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Note: Chris Ailman will be speaking at Markets Group’s Summer Retreat at the St. Regis in Park City, Utah from July 14-16.
The next national Retreat will be on Amelia Island, Florida Nov. 17-19.
Transcript:
Christine Giordano: My next guest is Christopher Ailman. Many of us remember Chris Ailman from his decades at CalSTRS, one of the largest funds in the world, for California teachers. Now, Chris spent decades balancing policy and politics very effectively, he also led through the 300 Club, a group of investors to talk about some of the topical things happening in the world.
Now, Ailman was awarded the CIO Hall of Fame by Markets Group before he retired, but years ago, he actually came up with that term, and he has been anointing CIOs into the Hall of Fame for years, respecting their work as the investors that they are. Over the course of this interview, we would like to discuss with Chris some of the things that prepared him for leadership, what he’s doing now in retirement, his advice on balancing policies and politics, and all of the new things that have entered into the portfolio construction puzzle, whether it’s inflation or interest rates and leverage. We’ll try to dive into quite a bit of it. Welcome, Chris.
Christopher Ailman: Hey, thank you, Christine. Thank you for that kind introduction.
Christine: My pleasure. Let’s catch up a little bit. What are you doing in your retirement? I can see that Ailman Advisers logo behind you.
Christopher: I’m slowing down. I have to say to everybody, retirement is all it’s cracked up to be. It is the goal, but it’s an adjustment. Part of my effort was to slow down slowly. If you do something for 40 years, 5 days a week, it becomes your life, and you’re so used to that pace. I knew that I didn’t want to just quit cold turkey. I wanted to slow down gracefully. I started Ailman Advisers just to be a project consultant, to share my advice, do some mentoring with people.
I have to say, after about three months, I reduced about half of the services because I realized I don’t want to work that hard. I enjoy retirement. Every day is Saturday and can pursue your hobbies. I will say, it is a big adjustment. I’m just one year into it, still doing a lot of things, but having fun and really enjoying it. I have to say, I’ve learned in retirement, you don’t go on vacation. You just travel because every day is a vacation.
Christine: [laughs] I love that. Have people approached you to start fundraising for them?
Christopher: Yes. One of the pieces of advice I got from Barbara Novick, who was a senior person at BlackRock for decades, was don’t hesitate to say no. It takes 40 years to build your reputation. It takes one bad deal to ruin it. For a lot of people, they wanted me to join and be an advisor or help them fundraise and I’ve said, “No, I am not going to call on my peers. My friendships are too important to me, to that and my reputation.”
I’ll be happy to give people advice, tell them where to go market, but otherwise, I’m not going to do it for them. That’s no fun. It’s been fun to mentor young people, especially. I’ve talked to some people that are at small funds and so they’re generalists and then other people are at big funds, in which case they’re in an asset class and they’re specialists. I don’t think enough young people want to be pursuing the CIO job so I’ve been encouraging people and sharing my thoughts and coaching them along. That’s fun to do.
Christine: What do you tell them if they are hesitant about pursuing that CIO role?
Christopher: I’m pretty honest about the fact that the CIO, I describe it, I have an image for everybody is think of a hamburger or think of a sandwich. The CIO is the meat in the middle. There’s a bun above you and a bun below you. Above you is a board or a CEO and then, of course, constituents and the public. Below you are your managers, your staff, and also then the press and things. You’ve got to learn to manage up and down and how to do that well and how to balance that time.
I think that’s a big part of what makes it such a tough job is you generally don’t have one boss you have to make happy. You have a whole board you have to make happy. Oh, by the way, they turn over. I still think it’s very rewarding. It is very much a leadership management job because you’re usually not just managing a portfolio. You’re not just making investment decisions. You’ve got to do a lot of strategy and big picture-thinking. I equate it to being a leader of an orchestra or a captain of a ship. You’ve got a lot of things to keep your eye on, but it’s really fun to make them all work together and make it hum and be a success. I enjoyed that and I think it’s a rewarding career for people.
Christine: That sounds encouraging. I know a lot of CIOs are fearful that in their retirement they will be less relevant. You certainly have kept your hat in the game. You still group the 300 Club and get their feedback on topics of the day, concerns. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Christopher: I know it’s been my honor to lead this club. Saker at Hermes started it. We’ve now got about 40 members around the globe of CIOs, not just pension plans, but sovereign wealth funds, even some foundations, some university endowments. Really nice mix of people, Australia, New Zealand, North America, both Canada and the US, and then UK and the EU.
It’s fun to talk to them about what’s front of mind. I really let them do the talking. I just try and organize it and get the topics going. There are so many things nowadays, whether it’s total portfolio approach, traditional asset allocation. Now obviously the resurgence of inflation, as you mentioned, higher interest rates, thinking about the balance of home country bias and non-home country investments, international. It’s an interesting challenge for everybody, and there’s no right answer.
I enjoy just keeping my fingers in, but I don’t do the day-to-day, and that’s awfully nice because I can say managing people I found was more difficult than managing a portfolio. It’s fun to have that backup and have that long-term perspective and not be involved in the minute-by-minute, day-by-day movements of the market, especially with this uncertainty and volatility. It’s crazy.
Christine: All right. What are some of your strategic thoughts? Now that you don’t have to take responsibility for being spokesperson for CalSTRS, what do you see as the approach to the changes of portfolio construction when you’re diversifying across asset classes and chronic inflation at the same time, when you’re hit with actuarial assumptions and high interest rates, which might help, but also anticipating what they might do with high levels of leverage on your portfolio, if that exists? I know that’s a lot of questions.
Christopher: No, Christine. I’m going to take it from the big picture standpoint, which is I see two big themes overlapping right now, which are interesting. If you go back to December, we were all focused on the MAG-7 and the US market being so dominant, and the discussion was, should we diversify? Obviously, the answer is yes. Diversification was not dead, but it didn’t help you in the prior two years.
Also that question of, gee, the public markets had done so well, and the private markets, particularly private equity and even real estate had not done much. If you look at people, you and I both know Bob Maynard well at Idaho. They’ve had a very simple 70-30 approach. Not a lot of privates. They had done better than some of the people that used the NACUBO, the endowment model that David Swensen started at Yale, which was heavy into privates.
I think that’s an interesting debate. It’s going forward, regardless of the MAG-7. Are public markets efficient, and how much should you have in private markets? I would relay that, with what I’m seeing as the first really deep philosophical debate about what we would call modern portfolio theory and asset allocation optimization: in the US, we all use an asset optimizer that’s based on Ibbotson-Sinquefield and Harry Markowitz and Sharpe ratios from the University of Stanford, Nobel Prize winners. Nowadays, people are questioning, is that the most effective way to do things, to try and forecast the future? The Australians, New Zealand, some of the people in Canada are starting to look at what we call modern portfolio approach, which is what’s the best investment at this point in time? Don’t be a slave to an asset allocation model, but really look at the opportunities. I’m seeing Scott Chan at CalSTRS and even Stephen Gilmore at CalPERS both try to figure out how to overlay that, how to add a little bit of that to their asset allocation because those programs have been successful since ’08 when they started in this philosophy.
It’s a real fun debate of which is better. Think of it this way, US plans are mostly built with a whole series of specialists. You’ve got your real estate team, your fixed income team, your private equity team, your global equity. They all specialize in their asset classes. Total portfolio approach, everybody’s a generalist. I use the analogy, you know I like analogies, think of a hospital nowadays. You’ve got very specific departments, the cancer side, the pediatrics, the obstetrics, and different groups. Now you’re asking everybody to become a generalist. It’s so really interesting debates on how to run a portfolio now and go forward.
You’re asking people to become a generalist when you’ve got other people below that are specialists. Imagine that if you think the best investment right now is infrastructure and you go out and you do an infrastructure deal, you’ve got to bring that home and have somebody who manages infrastructure now take that into their portfolio. Even the funds that have been doing this approach are finding that governance an interesting challenge.
The big funds in the US, PERS and STRS, are trying to figure out how do we balance this? How do we overlay these two philosophies? How do you get all these people to operate as one team to play together rather than be silos? Gets into the nuances and really interesting. That’s where management and leadership come together and being a CIO. I think it’s a really interesting time because we’re finally having an honest debate about modern portfolio theory and tactical asset allocation.
Christine: Fantastic. What is the learning curve associated with this switch to become a generalist?
Christopher: That’s the fun thing. I always tease everybody. If you step back and look at it, in both cases, you’re trying to predict the future. I learned the hard way that you can’t. Everybody keeps trying. When you buy an investment, especially a long-term one, you’re trying to anticipate the future. I think the jury’s still out. Everything is time-period specific. Right now, total portfolio approach seems to be better and more optimal.
Governance is certainly more optimal but you’ve got to get it right. You’ve got to have the right structure with the board. I think going forward, it’s going to be a blend is what we’ll find. There’s nothing perfect because, again, you’re trying to anticipate the future, which even if you ask AI, it can’t do it. It can identify trends and give you ideas, but it can’t predict the future.
Christine: If you were a CIO right now, what would be most troubling to you?
Christopher: Near term, I think it’s certainly the change in tariffs and the shift from globalization to nationalization. I have heard people say globalization is dead. I’ve got a tough time believing that. No one country can make and be self-sufficient. Nobody can be “An island”. It certainly is a pushback on the massive trend we saw in the mid-2000s.
Navigating that, deciding how much should you have in your home market, should you be truly global, think about the emerging markets. People have been viewing them as underweight and poor performing. We have yet to see many economies actually emerge and move into the developed markets. I think there’s some challenges in this environment. I’ll pick on real estate. What do you do with the office market?
People are back in the office in New York, but not so much in San Francisco or LA. How do you invest in a world that’s rapidly changing? I’ve talked to you in the past. I think there are some mega trends that really impact, and you have to be aware of them. Demographics is destiny. Everybody understands that. Climate change and what I will call an energy transition. We are a hydrocarbon-dependent economy now. I bet you 50 years, but certainly in 100 years, we’re going to have to have some very different energy source because they won’t have enough hydrocarbons.
Who’s going to be anticipating that investment opportunity and how do you make that? While you’re focused on the day-to-day, you’ve got to be paying attention, especially when you’re a big fund, over $100 billion, you’ve got to pay attention to mega trends and get ahead of them and try and anticipate them.
Christine: Over the years, what were some of your favorite investments that really panned out for you? Can you talk about it?
Christopher: Oh, you betcha. I laugh at that because so many of them, you realize, wow, there is some element of luck. There’s something smart. I have to admit the greatest investments were my staffs. I didn’t make any investments. I let a staff who made investments and they made some great ones. I remember a private equity one where one of my staff picked up the phone and said, “Hey, to a GP, I read that you’re doing this deal. We want in.”
They hadn’t thought of us. They hadn’t offered us a sidecar investment till we pushed. I don’t remember what it was, but it was a 10X, which is great for them. I remember another investment we made. It was a seed investment and the company about eight years later went to zero and the staff came to me and said, “We need to put more money in to hold our share.” I said, “Okay, let’s do it. Put more money in.” Four years later, it went to zero again.
They said, “Look, this company’s never going to make a product, but we’re going to make money from the patents. We should put more money in.” I’m like, “Are we throwing good money after bad?” They convinced me, “No, no, n, we got to go make this investment. It’s going to be good, but they’ll never really make their ultimate product. That’s not going to happen.” I’m like, “Okay.” Later on, that company went public. Today, that company’s name is Tesla. Go figure.
I’ve got a lot of stories like that, of things that actually went to zero, didn’t look good, and then something occurred and a home run. It taught me how much it’s how difficult. Again, you’re trying to anticipate future outcomes and that’s really hard to do. Like Yogi Berra said, “Predictions are difficult, especially ones about the future.”
Christine: [laughs] Now, over the years, I remember your investment committee meetings were attended by lobbyists, by students, by people clamoring for various causes. How did you walk that tight line between policy and politics? What did you have to have in place in order to do that, in order to convince the board it was the right thing to do? Can you give us some pointers?
Christopher: Yes. The thing I emphasize to people is governance. That’s where policies and procedures really can be your friend. People don’t like written procedures and written policies but having a structure and a rule and planning it. I used to say to my staff all the time, we’re going to plan our work and work our plan because that got us– We had a lot of people, we had to march in order and work out with the board, what are the issues you care about?
The other thing I emphasized is, “Hey, this wasn’t my money.” I wasn’t a teacher. I always tease everybody, but I was a state employee, so my pension was over at CalPERS. At California Teachers, we only covered public school teachers so it wasn’t our money. It was the board’s trust fund. They were trustees of a trust fund. You and I talked about that. I think too often we did a disservice by calling these pension plans and not honestly saying they’re trust funds.
They are other people’s money. If there are rules and guidelines they want to put on that trust fund, we can give them our professional opinion, but they’re the trustees, they decide that. I think that’s what was important for us to navigate, but also for the public, the legislature and the board to keep in mind to say, “This is not your money. This is somebody else’s money, has a very clear mandate, three basic laws in the constitution about what we’re supposed to do. We got to stick to those.”
It was you’re in a loud environment, which is unfortunate, but you really just try and stick to focus on that long-term and that mission and just constantly come back to that. I would say to the board many times that this is a marathon. Each year is just a pace of a mile. Could have been an uphill mile, could be downhill. Let’s keep in mind the pace and let’s keep our eye on the prize. We had a great trustee who loved football and used to always quote Bill Belichick of keeping your eye on the long-term, don’t get caught up on each week. That actually became a slogan for the board on the Cincinnati. It’s like, let’s just take one step at a time, but let’s keep eye on the goal. I think that helps people navigate that better than people that you could be a tumbleweed and get blown around. I always use the analogy of building a building on sand versus solid rock. To us, our policies and procedures were solid rock. They could change them, but that took some thought and some planning. You didn’t just react to willy-nilly things.
Christine: ESG seems to be something that’s highly cyclical, obviously weaponized in certain ways. Being in California, you’re in the hotbed of the ESG discussions. What have you seen regarding that just from your bird’s eye view?
Christopher: Christine, the letters ESG have become very volatile. The concept, absolutely long-term makes sense. Do things right. Do things the right way. Follow the law. Be good to your customers. Be good to your employees. I’m sorry, those are basic solid business principles that have stood the test of time. Now, we applied a label to them and that label became quite political. That’s been very frustrating. As you said, weaponized.
I think, unfortunately, taken away from the real nature of it, which is I used to say to people, “Hey, ESG is nothing but credit risk,” which is analyzing long-term. Is the company operating legally? Are they operating safely? Are they doing things smart or are they cutting corners? Because sure enough, companies that cut corners might make a short-term profit, but if you’re a long-term investor, you don’t want to be there.
To me, I’ve always said, that’s what ESG, given the label, but that’s what it’s all about, is understanding you’ve got the financial statements, balance sheet, income statement. Those are all great. We have accountants that audit them and make sure they’re accurate, but they’re also backwards looking. They’re one date in time or a time period in the past.
What I want to know is going forward, how is the CEO and board going to operate the company? How are they thinking about risks, cybersecurity, employee turnover, employee safety, pollution, where they get their important inputs to their business, whether it’s energy or a product or a resource, how are they sourcing those? Are those legitimate? Those are the things that good business people think about.
I can lump those into environmental, social and governance, but people have just gotten upset about that. The phrase we would use is sustainability, is I want a company that is long-term and is thinking long-term and going to make money. If you talk to credit people and fixed income, if you talk to private equity people, these are the risks they actually look at all the time and try and peel back the onion to get the data on.
Hopefully, we’ll go back to that and get away from this red state, blue state, woke. I always said to the board, I don’t really even understand what that is. I woke up this morning. That was a good thing. I hope I wake up tomorrow. That’s all I know. I do know investment analysis and I do know long-term risk. Those are the things that we have to keep in mind is financial and these business risks. I always call them, forget ESG, let’s call them business risk. That hasn’t gone away. That’s still legitimate and that still needs to be done and it’s not political.
Christine: Makes sense. Now, before it was political, you have actually banged the drum for diversity. You had a teacher’s fund. Most of the teachers are generally female and you used to use the term stale, pale and male. It was always fun to hear you talk about it because you would do certain things like insist on diversity within an asset management fund. Can you talk about that and what you see as still happening or not happening in the industry?
Christopher: The reason I use pale, male and stale is because I saw that every morning in the mirror. I felt like, “Okay, that’s a decent place to start. I can make fun of myself.” Funny experience. I got the chance to teach just a segment of a class at Harvard University Business School years and years ago. They had a display in the lobby on the history of Lehman Brothers. I walked around and looked at all the pictures, and I was just astonished that it was pale, male and stale. It was all old white guys and mostly from Ivy League schools. I had to think, this company went bankrupt. This venerable, great company disappeared.
Would that have been different if it had been Lehman Family or Lehman Sisters? I often use that analogy for people. Think back to your family environment. There’s a lot of give and take. We use the phrase diversity, and that’s gotten to become a hot phrase, but we love the phrase diversification. Would you hire everybody on your staff from the same business school? Probably not. Would you hire everybody on your staff in the same family? Probably not.
Hiring people who don’t look like each other, who are diverse because there’s diversification in the way they think, the way they come at problems, you know what, group therapy or group dynamics have shown that that actually adds a lot of value. I learned that early in my career. I was blessed with a diverse staff in Washington and even in Sacramento County. I realized, “Hey, these people think very differently than I do. Let’s get a group that doesn’t look or think like me.”
Looks doesn’t matter. It’s all really about brain power and how people analyze things and different, if it were, personalities. I think we’ve gotten way too caught up again in politics on things. Even when I would get pushed hard by this, I would say, looks, that’s just skin deep. I want diversification of thought. I want people from different places that look at problems differently, that think differently. At one point, one of the cosmetic firms was run by an entire board of white men.
I had three daughters. I can tell you, I didn’t really know much about cosmetics. Maybe these guys did, but gee, it’s not hard to say, “Hey, we should have a mixture of people.” I think that still is true today. I think it’s human nature to hire people who look like you or are like you, but you have to push through that and hire people– I’m really proud of the staff at CalSTRS. They are incredibly diverse. They think things differently. They hash out problems and they find reasonable ways to disagree and work through it.
They recognize that you need somebody from Brazil if you’re going to invest in Latin America or somebody from Asia if you’re going to invest in Asia. You don’t need to hire everybody from one university. You want people from different schools, different schools of thought, and challenge each other. That’s better. Long-winded answer, but I just can’t say I am so passionate about seeing that diversification, especially like you said, CalSTRS, 70% of the population were women.
I would look at many money management firms and it’s all male, and I’m like, “Why did you exclude half of the population? Where was the logic in that?” Yes, there are certainly industries where genders tend to work in but I think it works better when you really try to push through to try and split it up and get people from different areas.
Christine: Nice. Now, I know I’ve asked you this question before, but it begs returning to, especially during these times when so much pressure is put on investors in such a volatile economy. You were heading one of the largest funds in the world. That was very political, in a very political state. You had a lot of pressures on yourself. Money managers always banging on the door, a board of 12 people to answer to, 12 different bosses or 12 angry jurors, whoever you’d like to put it.
Christopher: You don’t want them angry, you got to be nice to them.
Christine: I guess it begs the question, how did you not crack? You were the frog in the boiling water sometimes, I’m guessing.
Christopher: Maybe I masked it, but I cracked. Oh yes. I realized– I look back, 2008 was such a black hole in my personal life and professional life. I recognized I needed to ride my bike, to take care of my health, to have balance. I’m a person of faith. I started every day I could on my knees and try and be centered. Also I would say to the staff, “Look, we’re money managers, that’s our profession. We happen to work in a government environment which is not the right business model for a money manager, but we do. Let’s make the best of it and rise to the occasion.”
Investment people tend to be highly competitive so I fed into that. Thankfully we had CalPERS just less than a mile away across the river, so they were fun to pick on. Texas teachers, Ontario teachers, we tended to focus on our competition and rise to the occasion and do the best we can. It gets back to working with the board, policies, procedures, keeping your eye on the long-term goal and doing your best.
Joe Dear, bless his soul, said it to me once, the best, which he said, “As a CIO, you’ve got to be a heat deflector and a heat reflector. The real key to the job is knowing when to be which.” There will be times you get political pressure or pressure from the board that you need to deflect from the staff. Then there’s times you get other pressures from them that you need to reflect on the staff and make them aware of. I think that’s a big part of the job that people don’t enjoy.
It certainly is something that has become much more of a challenge for CIOs in red states, as it always has been in blue states, is when you manage over $100 billion, there’s a lot of people that want to give you advice and they think it’s their money but like I said, these are trust funds. We did a disservice by calling them pension plans. These are trust funds. These are other people’s money. There are rules and regulations on what you’re supposed to do with it.
Never losing sight of that is what’s got to be critical. Yes, there’s still going to be heated meetings and lots of finger pointing and discussions and pressure, but you just come back to that as your goal and try to keep your eyes on the long-term and not get caught up on short-term issues.
Christine: Talking about keeping your eyes on the long-term, you hired Scott Chan with him in mind for your succession. That was years ahead of time.
Christopher: Yes, I got lucky, which I’ll be honest, my deputy CIO, I thought the world of Michelle Cunningham, came to me one day and surprised me by announcing her retirement. We were about the same age, so I thought about it, but I wasn’t ready. I realized this is an opportunity for me to hire somebody. Not that he would necessarily or she would take my role, but as I said to the board, I’m going to have them prepared to compete because I recognize, like anytime you have a leadership turnover, if the board wants to change things, if results haven’t been what they want, then you want a new leader and who’s going to come in and shake it up.
If results have been successful, then you want to keep the culture going and you want somebody prepared to take that. It was an open competition. I prepared Scott the best I could, but he won the job. He had to compete against several other existing CIOs from other funds and won it fair and square and I’m thrilled to say, continued the culture. I knew there were– My senior staff were all close to me. We were all in the same birth years in the late 1950s, early ’60s. We were all due to go out about the same time and I recognized that.
I think succession planning has to be part of that long-term thinking and long-term planning as a leader and understanding that. I believe in John Maxwell’s five levels of leadership, which level five is building into others to take your place. That’s what I wanted to do. I’m really proud of the team they’ve gone on. It’s turned over, which is great. A lot of the people retired after I did. Scott’s got his team that are all closer to him in age, and now he’s got to build into behind him so that some year when he’s ready to go out, there’s other people there.
Again, if the board wants to change things up, if results haven’t been what they want, they’ll go outside. If they want to stay with the culture, they’ll stay inside.
Christine: Interesting. I think a lot of funds around the United States they’ll have key person risk where the fund can easily become a falling house of cards because people aren’t invested in building out investment staffs. There’s no budget for that. There’s no budget for any kind of redundancy. In that kind of environment, how do you plan succession? What would be your advice as Ailman Advisers now, now that you’re wearing that hat?
Christopher: I’ve been talking to the Kroner Center for Financial Research at UC San Diego about analyzing that question. How does CIO turnover impact a return? I’m biased. I’ve offered up the two California funds as an interesting example. I sadly saw nine CIOs come and go over at CalPERS during my tenure and all match our results against theirs. Pretty similar asset allocations, pretty qualified staff, same town, same recruiting pool, different compensations, but we’ll look at the results.
I think it’s human nature. If you think about an orchestra, if the conductor turns over all the time, think about an opera, think about a hospital, any group where you see lots of change, coaches on a sports team, somebody’s new every year. The staff just can’t get used to new leadership, new changes, and then as soon as they do, somebody else comes in. It just causes an impediment and creates a drag. I think boards need to be good fiduciaries.
Number one, they set the asset allocation, but generally the liabilities are set for them. Their job is to hire the top people and then supervise them. Not do the job, but to manage them. Part of managing top people is thinking it through in succession planning and building that in. I think that’s critical to fiduciary duty. It’s the baby boom. There are a lot of CIOs that are in the baby boom and they’re all in their late 60s, and ready to retire and should.
I think more boards need to plan on that and anticipate it. My board was very direct and came to me five years before I retired and said, “Hey, what’s your time plan? We want to start thinking about that and talking about that ahead of time.” When my deputy CIO retired, we’re a public fund, so you have to be open to anybody. You couldn’t age restrict, but people whispered in my ear that, “Gee, we’d like to see you hire a deputy with hair, somebody who’s maybe a bit younger, less bald and less gray.”
It made sense to me, a ton of sense. I think you’re seeing that. I’m thrilled with the Milken Institute now has rising stars. So many different groups are doing things with building new talent and building into this talent pool so that people in their 20s and 30s are ready to step up to these jobs and take on these roles.
Christine: What gives you hope for the future, Chris?
Christopher: I’m so worried about climate change and I’ve said it before, Mother Nature right now is slapping us in the face, but pretty soon she’s going to start punching us in the face. Get ready for powerful winds, more heat, more rain, more hail, more everything. What gets me optimistic about the future is this generation behind us has so many tools. They’re much better educated and innovation. Our country and the world has amazing innovation and now everyone has access. AI is Einstein in your pocket.
You’ve got the ability to get access to the world’s knowledge very quickly and hopefully we’ll be smarter and make better decisions. Like I said, it’s still tough to predict the future, but I’m hopeful. I love spending time with my grandkids in retirement and I worry about their future, but I’m also hopeful that it’s in their hands and I think they care passionately about the environment they live in. That’s what I’m hopeful for and that’s why it’s enjoyable to mentor and work with younger people.
Christine: Fantastic. Thank you for joining us today, Chris, and very much looking forward to seeing you at the retreat in July.
Christopher: Same here. Thank you, Christine. My pleasure.
Christine: That’s Chris Ailman of Ailman Advisers.
