Our Mission

CAIA Association seeks to improve investment and societal outcomes of capital allocation through professional education, transparency, and thought leadership across all investor alternatives in our industry.

Investment Values

Our investment values serve as guiding principles for our curriculum, thought leadership, and advocacy agenda.

Virtuous Purpose

  • Trust, transparency, and professional standards are essential to a properly functioning capital market system that serves the public good; regulations and laws are not enough by themselves.
  • The role of capital allocation is to facilitate the flow of financial resources between investors and spenders to improve social, communal and investment outcomes.
  • A purpose driven investment firm with a fiduciary, client-centered culture will produce more sustainable results over time.

Long-termism

  • Investors are unable to consistently time the capital markets and therefore should take on a patient, long-term, multi-cycle horizon that centers on specific client outcomes and liabilities.
  • We understand and accept the inevitable primacy of shareholders and/or owners for organizations but believe that over the long term, additionally serving other stakeholders such as employees, communities, and the environment will result in better social and financial outcomes.
  • Cognitive (through proxies such as gender and race) diversity of investment teams leads to better decision making and superior long-term investment returns.

Diversification

  • A balanced portfolio consisting of various asset classes that offer diversified cash flows, return drivers, and risk premia enables less volatility and lower drawdown risk in achieving those long term goals.
  • Alternative investments are naturally more opaque and complex than traditional markets and therefore require proper education and robust due diligence to effectively evaluate their appropriateness for clients.
  • Developed public equity and investment grade debt markets are largely efficient but significant information and pricing inefficiencies remain in private markets and real assets as well as emerging public equity and debt markets.
  • Private capital offers unique benefits versus public markets such as a disciplined focus on long-term value creation, better alignment of incentives across the capital structure and management, and a more natural allocation of capital to socially impactful opportunities.