Tier One Interview: Michael Ashley Schulman

This month, Jay sits down with Michael Ashley Schulman, CFA®, Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Running Point Capital Advisors. Michael shares his perspective managing investment portfolios inside private placement life insurance structures, explains where expectations around PPLI investing tend to break down, and discusses why structure, governance, and balance sheet discipline matter more than ideology or illustrations. They also explore private equity’s growing role in the life insurance ecosystem, when that involvement strengthens long-term outcomes, and where it can introduce risks that don’t always show up on paper. Read on to learn more!

JAY:  It is difficult to turn on the television and to not see you being interviewed on Bloomberg, CNBC, Fox Business or any number of other financial programs, Michael. I am honored you are participating in the Tier One Interview Series. For many, you are a nationally recognized investment professional but unbeknownst to some of those folks, you have one foot in the affluent life insurance market. Let’s start by hearing about your Los Angeles-based company, Running Point Capital Advisors and your role there.

MICHAEL: Thank you, Jay; it has been fun to build a ground-up rapport with multiple reporters and media producers over the last few years. It seems like a natural extension of the connection, commentary, and plain-speak insight we share with our clients. It has also been a reciprocal relationship; just as I learn from the personal and business wisdom clients share with us, I’ve gained perspective from my dialogues with reporters.

Regarding Running Point Capital Advisors, my partners and I have built the firm to be a true multifamily office. We deliver fully integrated, custom solutions across investments, family office services, tax and business consulting, insurance, and trust and estate planning so clients can focus on what matters most: their priorities, family, and legacy. No two clients look exactly alike and neither do their investment portfolios or financial plans. Families appreciate that we bring as much as possible under one roof, so the right hand knows what the left is doing and they are not stuck herding a pack of disconnected specialists. As we say, “We Are Your Family Office.™️

Our clients tend to be business owners, C-level executives, and financial professionals, people with real complexity and high expectations. At our core, we’re building the caliber of experience we’d want for our own families, and we push to be better each year than our own prior best.

I lead the investment platform, combining a global macro perspective with bottom-up asset allocation, while my partners oversee financial planning, tax and business consulting, trust and estate planning, and insurance. But we operate as an integrated team rather than in silos, aligning these disciplines to deliver better outcomes.

I’ve been in markets professionally since graduating from UC Berkeley at 21, starting with analyzing and managing collateralized mortgage and bond portfolios for institutional clients, then building quantitative equity strategies that scaled to $1.5 billion before I earned my MBA at MIT Sloan. Since then, I’ve modeled CDOs and CLOs at Deutsche Bank, managed fixed-income arbitrage and multi-strategy funds through and after the Global Financial Crisis, and for the last two decades I’ve managed investment portfolios for high-net-worth families with an emphasis on return and real-world implementation.

The why for us is simple; make the complicated feel understandable and show up with friendly steady hands when life or markets get dramatic, anticipating needs before they become emergencies. Our job is less superhero and more Nick Fury with a spreadsheet and a smile, assembling the right lineup, managing stress, and making sure one bad sequel doesn’t tank the franchise.

We grow primarily through conversations and referrals from clients, peers, and industry professionals who see what we’ve built and want that same level of partnership for themselves, friends, or clients. While technology will play an important role in improving efficiency and insight, it won’t replace the high-touch, in-person engagement that ultra-high-net-worth families both rely on and expect for consequential decisions.

JAY:  Every time we get together, I learn another interesting part about your upbringing that takes me by surprise. If I am not mistaken, at the age I started buying comic books, you started buying stocks! Tell me more about this and then take me through your upbringing and your career path to where you are today.

MICHAEL: The great thing is that you can take your eye off the ball and a comic book won’t file Chapter 11. Yes, I bought my first two stocks when I was six years old, but there is a bit more to the story than that. I enjoyed Halloween like most children - dressing up, going door-to-door, collecting candy - but I didn’t have much of a sweet tooth. So instead of eating my hoard, I stashed it at the bottom of the kitchen pantry and slowly sold it on the two-hour bus rides to and from school. I’d sell for cash or on credit, keep tabs on who owed me what, the bus driver got a discount, and mom was okay with it as long as 20% of my profits went to charity. When I ran out of Halloween treats, I’d buy closeout candy wholesale and resell it.

At the end of the year, ready to put my earned money in a bank, I was told that better returns were possible in public stocks, so I invested in my two favorite companies at the time, MGM Hotels and Bally Manufacturing. And with that, I began to read the business section of the paper every day and check the prices of my holdings. In reference to my initial comment about your comic books, I sold out of my Bally and MGM positions long before they faced bankruptcy and multiple reorganizations. Slowly, investing became a passion, and after graduating U.C. Berkeley, I realized it could become a career.

JAY:  Your firm is a major manager of separately managed accounts underlying private placement life insurance contracts. I am curious about your experience regarding the expectations of clients when it comes to the investment strategy for SMAs within PPLI policies. At the start of the process, do clients usually have a sense for what the best investment methodology is?

MICHAEL: We manage and tailor custom private placement life insurance accounts not only for our own clients but also for the clients of other wealth managers and registered investment advisors across the country. Every client and every expectation is different. Most people are still coming up to speed on PPLI, learning about the structure, and seeking guidance regarding their optimal investment strategy. The information is out there, but it can be a little disjointed and people often don’t initially have a clear understanding of what can and can’t be done.

In our experience, most clients should begin the PPLI separate managed account process with targeting outcome they want, be it tax efficiency, privacy, wealth accumulation, estate planning advantages, or a smoother overall balance sheet. Understanding as much as possible about their financial picture helps. Early on, they may anchor to what they already know - a favorite manager, hedge-fund-like returns, or a passive-vs-active bias - but once they understand the realities of the insurance chassis, including IRS rules, implementation efficiencies, diversity requirements, carrier guidelines, a decades long timeline, their expectations shift.

With a fuller and deeper understanding, clients usually gravitate towards a flexible yet disciplined institutional strategy tailored for their PPLI needs and aligned with how the policy fits into the broader family portfolio. They realize that if their investment allocation calls for semi-illiquid tax-inefficient investments, it may make sense to house them in a semi-illiquid wrapper that just happens to be tax-efficient; they’re not radically changing their liquidity profile but simply improving after-tax results.

We find that once implemented, many clients love the unintended simplicities and bonuses that come with PPLI like no subscription agreements to read and sign, no K-1s to deal with, and no capital calls for each investment.

JAY: Let’s stay with PPLI for a minute. Given the rapid rise in SMA applications with PPLI policies, the debate regarding insurance dedicated funds versus SMAs has resurfaced.  Under what conditions does it make sense to use one or the other and do you ever see both underlying a single policy?

MICHAEL: We favor PPLI portfolios that are tailored to each client’s needs across asset classes and designed to access the broadest set of high-quality opportunities, rather than being limited to a narrow menu of insurance-dedicated funds. In most of the PPLI accounts we manage, we focus on securing attractive economics across a range of strategies - private credit, real estate debt, private equity, secondaries, hedge funds, and other specialized allocations - while keeping the overall structure efficient.

We can absolutely blend IDFs into an SMA-based portfolio when they provide unique manager access or meaningfully better fee terms that fit the allocation, but in many cases the IDF structure adds incremental expenses. Investing directly can expand the opportunity set and be materially more fee efficient. In addition, for certain managers we invest with directly, we’ve been able to negotiate reduced fees, and our PPLI accounts can benefit from those improved economics.

JAY: I finally get to play the role of a host on Bloomberg and to ask you what are some of the hot topics you are asked about? I would think crypto and A.I. would be popular.

MICHAEL:  Those are hot topics! I feel that reporters continue to reach out to me because I try to answer more than just the question at hand, blending friendly plain-speak insight with wry humor, snarkiness, and multiple points of view.  Yes, artificial intelligence and crypto are popular areas now, but big picture, I’d divide my “hot topics” into three camps: global-macro, change agents across industries, and company or investment specific insights.

A third of the topics I respond to relate to global macroeconomics - one of my favorite subjects - which incorporates geopolitics, Federal reserve and central bank interest rate decisions, juicy government fiscal policies and regulations, and economic trends in employment, productivity, and growth. These are the cogs, gears, and butterfly flaps that move the world and often have me talk about housing affordability, tax and tariff policies, Middle East financial dynamics, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Kevin Warsh, Canadian economic decisions, or Xi Jinping’s policy stimulus in China.

Another third of the questions relate directly to change agents across industries - technology, consumer products, finance, and other areas - because we look at all of these across public and private markets. AI boom and bust questions, venture capital, wearable technologies, productivity gains, and Mag 7 sustainability fall under this umbrella.

Additionally, reporters often reach out for both large- and small-cap, company-specific insight, particularly around interpreting management commentary, earnings results, corporate guidance, management changes, explaining abrupt share-price moves, and assessing mergers and acquisitions.

I enjoy the creative and analytical complexity of the questions, drawing on insight drawn from different spheres, even when the pieces don’t fit neatly together.

Michael with LISG's Jay and Pete as well as past Tier One Interviewee, Nikki Pethtel at the 2025 Spearhead SoCal PPLI and PPVA Forum

JAY:  At Life Insurance Strategies Group, we are hyper vigilant about watching for private equity investment in the life insurance industry. This takes several forms – ownership interest in a carrier, full carrier ownership, reinsurance deals on blocks of business and asset gathering for private equity funds. Is this a problem? An opportunity? Is the life insurance sector a sound investment?

MICHAEL: Ah, here comes the Bloomberg investigative reporter question. The insurance sector as a whole can be a very sound investment.  I believe that Warren Buffet has proved this out with how he leveraged insurance company balance sheets at Berkshire Hathaway.  It is a sound investment as long as you keep your actuarial assumptions in line and make profitable investments.

I think the judgement between problem and opportunity depends on management’s alignment, leverage, and governance, but this was true even before private equity stepped in. The insurance sector itself can be a sound investment because it offers durable cash flows, scale economics, and a spread and fee business that is attractive when underwriting and asset-liability management are disciplined. PE has brought real benefits to parts of the life insurance ecosystem, including fresh capital, modernization, better data and distribution, and more sophisticated asset management that can improve long-term returns and product competitiveness.

It can become a problem when the incentives tilt toward short-term return maximization at the expense of long-dated promises to policyholders. The risk is that a playbook of higher leverage, greater use of less liquid or harder-to-value assets, reaching for yield, complex reinsurance structures, and related-party arrangements can further reduce transparency and increase fragility. Life insurance is fundamentally a confidence business, so anything that weakens perceived balance-sheet strength, liquidity resilience, or claims-paying ability can quickly become self-defeating.

The opportunity is real, but the bar for responsible participation is high. You want conservative capital management, clear separation of duties, strong independent board oversight like what you provide the insurers where you are a Director, Jay.  You also want straightforward reinsurance with high-quality counterparties, and investment guidelines that match liabilities and survive stress tests. If those conditions are met, private capital can improve the industry; if they are not, it can amplify tail risk in exactly the place where people expect composure.

I don’t know if this is why you asked your question, but it brings to mind a safety aspect knowledgeable clients appreciate about PPLI; policy assets are typically held in a segregated separate account rather than commingled with the carrier’s general account, which can help insulate the policy’s cash value from the insurer’s general creditors in an insolvency.

JAY:  Only recently did I learn about some of your hobbies, Michael. Given how you rarely break character as an investment expert, I was happy to hear that you do have several pursuits outside of the office. How do you spend your free time?

MICHAEL: I have an unstoppable travel bug and may be exploring Laos and Vietnam by the time this gets published. My parents had me travelling back and forth within Europe and across the U.S. as an infant and that penchant for new sceneries, cuisines, and cultures never left me. Wherever I land, I usually start with museums and galleries, partly because I love learning the local story, and partly because I paint and sketch when I can and I’m always hunting for new visual inspiration from both classical and contemporary exhibits and art shows.

A few highlights stick with me. One of my favorite trips was an ecology-focused adventure through Venezuela’s Amazon region, cloud forests, and remote coral reefs, which was as humbling as it was beautiful. More recently, I’ve mixed travel with purpose, like mountain biking in Mongolia to help raise funds for underprivileged children, and I’ve also squeezed in quieter resets, like kayaking through part of the Stockholm archipelago or hiking an unpronounceable glacier in Iceland. In a way, it’s the same mental toolkit I use professionally, curiosity, pattern recognition, and appreciation for seeing how the pieces interact, just with better scenery.

JAY:   You made me laugh the other day when you told me that one take away from reading many of the past Tier One Interviews was that you thought I hated steakhouses. I had to explain that a steakhouse has traditionally been the lazy restaurant choice for the life insurance industry and I want to hear other options from our interviewees. Without naming a steakhouse or a steak dish, Michael, please tell me about some of your favorite restaurants and what I should order when I visit.

MICHAEL:  This is the easiest part of the interview!  Locally, in Newport Beach and Orange County, Bear Flag Fish Company is a simple order at the counter style restaurant that sells fresh fish on ice and always has a line out the door; my go-to is their panko crusted fish burrito with a side order of salmon poke. I have two hacks for beating the line; one is to order in advance and the other, well readers can ask me in person because I don’t want to divulge it nationally! 

For Italian in Los Angeles, Funke in Beverly Hills has been my standout over the past year. The move is to lean into their house-made pastas and whatever seasonal seafood they’re featuring that night.

And since I don’t eat dairy, I’m always on the lookout for vegan spots that don’t feel like a compromise; FreeSoulCaffé in Tustin (Orange County) consistently delivers on both ambiance and flavor.

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Since its inception, Life Insurance Strategies Group has solely focused on the individual high net worth life insurance market. We do not sell products. This allows us to offer unbiased, pragmatic advice. Visit us at www.lifeinsurancestrategiesgroup.com.