The Big Picture

Transcript: Bob Moser, Prime Group Founder and CEO

5 hours 33 min ago

The transcript from this week’s MiB: Bob Moser, Prime Group Founder and CEO, is below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

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This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.

Barry Ritholtz: This week on the podcast, what a fascinating conversation. Bob Moser is founder and CEO of Prime Group Holdings. Uh they’re the largest privately held self storage owner operator, investor in the country. Fascinating conversation. Started acquiring properties in college. Eventually, uh started doing RVs and uh mobile homes. Just really fascinating uh methodology of identifying undervalued properties. Uh I thought the conversation was fascinating and I think you will also. With no further ado, Bob Moser of Prime Group Holdings.

Bob Moser: Thanks for having me.

Barry Ritholtz: So, let’s start out with your your background, bachelor’s with honors in economics from Union College. What what was the original career plan?

Bob Moser: Tell you the truth, it was always real estate. So, I’ve always had an affinity for real estate.

Barry Ritholtz: Really?

Bob Moser: Yeah. My mom tells the story that when I was like 14 or 15, she’d drop me off at the local real estate broker’s office and I would drive them nuts for a couple hours and it was either that or just to get rid of me out of her hair probably. But I always had it. Got my real estate license before college. I got my brokerage license while at college and actually started the business basically my sophomore junior year while at Union.

Barry Ritholtz: Wow, that’s amazing. So, so your college thesis focused on how to value income producing real estate investments by comparing demand and value like so you really knew exactly what you wanted to do by your senior year. What was the outcome of that college thesis?

Bob Moser: It’s a good question. So, it was on the valuation of income producing properties using hydonic and non-hydonic regression analysis.

Barry Ritholtz: So, when we say hydonic you’re adjusting for quality…

Bob Moser: …location, attributes of the property, uh taking away basically the revenue stream, what else adds value to the asset. Uh and I was really hyperfocused on fragmented real estate assets. So basically every real estate asset when you look at it goes through the same life cycle when they’re originally owned, developed, managed by local regional developers. Then over time the larger groups come in and consolidate. So I was looking for that reflection point when that consolidation starts. And I was focused back then in college on the thesis for manufactured housing communities.

And when you’re a college student, you know, people pick up the phone when you call because they’re always trying to help somebody out. And I was very fortunate to speak to Sam Zell uh and some other obviously leaders in the real estate business. And they gave me some great insight. And one of the ones he said to me was that there’s a lot of buyers, but there’s not much product out there. You have to go out and find product for people.

So, I decided to start a company in college to facilitate that transaction. Obviously, I didn’t have any money. My dad was a retired New York City detective. Uh my mom was a teachers aid, so I didn’t grow up with any wealth. But I figured out that if I could find good product, there was a numerous amount of buyers to buy it. And I did this by using the Freedom Information Act of New York and then various other states where I figured out that I could track all real estate asset classes using the the same common denominator of water and sewer per So I went down to Albany and I made my request…

And one day, you know, UPS knocked at my door… and handed me a box. I’m like, “Oh, there’s my real estate information.” And he’s like, “Actually, that truck out there is.” I had boxes and boxes of the old DOSs printouts of every self storage facility, every mobile home park, every RV park, marina, multifamily. Just so some of the younger listeners can appreciate this, forget AI. This is really before there was any sort of usable internet… This is physical paper stored in physical um office buildings and file cabinets. I had to pay per page on the print out.

Barry Ritholtz: And what did that cost and how how long ago was this?

Bob Moser: So this was back in 97 96 97. Uh it probably cost me a couple hundred dollars which I really didn’t have as a college student. But I realized quickly that that information was the key to finding assets. And what I would do is I would systematically go through these lists basically county by county… identifying the institutional quality assets that were still owned by mom and pops or non-institutional investors. Then I would do a deep dive on those assets. I would call and get the rent. I would call the tax assessor to get the real estate taxes. My goal was to know more about the real estate than the owner did by the time I called them on the phone to see if they’d be interested in selling.

Barry Ritholtz: That’s unbelievable. So that’s what led you to unconventional and overlooked segments. You mentioned marinas and RV parks and um other things like that. Um uh manufactured homes. How long did it take you before you managed to acquire your first property?

Bob Moser: So, there was a I I acquired my first property shortly after college. And what happened was there was a mobile home park in Streetsboro, Ohio. Uh it was actually called Camelot Village. Again, a guy named Mike Duffy owned it. And I used to call Mr. Duffy probably every 30 days to see if he would sell his asset. And one day, I finally got him to sell. And I made a nice fee on the transaction. But I still needed a little bit more. And the year I graduated, my mom took a home equity loan against the family house.

Barry Ritholtz: Is that how you financed?

Bob Moser: That’s how I financed my first acquisition. So before that, I was facilitating transactions, making fees, almost like a broker, but not a listing broker. And then the first asset I bought was when my my parents took a home equity loan.

Barry Ritholtz: So if in you mentioned you got your real estate license in college, how are you finding buyers for these sort of unconventional properties. Are you going to the big institutions and saying, “Hey, I have a property that fits into your portfolio.”

Bob Moser: No, what I actually did was I had these lists obviously that I got from the foil request and I kept on seeing the same name show up in buyers or that were owners. Okay. So, if I knew they own five assets in that particular region, I thought, hey, if I develop one or I get a relationship with a seller that would sell, I would bring it to that.

Barry Ritholtz: You knew where to bring it.

Bob Moser: 100%.

Barry Ritholtz: Really, really quite fascinating. And so, when did you found your own real real estate brokerage firm?

Bob Moser: So that was basically in college. So that was in college.

Barry Ritholtz: So how long did you do that as a um as a broker rather than an investor or they kind of ran parallel paths?

Bob Moser: No. So I was basically working exclusively for generating fees from like 97 to 2000ish 20 2001. I started buying my first asset around 99 going into 2000.

Barry Ritholtz: So, you ramp up various assets until 2013 when you start Prime Group. Was that the path?

Bob Moser: So, what I did was I so my mom took the home equity loan, my parents did against their home. Uh the first asset I bought actually I had sold to that gentleman 10 months prior and I called them up and I said, “Hey, uh you know, Wayne, I sold you this property. It was on Cape Cod. Uh would you be interested in selling it? And he I sold it to him for 3 million. He ended up selling it to me for 5 million.

Barry Ritholtz: Wow.

Bob Moser: Uh 10 months earlier. And then I moved up to Cape Cod and I actually ran the asset for the first two years to see how the business worked cuz I didn’t want to be that owner that would tell people what to do without actually being able to do it themselves. And then I bought my second property and then I bought my third. And then by 2005, August 12th, 2005, I had a large liquidity event. I sold the group of assets to Sam Zell.

Barry Ritholtz: So So I want to draw a line. So you’re a college kid randomly calling big real estate investors…

Bob Moser: 100%.

Barry Ritholtz: Including Sam Zell who took your phone call.

Bob Moser: Took my phone call.

Barry Ritholtz: And you had a long conversation with him.

Bob Moser: I did. I did.

Barry Ritholtz: And so how many years later is like, “Hey Sam, do your It’s me, Bob. Do you remember me? I have some assets for you.”

Bob Moser: It was funny when you say that because when I was dealing with the CEO, there’s a CEO at the time. Uh I always wonder because I never really spoke to him then after. So I wonder if he actually put two and two together. I’m sure he did.

Barry Ritholtz: So now you have a liquidity event. You’re tapping into Wall Street securitization or to fund this. How uh at what point do you say, “Oh, there’s a ready source of capital. I could just put a rollup strategy together and run all these properties more more efficiently than mom and pops can do…”

Bob Moser: 100%. The what I so basically from let’s say 2000 through 2005 2006 I was acquiring a lot of mobile home RV parks… And what really transitioned to me to become an asset specialist which we are now was how well self storage was doing during the first financial crisis… I decided at that point to become an asset specialist singularly focus on self storage.

Barry Ritholtz: So I’m curious why would self storage do well during the financial crisis. Was it literally people were losing their homes? They had to figure out where all their stuff had to go or what was happening in that period that made that such a a a standout performer.

Bob Moser: I would say it was more the defensive nature of it where these other assets were decreasing dramatically. Storage was holding its own. And it’s need-based real estate. I do not buy aspirational real estate.

Barry Ritholtz: It seems like you are in a variety of different regions everywhere from Saratoga to Springs to Chelsea here in New York City. Um, how do your uh underwriting assumptions differ relative to is this urban, is this suburban…

Bob Moser: So, we truly obviously real estate and that sound cliche, but it’s location, location, location. So, if you look at our portfolio, it basically you take the United States and it looks like a U. So, we’re up and down the coasts… and the reason why we’re along coastlines and then we’re up picking up in the mountain cities out in like Utah and Colorado is that there’s a barrier that’s natural barrier keeping the population tight to a nucleus.

Now, we have built very sophisticated software that helps us pre-identify these areas that we should be buying, not even the area, the exact asset we should be buying even though it’s not for sale. So, we built out this program where it pre basically I can put in our buy box and it populates out of the 60,000 self-storage facilities in the country the ones we should go after… And then what we have is our deal teams, which are group of roughly three dozen people internally that we allocate the deals that fit our criteria to and then they continue to call and visit those owners until we convert them to sellers.

Barry Ritholtz: Really, really fascinating. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Bob Moser, CEO of Prime Group Holdings, discussing the Prime Storage business. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

([Break])

Barry Ritholtz: I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Bob Moser… So, let’s talk a little bit about the business model of self storage. I see these areas popping up everywhere… How widely used are they? How profitable are they versus, you know, traditional commercial real estate?

Bob Moser: It’s a great question. So self storage has the lowest break even occupancy of any institutional real estate asset class I can think of. So at 40% occupied, you’re breaking even on expenses.

Barry Ritholtz: So, no lobby, no door man, no showers, none of the things that multi family correct makes so expensive.

Bob Moser: Well, you think about a multif family, if you’re going to turn a unit, it’s going to cost you anywhere from, let’s say, 1,500 to 5,000 depending on what you’re doing. Self storage is $5. We’re sweeping it and replacing a light bulb if there is one.

Barry Ritholtz: Really really quite interesting. What about ancillary revenue streams? We’ve all seen those silly reality shows where they find these, you know, someone abandons a unit and they find some million-dollar painting in there. H how much nonsense is…

Bob Moser: Yeah, I haven’t had that luck. But the uh it’s funny that you bring that up. So, prior to those TV shows, we would have the auctions on site… What happened though, everybody also and started showing up to these had a personality. They thought they were on TV, right? So everything now is virtual. So when we have an auction, it’s all done online. But the and it’s not a revenue source for the business… One of them is a tenant protection program where uh the tenants are able to push the liability of a storm or something happening to their goods onto the landlord for paying a certain price.

Barry Ritholtz: I hadn’t even thought about the idea of a storm. So you live near a coast, there’s a big hurricane coming. Hey, I have a bunch of furniture and I want to get soaked. If we’re if we’re swamped, let’s move it inland to a storage area…

Bob Moser: 100% and and god forbid something happens to their home. You know, obviously a lot of stuff gets moved into the storage facility.

Barry Ritholtz: So, you you guys are the largest privately held self- storage um set of ownership. Uh what’s the competition like? I know I know Blackstone is in here. We see cubes everywhere. We see public storage. Who are your big competitors?

Bob Moser: Correct. So, there’s the group of public companies that you were just mentioning. You have Extra Space, you have public storage, you have CubeSmart, U-Haul, um, and

Barry Ritholtz: U-Haul. I didn’t even think of U-Haul. That’s right.

Bob Moser: Correct. You know, most people think of them just as the moving business, but obviously they own a substantial amount of self storage. Substantial amount. What we do differently is we operate differently… The REITs are highly focused on occupancy. They want to keep their occupancy above 99 92%. Where I’ll trade occupancy for topline revenue.

Barry Ritholtz: And then the related issue I see are the mobile pods people sometimes use is seems sort of adjacent to the space. What what are your thoughts on that?

Bob Moser: So we’re not in that business. Um it’s a lot more labor intensive.

Barry Ritholtz: You got to physically drop the pod off and then come collect it later.

Bob Moser: Correct. So in storage, one of the main benefits is there’s we take no availment risk. So we’re never taking possession of the person’s goods.

Barry Ritholtz: So this really went from kind of a niche to a mainstream investment class over the past couple of years. You were really early in this space. What did you see that others miss…

Bob Moser: It was the fragmentation… highly fragmented when I first entered the asset class uh even back in around 2015 2014 it was roughly 80% still owned by mom and pops.

Barry Ritholtz: Wow. So just the the REITs and the institutionals only own 20% of the the outstanding…

Bob Moser: It’s probably closer to 70 75% so there’s been a lot of validation.

Barry Ritholtz: So a couple of years ago you did a uh a raise, a couple of billion dollars from outside investors… So why go to outside investors rather than go this securitized route?

Bob Moser: It was basically it’s a it’s it’s scale play. So we I knew the asset class was going to consolidate quickly once the other the large institutions understood it better… and the best way to do it was through the co-mingled fund way.

Barry Ritholtz: So, so not hands off REIT like correct uh numbers. So, so let’s you mentioned your investment committee. Walk us through the typical acquisition. How do you source these things? Is it still just calling people up…?

Bob Moser: So, this this is where it takes the correct personality to be this part of the team… So what we use is our proprietary software we have developed inhouse that we load our entire buy box into this software and it projects it’s an AI system every self storage that fits that criteria in the country… then we allocate that deal to the deal team member that covers that area then he or she continues to call that owner every 30 to 45 days until we convert them to a seller.

Barry Ritholtz: What’s the conversation like with a seller? Hey, spoke to you back in uh October. Just checking in, seeing if anything changes. How receptive are people to this?

Bob Moser: So, it’s more than and I get those same email else and it drives me nuts… So when we call, you know, we’re referring to an exact asset… We’ve already been by the asset. We know what the numbers are. But then we visit them on the holiday. We find out when their their birthday is. We send them a card… and then we try to solve that problem. What they do with the money afterwards, how do they maximize their sale proceeds? And we hold their hand through the process.

Barry Ritholtz: That’s amazing. Maximizing returns afterwards. I’m going to assume that’s some combination of it’s it’s obviously capital gains… I would not have thought that a buyer is going to facilitate that process would hold their hand through it…

Bob Moser: Because we want to eliminate any kind of friction. We need to buy assets… If we weren’t buying it this way, we would be buying it like 99% of every other asset where it gets brokered… and at the end you overpaid for the asset.

Barry Ritholtz: The the winner’s curse in a in an auction situation.

Bob Moser: Exactly. The more buyers there are, the more likely it is the winner overpaid. 100%. So we bypass all that and we go directly to the seller…

Barry Ritholtz: That that’s really fascinating… I would not have guessed that degree of complexity, sophistication, and facilitation to the seller.

Bob Moser: Here’s the crazy thing. We’re closing six to seven deals a month.

Barry Ritholtz: So one or two a week.

Bob Moser: On average when you look at it that way.

Barry Ritholtz: So it sounds like just the prep before you make an offer. If it’s a few weeks, it sounds like you’re spending tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Bob Moser: Easily. But you think about it, if I don’t get that asset today, I might get it in a month… We’re into this for the long run.

Barry Ritholtz: And and when you guys raised fund three, that was the largest dedicated self- storage fund raise at the time. I think that was $2.5 billion or something like that. And and what’s the total um self- storage headcount?

Bob Moser: Uh we have over 300 close to 350 assets. We have around 7 or 800 employees around the country.

Barry Ritholtz: Really really quite fascinating. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Bob Moser… I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

([Break])

Barry Ritholtz: I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio and watching Masters in Business on YouTube. My extra special guest this week is Bob Moser… I want to talk a little bit about the state of commercial real estate today. But I still have a handful of of questions I have to ask you um uh about self storage. You mentioned uh small businesses are are a big customer… What percentage of your units are rented by small businesses and and what do they use this for?

Bob Moser: It’s a great question. It’s probably one of the most overlooked aspects of self- storage… The rest is a 30 to 40% are small businesses, contractors, landscapers, a lot of pharmaceutical reps. So, we are their warehouse. We’re the warehouse for that small business that employs the majority of the US population.

Barry Ritholtz: Really, really interesting. And we were talking previously about uh self- storage isn’t covered by the traditional landlord tenant law… This is a lean law system. Is that true in all states?

Bob Moser: 100%. And actually it carries to Canada as well uh in parts of Europe that we’re looking at. But yeah, it it and it’s basically very similar to like a bank loaning money… But it provides a way to collect the rent that’s owed unlike a multifamily where it might take you a year if you’re lucky to evict somebody that’s not paying.

Barry Ritholtz: And you mentioned Europe. Uh I don’t think you have a lot of exposure currently in Europe. How big a push are you looking to make on the continent?

Bob Moser: So, we’ve been doing a lot of digging in figuring out what the different aspects and different cities. You know, it’s interesting because some of the owners in Europe, let’s say, let’s look at London, there will be two or three owners that own the majority of that inventory. Our play again is going out and buying from that oneoff owner… In Europe, they’ve been consolidated into groups. So, it really doesn’t provide us that ability to buy assets that we think are highly undermanaged.

Barry Ritholtz: So in the US this laws vary somewhat from state to state but it’s fairly uniform. Um how different is it country to country in in the EU or UK?

Bob Moser: Yeah but even in the states the when it comes to the actual implementation of the lean law it does there’s different timings… So we have a whole legal compliance team that works on this on a daily basis to make sure that each state law is being followed…

Barry Ritholtz: Really Interesting. So, commercial real estates have seeing higher uh rates of of costs, interest rates and inflation have been kind of stubborn and sticky. What sort of refinancing stresses that create or are you sidest stepping that whole interest rate chase these days?

Bob Moser: So, we’re very fortunate being in real estate for as long as we have. We have developed really deep relationships with the large institutional lenders uh from CitiBank, the Goldman, the JP the BMO to uh Northern Trust… But we spend a lot of time making sure that we’re hedging our interest rates.

Barry Ritholtz: We’ve certainly seen shifts in in demographics with everything from migration and remote work and aging populations. How does that affect uh demand for commercial real estate, both self storage and other related real estate?

Bob Moser: It’s a big demand driver for self- storage. So, when you think about it, people now are living in apartments more. I think I just heard the average the firsttime home buyers now until like they’re 40 now. It’s crazy when it used to be like 28 or 26. So obviously they live in smaller apartments, they need place to put their stuff.

Barry Ritholtz: Yeah. Speaking of office, we’ve seen a lot of underutilized um office properties… I just saw a piece in the Wall Street Journal uh this week that there has been a sudden surge of office to residential conversions in lower Manhattan… Do you track that sort of stuff?

Bob Moser: We’re actually working on one of those now, actually.

Barry Ritholtz: Oh, really? So, commercial office to residential real estate.

Bob Moser: So, what it was was we there was a uh a group of assets in West Chelsea… We’re converting one to a high-end storage of the future we’re calling it… And the other part of the project was a nine story building that’s on the Highline that we are going in to have it converted from office to residential.

Barry Ritholtz: On the Highline, all those properties have become incredibly valuable… When you say high tech self storage, I can imagine uh an app… What What is high-tech self- storage look like?

Bob Moser: So, we have actually harnessed the free energy of your cell phone to unlock the lock.

Barry Ritholtz: Mhm.

Bob Moser: So, it’s pretty interesting… So, basically, if you look at the lock is what controls this business, the actual lock that’s put on… So, we’ve devised and have built a lock that your cell phone gets an electronic key sent to it and then you can use that to open up the lock. There’s no batteries needed. There’s no Wi-Fi needed.

Barry Ritholtz: Some of the new EVs are the same way where you show up with a phone and it not only unlocks the car, it lets you start it.

Bob Moser: So, we’re bringing this to the self storage business and And we have our first 5,000 being deployed as we speak right now… The other thing is if they’re late and don’t pay, their electronic key is turned off…

Barry Ritholtz: That that’s really fascinating. Um, if it’s not Wi-Fi, How does the key operate? Is that Bluetooth or something else?

Bob Moser: It’s purely off. So, your cell phone gives off energy just sitting there. And it was enough to harness to actually flip that solenoid. It’s pretty amazing. So, we’ve been working for a couple years to get this perfected.

Barry Ritholtz: I’m assuming there has to be a battery.

Bob Moser: No battery. Your phone.

Barry Ritholtz: No battery.

Bob Moser: No battery. That’s the key to this. So, and it’s good that you brought that up because everybody else has done it with a battery in the lock and eventually that battery dies.

Barry Ritholtz: This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Bob Moser: Now it is. So, you think about it. One of our facilities in Astoria is 3,300 units… First of the month comes, if people haven’t paid, that manager has to leave the front desk, go around and double lock those units. Right now, the electronic key just magically freezes the unit. So, it reduces our labor. It gives the consumer a better product.

Barry Ritholtz: Quite quite fascinating. So, given your perspective uh and experience in all sorts of commercial real estate, 2026, there’s a lot of questions… What are you seeing in the commercial real real estate space circa 2026.

Bob Moser: It’s a good question… You know, obviously I think SOFR is going to be coming down. You know, obviously rates are being lowered. I’m hoping to see that on the 5-year Treasury as well.

Barry Ritholtz: is that your benchmark for for fees as opposed to, you know, 10 year for mortgages?

Bob Moser: Yeah. So, I look at the five year quite a bit.

Barry Ritholtz: So, uh, we’ve been hearing from various manufacturers. There’s no sort of clarity as to policy. Everybody is kind of frozen… I get the sense that’s not really an issue with your business.

Bob Moser: Going back, it’s need based real estate. People need it to no matter what the life cycle is, whatever the macro economy is, they need space for their products, goods, inventory, their personal items.

Barry Ritholtz: Really, really fascinating. Last question before we get to our favorites. So, so what do you think commercial real estate investors aren’t thinking about or talking about um but perhaps should be…

Bob Moser: I really think it’s about how to really create value in real estate real estate is not a short term investment and a lot of people look and I’m not even talking 3 to 5 years is short in real estate I remember years ago this old-timer told me that you know real estate’s boring for the first 30 years.

Barry Ritholtz: It’s it’s funny the line, real estate is boring for the first 30 years. After Sam Zell passed away, I read a biography of him and one of the things that kind of that stunned me was he owned some of his properties for for half a century 50 years forever. That’s just that’s just a unbelievable number.

Bob Moser: It’s almost like the Warren Buffett way of buying real estate. Long-term is really long term when it comes to real estate.

Barry Ritholtz: So, so let’s jump to our favorite questions that we ask all of our guests. Starting with who who were your mentors who helped shape this obsession with real estate from the earliest days and helped shape your career?

Bob Moser: I’ve had I’ve been very fortunate to have some great partners along the way. Um, from some of my like Ken Langone, founder of Home Depot, was a really close friend and mentor… but I’ve been fortunate to have some of the largest investors in the world like the late Ira Harris who was absolutely amazing and taught me a lot.

Barry Ritholtz: So, let’s talk about books. What What are you reading and what are some of your favorites.

Bob Moser: I think probably one of my favorite was Remnants of a Stock Operator [sic]. It was a great book.

Barry Ritholtz: Uh what about streaming? What are you listening to or watching? Anything keeping you entertained these days?

Bob Moser: Podcast wise, obviously besides yourself, we were all in listening to some of that on the way down. I was just listening to actually your interview with Unlang’s uh CEO, Wilhelm Schmid of A. Lange.

Barry Ritholtz: Yeah. Fascinating guy. I didn’t realize how big into cars he was. So final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad uh interest in the career in commercial real estate investing?

Bob Moser: I think it’s in anything. Don’t count somebody else’s money. I see a lot of younger people wondering what the other person next to them is making and concerned about that. Always do more than what you’re paid for. And you have to be enthusiastic. Enthusiasm is probably the biggest driver of success. I can think of

Barry Ritholtz: enthusiasm. That’s that’s really fascinating. And our final question, what do you know about the world of commercial real estate investing today? Would have been helpful back in the 1990s when you were first starting out.

Bob Moser: I would say it was more about managing people. I It took me a long time to learn how to manage people… and the ability to empower people. It took you know obviously it took me probably a decade and a half before I really felt comfortable doing that. Uh but yeah I think that was probably if I had done that earlier I’d probably be bigger.

Barry Ritholtz: Really really quite fascinating. Thanks Bob for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking to Bob Moser. He is the founder and CEO of Prime Group Holdings. America’s largest privately held self- storage uh investment fund. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the 592 that we’ve done over the past 12 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, Bloomberg, YouTube, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I did not thank the Crack team that helps me put these conversations together each and every week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Shan Russo is my head of research. Anna Luke is my podcast producer. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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10 Monday AM Reads

15 hours 3 min ago

My back-to-work morning train WFH reads:

• You’ve Never Seen Super Bowl Betting Like This Before: Prediction markets are turbocharging America’s obsession with sports gambling. (The Atlantic)

• The Coming Crypto Apocalypse. The future of money and payments will feature gradual evolution, not the revolution that crypto-grifters promised. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies’ latest plunge further underscores the highly volatile nature of this pseudo-asset class; one only hopes that policymakers will wake up to the risks before it’s too late. (Nouriel Roubini)

• Who is America’s Largest Landowner? The Land Report 100 Research Team analyzes transactions and scours records to determine America’s leading landowners. That’s how we broke the news in 2020 that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was America’s largest farmland owner with more than 260,000 acres. That’s how we identified Shanda Investment Group founder Tianqiao Chen as the owner of almost 200,000 acres of Oregon timberland in 2024. It’s one of the many reasons why news organizations worldwide rely on the Magazine of the American Landowner to understand this asset class. (Land Report)

• Is It Really a Good Sign When Executives Buy Their Own Stock? We Ran the Numbers: We looked at 1,400 insider purchases over the past five years to find out whether they give share prices a boost. (Wall Street Journal)

• AI ‘slop’ is transforming social media – and a backlash is brewing. “I would say AI slop increases the brain rot effect, making people quickly consume content that they know is not only unlikely to be real, but probably not meaningful or interesting,” he says. (BBC) see also The AI Trade Is Entering a New Era of Skepticism: A selloff in software and data analytics stocks reveals growing fears AI tools could cannibalize established industries. Stock Market Survives AI Panic, Even as Tech Collapses. It’s a Monster of Our Own Making. (Barron’s)

• How the Capitalists Broke Capitalism: In a financialized economy, businesses become mere sources of cash, assets to be manipulated and then operated for maximum investor returns. Workers become just another cost, like lumber. Customers are just revenue streams to be tapped. (New York Times)

• The Economic Costs of Brexit on the UK. Ten years on, the economic cost of Brexit has been larger than analysts predicted and that prolonged policy uncertainty contributed importantly to the magnitude of the impact. Understanding the ways in which Brexit resulted in a drag on economic growth for the United Kingdom provides potential lessons about the costs of abruptly pulling back from the global economy for other countries. (Econofact)

• FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled: Lockdown Mode is a sometimes overlooked feature of Apple devices that broadly make them harder to hack. A court record indicates the feature might be effective at stopping third parties unlocking someone’s device. At least for now. (404 Media)

• People’s Choice: Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026: Organizers of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest are inviting the public to vote for their favorite images from this year’s competition. (The Atlantic)

• Efforts to Ground Physics in Math Are Opening the Secrets of Time: By proving how individual molecules create the complex motion of fluids, three mathematicians have illuminated why time can’t flow in reverse. (Wired)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Bob Moser, CEO and founder of Prime Group Holdings, a private investor in unique real estate holdings. They created Prime Storage, one of the largest, privately-held self-storage brands in the world, with over 19 million rentable square feet of space and 255 locations across 28 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The firm has acquired over $10 billion in real estate assets.

Software relative to the S&P 500 is a particularly brutal chart … essentially 6 years of relative gains wiped out

Source: @KevRGordon

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The Investor Show: How NOT to Invest

February 8, 2026 - 11:00am

Fun story: I meet this big guy at FutureProof (Maybe it was Investopedia’s cocktasil party?). We start chatting about his career in the military — he is a 20-year vet — and why he became a financial advisor.

He invites me on his pod, and we had fun chatting on his live stream “The Investor Show”:

“Returning to the mic for a special episode featuring one of the most respected voices in investing: Barry Ritholtz. After reading Barry’s book “How Not to Invest”, it was the best investment book I read in 2025! This live conversation will dive into what’s moving markets, how great investors think about risk, and the behavioral mistakes that can quietly sabotage long-term returns.”

10 Sunday Morning Reads

February 8, 2026 - 6:30am

Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:

• You’ve Never Seen Super Bowl Betting Like This Before: Prediction markets are turbocharging America’s obsession with sports gambling. (The Atlantic)

• 10 Reasons This Is the Worst Crypto Winter Ever. Bitcoin is now down about 44% since its peak last October. Other cryptocurrencies are down much more. This isn’t in the deepest drawdown the space has ever had, but as far as crypto-winters go, this is the coldest. (Odd Lots)

• Amid immigration crackdown, unauthorized access to license plate data: Hundreds of law enforcement agencies searched Mountain View’s ALPR data without the city knowing about it. (Mountain View Voice) see also Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon: In October, a retiree emailed a DHS attorney to urge mercy for an asylum seeker. Then DHS subpoenaed his Google account and sent investigators to his home. We have become a nation of petty cunts, teabagging each other in performative displays of trollery. Sad! (Think Big Picture)

• The rise of in-car ads (ugh): Automakers now view infotainment screens as huge possible sources of ad revenue Our cars are already trying to sell us stuff. CarPlay is disappearing because automakers want our data. And soon, cars may even eavesdrop on our conversations for ad targeting. Oh, good more car crashes… (Sherwood)

• The Rise of the Slopagandist: Nick Shirley and others like him are reminiscent of yellow journalism of the 19th century, updated and turbocharged by social media algorithms. (The Verge) see also The Trump Administration Is Publishing a Stream of Nazi Propaganda: Government social-media managers have transformed official feeds. (The Atlantic)

• 40 years later, a new look at lessons from the Challenger disaster: Christa McAuliffe’s flight as the “teacher in space” lasted 73 seconds. A reporter who witnessed the tragedy returned to the story and found an engineer still trying to spread its lessons. (Washington Post)

• He Leaked the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had to Get Out Alive: A source trapped inside an industrial-scale scamming operation contacted me, determined to expose his captors’ crimes—and then escape. This is his story. (Wired)

• How to tear gas children: After ICE gassed a family-friendly protest in broad daylight, Portland is up in arms. (They seem like nice people…) (The Verge)

• The Fashionable Notion of ‘Free Speech Culture’ Is Justifying State Censorship, Ironically: It’ll convince people that free speech is a sham. (The Unpopulist)

• The Great Ticket Crisis: How Attending Live Events Became a Luxury Sport: It’s not just you: It’s never been harder to buy a reasonably priced ticket to a major concert or sporting event. Taylor Swift tours, World Cup matches, the Super Bowl, you name it… We dug in to the complex systems of the live-events market to explain why buying tickets feels like such a colossal mess right now. (GQ)

Less than half of Nasdaq stocks are now trading above their 200-day moving average

Source: @Barchart

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~~~

To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.

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MiB: Bob Moser, Prime Group Founder and CEO

February 7, 2026 - 9:30am

This week, I speak with Bob Moser, Owner, Principal and CEO at Prime Group. We discuss his early career in real estate, and his current holdings. Our focus is on his investments in self-storage assets and why this non-traditional real estate was so essential to his investment strategy. We also discuss how interest rates and the change in homeowner age impact commercial real estate.

Moser’s initial commercial real estate investment experiences began in mobile and RV parks. During the Great Financial Crisis, he noticed that self-storage did not suffer the same declines the rest of the commercial real estate space went through. Soon after, he liquidated his non storage investments, and went all in on self-storage.

His favorite book is here; A transcript of our conversation is available here Tuesday.

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Heather & Doug Bonaparthe, a married couple who work together and wrote a book on the financial challenges couples face: “Money Together: How to find fairness in your relationship and become an unstoppable financial team.” Our discussion sits somewhere in between financial planning and couples therapy, built around real stories that try to help couples find a healthier approach to money.

Favorite Books

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10 Weekend Reads

February 7, 2026 - 6:30am

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

• What happens when we admit we don’t know? Kelly Corrigan on why humility fuels curiosity — and how to cultivate these qualities in an age of certainty. Champion curiosity, and you risk sounding like a kindergarten teacher or a journalism professor. We treat it as a trait for the young and unformed — something adults either already mastered or no longer require. After all, if experience is supposed to deliver answers, what’s left to be curious about? (Big Think)

• Bubbles as a Feature Not a Bug: Drawing parallels to electrification and the internet, Jason Thomas considers how AI is reshaping corporate priorities around data, infrastructure, and productivity, and why early investment enthusiasm often centers on perceived bottlenecks, while much of the economic value ultimately accrues downstream. (Carlyle) see also The Startup Graveyard: 1100+ Failed Startup Case Studies: Where 1,402 startups and $202.6B+ in venture capital was burned to ashes. Loot the wreckage. (Loot Drop)

• Interstellar Space Travel Will Never, Ever Happen — It’s Basically Impossible: It turns out that the ships in Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune etc. are not based on some kind of hypothetical technology that could maybe exist someday with better energy sources and materials. In every case, their tech is the equivalent of just having Dumbledore in the engine room cast a teleportation spell. Their ships skip the vast distances of space entirely, arriving at their destinations many times faster than light itself could have made the trip. (Jason Pargin)

• Federal Reserve 101: What America’s central bank does and why it matters. (Paul Krugman)

• Computers can’t surprise: As AI’s endless clichés continue to encroach on human art, the true uniqueness of our creativity is becoming ever clearer. (Aeon)

• How To Become a Mathematical Genius: What many people experience as a “cognitive limit” or the edges of their own intelligence is actually just a representational limit: it’s when we use a specific way of thinking, but apply it to the wrong types of problems. This makes us think we’re stupid, when actually we’re not! And what that process tells us about how to solve the world’s biggest problems. (But This Time It’s Different) but see The Fall of the Nerds: The age of humans who could think like computers is drawing to a close. (Noahpinion)

• Daydreamers and Sleepwalkers: Crossing the Borderlands of the Unconscious: Scientists, novelists, and philosophers have spent centuries studying the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness. Each descent only deepens the mystery. (MIT Press Reader)

• How to build a girl in modern America: What can sororities, #RushTok and influencer-student megastars like the Darnell sisters tell us about US girlhood? We visit the University of Alabama to find out. (The Face)

• Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard? Columnist Natalie Wolchover checks in with particle physicists more than a decade after the field entered a profound crisis. (Quanta Magazine)

• NFL & Fox: The $1.6B Deal That Changed Everything: In 1993, Rupert Murdoch vastly overpaid for NFC media rights. But the deal turned Fox into a major American TV network and completely changed the economics of the NFL. (SatPost by Trung Phan)

The $117 Trillion World Economy

Source: Visual Capitalist

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10 Friday AM Reads

February 6, 2026 - 6:30am

My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:

• Super Bowl ad slots hit record prices as brands return to TV marketing: Broadcaster NBC says some brands are paying more than $10mn for a 30-second slot. (Financial Times)

• Expect Equity Markets to Broaden in 2026, Led by Small Caps, International: Both fiscal and monetary stimulus should boost earnings in the U.S. and abroad, with dollar weakness continuing to underpin international stocks. (Chief Investment Officer)

• Why Tech (&) Media is complicated: In “comms” across tech, startups, and the larger ecosystem, little seems to matter anymore. It’s hard to pin down anythingconcrete or meaningful. Everything is noise and nothing can be heard. (Om)

• How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post: The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline. (New Yorker)

• Capitalism by Sven Beckert review – an extraordinary history of the economic system that controls our lives: This article is more than 1 month old The Harvard professor provides a ceaseless flow of startling details in this exhaustively researched, 1000-year account. (The Guardian)

• An oral history of the Fed’s Covid-19 crisis: We read a bajillion pages of transcripts so you don’t have to (unless you really want to, of course). (Financial Times)

• Forget Free NYC Buses: Just Build 41 Miles of New Subways: Fare-free bus service in New York City would cost around $1 billion per year. A new report proposes spending that on a “transformative” transit expansion instead. (Citylab)

• Why Do So Many Mental Illnesses Overlap? A concept called the “p factor” attempts to explain why psychiatric disorders cannot be clearly separated. (Scientific American)

• Scenes from the 150th Westminster Dog Show: This year marks the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show’s 150th anniversary. Hundreds of dogs competed for the top prize at Madison Square Garden on Monday and Tuesday. Penny the Doberman pinscher was named best in show on Tuesday night. A Chesapeake Bay retriever named Cota was the runner up. (NPR) see also Catherine O’Hara & The Oral History of ‘Best in Show’ Looking back at the dog show–centric successor to the mockumentaries ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ and ‘Waiting for Guffman’ on its 20th anniversary (The Ringer)

• Bridgerton Finally Gets It Together: The fourth season does something that should be rudimentary and yet in the context of this show, is remarkable: Because Sophie is a maid, and because the primary tension between her and Benedict necessarily involves class and labor politics, the other subplots in this season offer an array of related stories. (Vulture)

The Crypto Complex has shed $2-trillion in market capitalization since its October peak

Source: PaulKedrosky

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How Platforms Influence Your Perception

February 5, 2026 - 4:00pm

I spend a lot of time in “How Not to Invest” discussing how our own biases often work against us. This is especially true when it comes to the information we consume relative to our investments and portfolio.

While we tend to focus on the biases in various media outlets or cable channels, we may not stop to consider how the algorithms that drive the social media platforms we consume are affecting our perception of current news events (See chart above).

The Argument takes this to the next level by using survey data on where people get much (most?) of their news and how this affects their perception of specific events. They don’t evaluate platforms by their bullish or bearish stance, but rather how major news stories show up in people’s partisan preferences by platform:

“Whether you’re getting your information from TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, cable news, or elsewhere, platforms are shaping your information diet in ways you may not even notice. Content is inseparable from the vehicle within which it arrives.”

There is some risk that people gravitate to the platform that reflects their views; that certainly is likely ever since Twitter was purchased. Regardless of that selection issue, the results were quite surprising.

Consider the political leanings associated with each platform in the chart:

There is definitely an “algorithmic bias” built into all of these platforms.

I cannot say that I was surprised at Reddit, which tends to be more like the old internet — where college-educated, youth, and higher income skew to the left. I am a little surprised at TikTok, but I to assume it’s mostly a younger age demographic that drives all of that. I am completely unsurprised at Twitter…

If this sort of thing interests you, check out the complete piece, with lots more data and charts, at The Argument.

Previously:
TikTokInvestors (May 9, 2024)

The Price of Paying Attention (November 2012)

Source:
Twitter is not real life
by Lakshya Jain
The Argument, Feb 05, 2026.

I extensively detail why Social Media is the worst place to get your investing news from in How Not to Invest: The ideas, numbers, and behaviors that destroy wealth―and how to avoid them.”

It’s on sale at Amazon for $20.54!

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10 Thursday AM Reads

February 5, 2026 - 6:30am

My morning train reads:

• The Bitcoin Perpetual Motion Machine Is Starting to Sputter: Crypto treasury companies quietly crept into index funds and retirement accounts. Its collapse is good news for all of us. (Slate)

• DraftKings and FanDuel spending millions on 2026 midterms: The two largest online sports gambling companies, DraftKings and FanDuel, have already spent millions of dollars on the 2026 midterm elections, according to FEC disclosures filed on Friday. This is a sea change for the industry, which has traditionally focused its political spending on state politics. (Popular Information)

• U.S. Manufacturing Is in Retreat and Trump’s Tariffs Aren’t Helping: Levies on imports were supposed to bring back a golden age of U.S. manufacturing. They haven’t worked, so far. (Wall Street Journal)

• Pick for Federal Reserve Chair May Surprise The President: A childhood job at a racetrack taught Kevin Warsh more than he realized about how to amass power. (Politico)

• Stop Blaming DoorDash for the Affordability Crisis: One DoorDash Discourse to rule them all: Food away from home is down. Groceries are up. This is especially true for young people. Affordability is a real problem. (Mike Konczal)

• Meet ‘Coalie,’ the Lethal Mascot for Dirty Energy: Secy of the Interior Doug Burgum is using an anthropomorphized lump of coal, named “Coalie”, as the mascot of President Donald Trump’s “American Energy Dominance Agenda.” The use of Coalie as a mascot for the “American Energy Dominance Agenda” is seen as a perversion of its original purpose, as it now promotes the use of “clean, beautiful coal” despite the negative environmental effects of coal consumption. (Bloomberg free)

• The Murder of The Washington Post: Wednesday’s layoffs are the latest attempt to kill what makes the paper special. (The Atlantic)

• America has reached peak sauce, and some people won’t leave home without it: Just how much do we love condiments? We’re stashing them in purses, backpacks and glove compartments. (Washington Post)

• The Paramilitary ICE and CBP Units at the Center of Minnesota’s Killings: Two agents involved in the shooting deaths of US citizens in Minneapolis are reportedly part of highly militarized DHS units whose extreme tactics are generally reserved for war zones. (Wired) see also The powerful tools in ICE’s arsenal to track suspects — and protesters: Biometric trackers, cellphone location databases and drones are among the surveillance technologies that federal agents are tapping in their deportation campaign. (Washington Post) see also ICE Begins Buying ‘Mega’ Warehouse Detention Centers Across US: Plans for ‘mega centers’ and jails in nearly two dozen communities have sparked protests over suitability, proximity to homes and schools. (CityLab)

• No Cult Favorite: BREAKING AWAY Is a Masterpiece: I trust Breaking Away completely. Simply and without strain, it remains one of the greatest and most truthful American films ever made. (Tremble…Sigh…Wonder…)

The economy is doing great! (For 34 people)

Source: Your Brain on Money

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At The Money: The Finances of Divorce

February 4, 2026 - 11:30am

At The Money: The Finances of Divorce with Patrick Kilbane (February 4 , 2026)

Divorce is an expensive, confusing, and stressful experience. Dividing up family assets, including not just the family home, but portfolios, real estate, trusts, and other businesses. There are big mistakes to avoid.

Full transcript below.

~~~

About this week’s guest:

Patrick Kilbane is General Counsel of the RIA Ullman Wealth Partners, where he leads the Divorce Advisory Group. In addition to his years as a divorce attorney, he is also a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst (CFDA) and Wealth Advisor at the firm.

For more info, see:

Professional Bio

~~~

Find all of the previous At the Money episodes here, and in the MiB feed on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Bloomberg. And find the entire musical playlist of all the songs I have used on At the Money on Spotify

APPLE EMBED

TRANSCRIPT:

Is there any life event that’s more expensive, confusing, and stressful than a divorce? You’re not only dividing your family, you’re also figuring out the disposition of a lot of assets: portfolios, real estate, trusts, businesses, more. I’m Barry Ritholtz, and on today’s edition of At the Money, we’re gonna discuss the finances of divorce. And full disclosure, I am and remain happily married for 32 years.

To help us unpack all of this and what it means for your portfolio, let’s bring in Patrick Kilbane of the RIA Ullman Wealth Partners. He’s General Counsel for the firm, and also leads the Divorce Advisory Group.

So Patrick, let’s start with the basics. You focus on people. Going through divorce, what’s the first financial triage you do when a new client calls?

Patrick Kilbane: Barry, great to be with you. Thank you for having me. When somebody gets hit with this bomb, when this bomb is dropped on them, you know, I, I’m a, I’m a big fan of Coach Lou Holtz and he has an acronym WIN, and it stands for what’s important now.

So I generally talk to the person who this might be their first exposure with the legal system. And I figure out what their goal is – has their estranged spouse cut them off from the cash flow from the assets? Is this a child custody situation? You know, what is the first thing that we need to handle?

And then it’s sort of giving them the confidence and the reassurance that, hey, you’re not the first or the last who’s gonna go through this, and I’m gonna be your Sherpa through this process.

Barry Ritholtz: I imagine there are some consistent large money mistakes people make in the first 30 to 60 days of a separation. Obviously it’s very emotional and you know, most people don’t go through these sort of things repeatedly. What sort of mistakes do you see before the lawyers and the written agreements start showing up?

Patrick Kilbane: Like most people who have a long history together, they. Have solved a lot of problems together; I see people trying to work the divorce settlement out among themselves. The spouse that may not have all of the data, all of the information, may not know the extent of their holdings, may make some agreements before they have any idea. What their rights are.

Like you, Barry, I’m a lawyer, although I’m not practicing anymore. I litigated high-net-worth divorce cases for 10 years. And what I try to do is not give legal advice, but say, Hey, let’s slow down a little bit and let’s make sure that you have a full understanding of what you agreeing to or waiving before you do it.

Barry Ritholtz: I think about all the assets that are involved in a family dissolution. There’s cash, there’s retirement accounts, there’s property, there’s business interests. How do you help clients understand the value of what they’re negotiating, either cash upfront versus a longer-term set of assets?

Patrick Kilbane: I try to divide everything into different buckets, so I make sure that my clients aren’t comparing apples to giraffes. They’ve gotta be comparing apples to apples.

Depending on where the spouses are situated and where each one of them wants to go, we know that all assets aren’t created equal. So there may be an opportunity to work together. To reach a divorce settlement that’ll be more advantageous for both spouses than what they would end up with in court, if the court just took a meat cleaver and busted everything in half.

Barry Ritholtz: You have a background as a matrimonial lawyer. How does that change the way you sit down as a financial advisor when you’re having these conversations with clients who are just starting the divorce process?

Patrick Kilbane: I have a perspective from litigating these cases for 10 years and seeing people at the very beginning of the process, and I think a financial planner, a wealth manager, an asset manager who may not have that same experience, may want to get right into the details.

You mentioned the word triage earlier in this conversation. This client, this family is coming to you, they are experiencing trauma. The wound may be fresh, so I think we really have to slow down. And it’s sort of like, you know it, when you see it, you’re ready to delve into the financial planning and start talking about Barry 2.0 when Barry is ready to start thinking about Barry 2.0.

But a lot of these people come in and they’re at a total fog. They’re trying to figure out. Where their next dollar is gonna come from? How is cashflow gonna go? Where am I gonna live? So we have to sort of satisfy that basic level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs before we can even get into that financial planning conversation.

Barry Ritholtz: The past few divorces I’ve witnessed from relatively close, the big question becomes who gets the house? It always seems to be one of those things – it’s an emotional decision, it’s a financial decision. Is there a better framework for addressing that? How do you avoid that from becoming so toxic, so War of the Roses sort of a disaster?

Patrick Kilbane: I think you have to really start and understand why somebody wants the house. You made a great point. Is this an emotional decision? Is this a financial decision? Do I have comfort in my neighbors? Is the house in a public school district where I want my children or child to continue to go to school until they reach the age of 18?

And then once you really have a good idea why that’s the case, maybe that spouse wants the house just because they know the other spouse wants the house. We have to take a step back and understand the true motivations. And then we start talking about the financial problems and the tax problems that come.

A married couple, if this has been your primary residence for two of the last five years, you can exclude up to half a million dollars of a capital gain if there is one. Of course. If you’re single, then you can only exclude up to $250,000 of the gain. What’s the basis? Do we have a state tax situation? There are a lot of different layers,

Back to my previous comment, I don’t think we can even hit on that until we have a true understanding of what the client’s motivation is and when they’re emotionally prepared to have that financial discussion.

Barry Ritholtz: You mentioned taxes, it’s easy to imagine how taxes can just flip the math.

What are the big tax traps in divorce settlements to avoid?

Patrick Kilbane: All of these assets are different. They may be tax at ordinary income rates, capital gains rates. Your audience is sophisticated, but some of our clients who are going through this process are also very sophisticated, but that hasn’t been their role in the household.

A lot of it is re-educating them and understanding or trying to have an idea what is their tax situation going to be post filing, they may be in a totally different tax filing status. They may be going back to work. They may not be going to work. They may have investment income imputed to them. They may have to use IRS, uh, rule 72T if they’re before 59 and a half to be able to tap into retirement accounts, um, because of imputed investment income.

Of course, those laws vary by state, but that’s why it’s so helpful to have somebody who really knows that perspective and can work with the various tax and estate planning professionals to be thinking about these issues.

Barry Ritholtz: What about retirement assets? What do people need to know about avoiding penalties or getting a bad allocation? There’s a whole other QDRO thing that I’m wholly unfamiliar with. What are the issues in divorce with? 401Ks, 403Bs. IRAs. Any joint or individual retirement asset?

Patrick Kilbane: Quadro is an acronym that’s, uh, stands for qualified domestic Relations order. It is a subsequent court order that it, that is used to segregate a retirement plan that’s subject to ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act). But if your spouse is a participant in a government plan, a government plan may not accept a QDRO, then how in the heck do we divide that marital asset?

It always requires us to stay, take a step back and get a hold of a document called a summary plan description. Which sets out the rules and regulations of each retirement account.

We’ve heard people say all the time, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, and whether it’s a retirement account or some other asset, we have to be very intentional and very careful and go with each asset.

What is it? Is it a qualified or a non-qualified account? How do we divide it? What are the tax consequences? There are other contingent assets, like carry and restricted stock and so on. But what’s the best way to actually accomplish this on each asset?

Maybe with that asset, with that asset, we say, wait a minute, I don’t want to have to deal with my estranged spouse in the future to get my fair share. Isn’t there a way that I can barter this away and get something else that works better for me? So those are all the discussions that are asset by asset level.

Barry Ritholtz: That’s complicated. Let’s talk about something even more complicated. What do you do with illiquid assets, private businesses? Hey, it’s easy to split a portfolio of publicly traded stock. What do you do about a company that is private and one of the spouses is running, and how do you you know, figure out what it’s worth and who gets what?

Patrick Kilbane: You and I can look at our brokerage account statement or retirement account statement. Have a pretty good idea what that asset is worth with an asset that we know that has value, but we’re not sure what that value is. You are required to hire another professional called a business appraiser or a valuation expert.

And the crazy thing about the divorce world, Barry, is it imposes these. Fantasy rules and regulations that you and I would never, you know, have to discuss with a married couple. We talk about enterprise, goodwill and personal goodwill when we come to the value of a business.

A valuation expert can say, okay, this firm is worth X, you know, million dollars. But in a divorce context, especially my home state of Florida, we have to look at what’s the value of Barry’s firm, without Barry? And the value of Barry’s firm, without Barry, that’s the marital asset in Florida, that’s what we have to divide.

So a year prior, somebody may have offered to buy the family business for $15 million, but if you take Barry outta that family business and the value of the office buildings and the furniture and so on and so forth is a million, then the marital share is 500 grand. And you have a spouse thinking, wait a minute, I’m gonna end up with seven and a half million dollars of this asset. But really it may be half a million dollars or you know, and you can pick any other example.

So you need that expert. And then you need to understand how the state dissolution of marriage laws apply to valuing that asset within the context of a divorce.

Barry Ritholtz: What do you tell clients about cash flow planning right after the divorce? Suddenly, whatever emergency funds, credit, even just a household budget, all that stuff gets thrown out of the window. How, how do you rebuild that? How do you face that first year of spending reality?

Patrick Kilbane: In the context of the divorce negotiations, I try to help my clients and lawyers think about asking for a larger-than-normal emergency savings fund.

We talk about “this is how much money you have to spend on a monthly basis,” But that first year where this now single person is in charge of their monthly budget, there may be some surprises, and there may be a learning curve, and so on and so forth. I aim to build that experience and, even if it’s not an alimony case, help settle the case if alimony is possible for a short period to help with that transition and ease somebody into being responsible for probably the first time in a long time for managing their own cash flow.

Barry Ritholtz: Final question. If you could give one piece of advice to someone starting the divorce process, what’s the best decision or even document that improves the outcome for everybody?

Patrick Kilbane: In my state, there is a document that’s required to be filed by each party in every case, and it’s called a financial affidavit. I see in New York, it’s called a net worth statement or so on and so forth.

It is a daunting, overwhelming document, but really it’s a forum that. You’re normally required to, you know, sign, you take an oath and say that what you put on here is truthful, but you outline all of your sources of income, all of your expenses, all of your assets, and all of your liabilities.

From a financial standpoint, if you can take the time and make that as accurate as possible, um, that’s gonna really go a long way to helping you, your lawyer, and the other financial professionals on your team to get a really precise idea of what we’re dealing with.

Spend that time, take the time upfront, and you may not have all the information that you need to answer that question until you get the discovery from the other side. And what I tell people all the time is, that’s okay. Disclose it, and then put a footnote that says, “Hey, I don’t have this information. And when I get it. I’ll update it” and then when you really break it down like that and let people know, Hey, you can amend this document, I see them start to relax a little bit and say, okay, I got this.

Barry Ritholtz: To wrap up, I’m gonna quote Patrick, “Divorce is really a financial or tax problem disguised in a divorce costume.” And that really sums it up. It’s as much about. Separating your personal lives as it is to figuring out your financial and asset lives going forward. Take it seriously. Make sure you get good counsel and follow the process that your lawyer and financial advisor walk you through.

I’m Barry Ritholtz. This has been Bloomberg’s at the Money.

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Transcript: Kate Burke, Allspring Global Investments, CEO

February 3, 2026 - 8:30am

The transcript from this week’s MiB: Kate Burke, Allspring Global Investments, CEO, is below.

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Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio News. This is Masters in business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio

Barry Ritholtz: On the latest Masters in Business podcast. My conversation with Kate Burke, she’s CEO of Offspring Global Investments, helping to run about $635 billion in client assets. She has a fascinating background. She’s held all sorts of roles. CEO-COO-CFO, Chief Talent Officer, both at Alliance Bernstein and Offspring. I thought this conversation was fascinating, and I think you will also, with no further ado, my interview with Kate Burke of Offspring Global. Kate Burke. Welcome to Bloomberg

Kate Burke: Thank you Barry for having me.

Barry Ritholtz: So we’re gonna get to all of your various titles, many of which I’ve, I’m fascinated by, but I, I have to start with your background. So you study economics at Holy Cross before getting your MBA at Kellogg, what was the career plan? Was it always investing in finance?

Kate Burke: No, I, I had an idea, it might be finance, but I grew up in Rochester, Minnesota. It was a town of 80,000. It’s probably about 120 now. Largely the Mayo Clinic is there and IBM is there. And so there wasn’t a lot of financial acumen that was easily available to me. It just wasn’t a career that really had presented itself. But I was interested in investing. I’m one of five kids. My dad was trying, and mom were trying to save to help us pay for college. And my dad would take, talk me through the decisions he was making, even though he was a self-taught investor as well. And that was really the first interest I had. My first job, one of my first jobs was actually being a teller at a bank because I thought, this is how I’m gonna learn about banking,

Barry Ritholtz: Really, as a teller.

Kate Burke: Didn’t know. That’s how little I knew at the, you know, when I’m 18 years old, there’s very little, you don’t have all the information you have today available. Right. We didn’t have the internet. I had the Wall Street Journal that I could, that my dad got, that I could read. And that was really it. And so I thought, well, how, if I’m gonna get into banking, I might as well go be a teller at a bank. That was obviously not the longer term career path I chose, but it showed an early interest in the, in finance. So,

Barry Ritholtz: So what was it, was it your, your father that sparked the interest in investing or was it school? What, what led you to say, Hey, this is a legitimate career option For me,

Kate Burke: I think it was a little bit of, it started with my, my dad and then economics. I, holy Cross is a liberal arts college. I had originally thought I was going to go to a university with a business program. So I knew I wanted to do business. I fell in love with Holy Cross. Economics was the closest major you could have as a liberal arts uni college. So I pursued that. And then it was my first year outta college, I actually worked for a not-for-profit called Americas Sure. And then was looking to get a job in finance. ’cause I was very close to New York City, but not in New York City. And started networking with people to try to learn more about jobs and finance, because I certainly had friends who had moved into it. But I ultimately went and worked at Tommy Hilfiger instead. And so I went, but that’s where I really got interested in it. ’cause I did investor relations there.

Barry Ritholtz: That was in between college and, and MBA. And, and what was the first job? Right outta business school.

Kate Burke: It was management consulting at, at Kearney. So that, that exposed me. I call that my finishing school. You know, you go to business school, you liter learn a lot of theory. By doing consulting, you learn a lot of more practical application. And it really, I still leverage a lot of the, the things I learned in consulting about how do you go into something that you don’t fully know, ask a lot of questions, learn how do you structure a problem, and then how do you break down the work to make for forward progress? And being able to do that kind, that critical thinking and that strategic planning, I think has helped me throughout my career. So,

Barry Ritholtz: Kate Burke: So Tommy Hilfiger consulting, Tommy Hilfiger. How did you end up at Alliance Bernstein?

00:04:32 [Speaker Changed] So I was doing, so it was Tommy Hilfiger Business School, then consulting. And at Tommy Hilfiger I did investor relations. So I was the only person in a suit compared to all the other 20 year olds like skateboarding down the hall. So it was very fun in my twenties to be working there. But after business school was doing consulting, we were living, I had gotten married, we were living in Ohio, and we really wanted to be in New York City. I had already lived here once, my husband had not. And when we moved back to New York and I was doing consulting, I just, I couldn’t be in New York City in the hub of finance and not be in finance. And so using, again, networking came across Bernstein Research and said, this is the place I wanna work. I just absolutely loved it.

00:05:25 [Speaker Changed] They, they’ve had a great reputation for, for decades. You’ve had a number of roles there. Everything from, you know, across your career. Chief operating officer, chief financial Officer. Tell us about Chief Talent Officer. What, what does that involve?

00:05:41 [Speaker Changed] So, chief Talent Officer, I, I had moved out of sales and sales management into the head of Human Capital with, which is head of hr, human Resources. And as part of that, your role as Chief Talent Officer, which an asset manager, when all that you have is your talent, right? Is an incredibly critical job. And what that really is about is how do you create better teams? How do you find talent, nurture talent, build talent? How do you help collaboration across silos in the organization? How do you build performance management systems? All of those things come into to how do you build the best talent? And it was a fantastic role for me. One that I was worried originally about taking, moving from a producer, a sales producer, into a corporate function. I didn’t say yes right away when they offered it to me because I was, I thought of myself, my, my, you know, I thought of myself as a revenue generator and moving into that role was the best decision I made.

00:06:57 Wow. Because it moved me one outta my comfort zone. I was working with a group of people within the talent organization who were deep practitioners of human capital kinds of practices who had studied this. They were passionate about it. And I came in with a business acumen and I had to very quickly learn to work with them and find a way to create value with people who questioned a little bit about why I was their boss. It wasn’t the first time that it happened to me really. And, and so moved into that role and really embraced it. And I came up with, you know, return on invested capital. I came up with a phrase, return on invested time. So anytime you ask anyone inside the organization to do something, you’re asking them to invest their time so you better have a return on it. And so it stopped us from doing, from chasing things that may be academically interesting or fads, but really focused on the individuals inside Alliance Bernstein and how could we help use their time wisely to develop themselves and to build a great firm.

00:08:10 [Speaker Changed] I, I’m kind of fascinated by the reluctance to go from something that is measured in very specific, can be easily quantified. Here’s how much assets we generated, here’s the revenue that came in off of those as either a producer or managing a producer, chief talent officer where you’re responsible for attracting talent and then retaining talent. It’s a little squishier. How can you tell? And more importantly, how can senior management tell how effectively you’re doing that job?

00:08:41 [Speaker Changed] So there are metrics still. You look at things like your retention promotions, if you have a voluntary or involuntary turnover as ways of having some measurement of it. You also do cultural surveys. So you will ask the employee population a set of questions. There’s firms that do this. So you can compare yourself not only year over year, but also to your peers in the industry to get a sense of, is it, is it a place where talent wants to stay? So retention is probably the number one stat that you have. But the other part is, are you a good partner to the other leaders in the organization? And are you gaining their trust? Are you helping work through their talent issues? The number one lesson I took away is that there are many, many ways to be a successful leader and to build a good team.

00:09:42 But the number one thing that you have to do is you as a leader have to be the chameleon to your team that you should be adjusting your management style to bring out the best of the individual ver and to give them feedback and to help them versus expecting that individual to mirror you. And that was really powerful because I think it creates this opportunity for you to bring together a really diverse group of talent where they have permission to leverage their strengths. And then my goal is always to build scaffolding around them and to ensure that the dy overall dynamic of the team, that you cover the bases of everything you need. And helping leaders see who on their teams were really analytical versus who were more of the culture and people carrier versus who really partnered well with others. And, and do you have that representation on your team so that you can do more to together versus having five people on a team or 10 people on a team who are all carbon copies of themselves, that that tends to lead to more siloed thinking. So it was, it was really fun. And I got to work with really smart, great leaders and managers across the organization to, to learn many of those skills. It,

00:11:04 [Speaker Changed] It sounds like Chief Talent Officer was a natural bridge to chief executive officer.

00:11:11 [Speaker Changed] It, it, yes. I did not think that at the time, but when I reflect on my career, it was the best job for me to have taken and it, for all the reasons I’ve already stated in terms of how you engage with talent and learning how to build teams. But also it gave me the opportunity to have a seat at the table with the rest of the senior leadership team and talk strategy and understand how we were building the business. And it was great training ground. I had been in the role about a year, maybe to maybe two when we had a CEO transition. There’s a lot of pressure on the head of human capital to, to partner with the CEO to make sure they’re successful for sure. And so that gave me the opportunity to work closely with Seth Bernstein, who’s the current CEO of, of Alliance Bernstein. And he is the one who then also afforded me a lot of other opportunities over time to take on other roles because I became a trusted partner to him. Huh,

00:12:18 [Speaker Changed] Really, really interesting. And then how did you end up moving from Alliance Bernstein to Offspring?

00:12:24 [Speaker Changed] I was very happy at Alliance Bernstein. I had, I was the CFO and COO at the time. You, you were there

00:12:31 [Speaker Changed] For almost two decades. Yes. Almost 20 years.

00:12:33 [Speaker Changed] Yes. And, and, and, and, and I said had a number of great roles and they really helped build out who I am as a person and as a, as a leader today and is a great firm. I have a lot of admiration still for everyone who, who works there. So I wasn’t looking, I, I followed the path of having a, a, a headhunter call, of which I first said no, I was not interested in pursuing the, the conversation, not because of anything about all springing, but just because I was happy with where I was. And then he said, well, why don’t you just look into it a little bit, read a little bit, maybe meet with, just meet with some of the people, maybe meet with someone. So a very effective headhunter in that regard. And as that conversation started to unfold, I got really excited about Offspring because I could see all of the potential that was there.

00:13:31 For those of you who like, who don’t know Offspring, and many people still don’t. We’re, our brand is only four years old, but we have 635 billion of assets under Management, 450 of which are fixed income. And nobody knows we’re one of the larger fixed income players out there because it, so there was so much potential and such a rich history of Invest teams. It was a multi boutique model. It was, it’s, it was Wells Fargo asset management that they were selling and had, they had sold, and it was about two years into its transition and there was still a lot of work both to, to do on the transition out of Wells Fargo. So all of the TSA, the getting out of all of the transaction servicing agreements, we were still, they were still in the midst of that. They were thinking about the evolution of the investment platform rebuilding out distribution. And I thought, I’ve done a lot of this so I can be really, I can really create a lot of value by going here and working with such a great team, great leadership team that was already in place and with so much potential that I just got really excited about it.

00:14:48 [Speaker Changed] Huh. Really, really fascinating. So before we get to Offspring, let, let’s talk a little bit about AB for a minute. I know a lot of people who, who either work there or used to work there, the firm has evolved over the years. What’s the current relationship with, is there a parent company now? What? Wasn’t there a merger

00:15:10 [Speaker Changed] At Alliance Bernstein?

00:15:11 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. Who, who’s the

00:15:12 [Speaker Changed] Equitable,

00:15:13 [Speaker Changed] Equitable is now, is now, which is really right down the street from them, which is kind of ironic down Seventh Avenue from where the HQ used to be.

00:15:21 [Speaker Changed] So what’s interesting is Equitable is now in Alliance Bernstein’s old offices at 1345 and Alliance Bernstein has actually moved down to Hudson Yards.

00:15:31 [Speaker Changed] Oh. Which is, which is really yeah. A, a a a fascinating place as well. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Kate Burke, CEO of Offspring global Investment, discussing what it’s been like working at both Alliance Bernstein and Offspring Springing Global. I’m Barry Ritholtz, your listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

00:16:02 I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Kate Burke. She’s CEO of alls springing global. The firm manages or advises on $635 billion in assets. Previously she was C-O-O-C-F-O and head of Human Capital Chief Talent Officer at Alliance Bernstein. So you’ve had very distinct jobs that I think of as so different. Chief operations officer is very different than CFO, which is so different than CEO. How do you shift from one major position to another that it’s a whole nother, like CFO is an entirely different silo than CEO?

00:16:52 [Speaker Changed] Yes. So each one of them teaches you different areas of discipline or focus, but each time I have taken on a new role, I start, I’ve started to establish a little bit of a playbook, which is, you know, people talk about your first 90 days and and there’s truth to that. The number one thing that I do is I go in and very quickly, and this goes back to the story I was telling you about human resources, is I recognize that oftentimes at the table, I’m gonna be the person with the least amount of subject matter expertise on a topic. And rather than try to fake it and act like I have all of the answers, I use a lot of inquiry to ask questions and to, and to peel back the knowledge that they have to share with me and to invite that into the conversation.

00:17:47 And then I have the confidence that the, the other parts of the organization I’ve seen that I’ve been a part of have value to add to that analysis. And it becomes really a conversation about where we’re going so that I’m partnering with the, the people in the, in that discipline to come up with what the strategy and implementation plan is. And what I think I’m good at is I’m good at focus and execution. I say a lot at all springing. There’s no shortage of good ideas. There’s a shortage of great execution because you can get, you know, I have an idea for a podcast. No, I don’t actually, but everybody has ideas, right? Right. It’s how do you get that idea into something that is tangible, that then you make that first step, you make the second step and you get it off the ground and you create the momentum and then the willingness to pivot or change direction based on the measurement of are you making the progress the way you thought and, and constantly learning. So I talk about growth mindset, how do you engage in that? And I think that that’s been what’s allowed me to be able to move into different roles is I appreciate how good the people are that I’m working with.

00:19:05 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. But you also have to be a quick study because, all right, so C-O-O-C-F-O very operationally focused. You led Bernstein private wealth not only for a couple years, but really challenging years right in the middle of the pandemic. That’s a completely different set of skills and, and set of tasks to execute. Tell us a little bit about leading Bernstein’s Private Wealth.

00:19:30 [Speaker Changed] So I do think that I’m a fairly quick study, but I work really hard to be a quick study. I put in a lot of, I put in a lot of time Funny how

00:19:38 [Speaker Changed] That works, isn’t it?

00:19:39 [Speaker Changed] It really does pay off really can help pay off. So, you know, with Bernstein Private Wealth one, it had helped that I’d been at the organization a long time. So I obviously knew the strength of the, the brand of the proprietary nature of how they invest for individuals. I’m actually still a client of theirs, not surprisingly. And I went in and in the end, so one, it’s about how do you, how, what was the Bernstein philosophy about investing for, for wealthy individuals and, and recognizing the strength and the legacy. The, the financial advisors are very proud of that business. And so the number one thing you have to recognize is don’t mess that up. Right? So how do you build on that and, and try to protect that, particularly during challenging times. Two, it is all about the talent. So there’s a consistent theme there that it’s all about the talent.

00:20:39 It was a strong leadership team and my role was to come in and help study our business during a time of cha of a time of challenge. And to do that, you do get very focused on really on, on the client. This, it was a wonderful reminder for me. I had been in sales for a long time, it was my first job back into a client facing role after I’d moved into hr. And I love the clients. And so being able to talk with clients again helps give you a lot of direction about the challenges our advisors are facing. And my role was to be there for our adv, our advisors. They, they give so much of themselves. Every financial advisor, regardless of the firm you’re working at, is investing their time and energy into the success of other people. They need someone to fill that bucket who’s doing that for them. And so my view in that role was, let me help fill that bucket. You’re under so much pressure under duress with your clients and, and, and helping them through challenging times. How can I help support you in that? So,

00:21:53 [Speaker Changed] Huh, really, really interesting. So now, now let’s move forward. You get recruited to Offspring as CEO for people who are not familiar with Offspring. Tell us a little bit about the firm, who the clients are, how, how they’ve managed to accumulate, you know, over $600 billion.

00:22:09 [Speaker Changed] Sure. So Offspring’s history is, is that it was built under Wells Fargo asset management really as a multi boutique model. So Wells Fargo had acquired brands like Montgomery, strong Capital, evergreen, and they had really functioned as, you know, sort of independent investment teams leveraging then the distribution and operations. The distribution was really twofold. And, and this is what we’re growing out, what what we’re grow leveraging to continue to grow, which was one a strengthen retail because Wells Fargo Advisors is our, is our, was our largest, is our largest client still today. And they were very focused on understanding the needs of the advisor community. And then two was an institutional business that was largely in defined benefits and other types of institutional channels. And so tho that history was there, equity is about a third of, of about a fifth probably of the assets. And then we have a liquidity business, a money markets business that is incredibly strong.

00:23:27 And then a fixed income business that’s really two pieces. One, a fixed income platform that has both credit all the way to high yield, sort of the entire curve. So my view is if you need a fixed income strategy in your portfolio, offsprings should be one of them. And then on the other side of it was a very strong brand gallard, which was stable value and really used a lot in defined benefit and contribution programs. And so we had all of those pieces, but they had all operated independent, fairly independently. And one, what’s really important for investment portfolio managers is their autonomy to make investment decisions like that is what we are, what people are buying from them is that the, that the portfolio managers that they believe in and have established the track record still have the autonomy to, to make those choices. And I believe that firmly that is croson, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t talk to each other.

00:24:32 And that you can’t create an investment platform where you’re leveraging the insights internally within all springing to benefit the totality of our clients and the totality of the investment decisions. And so that was one of the first things I started working on with John Branco, our, our head of our CIO and head of investments was we have all of these amazing capabilities through, they’ve historically worked independently, we are now all under the offspring brand. They’re all aligned with the success of Offspring as an organization. Is there something we can do as we evolve the investment platform to create more leverage across these teams? And that’s what, that’s the journey that we’ve been on with the investment teams. Hmm.

00:25:21 [Speaker Changed] Really, really interesting. You, you mentioned the money market group is separate from the fixed income group. I kind of think them a as it,

00:25:29 [Speaker Changed] It, it, we ha we separated out. I agree with you. So when I say we have over 400 billion in assets under advisement in fixed income, I’m including liquidity in that piece. So I do, that is part of the, the curve. But liquidity as is such an, in a strong, independent piece of that asset allocation for us that we often call it out because it, it’s such, it’s been such a powerful and particularly in a higher interest rate environment has had been a very strong source of, of flows and growth for us.

00:25:59 [Speaker Changed] We were, what were we over four, four point a half percent last summer and now we’re back in the high threes, like four point a half per people forget, we spent 25 years pretty much at nothing. Nothing. So four point a half percent wait safe liquid. Wow.

00:26:14 [Speaker Changed] Why would you not, why would you not have it? And you’re seeing what’s interesting is, you know, even with advisors or or with clients, they’ll, they’ll have money in a deposit account earning very low interest. And then when they’re put, they’re trying to figure out how to put it into work. The question of whether or not you wanna put it into equities at the this value, right, these, these valuations right now versus saying no, you can get a stable return off of fixed income. Fixed income was out of favor for a period of Oh, long

00:26:47 [Speaker Changed] A period

00:26:47 [Speaker Changed] Period of time. Period. Yeah. Period. I think we’re back in the age of, of fixed income for, for quite a while now where bonds should really are really well positioned to outperform and really, and our source of income, especially when you think of an aging demographic who’s looking for income, there’s the stability and safety of bonds that PR can provide you with their, those income, that income particularly they’re active, managed. So we can work through some of the unknown challenges of our current economic environment.

00:27:19 [Speaker Changed] It, it’s so interesting as people are gonna be hearing this, it’ll be around the time when lots and lots of bonuses will be hitting people’s personal accounts, which means lots of people are gonna be getting phone calls from their bank saying, Hey, I see there’s a pile of cash here,

00:27:39 [Speaker Changed] How would you like to use it?

00:27:40 [Speaker Changed] Right. And I’m al I always say, well half of that’s going to Uncle Sam can, what can you guarantee me that’s safe? And I, and I mean guarantee. And it’s like, well, you know, there are no guarantees. I’m like, all right, it’s, it’s going to, it’s gonna go to the money market fund even if it’s three eight, that’s better than some crazy covered call strategy that may or may not be there for April 15th.

00:28:05 [Speaker Changed] Exactly. So one, it’s a safe, it’s certainly always a safe place in the short term to, to put your liquidity. And then in the longer term, when you think about people’s wealth accumulation over time, in the very beginning it is simply about starting to, to grow wealth accumulating it, you’re gonna be largely in equities and not to get that kind of equity return. And then you start to move into, well now I have to start planning for retirement. So then preservation starts to become more important. You wanna protect those assets and that’s when you see people tend to move more into a more balanced portfolio. Well then they move into retirement and they need income and they want, that’s where fixed income really can be very beneficial or, or di you know, we also have a number of equity income strategies that put off a nice distribution and that’s where you wanna have an advisor or help you understand what is the income stream you need to, to live and pursue the life you want in retirement. And then the last stage is legacy and, and what do you do as a legacy planner and how do you again, go back to that preservation of those assets so that you can, whether it’s your legacy is philanthropic or around your family, you know, our view is we wanna partner with the, the wealth advisor along each parts of their, their client’s journey and know that they can turn to offspring with the right set of public market products that are beneficial to those clients.

00:29:42 [Speaker Changed] So you’re, you’re discussing a lot of relationships it sounds like, with RIAs, registered investment advisors. Tell us a little bit about the relationship you have with RIAs. Are they primarily at Wells Fargo? Are they everywhere? Give us a little bit of insight into how Wells far, how Wellspring operates.

00:30:03 [Speaker Changed] So Offspring has a very strong relationship with the Wells, Wells Fargo advisors still. And, and, and we’ve been able to grow that relationship, even post-separation, which I think people were concerned about whether that continuity would, would continue or would, would that cost some friction? Instead, they’re a tremendous partner and, and we can work with them to help Wells Fargo advisors achieve their agendas with their financial advisors. The same though is true for other intermediaries. Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Raymond James, these are all other intermediary platforms that have some offspring product. We’re looking to continue to place more the, and then we have the RIA channel, which as you know, is going through a tremendous amount of change and an investment. You’re seeing consolidation, you’re seeing aggregators of RIAs out there, you’re seeing ts you know, platforms that are providing a lot of the infrastructure

00:31:02 [Speaker Changed] Turn

00:31:03 [Speaker Changed] Asset management, thank you, that are providing a lot of the infrastructure and technology and operations that advisors need. And we’re able to partner with each part of that ecosystem all the way to the independent RIA who’s hung their shingle and built a great business. So one of the investments we made in the last year was really building out an RIA sales organization, recognizing that it’s similar to intermediary, but as those RIAs are growing and getting more sophisticated, having support of that growth with them and, and being able to help bridge, like this is what other sophisticated, larger aggregators are doing, how can we help partner with you to, to build and protect that business has been a real focus of ours. And, and that’s where we have a number of our remys, our tax managed SMA platform, separately managed account platform that is really, I think, powerful when you’re working with RIAs and, and those individual investors. So,

00:32:08 [Speaker Changed] So let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on with the, the market today. By the time people hear this, it’s 2026, what is going on that’s different now for institutional and wealth clients that perhaps is different than what they were looking at five or 10 years ago?

00:32:28 [Speaker Changed] So I think one of the things we’re focused on right now is there is from the, from the curve perspective, you know, this question of whether we’re entering into stagflation where you’re seeing a lower growth still inflation high in low high interest rates that will be coming down is where do you position yourself along that curve? And rather than have it just be a long duration play, we think that investors really need to be looking at how do they take advantage of both the change in the curve. We expect the, the curve to steepen the long end of the curve to to, to steepen, particularly as central banks are figuring out how to balance the inflation at and lower interest rates to, to try to protect growth. You also have heavy debt servicing loads. So while all of them are perfectly solvent and, and can and of develop company and manage that, they care about those interest costs, it’s a big part of any, any government’s budget. And it’s a growing part. And I think that that changes some of the behavior of the curve in the long run where we would expect that that longer end tail of it to continue to, to go higher. So playing that intermediate part of the curve we think is gonna be really important and you’re gonna want high quality credit driven companies to do that. So credit research is really gonna matter more versus just playing the duration play. Coming

00:34:10 [Speaker Changed] Up, we continue our conversation with Kate Burke, CEO of Offspring global investing, discussing the state of investing markets today. I’m Barry Riol, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

00:34:37 I am Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Kate Burke, she’s CEO of all Spring Global investments, helping to manage about $635 billion in client assets. Previously she ran multiple divisions at Alliance Bernstein, including as C-F-O-C-O-O and head of the private wealth group. So when we look at active management in equities, it’s kind of fallen out of favor. They’re not, they don’t help themselves by pretty regularly underperforming half each year. Half of the active fund managers underperform their benchmark and if you go out to five or 10 years, it’s much worse. But we really don’t see the same sort of performance in bonds. It seems that active bond managers really bring a lot of, dare I say, alpha to the table. Yes. Tell us a little bit about the active side of, of bond management at Offspring.

00:35:36 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, so at all springing over 90% of our fixed active fixed income outperform on a three, five and 10 year basis. Wow. So active management really matters in fixed income. And I’m happy to go back to why I believe it in equities as well. But, but focusing on fixed income for a moment, I think part of the strength of the all springing platform is the deep credit research that we do. And that means understanding the specific issuances and the companies that are doing it so that you’re making the right choices. And we do run the risk of, and you see a little bit of this in some of the private markets, you know, this question of of credit and, and the strength of the underlying businesses. If we have challenges in the economy, that’s where it comes out. And so making those strong, having a strong view on, on quality credit, we think is really important because it allows you to do two things. One, we talk about income, we think you’re gonna get, most of the return is gonna come out of yield. So searching for that income, being able to harvest that income is really important. And why we like the intermediate part of the curve is the duration play. So still being nimble enough to adjust to a changing rate environment, either led by the central banks or driven by inflation. How do you position yourself along that, that part of the curve to, to be able to capitalize on that return?

00:37:05 [Speaker Changed] What, what are you guys seeing on the private alt side? Private debt, private equity. Private credit. There has been a land rush to that space. I get the sense that offspring has become a little skeptical about that area.

00:37:19 [Speaker Changed] Look, I I private credit is a perfectly good asset class and it, it creates a lot of value, certainly for the economy. It was, it was, it grew out of the need of the banks pulling back on their ability to to to make those loans. But it has gotten to be a crowded space. You have, you have a number of new players that have entered into the private credit market. If you look at future returns, what happens with basic law of supply and demand, you have a lot more people supplying liquidity to that part of the, of the private credit market. Wanting to make those loans means those spreads are likely to come down. They’re gonna be competing origination is really gonna matter in that space. And so I think we’re going to see similar to asset managers, those who are really good at it and those who end up not being as well positioned for it.

00:38:10 So who you, who you own there and who you partner there I think is, is really important. We’re choosing despite many of our similar size peers seeking out either through acquisition of our partnership with private credit firms, I’ll never say never there could be a partnership with someone that creates a really interesting strategy that’s specific for the client. But you’re seeing I think some challenges even with what’s happened so far where people don’t understand the product, they don’t understand the liquidity, they don’t understand the fee structure. And so that’s a lot of time you have to be spending with those advisors, trying to educate them and con and convince them that that’s the right decision to be making versus saying no, buy your sleeve of, of li liquid, you know, the public liquid fixed income products and then buy your sleeve of private credit with whoever you choose. Seems to me to be one of the paths that, that people may pursue. I

00:39:11 [Speaker Changed] I’m always surprised when people talk about not understanding the liquidity. Just go back a couple of years ago to beat credit at, at Blackstone where a bunch of advisors tried to head for the exits before the year end marks happened. Hey, which part of locked up for five years is confusing In year two it’s, you got three see ya in 2029. So

00:39:37 [Speaker Changed] It’s, it’s, look, it requires a sophisticated investor to understand how you’re laddering into illiquid assets and and what does, does

00:39:45 [Speaker Changed] That mean, not mean sophisticated, right? Seven year lockup is is seven years. Oh, so I get my money back in year two, no seven year lockup. And yet people seem to not really take, take it very seriously.

00:39:59 [Speaker Changed] So that’s why we are staying in the public side. We think liquidity is really important and and provides an important part of your asset allocation. I’m not arguing against cl clients having a piece of alternatives in their portfolio, but understanding the structure of what that alternative’s makeup is, whether it’s private equity, private credit, real estate, understanding those terms, understanding how that access to how and, and your comfort level that in times of illiquidity your asset allocation may be much higher to those asset classes than you originally intended because you’re gonna have to use your liquid assets in a way that you had not originally planned. And that creates the, the danger that an individual investor in particular has in thinking about how they’re adding that into their investment portfolio. And that’s where a really good advisor is going to be helpful. But they are also all in their own education of this now.

00:41:02 And so who each advisor advisors talk about how much they’re needing to learn about private credit, about tax loss management like that, we’re asking more and more out of these advisors. So we think you can still get a really good risk adjusted return by a pretty traditional portfolio in the long run. And if you look at what the s and p 500 has done for the last 30, 40 years, not too shabby. Right? Not too shabby. And if you invest in that in the long run and have enough liquidity to live through the downturns and leave those in place, that has proven to be a winning strategy for a very long time.

00:41:39 [Speaker Changed] And, and we’re just, if you look at rolling 15 year periods, we just finished one of the best 15 year periods Yes. In history. People forget what it’s like when everything hits the fan and liquidity is really valuable. Yeah.

00:41:54 [Speaker Changed] I’m not, I’m just not sure what we’re trying to solve for, for the client in saying that they need to have a significant allocation.

00:42:01 [Speaker Changed] So you’re not in the 30, 40, 50% illiquid alts camp at all? No,

00:42:06 [Speaker Changed] Definitely, definitely not personally and definitely not what I would be recommending others to do. Unless you’re at the really ultra high net worth part of the curve where you have plenty of liquidity in that 30% because you just have so much in that account overall. The

00:42:22 [Speaker Changed] 70% is such a big number

00:42:23 [Speaker Changed] Because Right. So that, but, but for many people that’s not their reality. Right. And so I think we have to be appropriately cautious. We want more people investing for their future. I do think it’s an incredible, you know, that generating, creating wealth for yourself, you know, outside of my Seth Bernstein used to say this outside of your, your, your doctor, your financial advisor is probably the next most important person in your overall wellbeing outside of obviously your family. Like in terms of the professional advice that you’re getting. And, and, and I think that that’s really important to understand that indi there’s so many different individuals. That’s why I believe in customization at scale in the long run is that every individual, you know, target dates work for retirement when you have similar people in collected together to make a target date decision. But, but the diversification is not just the year you’re planning on retiring, it’s, well, what are the assets you have? How big is your family? What are your other needs that you need to be planning for? So how do you start to create customized solutions for the individual investor and help the financial advisor create those individual solutions at scale, I think is gonna be the next wave in wealth management.

00:43:43 [Speaker Changed] So you’re, what I’m hearing is if you’re an aspirational investor, if you’re a high net worth investor, if you’re a family office or if you’re an institution endowment foundation, those are very distinct needs and you should have very distinct solutions to your problems. Correct. Hmm. Really, really interesting. I only have you for a few more minutes, I want to get to some other questions before we run out of time. I love your quote, what does it mean, quote, being the easiest asset manager to work with. What does that mean in practice and, and how are you driving that philosophy? So

00:44:19 [Speaker Changed] Think about who you have loyalty to. Do you, are you loyal to an airline? Are you loyal to a hotel chain? Why are you, are you loyal to a grocery store? You’re loyal to them because you find the consistency of the experience you’re having with them makes you want to go back and it’s usually pleasurable and easy and you get what you want when you want it at the right price, with the right level of service to bring you satisfaction. Clients are no different in asset management. And we have within asset management, a lot of regulatory, you have client reporting, you have complexity of portfolios, like we were just talking about that and all. And, and you then have challenges in sometimes in an investment strategy or in the markets generally where you’re looking for good advice. So for offspring, what does it mean? It means accessibility, it means accessibility to our portfolio managers.

00:45:16 So if you, if you’re, if you have a question that you need to answer for a client and you need to get a portfolio manager or someone on their team get that answer quickly, you get it, we’re able to provide that for you. It’s also knowing our clients and getting the right information into their hands at the right time. Leveraging technology. It’s also about all of the backend, the complexity of reporting, the complexity of client onboarding. No one wants to fill out 30 forms to open up, up an account or to start a new investment. How do we create the ease of engagement with offspring for the intermediate, whether it’s an institution or the client that their money is put to work quickly and efficiently and easily in a way they understand. And that’s largely level leveraged by really good client relationships and then a technology infrastructure that’s being built to get them what they want when they want it. So we’re investing a lot in our technology platform right now to help achieve

00:46:15 [Speaker Changed] That. Since, since you brought up technology, I I’m legally obligated to ask about ai, what do you think about artificial intelligence as applied to the wealth management industry? How is offspring using ai?

00:46:27 [Speaker Changed] It’s, so I think of AI in sort of, or or strategy around AI in really three ways. One, we’ve turned it on in what I just call general efficiency tools like chat, GBT ask a question, you’re gonna get a better answer than if you put it into Google or helping you do first drafts of writing. Like there’s a lot of general efficiency kinds of tools that are out there that you could, like really anybody can be, can use fairly quickly without a lot of training. The second phase for us is really about partnership and who are we working with, who’s also investing in ai who will help us leverage solutions to help really mine data, it’s all about data at the bottom. You need really clean data. So we’re also spending a lot of time making sure we have clean data, but you need, if you’re gonna query data to give you an answer, the data better be right.

00:47:18 Otherwise you’re gonna get the hallucinations and false findings. So who we’re trying to leverage good partners in terms of building out our, our AI capabilities. And then the third pillar of it is really our own agents and, and, and the ent AI and, and what is it that we specifically can build inside offspring that will help us answer very specific questions associated with our own workflow and our own clients and trying to invest very specifically in business cases. There either in any of those scenarios though, you need to be able to put the business issue and, and the technology you need to be able to be able to translate between the two if you wanna be effective with it.

00:48:05 [Speaker Changed] And I, I feel compelled to ask you a question about culture. Not only because you were running a wealth management shop right in the middle of pandemic, but you’ve talked about the importance of culture and how significant it is for there to be a unifying philosophy for firm. Tell us a little bit about the culture of offspring and and how do you maintain that?

00:48:28 [Speaker Changed] So first all the, and what our cultural surveys have have conveyed to us is that the client centricity, the client focus at offspring is so high. I mean it’s, everything we do is are, we put what is in the best interest of the client. And I think if you have that as your North star from a cultural perspective and as a fiduciary, that means you’re gonna do the right thing. And that, and that then creates a lot of pull through, whether it’s in risk management or in client servicing, that all is really meaningful. Two, we, we have a nice culture. Like I think being, I think being positive, optimistic, nice to each other is really important. You wanna bring, you wanna build comradery, especially when you’re building a new organization. There are a lot of difficult things we have, we had to tackle internally and that we’re looking to build together.

00:49:22 So comradery and focus is really, I think, important. And then the third part of the stool to me is always this, always be learning is this credible challenge culture, right? Which is very important where we can all sit around the table and not agree. That’s the beauty of investing. That’s the beauty of any, any diverse set of people is that you’re gonna get differences of opinions and we should be able to share those opinions, debate those and get to a conclusion and then move forward. But you have to have credible challenge, you have to have it public and in the room, not in the conversation after the conversation. And so that’s something that we’re really focused on as we’re bringing, you know, the, these different parts of, of, of all springing together to work more closely is everyone has a voice and a seat at the table to express that their perspective. Doesn’t mean you get what you want, but but, but we’re, but we wanna hear it because that will help us make better decisions for our clients.

00:50:23 [Speaker Changed] Credible challenge. I I like that phrase. So last question before we get to our favorite questions. What do you think investors are not talking about but should be? Could be a asset or a geography policy. Okay. What’s out there that, that just isn’t getting enough attention? So

00:50:39 [Speaker Changed] AI is amazing in one way, but the other part of AI that I think has not gotten a lot of conversation yet is how much energy it uses. Oh really? And the need for the energy grid. There’s a lot of infrastructure build that’s gonna have to happen for the dream of AI to be successful. And if we aren’t able to catch up our energy infrastructure, then some of the dream of AI is going to be tampered simply because we don’t have enough energy to run it and individual consumer bills are gonna go through the roof, which is not gonna be palatable either. So to me it’s energy around AI needs more debate and discussion, huh? Yeah.

00:51:17 [Speaker Changed] And it’s already happening. We’re already seeing Yeah. Pockets of energy bills going through the roof. Exactly. Alright, let’s jump to our favorite questions that we ask all of our guests. Starting with mentors. Who are your early mentors who helped shape your career?

00:51:30 [Speaker Changed] So one of my earliest mentors was at Tommy Hilfiger, woman named Kathleen Gannon and another woman named Lynn Shanahan. They were just two powerhouse women early in my career who made me, helped me believe in myself and, and my capability set the other, the other, can I shift the question quickly? Sure. What I like to talk about is my board of directors, which is a concept of that as, as you work through your career, you should be aware of the people that you’re engaging with and how they can help you make good decisions in totality around your life. So as

00:52:05 [Speaker Changed] You, you’re not referring to your corporate board of directors? No personal,

00:52:07 [Speaker Changed] Your personal board. Personal board of directors.

00:52:09 I love that idea. So when I was a young mother, I needed other young mothers to be a part of my board who could help me work through like the challenges of work and, and, and rearing young children. As you progress in your career, some of them have been on my board forever. My parents, my, you know, my siblings are, are always available to me, but I have people that I’ve grown up with who have taken very different career arcs, but are really good with people or are really good with financials or really good with strategy decisions. And who can I look at outside of my, you know, people that I work with who provide all of that to me. But no, I have outside counsel and, and know that people come in and off that board at, depending on the phase I am in my own life. And so how do I, how do I leverage? So now I’m trying to build a better personal board of directors as a CEO saying, who are other people who have to experience these same sorts of experiences that I’m going through and how can I build relationships with them to help me learn and grow and gain more so I can be more value at it.

00:53:11 [Speaker Changed] Really interesting. Let’s talk about books. Yep. What are you reading now? What are some of your favorites?

00:53:16 [Speaker Changed] I I love historical fiction. I’m reading Trust right now by Hernan Diaz, I think is the last name. If I got that wrong, you can edit it out out. He, it’s about the, it won the Pulitzer Prize. It was, it’s about the, the roaring 1920s. It’s four disparate views of, and it shows how people can believe their own narrative of if they’re adding good to the world. So it’s like a robber baron is in it there, you know, there’s people who are involved in the evolution of what’s happening and some of them view that what they’re doing is good for society when in reality the society, you know, we went through a great depression as a result of it. Is

00:53:57 [Speaker Changed] That historical fiction or historical nonfiction,

00:54:01 [Speaker Changed] That’s an interesting view of it. But it’s very, but it’s, it’s fun to read and it’s, and it’s written by an author who’s writing it in four really distinctive voices too. So I enjoy it. Huh.

00:54:12 [Speaker Changed] Sounds, sounds interesting. What about entertainment? What are you either watching or listening to these days? What are you streaming? So

00:54:18 [Speaker Changed] When I am just winding down, I like a, a good hang with Amy Poer. I want her to be my friend. I want most of the people on that show to be my friend. She just brings such energy and positivity and humor to it that it’s always a, a good one to, to listen and, and wind down to. And then TV wise, I just watched Stranger Things with my children when they were back home from break. And I love Stranger things ’cause I’m literally the age of those kids, right? Like in the show I’m like, this is my, I’m like watching my youth play back to me, riding my bikes, building forts. My parents had no idea where we were. Thankfully we didn’t have any demic ordinances a after us. But like, it, it is just, it’s, it’s super fun. Nossal nostalgic and I, and, and then a great story line as well of teamwork and perseverance and fight and all that good stuff that,

00:55:12 [Speaker Changed] That’s next up in Mike Q. That’s really good. Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college graduate interested in a career in, it doesn’t matter, fixed income, investing in, in finance.

00:55:25 [Speaker Changed] One is network, network, network, network. I got my first job because I was trying to get a different job. I was talking to someone to make another introduction and ended up getting a job with that person instead. So you never know. You really have to lean into to meeting people and being open to where the conversation takes you. And two, what’s different now versus when I was growing up in it is there’s so much information available with this podcast. There’s so many places to learn and be informed. So really take control of your career and always be learning and, and find the area that is most interesting if you’re, if you lean towards equities, lean towards equities. If you lean towards fixed income, but teach yourself, don’t expect someone to teach it to you.

00:56:12 [Speaker Changed] And our final question, what do you know about the world of investing today might have been useful 25 or 30 years ago when you were first getting started?

00:56:20 [Speaker Changed] I mean, this is true for all the power of compounding

00:56:24 [Speaker Changed] That comes up all the time,

00:56:26 [Speaker Changed] Every time. I mean it is, and

00:56:27 [Speaker Changed] You just don’t see it when you’re younger.

00:56:28 [Speaker Changed] You just don’t understand it when you’re younger. And so, and investing consistently, dollar averaging through the good times, through the bad times, if you have a consistency approach, you can build a long-term durable portfolio.

00:56:42 [Speaker Changed] Thank you Kate, for being so generous with your time. We have. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. We have been speaking with Kate Burke. She’s the CEO of alls springing Global Investments. If you enjoy these questions, well be sure to check out any of the 600 previous discussions we’ve had over the past 12 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, Bloomberg, YouTube, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And be sure to check out my new book, how Not to invest the ideas, numbers, and behavior that destroys wealth and how to avoid them at your favorite bookstore. I’m Barry Als. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

~~~

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10 Tuesday AM Reads

February 3, 2026 - 6:30am

My morning train reads:

• Why US stocks don’t care a jot about Greenland, trade wars or global aggro: Does nothing matter to financial markets? Is this irrational exuberance run amok? Not really. Markets are mostly rational in ignoring most of the headlines slushing around. And they have a template to follow from last year. It seems a lifetime ago, but we have seen this movie before. (FT Alphaville)

• Former Fed Researcher Claudia Sahm explains Kevin Warsh’s economic philosophy: He’s long on criticisms and short on solutions, which is troubling for someone who served as a Fed official during the largest financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. (Stay-At-Home-Macro)

• Bitcoin down for fourth consecutive month, its longest losing streak since 2018: Bitcoin also suffered roughly $800 million in liquidations and ETF outflows in the past 24 hours. (Sherwood)

• He’s Wall Street’s Biggest Showman. Should You Trust Him? Dan Ives has gone mainstream as Wall Street’s highest-profile stock analyst. Less well known is his growing set of overlapping business interests. (Barron’s)

• A mysterious delay in the Supreme Court tariffs case: The Trump administration, though the underdog, will find each passing week an encouraging sign. (Washington Post)

• The US Is Flirting With Its First-Ever Population Decline: America’s population wasn’t expected to start falling until 2081. Trump’s immigration crackdown means it could happen as soon as this year. (Bloomberg free)

• Moltbook is a human-free Reddit clone where AI agents discuss cybersecurity and philosophy: Moltbook might be the strangest corner of the internet right now. It’s a Reddit-style social network where more than 35,000 150,000 1,146,946 AI agents talk to each other without any human involvement. The visual interface exists purely for humans to observe; agents communicate entirely through the API. (Decoder)

• The Handyman: In the parking lot that defines America, Donald Trump’s darkest agenda is still unfolding, one hour at a time. (Slate)

• The Man Who Broke Physics: Even before competing in his first Olympics, 21-year-old Ilia Malinin has transformed the sport of figure skating. (The Atlantic)

• Bad Bunny and Kendrick Lamar win big in Grammys ceremony filled with anti-ICE sentiment: Musicians delivered impassioned speeches during a star-packed night that saw Lamar become the most awarded rapper of all time. (The Guardian)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Kate Burke, CEO of Allspring Global Investments a global asset manager with more than 600 billion dollars in assets under advisement. She is also a director on the firm’s board. Previously, she was at AllianceBernstein as COO/CFO.

The Average Effective Tariff Rate

Source: Apollo

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