David Ben-Ur
David Ben-Ur is a senior managing director in Blackstone Multi-Asset Investing (BXMA), where he serves as chief investment officer of the absolute return platform.
Prior to joining Blackstone, Ben-Ur served as chief investment officer of the Kovner Foundation and of CAM Capital. From 2004 to 2012, Ben-Ur was a partner in and co-chief investment officer at Corbin Capital Partners. Prior to joining Corbin Capital Partners, Ben-Ur worked at Goldman Sachs Asset Management and at Fidelity Management & Research Co.
Ben-Ur earned a B.A. from Tufts University and a master of public policy degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a CFA charterholder.
CIO: How are you adjusting strategic and tactical asset allocation for a “higher-for-longer” rate environment, persistent inflation uncertainty, and increased geopolitical fragmentation?
Ben-Ur: Environments characterized by uncertainty reinforce the importance of building diversified, all-weather portfolios, rather than relying on any single macroeconomic outcome. While predicting the precise path of inflation, growth or policy remains challenging, we believe investors can position portfolios around durable sources of return that are designed to be resilient across a wide range of market environments.
Our approach emphasizes diversification across several strategies with return drivers that have historically exhibited limited correlation to traditional equity and fixed-income markets. We expect skilled active managers to continue identifying opportunities created by structural trends, technological innovation and shifting policy regimes. Specialists with deep domain expertise are often well positioned to capitalize on uncertainty, adapt to changing conditions and help generate attractive risk-adjusted returns. We also believe dislocation investing can play an important role in institutional portfolios by providing a flexible source of capital that can be deployed when periods of market stress create compelling opportunities. Together, these differentiated potential return streams, along with disciplined manager selection and dynamic portfolio construction, can help build more resilient portfolios while creating the flexibility to capitalize on an evolving opportunity set.
CIO: Given the outsized market valuation of a small group of mega-cap technology companies, how should institutional investors think about equity concentration risk and the opportunities created by the growth of AI and related sectors, including electricity infrastructure?
Ben-Ur: Artificial intelligence represents one of the most significant technological shifts since the internet. While market attention has focused on a small group of mega-cap technology companies, the more important point for institutional investors is that transformational change creates winners and losers across entire ecosystems. Concentration in a handful of names introduces meaningful single-stock and sector risk. Our objective is to look beyond that concentration and identify opportunities on both sides of the disruption, rather than depend on the continued outperformance of any single company.
The opportunity set is broad. Every AI interaction draws on a complex ecosystem spanning compute (the processing power that runs AI), physical infrastructure, electricity generation and transmission, and more. This creates opportunities to identify which businesses are best positioned to benefit from this buildout and which may be challenged by resulting competitive shifts.
An absolute return approach is uniquely suited to this environment. The flexibility to express conviction through both long and short positions allows us to capture upside among beneficiaries while identifying opportunities created by broader market shifts.
Rather than making a directional bet on AI’s trajectory, this framework is designed to provide diversified exposure across the value chain and to reduce reliance on any single outcome, and it offers the potential to generate returns across a range of market environments.
CIO: Which asset classes, sectors, or strategies are most attractive today (e.g., credit, infrastructure, secondaries, real assets), and what is driving your conviction?
Ben-Ur: One of the challenges facing investors today is that traditional diversification may be less effective than many assume. In recent years, stocks and bonds have often moved in the same direction, limiting the diversification benefits upon which many portfolios rely. As a result, portfolios that appear balanced may be more exposed to common macroeconomic risks than investors realize. We believe this reinforces the importance of incorporating truly differentiated absolute return investments alongside traditional equity and fixed-income allocations.
Against this backdrop, we remain particularly constructive on absolute return. We see attractive opportunities across equities, credit, macro and quantitative strategies, where skilled managers can capitalize on market dispersion, macroeconomic uncertainty, geopolitical developments and structural themes such as artificial intelligence. Rather than relying on broad market direction, these strategies seek to generate returns from security selection, relative value opportunities and changing market conditions.
We believe absolute return can serve as a valuable “third engine” within a portfolio complementing stocks and bonds with investments that are designed to be less dependent on traditional market direction. By combining multiple differentiated sources of alpha, investors can potentially improve diversification, enhance portfolio resilience and pursue attractive risk-adjusted returns across a broad range of economic and market environments.