Episode 353: Alex Ambroz of the Allocator Training Institute: The art of crawl, walk, run as an investment discipline

Alex Ambroz is CEO of the Allocator Training Institute, which grew out of a career-long observation of the gap in the market for the kind of training that allocators need. Our podcast discussion starts with his own upbringing and he describes how he grew up in foster care and moved around a lot during his childhood in the US North East. The US Army was then a natural place to find his bearings given his lack of family supports and he went from there into university from where his career in finance began. 

Alex discusses how he found his role at Morgan Creek Capital Management and the range of skills and mentorship that he had access to there. We move then to discuss his investment beliefs and Alex highlighted the "Ferrari effect" and "fake alpha," stressing the need for systematic evaluation of factor exposures. He also introduced a novel emerging managers program involving a structured three-year investment bake-off. 

Alex is currently based in Ireland and we discuss what brought him there, his role in Aberdeen Investments Ireland and what drove him to create the Allocator Training Institute and the vision behind it.  We discuss the value of networks, continuous learning, and the importance of getting stakeholder buy-in for successful change management.

This podcast is kindly sponsored by Benefit Street Partners and PIMCO. Founded in 2008, Benefit Street Partners – BSP – is Franklin Templeton’s specialised private credit manager with $92 billion in assets under management. 

The firm provides a wide range of private credit strategies across the US, Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific, including direct lending, special situations, commercial real estate debt, infrastructure debt, asset backed finance, structured credit and liquid credit.  

PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company LLC) is a premier global investment management firm founded in 1971, specializing in active fixed-income with over $2 trillion in assets under management. Headquartered in Newport Beach, California, it offers diversified investment solutions across public and private markets, serving institutional and individual investors worldwide.