Joseph Zidle
After a more-than-20-year career across investment strategy at Richard Bernstein Advisors and Merrill Lynch, concluding with eight years at Blackstone, Zidle launched his own macro research company—Zidle Macro Strategy Group.
“I started thinking about something I would label a Plan C, and then over time, became Plan B, and then a couple of weeks ago, it became Plan A, and that was the idea of starting my own firm where I would do a combination of a traditional investment-strategy-newsletter, subscription-based offering, but then for a small number of clients, I would be like a CIO on a fractional basis and help them think through the intersection of investment strategy, macroeconomics, and public and private markets,” Zidle tells CIO.
Insight Into Private Markets
Zidle aims to provide an independent perspective on macroeconomic views, private markets and asset allocation for allocators, registered investment advisers and family offices, at a time when private markets are becoming a larger piece of allocator and RIA portfolios.
Zidle says his work at Blackstone provided him with the best training for investing in private markets. While there, he helped the firm’s various businesses consider top-down macroeconomic themes, while developing insight on the private markets, investing and how shifting global economic trends and the growth of private assets affect portfolios—an experience which laid the groundwork for launching the company.
“I think that there’s a lot of people out there who are thinking about the role of alternatives in portfolios and thinking about how those impact existing portfolios, what they do to public market portfolios, and ways to better incorporate those,” Zidle says.
Zidle notes that as the private markets playing field has been leveled and more people have access to alternative investments than ever before, it is important to have independent views about how the investments fit inside a portfolio and what it means to put them side by side with public markets investments in an asset allocation framework.
Zidle, who joined the U.S. Army Reserve in college and served in a military intelligence unit, finds parallels from that work in his work as an investment strategist.
“A lot of my early training … was [focused on] the idea that we’ve got to synthesize data, lots of times [when] we don’t have a full picture,” he says. “Lots of times it’s fragmented information and we’ve got to essentially make real-world decisions with pictures and data that’s not entirely clear. … As my career has progressed over the years through Merrill Lynch and Richard Bernstein Advisers and Blackstone, I … think about putting all these pieces of a puzzle together and really trying to help people understand what that means from the medium- to long-term perspectives.”
Using AI as a ‘Game Changer’
Additionally, Zidle highlights how artificial intelligence is enabling a research process that previously needed the work of multiple analysts. During a six-month sabbatical following his exit from Blackstone, Zidle began experimenting with AI agents to inform a research process.
Asset managers and other firms are increasingly using AI in their research and investment functions. A survey from Acuity Analytics found that AI was moderately or significantly impacting research reporting at 90% of surveyed asset managers. A 2024 survey on AI integration in investment management from Mercer noted that asset managers’ use of AI across investment research and alpha generation were largely focused on augmenting existing capabilities through idea generation and the expansion of datasets and analysis.
Zidle says five teams of AI agents—which run from a Mac Mini on his shelf—are constantly modeling regressions and building asset allocation models 24 hours a day. What he observed of the AI multiplier effect, in terms of the amount of work one person can do, helped inspire him to launch his firm.
“The writing is mine, the ideas are mine, everything pen to paper is mine. The underlying research is being done at such a high level that it’s equivalent to 10 or more, 20 or more analysts,” Zidle notes. “It’s really a game changer, … and I think the AI can be part of the IQ. Then I think about me putting pen to paper and using my experience as a strategist as being part of that EQ.”
Quality content does seem to be in demand. A September 2025 survey from CoreData Research found that 99% of institutional investor respondents said the content they received from their asset managers influenced their investment decisionmaking. The same survey found that a firm’s content influenced manager engagement and allocators’ own thinking on strategic asset allocation and portfolio construction.
“I think there is a lot of room out there for the kind of independent perspective from someone who [has] operated at the levels of Blackstone and so many terrific firms like that,” Zidle says.
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