Michael Gruener: Asset Management's Third Wave (and What Will Break It)

The mutual fund put investing in the hands of ordinary savers. The ETF made it cheaper, faster and borderless. Both transformed asset management. Both also required infrastructure that didn't exist when the product arrived. Private markets are wave three. And the infrastructure problem is bigger this time.Michael Gruener lived through both of the first two: mutual funds at Goldman in the early 2000s and ETFs at BlackRock through the iShares expansion across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He knows what a category-defining shift looks like from the inside. And he knows what breaks when the rails are not ready.Now, as co-CEO of Titanbay, he's building the infrastructure for wave three before it breaks.In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Michael and Marc cover:Why the semi-liquid evergreen fund is the ETF of private markets - and why the infrastructure underneath it is not readyThe "know your client, know your trade" problem - and why today's trade rails were built to do the oppositeWhat an 8% NIGO rate looks like when a model portfolio rebalance triggers 100,000 trades in a single dayWhy the fix is faster than the industry expects - and why it comes down to 24 namesHow Titanbay connects to distributors in whatever format they have, applies private market logic, and hands back a trade in good orderWhere the boundaries between public and private markets are heading - and the one condition that has to be met first"That trade infrastructure was not built for this product... It was built for the industry as it existed in 1996, when I started at Goldman. Nobody went back and rebuilt it."Wave three is already in motion. This is a conversation about what it breaks on the way through.