"I don't Care What Your Numbers Are If I Can't Understand What's Driving Them!"

As I mentioned, I've been doing manager selection and manager research for the vast majority of my career, 20 plus years at this point. I've probably met with thousands of managers in all kinds of different asset classes, emerging markets, growth, value, you name it. The one thing that I've always done is we would always be meeting with a lot of managers because we were doing manager research for a variety of different usages.

We were always looking for certain qualities, and we only have so much time in the day. So, we had easy ways to eliminate folks and whether or not we even wanted to bother diving into anything. One of the main things is, tell me what you're doing. If you can't tell me how you're generating alpha and why I should be interested in your product, then I'm not wasting my time. You're wasting mine because I have to set performance expectations.

At the end of the day, the number one thing that I was looking to achieve anytime I evaluated a manager was how are they achieving the returns that they achieve? How will that behave over a full market cycle? And what are the returns I should expect? Because nine times out of 10, I only get mad if your performance doesn't match my expectations.

So I need to understand how to set those expectations. A lot of times that comes from you telling me what you own because sometimes the manager can't articulate why they outperform. But they can tell me how they select names, and then I can back into that by just doing a number of different analytical kind of back tests and build out my own mathematical regression using different factors. They might think that they're adding value by doing something, but then you just find out that they're closing and indexes or they're just really momentum or whatever.

What I need is I need you to tell me what you're doing because I can't make a decision and set return expectations if I have no idea how you're achieving what you're achieving. The problem I have with the two actively managed funds in this battle is they don't tell me anything. So for me, I'm not wasting my time. I don't care what your numbers are. If I can't understand what's driving them, then it's all well and good when you're doing awesome. But when you're not doing awesome, then we have a problem, and there's going to be a point where it doesn't work, and you're going to want to know why. And if you don't know how to do it intuitively, that's a problem.

I also think that's a reflection of somebody not being a good partner. So I would not use CN EQ or BKCG for those reasons. I should be able to know at least a little bit about your approach so that I can understand and set return expectations. TOPD, at least I know exactly what they're doing. Now, to Tony's point, I'd probably replicate it, and it would cost me less, but at least it's