long end of the curve. And that's where we then balance and say, hey, you need to have true diversification through this allocation to absolute return

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They help improve, reduce any J-curve in your portfolio. And they give you more control over portfolio construction, too, let alone they deepen relationships with the GPs. investing with. And I'd also, one could argue the other side of that adverse selection question. Rather, I mean, you're getting access to, to a set of higher conviction investments that these managers are doing when you're doing co-invest and selecting them appropriately. So as you mentioned, you have to have some processes in place to do your best to mitigate the adverse selection. And two ways to mitigate that. And our view is one, full stop. You have to know the GPs thoroughly. the ex ante, and that is typically the case because usually we've already underwritten their

funds, their ability to operate in the verticals that they've chosen. And two, you need to have a team of professionals that have honestly been principal investors before as GPs so that they can underwrite those co-invests, call out the ones that come across as the GP is stretching to make a deal work. It takes one to no one in that respect. And in doing the co-invest work, and like I mentioned at the front of the call as well, in keeping that funnel really wide. that means you're going down a lot of different rabbit holes, and there's some dead deal costs that are associated with it and some time sync as well.

So having that dedicated team is crucial when trying to affect the program where even we're just doing kind of a two-thirds, one-third split between our fund investments and co-investments today. You've said that family office is under $250 million, so a quarter of a billion dollars, should not have their own family office. Why do you believe that? What is the hard truth about going alone at scale at under $250 million? With family offices under $250 million, we think they face some structural challenges that can limit their ability to operate with the same rigor, sophistication of the larger institutions.

So we do believe that joining a larger platform creates some meaningful advantages, really in four key areas. One, access to broader investment opportunities. You know, at sub-250 million in scale, it's difficult to source an underwrite truly differentiated investments. especially alternatives. It minimum check sizes, operational complexity, and manager access often lock smaller families out of the most what we view as compelling private equity, credit, and real asset opportunities. And so a larger platform solves this by offering the institutional quality deal flow, shared due diligence, and the ability to invest alongside a scaled capital base.

So that's one. Two, it actually, if you're joining a larger platform, you're lowering your cost and your upping, have higher quality infrastructure. Running a family office is expensive. With limited AUM, it's hard to justify best in class technology, research, reporting systems, or a full-house, full in-house investment and tax team. And larger platforms spreads those costs across many families, given each one the infrastructure they'd expect at a multi-billion dollar institution, but at a fraction of the cost.

The third area for those 250 million family offices to think about is that a larger platform would give you some strength in governance, risk management, and continuity. Smaller family offices, they often depend on really a handful of key individuals. So you have some real concentration risk in that respect. And a platform ends up bringing you depth within governance frameworks, compliance oversight, succession planning, and consistent processes that, then can help you protect that wealth across multiple generations. The final point, I would say, like the simple advantage would be that a larger platform gives the family the ability to stay focused on what matters most. You know, for many families, the goal of the family office is not to run an investment firm.

It's to preserve and grow wealth while allowing family members to focus on their lives, to businesses and philanthropy. You know, being part of a strong platform offloads that operational burden and can deliver peace of mind. So for families below 250, you know, joining a larger platform, it isn't about giving up control. It's about gaining access, stability, and expertise that would be nearly impossible to replicate independently. You alluded earlier about two different philosophical approaches to portfolio construction. One is the endowment approach, endowment model, and the second is the total portfolio approach to TPA, which is a newer framework.

What is the strengths and weaknesses of those two approaches? For the endowment model, it's one that helps set up a framework so that you can think about, as we were discussing earlier, what is that asset doing in my portfolio and how should I think about what its aim is in the portfolio? To be crude, I think TPA is really a way for CIOs and managers to really loosen a lot of the constraints that they have felt about an endowment model and give them much more discretion on where they can move capital, ultimately. because the endowment model itself and having a strategic policy portfolio and having it set where you're working with a board, it's a great governance framework because you can create a great relationship as you need with the, you know, governance of that particular foundation or endowment and the hired hands that are meant to be stewards of that capital. There's this tension about wanting to have flexibility and moving capital across asset classes. and I think that can be built into the endowment model and the ranges that you give each of those asset class buckets.

In a vacuum, it's great to think about because you're having every asset or manager kind of compete against one another. And so that is attractive. Like we were mentioning earlier, you're always thinking about the opportunity cost and tradeoffs. But I think also you have to watch out because you've kind of loosened up a lot of the guardrails in why the endowment model works so well in making you think about having you think about having. having your factor exposure spread out or your diversification assets work for you as you and intended. Managers love it because they have more discretion and they have less belt suspenders and handcuffs as to how they can allocate capital. But you can build that into the endowment model as well.

Is there a place to stay out of the entire asset class? For example, today a lot of people are saying we don't want to be in large buyups. We just think the entire market is overheated. is that good investing or is that not diversified enough or not risk-contrained enough? Do you want to be cognizant about anything that looks like market timing? We know that does not pay off well over longer periods. And, you know, the Hall of Fame of investors that are market timers or there's no one in it. So right now, I hear what you're saying in terms of you don't want to pick market timing,

but also there are supply and demand dynamics and so much money has been raised. there's only a finite opportunity set, why wouldn't it be rational to sit out a certain, you know, a certain vintage? It's hard to time vintages, too, particularly on the private side. That's where we give ranges, what I would end up doing and what we ended up doing going into even the 2020, 2020, 2021 period. Hindsight, looking back, it's the case where we had tried to be more tactical in lowering the allocations that we were giving to managers. Mangers were increasing the cycles that they were coming back to market. We didn't know that that was a top then, but the prudent thing to do was we were still maintaining that relationship, but yet we're kind of pairing back how much we would be committing to the next vehicle. I think it's incredibly hard, and that's why we try to set up our program such that clients are investing across vintages, because as soon as you make the decision that you want to get out of a vintage, the vintage coming out of 2022, 2023 for our private equity and private credit investments have been quite strong.

And if it was the case that you chose to kind of sit out both, you're going to miss both the top and picking the bottom as well. And so we do try to modulate a little bit. You give ourselves a range. I mean, we may not be making as big of a commitment as we were. But to go from 100 to zero in a particular asset class is not one. We're trying to, again, try to educate clients so that they kind of can hold through or stay through rather than trying to time. What is the single most valuable piece of investment advice you took from your time at Davidson's endowment? At Davidson, what was underscored for me was the power of a network effect within the investment world.

Within venture, what we found is that GPs with true success in their field were nexus points for that particular subsector of venture, whether in fintech, hard tech, B2B SaaS, marketplaces. the GPs that are viewed by entrepreneurs as those that are knowledgeable, connected nodes or nexus points in those segments, it became a self-fulfilling cycle in the sense that they, those nexus points, those GPs, they attracted some of the brightest and best entrepreneurs in that vertical because those entrepreneurs wanted to get capital from GPs that could truly appreciate what they were doing. And I think one evidence of that in the market, like YC and other incubators, are real proofcase in that respect and a reason why that model has been successful in my view as well. But really an appreciation for that piece, the power of that network effect, and being that nexus or node within a particular space within Venture was one that we took advantage of at Davidson and really started to pay off. To put a finer point on it, it was more saying Mickey Malka at Rib at Capital viewed as a kind of a nexus or node within the fintech space. That then kind of attracted other entrepreneurs in that space that wanted ribbed capital as that partner in GP.

And so that's where that self-fulfilling cycle came together and one that just have a, you know, tremendous appreciation for from a network effect standpoint, particularly in venture. You're at the University of North Carolina Endowment. What's one principle that they really drilled into you at your time there that you still hold on to today? At UNT's endowment, I would have to say the schooling and the endowment model is written up famously and the late David Swinton's Swenson's pioneering portfolio management

would be that single most important thing that was drilled into me in that book as I think other guest hosts have mentioned earlier. I mean, he had underscored a few things that I've carried with me. You know, for one, AS allocation is the primary driver of long-term returns, whereas much of the world focuses on security selection

or trying to tie markets. You know, two, one should harvest illiquity premium wherever you can find it. And that may mean having to shift in move when capital ends up flooding into certain segments of the private markets. And instead of being in large-gap buyout, you're moving more into lower-metal market buy-out. As we were just discussing, too, on hedge funds, diversification does reduce risk, but only of correlations between those assets are low.

Otherwise, you dilute or you diversify your returns was another point out of that kind of endowment school of thinking. active management. It works, but only in inefficient markets. And I would say a fifth thing that probably one of the major piece within that kind of endowment model, as Swenson had put it, too, was that manager selection is crucial to success and it's difficult. You know, it's a people business at the end of the day. You're evaluating managers both from a qualitative and relationship driven standpoint, but also from a quantitative standpoint. It's both art. in science. And so I would say for anyone wanting to learn the endowment model, it's a great book,

and a lot of those tenants are timeless. And now I was fortunate to have the opportunity to live it straight out of college at UNC Management Company. If you could go back to 2004 when you just started at the UNC Endowment, what is one piece of advice you wish you would have known that would have helped either accelerate your career or help you avoid very costly mistakes? It's a good question. And for me, I'd favor the type of advice that would help you avoid mistakes. And I tell my younger self to simply be humble as investing as a humbling business. I came out of UNC seeking to learn as much as I could about investments and the endowment model, but also looking to make a mark and climb a ladder in a way. And in doing so as a young

analyst, I think you're eager to build conviction in particular investments and build up your circles of confidence, but you can you can mistake that conviction for hubris. So if you're not humble about what you know and don't know or what you think you know that really ain't so, you know, coming in with a more humble mindset would have let me hold those convictions a little more loosely, be aware of data points that don't match up with my thesis, my own, you know, behavioral biases. There's a famous quote attributed John Maynard Keynes of, you know, when the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do, sir? You know, if you're humble, you're more apt to see when those facts change and that can help you avoid some investing pitfalls. But I'd also tell my younger self

that, you know, in the end, markets will humble you. Thanks so much for jumping on the podcast. Looking forward to continuing this conversation live. Appreciate Dave. Thanks. Glad to be with you. That's it for today's episode of How I Invest. If this conversation gave you new insights or ideas, do me a quick favor. Share with one person in your network would find a valuable or leave a short review wherever you listen. This helps more investors discover the show and keeps us bringing you these conversations week after week. Thank you for your continued support. Mark.