Britt Harris, President, CEO and CIO of UTIMCO

In this episode, Britt Harris, President, CEO and CIO of UTIMCO, the largest public-university endowment in the US, discusses his outlook on the energy sector, millennials’ impact on the future of the market, and one of the biggest lessons he learned in his investing career. 

On the shift to renewable energy sources: “It’s going to be a long road. It’s going to be a 30-year road to travel. The spending on global energy in the past has been about $1.7 trillion per year—and about 90 percent of that’s gone to traditional energy companies. The projections are that the world is going to spend $60 trillion on renewables over the next 30 years… The first thing you’ve got to realize is the technology is not ready. But we believe it will be ready along the way. So, the first phase is going to be developing the technology and installing the infrastructural base.”

On one of the biggest lessons from his early career: “I was just out of college a couple years... and I made a $10,000 investment in an oil company… Somebody gave me a tip sheet, and somebody said, ‘This is a good stock.’ Okay. I put my $10,000 and I lost it all. At that moment in time, I decided this will never happen again. Not the losses, but the outcome will never again be a situation where I have to admit that I didn’t do the work, or the people that I’m with didn’t do the work. And so, from that day to this day I’ve had plenty of losses. But I’ve not had a single one where I had to say to myself, ‘I did not do the work,’ or ‘The people that I work with did not do the work.’”

 

This session was recorded on October 8, 2020.