About
I am Investment Director and Head of OCIO at Shaw and Partners New Zealand, where I run the Outsourced CIO practice for institutional investors: community trusts, iwi, charities, local authorities, superannuation schemes and family offices.
The work
I have spent over fifteen years in institutional investment consulting. I led Mercer's Implemented Consulting business in New Zealand, around NZ$14 billion under management, and before that held senior portfolio management and Outsourced CIO roles at SECOR Asset Management, on UK and European mandates of more than US$10 billion.
Shaw and Partners New Zealand brought me in, in February 2026, to build its Outsourced CIO practice. I sit on the Investment Committee: five voting members, meeting weekly, deciding in Auckland. The team has advised New Zealand institutional and family-office clients for close to thirty years, first as JMI Wealth, and the wider group, Investment Services Group, has NZ$8.7 billion under advice and management. The practice takes mandates from about NZ$50 million to NZ$2 billion and above.
What has changed for New Zealand boards
Portfolios here have become a great deal more complicated in ten years. A community trust that once held a balanced fund with a single manager may now hold five managers across domestic and international equities, alternatives and fixed income, with impact allocations, climate commitments and a spending policy that has to hold up in perpetuity. The oversight that goes with all of it has grown in step.
Much of that is a governance question rather than a returns question: who decides what, at what size, on what evidence, and how a board sees enough to be confident in the answer. It is the part of the work I find most interesting, and it is where an Outsourced CIO earns its place.
How much a board hands over is its own decision, and a governance decision at that. Some want recommendations brought to them for approval. Some set the strategy and want the implementation handled. Some delegate the function inside parameters they set and can change. All three are legitimate, and boards often move between them as the portfolio gets harder to hold.
Why I publish
Most of the investment research that reaches New Zealand trustees is written for larger markets, and the conditions here are different enough that a good deal of it does not carry across. I would rather add something written for this one.
Shaw and Partners New Zealand publishes eleven governance and investment guides for New Zealand trustees, on adviser business models, SIPOs, investment costs, spending policy, investment risk, fund structures and values-aligned investing among others. Any New Zealand trustee can have them, client or not. Email me and say which ones.
This site is the other half. Twice a week, the podcast segments worth the time in investment and AI, with what I think follows from each one. It is reading I do anyway, and publishing it saves someone else the thirty hours.
How a clip earns a place
I read every episode on the list as a transcript, in full. Most produce nothing. A passage earns a place when it stands on its own in one to five minutes: a view argued against the consensus, an unusually clear explanation of something hard, a specific call with the reasoning attached, a way of thinking that transfers to other problems, or a short take on something live.
Under each clip there are two or three lines from me. Each carries the mechanism, what follows from it, or the reason to be sceptical. Where a speaker has an interest in the conclusion, I say so and leave you to weigh it.
Rules I hold to
- I re-host nothing. Video plays from YouTube and audio streams from the publisher's own feed, so the listen still counts to them.
- I do not attribute a line to an individual. Automatic transcripts do not reliably mark who is speaking, so a page names who took part in the conversation and stops there.
- I do not quote anyone until the wording has been checked against the audio. Automatic transcripts substitute plausible wrong words rather than dropping them, and one case here turned PGIM into PIMCO, a different firm. Everything on the site is paraphrase unless it sits in quotation marks.
- I do not state a credential the episode has not stated.
- Where a show republishes an old conversation under a current date, the page carries the date it was recorded.
Getting in touch
If you want the guides, or you would rather compare notes on how your own investment function is put together, my address is below. I read everything that arrives.
Disclaimer
This site is mine. I publish it in my own name, and Shaw and Partners New Zealand neither publishes it nor stands behind what is on it.
The clips are other people's arguments. Putting one here is not agreement with it.
Everything here is general information. It is not financial advice, it is not a recommendation to buy or sell anything, and it takes no account of your circumstances. Shaw and Partners Financial Services Limited (FSP93061) is a licensed Financial Advice Provider.