I am a creature of habit.
Perhaps not as much a one as NISA’s Jess Yawitz, but I get my coffee at the same ma-and-pa café each morning (Bonsignour), take the same route to work each day (New York’s E train), stick to the same after-work bar (The Press Box), and have a small rotation of favorite restaurants (no longer including McDonald’s) that I frequent.
This makes what has happened at this magazine over the past six months so challenging—and yet extremely rewarding, as well.
If you’ve gotten this far into the magazine, you’ll have already noticed one change: We dropped a few words and letters from our name, and are now officially (and, I hope, perpetually) Chief Investment Officer—or CIO, for short. The reasons for this are manifold and need not be explained in full, but suffice it to say, I’m happy about it. It fully aligns with our target audience, offers clarity, and, in my mind, it has a nice ring to it—and a ring that does not evoke “Old MacDonald… E-I-E-I-O” etc. While I won’t give them the pleasure of being listed here, our competitors have full names and abbreviations. Now, CIO does too.
But that’s just the start. Astute readers will also notice that beyond the cover, we have executed a fundamental redesign of this brand—meant as much to force ourselves to be fresh in our reporting as to present a fresh face to the world.
In the magazine, it extends from style—notice the change in font and headline designs—to editorial, most notably our new section titled Scene+Heard, which features some of the most entertaining pieces we’ve published to date.
Online, it means a whole new website, which has been six months in the making. Go online (still at www.ai-cio.com) and see what we’ve done. Our motto there has been “simple, clean, and cleaner”—an aesthetic that we hope will further help us help you do your jobs better.
Astute readers will also notice that beyond the cover, we have executed a fundamental redesign of this brand—meant as much to force ourselves to be fresh in our reporting as to present a fresh face to the world.
Still, amid all the nips and tucks, I believe we’ve kept the best of what we do. From Day One (June 15, 2009, to be exact), we have focused on long-form analysis of trends and people in this industry. This updated magazine, although somewhat different in style and format, attempts to maintain that.
Take, for example, our cover story. For our five-year anniversary, we decided to profile the five most impactful people in the entire asset management industry over the past five years (called, appropriately, the Five for Five). A list like that is obviously subjective—yet the five profiles you’ll find in these pages do justice to the idea that people can represent trends, that this industry has seen huge dynamism in the past five years, and that for at least one of them, you can have purpose without being positive. They are, in mostly alphabetical order, Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board’s David Denison, Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, Yawitz, and then last and certainly least, Bernie Madoff. Many will disagree with these choices—heck, we often disagree with our choices—but I think you’ll find all warranted in one way or another.
Which leads me to the piece that, perhaps counter-intuitively, I personally take the most pride in.
As we searched for these five individuals, a raw truth emerged: We weren’t talking about women. I very sincerely believe magazines shouldn’t just report on what’s happened or happening. They should also be forces of change. That there were no women on our minds made us (meaning myself and, at the time, my all-female staff of writers and editors) examine our own editorial decisions.
The result was a decision to directly confront the issue in what turned out to be “The Missing Women of Asset Management”, an exposé on the state of females in the industry.
I won’t ruin the piece for you, but needless to say, we have a problem: As far as CIO can tell, there is literally no profession in America worse than asset management—and hedge funds in particular—when it comes to gender balance in senior roles. Bright lights exist of course, but they are few and far between. At a time when the Federal Reserve and US Securities and Exchange Commission are led by women, as is the race for the next president of the United States, it seems absurd to us that there are no women in the annual lists of hedge funds’ highest earners, or on a list such as our Five for Five. When we do this again in five years, I will be extremely disappointed in the industry, and myself, if this has not changed.
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I would be remiss if, on our fifth anniversary, I didn’t thank the people who have brought us to where we are today.
Many people appropriately called launching a magazine in the depths of a financial crisis “absurd.” And yet here we are—the result, I know with certainty, of hundreds of people’s efforts. I can’t list them all, but I would like to make special mention of a few: our founder Charlie Ruffel; our CEO Jim Casella; Middle-Seat-Cassidy; our creative director SooJin Buzelli; our publishers Katie Bacon (current) and Noel Smith (past); our conference team, led by Mike Garity and Carol Popkins; and our longtime columnist Angelo Calvello.
However, my largest well of gratitude goes to Paula Vasan, Elizabeth Pfeuti, Leanna Orr, Charlie Thomas, Sage Um, and Nick Reeve—the six kids (and I do call them kids) who have slaved away with me over the past five years. I wouldn’t want to work for me. The fact that you did and do makes me happy to do this every single day. By the way, there’s a fresh bottle of single malt in my desk as a token of gratitude—when you finish your news stories.
Here’s to all of you,
Kip McDaniel, Editor-in-Chief