In Conversation with Julie Segal

About In Conversation with Julie Segal

In Conversation with Julie Segal is a dialogue with the people who have shaped and continue to influence the world of institutional investors. The podcast will feature both familiar names talking about new ideas and upstarts who want to do things differently.

Publisher

Institutional Investor

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

1 Nov 2023

Latest episode

8 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 24 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   8 Oct 2026

   Investors Know What Not to Do in Emerging Markets. But They Keep Doing It Anyway.

   Robert Koenigsberger isn’t rattled by uncertainty, at least when it comes to markets. That may be simply part of his natural constitution. He started his career in the 1980s when emerging markets were essentially a collection of bank loans in default — and he founded Gramercy, the emerging markets alternatives firm, in 1998 when Russia devalued its currency and kicked off the restructuring of its government debt. That experience comes in handy now as developed markets are facing the kind of uncertainty once reserved for emerging markets. Investors are facing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, shaky global alliances, and rising inflation, debt, and interest rates. When we met to record the podcast, Robert said people will look back at the last three decades as a time of “extraordinary peace,” which translated into an environment that was “extraordinarily friendly to investors.”  The tools that investors have come to take for granted, he said, probably won’t work for the next 35 years. Institutional investors need to make peace with the uncertainty hanging over markets. Koenigsberger said he and Mohamed El-Erian, the chair of Gramercy, agree that “Our highest conviction is you can’t have conviction.” Not particularly reassuring, of course. But investors need to accept that volatility isn’t going away and then construct portfolios that use it rather than “get whipped around by it.” Which brings me back to investing in emerging markets, which is an object lesson in how not to deal with uncertainty. Institutions let  well-intended asset allocation rules and governance policies prevent them from being flexible and opportunistic. In episode 23, Koenigsberger told Julie that “If you were Rip Van Winkle and you owned the asset class, it did everything it was supposed to do,” including outperforming. The problem was that investors weren’t earning those returns. The culprit was behavioral mistakes. Counterintuitively, investors added emerging markets to their portfolios by buying the index, rather than making bets in which they   had the highest confidence. That meant they had a big slug of their portfolios in Argentina in 1999 and in Russia and Ukraine in 2022, to name a few. The pattern repeated itself over and over: investors bought in when markets were exuberant, held on too long, and then sold at the worst time. Then they blamed it all on the instability of emerging markets, explained Koenigsberger. A month before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, sources on the ground told a Gramercy analyst that there was a 40 percent chance of an invasion. “And if that happened, Russian bonds would drop X and Ukraine would drop Y.” Koenigsberger said he didn’t need to hear more. He sold the exposure and decided to wait and see. “How could you go to bed at night thinking” Russian tanks could be in Ukraine by the morning. “Performance doesn’t just come from what you own,” he said. “It comes from what you don’t own.” Institutions repeat flawed investment behavior despite understanding the negative impact of slow decision-making and following rules that don’t fit what’s actually happening in the market at a specific point in time. Now, when investors are more concentrated than ever, emerging markets offer much-needed avenues for diversification and resilience, which have been repeatedly tested since the global financial crisis.  In fact, as Koenigsberger said, the landscape has changed over the last few years, with the gap between emerging markets and developed ones narrowing significantly. “I think you have developed markets and emerging markets and you have submerging markets.” Other topics of discussion include: Koenigsberger and El-Erian wrote a piece in late 2019 warning of a coming dislocation in emerging markets. But when it came in March 2020, interested investors said they might get board approval by July or October. “Boing, they missed the entire V-shaped recovery,” he said. On legal protections and contracts: What’s different about emerging markets is “we have to underwrite the people…. Contracts matter when you get the people wrong.” On why investors index: “If that’s what everybody else is doing, then I’m not really taking a career risk with this. Hey, we all got smoked from Russia.”

2. 

   13 Aug 2026

   It’s Not Just Public Versus Private Credit Anymore

   In this episode, Julie Segal speaks with Matt Harvey, head of direct lending at PGIM Private Capital, about how he evaluates opportunities as more companies tap both public and private credit markets for financing. The episode is a follow on to my podcast of July 17th, “AI’s Debt Boom Is Giving Credit Investors Rare Leverage. PGIM’s Greg Peters Says They Should Use It.” Harvey explains why he views illiquidity as a hurdle rate rather than simply a premium, why PGIM integrated its private and public credit teams, and how demanding covenants, which are often misunderstood, allows lenders to actively manage risk after a loan is made. The discussion also explores AI-driven concentration risk, why private credit deals, contrary to popular opinion, can often provide more information than public ones, and how all these shifts are changing the way credit portfolios are constructed.

3. 

   17 Jul 2026

   AI’s Debt Boom Is Giving Credit Investors Rare Leverage. PGIM’s Greg Peters Says They Should Use It.

   AI is fueling the largest borrowing boom in at least a generation. But Greg Peters argues that focusing on AI alone misses the bigger story playing out across credit markets. In this conversation, the co-chief investment officer of PGIM Fixed Income explains why PGIM is pursuing some AI-related financings while walking away from many others, why he believes we're entering a true credit-picker's market after years of the opposite, and what lessons he learned from the tech bubble in the late 1990s. You’ll enjoy his story about false diversification and an invented market sector from that time. Peters also discusses the uncertainty surrounding AI's long-term economics, why he readily admits what he doesn’t know, and how the lines between public and private credit continue to blur, and why that matters to investors. Other topics we touched on: The debate inside PGIM over AI companies’ claims about future revenue and the difficulty of getting information. Why "30 years is a long time" when financing a rapidly changing technology. What protections investors should get when financing data-centers Why Peters believes credit investors have unusual negotiating power despite being late in the credit cycle and why they should use that power. How investors should think about diversification when so many assets share similar underlying risk drivers.

Inside a recent episode

Alts Managers Race for Retail Clients — But They're Not Lowering Fees

Published 27 Nov 2023 · Transcript excerpt

[…] Right. And so, I think for institutions like that, what they see is the opportunity to be able to find, you know, in some ways, a benchmark, right? Like if you, if you can't build a hedge fund portfolio that beats, you know, that beats the index by 300 basis points, you know, then doesn't make sense to even have all the infrastructure and the hassle of doing direct fund investments. It's interesting. So, part of this is just a could be just a benchmark. It is. And I think it certainly, I think it certainly offers an opportunity to be that sort of benchmark where it's like, you know, here's something that, you know, essentially takes no, no meaningful effort from the investor to go buy into, right? […]

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

5 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 24 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

24

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

60

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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