Dr. Ashby Monk is the Executive and Research Director of the Stanford University Global Projects Center. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the University of Oxford, a Senior Advisor to the Chief Investment Officer of the University of California, and the co-founder of Long Game. Ashby advises sovereign wealth funds and large pension funds, and is involved with a bunch of fin tech companies, all of which attempt to create innovative solutions to fixing the financial future for individuals, pensions and countries in the years ahead. Our conversation starts with Ashby’s early work experience and path through academia, and flows into an exploration of next generation, lower cost approaches to active management for large asset owners.  We touch on investing in public equity, private equity, venture capital, and hedge funds using examples from the Canadian and Australian pensions, New Zealand Super Fund, and University of California endowment. Lastly, we discuss Long Game, an innovative company seeking to improve personal savings in the U.S.  Ashby is a passion-driven, creative thinker who rightfully has the ear of some of the most important pools of capital in the world.  His ideas will change the way you think about allocating capital.   Learn More  Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides or LinkedIn  Subscribe to the mailing list  Access Transcript with Premium Membership 

On today’s show, we’ll discuss a continuing empty room – an opportunity ignored by most investors because they either don’t want to or can’t participate. We’ve shared conversations under the theme about investing in Venezuela, Africa, CLO equity, tax assets, and biotech. Among them, biotech is a room that just keeps getting emptier, so I thought it would be fun to pay it another visit.   Rod Wong is the founder and Managing Partner of RTW Investments, a life sciences-focused investment and innovation firm of 80 professionals that manages $6 billion in assets.   I had a chance to drop by Rod’s office in NYC and discuss his background, case for life sciences, investment and business approach, investment process across sourcing ideas, research, probability assessment of binary outcomes, portfolio construction, competition, and outlook.     For full show notes, visit the episode webpage here.  Learn More  Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides or LinkedIn  Subscribe to the mailing list  Access Transcript with Premium Membership