Latest / Masters in Business / Bridgeway's John Montgomery Gives Away Half of Its Profits
Transcript
- 0:02Speaker 1: This is Master's in Business with very Ridholts on Bloomberg
- 0:06Speaker 1: Radio this weekend. On the podcast, I have a fascinating
- 0:12Speaker 1: guest and I think you'll really enjoy listening to him.
- 0:15Speaker 1: His name is John Montgomery. He is a former UH
- 0:20Speaker 1: civil engineer slash transportation engineer who decided to take his
- 0:27Speaker 1: love of quantitative mathematics and apply it in the world
- 0:32Speaker 1: of investing. If that isn't somewhat unusual enough of a background,
- 0:37Speaker 1: he managed to put together not only a firm that's
- 0:41Speaker 1: running eight and a half billion dollars, but a very
- 0:44Speaker 1: unusual firm with as you'll hear, some very unusual qualifications,
- 0:50Speaker 1: including the fact that Bridgeway gives away half of their
- 0:54Speaker 1: profits to various charitable organizations every year. He also has
- 1:00Speaker 1: some internal rules about um how much he can be
- 1:04Speaker 1: compensated relative to the lowest compensated person in the firm.
- 1:09Speaker 1: You know, thirty years ago, the CEO to factory floor
- 1:14Speaker 1: ratio is something about five to one. UH it's now
- 1:17Speaker 1: somewhere depending on whose numbers you use, two hundred and
- 1:20Speaker 1: fifty to four hundred to one. At Bridgeway, the highest
- 1:25Speaker 1: paid person and lowest paid person, it's a seven to
- 1:27Speaker 1: one ratio that is really quite unusual. Their goals and
- 1:33Speaker 1: focus and client customer service are just not what you
- 1:36Speaker 1: typically here on Wall Street. And there their evidence base,
- 1:41Speaker 1: their data driven. I think that they are not the
- 1:45Speaker 1: usual farm. And that's why I wanted to have John
- 1:47Speaker 1: on the show because his story and Bridgeway story is
- 1:51Speaker 1: somewhat unique and kind of fascinating. So, with no further ado,
- 1:55Speaker 1: my conversation with Bridgeways John Montgomery. My special guest today
- 2:04Speaker 1: is John Montgomery. He is the founder of Bridgeway Capital Management,
- 2:09Speaker 1: an asset management firm which is running eight point four
- 2:13Speaker 1: billion dollars. Bridgeway is unique in a number of ways,
- 2:17Speaker 1: perhaps most notably, the firm donates fifty of its profits
- 2:23Speaker 1: to nonprofit organizations each year. John Montgomery, Welcome to Bloomberg.
- 2:29Speaker 1: It's an honor to be here, Barry. So you have
- 2:31Speaker 1: a really interesting background, and before we get to the
- 2:34Speaker 1: asset management side, I have to talk a little bit
- 2:37Speaker 1: about your education, which is someone unusual for someone running
- 2:43Speaker 1: an asset management firm. Undergraduate, You're at swarth Mar and
- 2:47Speaker 1: what are you studying there? Philosophy and engineering, okay, which
- 2:51Speaker 1: is a good combination of things. A little left brain,
- 2:55Speaker 1: right brain. It kind of works. And then you end
- 2:58Speaker 1: up going to M I T and Harvard. What do
- 3:00Speaker 1: you study there? Engineering at M I T. So that's
- 3:04Speaker 1: where I had my background in statistics and quantitative modeling,
- 3:08Speaker 1: and at Harvard I study business. And so you come
- 3:12Speaker 1: out of that world essentially working in transportation engineering. That's right.
- 3:18Speaker 1: That was my first career. But while you were at
- 3:21Speaker 1: Harvard Business School, you you have written about and told
- 3:24Speaker 1: the story of a for lack of a better word,
- 3:28Speaker 1: and epiphany that you had there. Tell us about that. Well,
- 3:32Speaker 1: I call it my my first behavioral finance insight. This
- 3:36Speaker 1: was in UH and it was very early on in
- 3:40Speaker 1: behavioral finance, so I didn't even know the field existed. UM,
- 3:43Speaker 1: But I was at Harvard Business School really to um
- 3:47Speaker 1: learn more fill in gaps in my knowledge base about
- 3:51Speaker 1: business and specifically in transportation. I didn't have any idea
- 3:55Speaker 1: at that point that I would go into finance, but
- 3:57Speaker 1: I thought, while I'm at Harvard, I'll take a few
- 4:00Speaker 1: investing courses and maybe turned back the opportunity cost of
- 4:04Speaker 1: taking two years out of your life after you were
- 4:06Speaker 1: already UM had some jobs. So did that. My grades
- 4:11Speaker 1: said that I should have gone to Wall Street. Those
- 4:13Speaker 1: were among my best grades in business school. But I
- 4:16Speaker 1: was in one particular class one day where we were
- 4:20Speaker 1: studying a quantitative method of investing, and I found that fascinating.
- 4:25Speaker 1: And at the end of the class, the professor steps
- 4:27Speaker 1: back from the blackboard and he kind of tugs on
- 4:30Speaker 1: his beard and he says, so, who among the people
- 4:33Speaker 1: in this class think that when you get out of
- 4:35Speaker 1: school here and probably go to Wall Street, that you'll
- 4:38Speaker 1: be beating this record? Well, this was a pretty fine record.
- 4:41Speaker 1: It wasn't just beating the market. It was it was
- 4:43Speaker 1: doing quite well in the hands and the class go up,
- 4:47Speaker 1: and the immediate thought that I had was the twenty
- 4:49Speaker 1: rule of the people think they can beat the market,
- 4:53Speaker 1: but it's probably the other way around, and it's probably
- 4:56Speaker 1: at that point not the UM that had the discipline
- 5:00Speaker 1: to do it. And if you think about UM, you know,
- 5:03Speaker 1: a top tier business school with very bright people. What
- 5:07Speaker 1: has worked for them getting them to a certain place
- 5:09Speaker 1: in life doesn't always work in investments. As a matter
- 5:12Speaker 1: of fact, some of the dynamics of that works against you.
- 5:15Speaker 1: Michael Mobus uncles that the paradox of skill, when you
- 5:18Speaker 1: have an entire marketplace filled with very smart, very competitive people,
- 5:23Speaker 1: they all kind of cancel each other out. Yes, So
- 5:26Speaker 1: part of the dynamics of that that I thought was, Uh,
- 5:29Speaker 1: if this is a microcosm of Wall Street five years
- 5:32Speaker 1: from now, then using quantitative methods should help get you
- 5:36Speaker 1: on the other side of that investment, which should have
- 5:39Speaker 1: some benefits of efficiency and cost and some other things.
- 5:43Speaker 1: So that that was just a seed planet for what
- 5:46Speaker 1: would become Bridgeway uh some decade later. So that's still
- 5:51Speaker 1: a pretty significant insight to look around a room full
- 5:54Speaker 1: of really smart people and say, like Laby Lake will
- 5:58Speaker 1: be gone, where all the children are above average, how
- 6:01Speaker 1: is it possible that of the room thinks they're going
- 6:04Speaker 1: to beat the market. If you want to see the
- 6:07Speaker 1: same numbers come up, ask a room next time you're
- 6:10Speaker 1: speaking in front of a group of people. Ask everyone
- 6:12Speaker 1: in the room how many of them are above average drivers?
- 6:15Speaker 1: And it's the same number. Eight in the hands go
- 6:18Speaker 1: off And if you've been on the roads, you know
- 6:20Speaker 1: that everybody seems to be below out. So Barry, my
- 6:23Speaker 1: answer to that question, usually it's a humble was like, no,
- 6:26Speaker 1: I'm not. Probably i'm not. And in business school I
- 6:29Speaker 1: didn't think I was going to be in the top
- 6:31Speaker 1: half of the class. But with respect to driving, I've
- 6:34Speaker 1: never had a chargeable accident um and I've never had
- 6:37Speaker 1: a moving traffic violation and never had a moving traffic
- 6:42Speaker 1: So I always go back to the statistics, the logic,
- 6:45Speaker 1: the data, the evidence. Evidence based investing is what we do.
- 6:48Speaker 1: And and so that's a knee jerk reaction for me
- 6:50Speaker 1: is like, well, let's just take a look at the
- 6:51Speaker 1: numbers and see what So if you believe in mean regression,
- 6:55Speaker 1: that would suggest you might be due for it, so
- 6:57Speaker 1: that that could be true as well. And so you
- 6:59Speaker 1: want differentiate when things do and don't regress to the
- 7:02Speaker 1: main is their skill or just luck and driving this
- 7:06Speaker 1: like investing, there's certainly both the and and like sports
- 7:12Speaker 1: where you need a certain amount of skill to make
- 7:15Speaker 1: it to the major leagues, but at that level where
- 7:18Speaker 1: everybody is so skillful, luck becomes even more important. So
- 7:22Speaker 1: how did you go from transportation engineering as a career
- 7:27Speaker 1: to turning around and saying, Gee, that epiphany at Harvard
- 7:30Speaker 1: Business School is something I really want to pursue. First
- 7:34Speaker 1: of all, transportation is a service industry. I love service industries,
- 7:37Speaker 1: and anytime anytime I'm experienced service that's uh subpar, I
- 7:42Speaker 1: think there's a market opportunity there, whether it's a restaurant,
- 7:45Speaker 1: a hotel, anywhere. Like if you're just doing a lousy
- 7:48Speaker 1: job providing service, you're inviting competition. In UM. So I
- 7:53Speaker 1: was in the transportation service industry, but I was also
- 7:56Speaker 1: an investor in a couple of mutual funds setting up
- 7:58Speaker 1: an I RA and think and like, you should be
- 8:01Speaker 1: able to do better than this, not just the investment,
- 8:03Speaker 1: the whole promin side, but the communications well you know
- 8:06Speaker 1: the talked about just I had a dozen ideas for
- 8:09Speaker 1: how you could um improve that industry. So UM at
- 8:13Speaker 1: the time, I have an entrepreneurial spirit and hit a
- 8:17Speaker 1: certain roadblock wall you could say, professionally in the transportation
- 8:21Speaker 1: industry where I was trying to bring private sector incentives
- 8:26Speaker 1: UM and some insights I had about how to reorganize
- 8:29Speaker 1: city urban transportation bus systems in particular, took that to
- 8:34Speaker 1: a certain level and UM and and then it was
- 8:37Speaker 1: clear it wasn't gonna happen. The wall problem. I hit
- 8:39Speaker 1: the wall. This was an opportunity to transition and do
- 8:43Speaker 1: something that I've been doing as a hobby let's talk
- 8:45Speaker 1: a little bit about some current trends and as we
- 8:48Speaker 1: ease into quantitative investing, what you've been doing for a
- 8:52Speaker 1: long time is essentially factor investing, which really today goes
- 8:57Speaker 1: under the branding name smart Beta. Yes, so the first
- 9:02Speaker 1: question is how did you manage to find your way
- 9:05Speaker 1: into that methodology and what do you think of the
- 9:10Speaker 1: rise of smart beta today. Well, first of all, the
- 9:12Speaker 1: name smart beta kind of revels my feathers. Sum so, uh,
- 9:16Speaker 1: you know, it's data. It's there's nothing human or or
- 9:21Speaker 1: or um. There's nothing smart or beta about it. Well
- 9:24Speaker 1: maybe beta, you can you can argue beta or alpha
- 9:27Speaker 1: or you know, a different system of looking at it.
- 9:30Speaker 1: But the smart part sounds to me like a bunch
- 9:32Speaker 1: of guys in a room of marketing trying to figure
- 9:35Speaker 1: out how to sell something. It's good branding, and I
- 9:37Speaker 1: think everybody and there's and there's nothing wrong with branding,
- 9:40Speaker 1: but um, you know, we want to we we go
- 9:43Speaker 1: first to the substance of it. So well, first of all,
- 9:45Speaker 1: we didn't call it factor investing twenty five years ago,
- 9:48Speaker 1: but absolutely applying quantitative methods to the process of investing
- 9:52Speaker 1: and then figuring out as many different ways to apply
- 9:56Speaker 1: numerical methods as possible. So that's not just the deciding
- 10:00Speaker 1: which stocks to stay away from and which you're adding
- 10:03Speaker 1: to a portfolio to UM produce a certain design and
- 10:07Speaker 1: results that you're going for. But it's also think things
- 10:10Speaker 1: like transaction cost managing every other aspects of cost. UM
- 10:15Speaker 1: the business side, strategy side, we like UM what we
- 10:18Speaker 1: call evidence based worldview at Bridgeway. So if you're using
- 10:23Speaker 1: quantitative methods for what we now call factor investing Fama, French, etcetera. UM,
- 10:29Speaker 1: were you ever playing with the idea of individual stock
- 10:33Speaker 1: picking or was it always a mathematical screen. We don't.
- 10:37Speaker 1: We don't purchase individual stocks. We buy groups of stocks.
- 10:41Speaker 1: And so that is key to UM factor based investing
- 10:45Speaker 1: in an evidence based worldview. And so that leads to
- 10:49Speaker 1: the important question, what is it that drive stock performance
- 10:53Speaker 1: over the long term? So the stock market has to
- 10:57Speaker 1: follow the economy long term. UM. The problem is in
- 11:01Speaker 1: the short term it absolutely doesn't. There are two things
- 11:04Speaker 1: we think that drive returns. One is risks. So in
- 11:07Speaker 1: the beginning twenty five years ago, definitely had a risk
- 11:10Speaker 1: based worldview, and and Eugene Fama was a major contributor
- 11:14Speaker 1: to my thinking on that. Uh. I took a year
- 11:17Speaker 1: and a half off before founding Bridgeway to do research
- 11:20Speaker 1: on the quantitative methods I've been using individually, writing a
- 11:24Speaker 1: big business plan for Bridgeway and and learning more. UH
- 11:29Speaker 1: the the let me let me interrupt you there, because
- 11:32Speaker 1: I find that fascinating. You're you're working in a field,
- 11:35Speaker 1: you're fairly well compensated, but you hit the wall and
- 11:39Speaker 1: you instead of saying I'm going to just switch jobs
- 11:42Speaker 1: or even switch careers, you say I'm going to take
- 11:45Speaker 1: a year off and think about what i want the
- 11:48Speaker 1: next phase of my life to be. Is that a
- 11:51Speaker 1: fair descript That's right? And I had I had a
- 11:53Speaker 1: model for that. There was a mayor of Houston, Bob
- 11:56Speaker 1: Lanier at the time, who had four different careers and
- 11:58Speaker 1: every time he switched to ears, he took a year
- 12:01Speaker 1: off to study the heck out of the next thing
- 12:03Speaker 1: that he was doing, and he's very thoughtful about it.
- 12:06Speaker 1: And I thought that was a fascinating idea. UM Let
- 12:09Speaker 1: the record reflect that the guests used the word fascinating
- 12:13Speaker 1: multiple times before I did. I always get emails making
- 12:17Speaker 1: fun of my over alliance on the word fascinating. But
- 12:21Speaker 1: I find things fascinating, as do you. So I'm glad
- 12:24Speaker 1: you you brought that up. UM. So that's pretty interesting.
- 12:28Speaker 1: Four separate careers, and you based this decision making on
- 12:33Speaker 1: that model. That's correct. And so when you spent the
- 12:36Speaker 1: year researching quantitative finance and running an asset management firm,
- 12:41Speaker 1: where did that lead you? How that was? That was?
- 12:44Speaker 1: That period was when Family French published their seminal paper
- 12:47Speaker 1: on value and building. So so we had, you know,
- 12:50Speaker 1: early nineteen eighties, uh small the small size effect. It
- 12:54Speaker 1: had been around why and I was fascinating premium, it's
- 12:57Speaker 1: absolutely but the value part was really resonated with me.
- 13:02Speaker 1: The thought, you know, I'm buying a refrigerator. It's one
- 13:05Speaker 1: place or another place, and if it's basically the same refrigerator,
- 13:08Speaker 1: there's some way to figure out that they're comparable. I'm
- 13:11Speaker 1: gonna go for the lower price. That just resonated with
- 13:14Speaker 1: me and made sense that that would work. And there
- 13:17Speaker 1: was a risk based world UM framework for that that
- 13:20Speaker 1: I really bought into. And it wasn't until probably fifteen
- 13:24Speaker 1: ten ten fifteen years later that I started reading more
- 13:29Speaker 1: and thinking about the behavioral insights, and there was one
- 13:31Speaker 1: factor that really put me over the top on that.
- 13:35Speaker 1: Explain that's the low volatility factor. So if you think,
- 13:38Speaker 1: if you have a risk based worldview and you think, okay,
- 13:41Speaker 1: value stocks are more volatile in some sense, they're riskier, um,
- 13:46Speaker 1: so they should liquid less, go through the number of
- 13:49Speaker 1: things they should do, you know, as a group better
- 13:51Speaker 1: in the long term size, same thing. If you've got
- 13:55Speaker 1: fewer products, uh, less diversification, less act access to the
- 14:00Speaker 1: capital markets, that's more risk absolutely, and then it makes
- 14:04Speaker 1: sense that you would have higher returns over the long
- 14:06Speaker 1: term with that. But the but the low volatility factor
- 14:12Speaker 1: turns that on its head, and and what was remarkable
- 14:15Speaker 1: to me was that it wasn't a bigger problem for
- 14:17Speaker 1: more people that the low volatility stocks did better in
- 14:21Speaker 1: the long terming wait a minute. We talk about measuring risk,
- 14:25Speaker 1: and we can go into a lot of detail on
- 14:27Speaker 1: what's risk, but most common way to measure risk and
- 14:30Speaker 1: academia standard deviation of returns, specifically measuring the exact same way.
- 14:35Speaker 1: The low volatility is less risk by definition and should
- 14:39Speaker 1: do less well over the long term. But the reverse
- 14:41Speaker 1: is true. Why is that you can't In my mind,
- 14:45Speaker 1: it was just a complete short circuit that those two
- 14:48Speaker 1: things don't go together. If that's true, something else must
- 14:51Speaker 1: be driving these stocks. What is that? And I think
- 14:54Speaker 1: that's behavioral finance. So a lot of people focus on
- 14:58Speaker 1: the models, but they don't pay that close attention to
- 15:01Speaker 1: the execution of these models. How can you take advantage
- 15:07Speaker 1: of of ability to execute, ability to perform versus just
- 15:13Speaker 1: the plain old algorithm. Well, the first of all, the
- 15:16Speaker 1: algorithms are built by people, so there's a very strong
- 15:19Speaker 1: human component to that. And the models are only as
- 15:22Speaker 1: good as the modeling process that you've got, So that
- 15:25Speaker 1: would be um where I start. I think there are
- 15:29Speaker 1: huge advantages to machines being able to process huge amounts
- 15:32Speaker 1: of data. So that's the key advantage there. And we're
- 15:36Speaker 1: learning more all the time about technology and artificial intelligence
- 15:41Speaker 1: and where that might go. Let's talk a little bit
- 15:44Speaker 1: about your corporate culture, and I find some things about
- 15:49Speaker 1: Bridgeway quite fascinating. First, eight and a half billion dollars
- 15:53Speaker 1: is a nice chunk of money. You're somewhat under the radar.
- 15:57Speaker 1: Is that a conscious decision or is that just happenstance
- 16:01Speaker 1: of being in Houston? I would say both. Early on,
- 16:05Speaker 1: we had some thought of being about substance and not fluff,
- 16:08Speaker 1: and that has continued in our culture and worldview and
- 16:12Speaker 1: obviously the other giants issue. It's unusual to see a
- 16:18Speaker 1: finance company that gives away half their profits to charity
- 16:22Speaker 1: each year. Tell us a little bit about how that
- 16:24Speaker 1: came about and uh, how you execute on that well, Barry,
- 16:28Speaker 1: I'd say naivete has worked pretty well for me in life.
- 16:31Speaker 1: So I got married at twenty one. That's not the
- 16:34Speaker 1: statistics on that are not great. Um. Uh, statistic would
- 16:38Speaker 1: say wait a while, get more life experience. But it
- 16:41Speaker 1: was awesome for me. I'm married to um, the love
- 16:44Speaker 1: of my dreams for forty years now. Just celebrated to
- 16:47Speaker 1: fort anniversary. I think you just celebrated, um, So that's
- 16:51Speaker 1: worked out great. Also, when I was founding Bridgeway, we
- 16:55Speaker 1: we had some concern my wife and I about if
- 16:59Speaker 1: professorly we were successful as I had been over the
- 17:04Speaker 1: prior six years individually with the model that I had.
- 17:06Speaker 1: This is a quantitative model, so you didn't have to
- 17:08Speaker 1: hire an army of analysts, so it was a low
- 17:11Speaker 1: cost strategy aspects that of modeling that we had worked
- 17:15Speaker 1: with for some time. Then it should be a cash
- 17:18Speaker 1: cow in the investment advisory business. There's no accounts receivable.
- 17:21Speaker 1: There's no accounts because people you manage money, you have
- 17:25Speaker 1: their money. There's no inventory except computers, which are actually
- 17:29Speaker 1: pretty cheap these days. There's no It's an amazing cash
- 17:33Speaker 1: cow business. And we thought, so what would you do
- 17:35Speaker 1: with those resources? And we actually had some concern twenty
- 17:38Speaker 1: five years ago that that could be a problem in
- 17:41Speaker 1: raising kids and the environment within which we raised more
- 17:44Speaker 1: money is not always good in spite of the fact
- 17:46Speaker 1: what we do for living is is managed money. So
- 17:49Speaker 1: we thought, had the naive thought of giving half away,
- 17:52Speaker 1: there'd be less around. Interestingly, about ten years into the
- 17:57Speaker 1: process of of Bridgeway capital manage I had the thought, well,
- 18:01Speaker 1: that didn't work out at all. The money that's left
- 18:03Speaker 1: when you're that generous and you build it in the
- 18:06Speaker 1: fabric of a company and you are able to hire
- 18:09Speaker 1: and retain inspired people, the benefits of that to the
- 18:13Speaker 1: company far outweigh the half that you give away. So
- 18:15Speaker 1: we actually that was a bust. I figured out at
- 18:18Speaker 1: ten years is much more powerful when you have a
- 18:20Speaker 1: generous spirit. So, in other words, giving away money ended
- 18:24Speaker 1: up generating too much in return for yourself. Is that
- 18:27Speaker 1: is that what I'm hearing too much? You know? Okay,
- 18:29Speaker 1: So the expect more than expected for sure, and you
- 18:32Speaker 1: also do something else that's kind of unusual. Your compensation
- 18:37Speaker 1: as chairman is limited to seven x the lowest paid employee.
- 18:42Speaker 1: Am I getting that correct? So we now talk about
- 18:44Speaker 1: that is our stewardship imperative. So if you're a new
- 18:48Speaker 1: person coming into Bridgeway, of the conversation goes something along
- 18:51Speaker 1: these lines. One, We're here to make a difference in
- 18:54Speaker 1: the world. And that's that's really cool about for our
- 18:58Speaker 1: clients first, because that's why we're here for our fellow
- 19:01Speaker 1: partners each other. And that's partners is the word we
- 19:04Speaker 1: use for all the staff um with a full time
- 19:06Speaker 1: and long term commitment at Bridgeway and also the communities
- 19:09Speaker 1: that we live in. However, we expect everybody to engage
- 19:13Speaker 1: in that. And and if you look back over forty
- 19:15Speaker 1: years of compensation in the US, it's pretty clear to
- 19:18Speaker 1: me that things have gotten out of hand at the
- 19:20Speaker 1: top end. I just didn't want to get caught up
- 19:22Speaker 1: in that. It Bridgeway and actually it's a pretty great
- 19:25Speaker 1: screening tool for if you if you put at one
- 19:28Speaker 1: end of the spectrum, greed and a lot of things
- 19:31Speaker 1: that the finance industry is criticized for. And at the
- 19:34Speaker 1: other hand, generosity and making a difference in life at
- 19:38Speaker 1: the other end of the spectrum. It's pretty great to
- 19:40Speaker 1: be able to say, if you want to make seven
- 19:41Speaker 1: figures and you're about generating you know, personal wealth at
- 19:45Speaker 1: the high end, you won't come to Bridgeway like there
- 19:47Speaker 1: are other places to do that. We don't make any
- 19:48Speaker 1: value judgments about that. We just think that life is
- 19:52Speaker 1: about um more and if you take that attitude in worldview,
- 19:56Speaker 1: it's incredibly powerful. You also have a requirement that all
- 20:01Speaker 1: the staff members are shareholders in Bridgeway and they are
- 20:05Speaker 1: unable to make investments outside of the firm. UH. Does
- 20:11Speaker 1: that include the firm's investment portfolios? How do you? How
- 20:14Speaker 1: do you manage that? So two things. One, we have
- 20:17Speaker 1: what we call a partner stock ownership, which is typically
- 20:20Speaker 1: referred to as an esop so UM all the UH
- 20:24Speaker 1: full time UH people at Bridgeway. UH currently about of
- 20:30Speaker 1: your W two goes to buy stock in the advisory firm.
- 20:33Speaker 1: And that's across the board. That's not typically a firm
- 20:35Speaker 1: our size. The top five people or so would have stock. Uh.
- 20:38Speaker 1: This is broadly based across the full spectrum of salaries.
- 20:43Speaker 1: Some people thinks like, oh, so you have an ownership culture.
- 20:45Speaker 1: We say, yeah, they're aspects of that. So yes, you
- 20:48Speaker 1: want to you know, treat costs as you know your
- 20:51Speaker 1: cost and but we we like to focus on the
- 20:54Speaker 1: stewardship aspect of that. There's a there's an asset resources
- 20:58Speaker 1: that we've been entrusted with on behalf of our clients,
- 21:03Speaker 1: on behalf of the public good. When you talk about
- 21:05Speaker 1: the foundation, we want to do an excellent job with that.
- 21:08Speaker 1: That's the focus um and we think that comes back
- 21:12Speaker 1: in in multiple ways. Let's talk a little bit about
- 21:16Speaker 1: the modern world of investing. We see index funds taking
- 21:20Speaker 1: assets from active managers. You're experiencing the opposite. You're seeing inflows.
- 21:28Speaker 1: What are you doing to attract assets when most non
- 21:32Speaker 1: index funds are seeing outflows. Well, certainly we're experiencing that
- 21:37Speaker 1: in some places at Bridgeway. First of all, we do
- 21:39Speaker 1: have our own proprietary index fund. It's it's non market
- 21:42Speaker 1: cap weighted, has some really cool I'm an engineer by back,
- 21:46Speaker 1: really cool design features that we've executed. We just celebrated
- 21:49Speaker 1: twenty years. What makes that index unique and what led
- 21:53Speaker 1: you away from cap waiting research research is what we
- 21:58Speaker 1: live and breathe and do for living on the investment team,
- 22:02Speaker 1: market cap weighted index. The more stock goes up, the
- 22:06Speaker 1: more money you throw at it. That's a momentum strategy.
- 22:08Speaker 1: There's nothing wrong with momentum. It works of the long
- 22:11Speaker 1: term except well that's true. But but the main thing
- 22:14Speaker 1: is you have to you have to you have to
- 22:16Speaker 1: sell it over relatively short period of time, probably you know,
- 22:19Speaker 1: somewhere between three months and twelve months. If you just
- 22:21Speaker 1: hold on forever, then it goes up and then when
- 22:23Speaker 1: it falls, you go down. That's a very inefficient structure.
- 22:27Speaker 1: So with that insight, we went back and said, okay,
- 22:29Speaker 1: is there is there a different structure. We studied a
- 22:32Speaker 1: number of them. This was you know, twenty plus years
- 22:34Speaker 1: ago now, UH and a very basic equal what we
- 22:38Speaker 1: call roughly equal waiting strategy. UH has some really cool
- 22:44Speaker 1: risk statistics. So over the entire time frame since inception, UM,
- 22:49Speaker 1: you know, call it kind of flat between our fund
- 22:53Speaker 1: our strategy in the Blue Ship thirty five area and
- 22:56Speaker 1: SMP five fund. But the risk characteristic are really cool
- 23:01Speaker 1: at that the ten worst downturn quarters of the SMP
- 23:06Speaker 1: five hundred we've out we've provided cushion and nine of
- 23:09Speaker 1: those So there's something special going on. And I think
- 23:11Speaker 1: that relates right back to momentums with no hold period.
- 23:16Speaker 1: Just spinning it out is not a great strategy. That's
- 23:19Speaker 1: what a market cap waiting is. So you have to
- 23:21Speaker 1: be really careful about when you use market cap waiting
- 23:24Speaker 1: and when you don't. So you're you're evidence based. You
- 23:26Speaker 1: crunch a lot of data. The data typically suggests that
- 23:30Speaker 1: when markets are enjoying a high valuation, your future expected
- 23:36Speaker 1: returns are likely to be lower. How do you perceive, uh,
- 23:41Speaker 1: the current environment? Is that a fair statement? Or or
- 23:44Speaker 1: am I overstating it? So if the question is do
- 23:46Speaker 1: I think the market is expensive, the answers yes, how
- 23:50Speaker 1: expensive depends on how you measure it. But the second
- 23:53Speaker 1: question relates like okay, like statistically you can measure this
- 23:56Speaker 1: based on history that is more more expensive. So does
- 23:59Speaker 1: that mean we should get out of the market? Should
- 24:01Speaker 1: we time that somehow? And that's a very very different
- 24:04Speaker 1: question with with with an answer that takes you into
- 24:08Speaker 1: a buy and hold strategy on the market overall in
- 24:11Speaker 1: other words, your your expectation is the odds are strongly
- 24:14Speaker 1: against us. It's not only strongly, it's incredibly strongly against you.
- 24:19Speaker 1: This goes back to that year and a half that
- 24:21Speaker 1: I took off in in nine into ninety three doing
- 24:25Speaker 1: research where I actually went back and studied the Great Depression.
- 24:28Speaker 1: So like, if you want a granddaddy of downturns and
- 24:31Speaker 1: you want to understand if you're studying risk, which is
- 24:33Speaker 1: what I was doing, you go back to that period.
- 24:35Speaker 1: Some people say, like John, you know, like the FED
- 24:37Speaker 1: didn't even exist in his current form, why would you
- 24:40Speaker 1: go back to the nineteen thirties. My answer to that
- 24:43Speaker 1: is the specifics of risk have changed. Nuclear bonds didn't
- 24:46Speaker 1: exist in the nineteen thirties, so obviously that's a very
- 24:49Speaker 1: different risk. But the nature of risk itself has been
- 24:51Speaker 1: around a long time. You can learn a lot, and
- 24:54Speaker 1: I convinced myself from that a couple of things out
- 24:57Speaker 1: of that exercise. One is, be prepared for the downturn.
- 25:00Speaker 1: They will happen. It's not it's inevitable and and its behavioral.
- 25:03Speaker 1: It's not just based on how expensive, uh the market is.
- 25:08Speaker 1: Number Two, it's incredibly difficult to time that, and and
- 25:12Speaker 1: we've done all this research on a lot of different
- 25:14Speaker 1: ways systems that people have done that. It's just very
- 25:19Speaker 1: difficult to do. There's certain things you can reduce risk on,
- 25:23Speaker 1: like I mentioned the the market cap waiting in large
- 25:27Speaker 1: cap stocks UM. But the second thing I learned from
- 25:30Speaker 1: that is about leverage so UM. Some of my quant
- 25:34Speaker 1: competitors use a very significant amount of leverage and long
- 25:38Speaker 1: short strategies. I won't say that, you know that's a
- 25:40Speaker 1: complete You know that in all circumstances that's a bad idea,
- 25:43Speaker 1: but you should be very, very very careful. The Dow
- 25:46Speaker 1: Jones Industrial Average and the Great Depression fell eight s.
- 25:50Speaker 1: You can't say it can't happen. It has happened. That's
- 25:53Speaker 1: one thing about statistics is it's like, oh, that will
- 25:55Speaker 1: never Well, of course it can happen. It has already happened.
- 26:00Speaker 1: If you've got debt on top of you know, buying stocks,
- 26:03Speaker 1: it doesn't take much debt to completely blow you out,
- 26:06Speaker 1: to cash you out, like you're out of investing. People
- 26:09Speaker 1: forget how how recently we've seen a near crash. Everybody says, well,
- 26:17Speaker 1: twenty nine is so long ago. The NASDAC in two
- 26:20Speaker 1: thousand fell almost as much as the Dad Jones did
- 26:24Speaker 1: in twenty nine. It was I think it's just a
- 26:27Speaker 1: hair under eight percent of memory serves. So it's not
- 26:31Speaker 1: like it's a hundred years ago. It's a decade and
- 26:34Speaker 1: a half ago we experienced something very very similar. Yes,
- 26:38Speaker 1: So let's that brings us obviously to the behavioral side.
- 26:42Speaker 1: And you said something that I found quite fascinating. One.
- 26:47Speaker 1: The first part of it is the importance of behavior
- 26:50Speaker 1: to successful investing, but the second half was really interesting.
- 26:55Speaker 1: You said, it's been twenty five years of trying to
- 26:59Speaker 1: help investors manage their behavior, and it sometimes feels like
- 27:04Speaker 1: it's a losing battle. Yes, tell us about that. So, um,
- 27:09Speaker 1: so this is probably my biggest source spot professionally in
- 27:13Speaker 1: the investment uh, you know, the investment industry, in the
- 27:17Speaker 1: service that we've provided, the place where we're still living, uh,
- 27:22Speaker 1: the film. We have not solved the problem with what
- 27:24Speaker 1: I refer to as the behavior gap. The behavior gap
- 27:26Speaker 1: coined I believe by Carl Richards as a description of, um,
- 27:31Speaker 1: the natural tendency of human beings uh to uh buy
- 27:36Speaker 1: more when things are going up. Call it greed or
- 27:40Speaker 1: just wanting to get on the bandwagon. So it's chasing
- 27:44Speaker 1: hot returns. Uh. And on the downside, UH, fear when
- 27:49Speaker 1: things go poorly, when the stock market goes down, it predictably,
- 27:53Speaker 1: and it is so broad based, uh that people are
- 27:57Speaker 1: going to panic and and what do you do? You
- 27:59Speaker 1: get out? And they are all different versions of this.
- 28:01Speaker 1: It's but so it's another version of marketing timing. It's
- 28:04Speaker 1: it's behaviorally based. Um. And let me let me, let
- 28:08Speaker 1: me give you a real world example of this. At Bridgeway,
- 28:10Speaker 1: I looked at statistics on just before coming in updated
- 28:14Speaker 1: on one of our more aggressive strategies over the last
- 28:17Speaker 1: fifteen years. According to morning Star, the returns to investors
- 28:21Speaker 1: of this fund is the average in return is about
- 28:24Speaker 1: two thirds of the total return. So we've produced what
- 28:29Speaker 1: I think is very attractive fifteen year track record. The
- 28:32Speaker 1: timing of when people get get in and get out,
- 28:35Speaker 1: they're chasing hot returns. They panic, you know in oh A.
- 28:38Speaker 1: The net of all that over the last fifteen years
- 28:40Speaker 1: is the average January return is one third less. Like
- 28:45Speaker 1: from that standpoint, think like a third of the value
- 28:47Speaker 1: that we've created and that the economy has created gets
- 28:51Speaker 1: washed down the toilet by when people are in and out.
- 28:54Speaker 1: It's worse than that though. Think of that number one third.
- 28:57Speaker 1: If you take an investing rising of thirty years, like
- 29:01Speaker 1: you're saving for retirement, when you're forty thirty years later,
- 29:05Speaker 1: the amount of money that you've got is one third,
- 29:08Speaker 1: two thirds less one third of what it would be
- 29:11Speaker 1: had you just used to buy and hold stuff that alone.
- 29:14Speaker 1: So so the emotional side of the behavior is that
- 29:18Speaker 1: people underperform their own holdings. And then you add to
- 29:23Speaker 1: that the insult of you add insult to injury by
- 29:26Speaker 1: the loss of compounding of that over the long haul.
- 29:29Speaker 1: And this is not this is not just true of
- 29:31Speaker 1: individual investors. It's true in a very broad sense of
- 29:34Speaker 1: institutional investors as well. And the study I like to
- 29:38Speaker 1: cite on that is a study that was done of
- 29:40Speaker 1: pension fund performers, and they took a look at the
- 29:43Speaker 1: three year forward returns of managers that were fired versus
- 29:47Speaker 1: the ones that they hired to replace them. And what
- 29:50Speaker 1: do you think happen? I'm assuming the activity ends up
- 29:53Speaker 1: costing them more than have they done nothing. Well, it
- 29:56Speaker 1: not only costs them more if their transaction costs, but
- 29:58Speaker 1: the actual perform of those two players is flipped based
- 30:02Speaker 1: on what you would think the fired manager does better,
- 30:05Speaker 1: because there by you know they're being fired at if
- 30:09Speaker 1: they have a solid process, and if they're doing you know,
- 30:11Speaker 1: screw stuff, that's one thing, but they have a solid process,
- 30:14Speaker 1: is just out of favor. That's the time to be buying,
- 30:16Speaker 1: not selling. It's upside down. I have a buddy who's
- 30:20Speaker 1: a fairly well known household name. He's a hedge fund
- 30:23Speaker 1: manager and a value investor, and he says all the
- 30:27Speaker 1: time he could tell when an underperforming investment is about
- 30:31Speaker 1: to pay off. First the phone starts to ring, and
- 30:34Speaker 1: then the emails come, and then ultimately clients start pulling
- 30:38Speaker 1: money out. And usually it's at the moment when this
- 30:44Speaker 1: underperforming value approach is about to take off, and it's
- 30:48Speaker 1: it's been a it's been an interesting observation, just like
- 30:52Speaker 1: the pension funds firing people at the nature of their cycle.
- 30:57Speaker 1: I'm most comfortable when everyone else is ringing the hands
- 31:00Speaker 1: As an investor, that's just my my personal makeup. That
- 31:03Speaker 1: doesn't mean, however, that I should take that information and
- 31:06Speaker 1: try and time the market. That would be the wrong conclusion.
- 31:09Speaker 1: Just just holding through the downturns here's the here's another
- 31:14Speaker 1: great I mean you think Bilo said, all right, everybody
- 31:17Speaker 1: knows that most people will say they're doing that, and
- 31:20Speaker 1: then you go back and track their actual numbers, they're
- 31:22Speaker 1: not doing them. Most behavioral thing is much much stronger.
- 31:26Speaker 1: It's much easier said than done. Actually doing it requires
- 31:29Speaker 1: you to be comfortable when everybody is miserable and and
- 31:33Speaker 1: and we haven't solved that problem. Like I can show
- 31:35Speaker 1: you statistically, this is a problem at Bridgeway. By the way,
- 31:38Speaker 1: it's it's true of the index or still you can
- 31:40Speaker 1: look at Vanguard's, you know, biggest index fund. They've got
- 31:43Speaker 1: this problem as well. We've as an industry, we have
- 31:46Speaker 1: got to work on this and solve it. And I
- 31:48Speaker 1: think that's the next frontier. We have been speaking with
- 31:51Speaker 1: John Montgomery. He is the chairman and chief investment Officer
- 31:55Speaker 1: of Bridgeway Capital Management. If you enjoy this conversation, be
- 31:59Speaker 1: sure and stick around for the podcast extras, where we
- 32:02Speaker 1: continue to chat about all things investing. Check out my
- 32:06Speaker 1: daily column on Bloomberg View dot com. You can follow
- 32:09Speaker 1: me on Twitter at rid Halts. We love your comments,
- 32:14Speaker 1: feedback and suggestions. Email us at m IB podcast at
- 32:19Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot Net. I'm Barry rich Halts. You're listening to
- 32:22Speaker 1: Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast. John.
- 32:40Speaker 1: Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate
- 32:43Speaker 1: um all of your time. There are so many questions
- 32:45Speaker 1: we didn't get to Before I get to my favorite
- 32:49Speaker 1: standard questions, there's a bunch of things I have to
- 32:53Speaker 1: go back and and ask you about. Course, we blew
- 32:56Speaker 1: through them so quickly. We talked earlier about the behavior gap.
- 33:00Speaker 1: I have to ask you a question about that. Now.
- 33:03Speaker 1: Are you hearing from clients? Are you're getting emails and
- 33:06Speaker 1: phone calls? Given the supposed nosebleed valuation of the US markets,
- 33:11Speaker 1: we get questions, but I don't. I don't. I wouldn't
- 33:13Speaker 1: say it's it's overwhelming in previous that leads to the
- 33:19Speaker 1: quantitative evidence question. And you've been doing this long enough.
- 33:24Speaker 1: In previous market peaks, let's call it late oh seven
- 33:28Speaker 1: or late were you getting the same sorts of inquiries?
- 33:33Speaker 1: Did you? Was there anything to be learned by client
- 33:37Speaker 1: expressions of fear or they're usually greedier at the top
- 33:42Speaker 1: than fearful. Well, the main thing is it's always easy
- 33:46Speaker 1: to know what the top was after the fact, uh
- 33:49Speaker 1: in the middle of it. Uh like take us back
- 33:53Speaker 1: to remember the period very clearly in I thought, oh, gee,
- 33:59Speaker 1: this is really really expensive, Like we're really getting outside
- 34:03Speaker 1: the sweet spot of how how cheap or reasonable even
- 34:08Speaker 1: the market is. I don't like that. If I had
- 34:11Speaker 1: acted on that inside, and I wasn't wrong along with
- 34:13Speaker 1: other people, I wasn't wrong on that. Had I done that,
- 34:16Speaker 1: we would have missed one of the best years in
- 34:17Speaker 1: the stock market the following year. Absolutely, just because things
- 34:21Speaker 1: are expensive doesn't mean that they won't get more expensive
- 34:24Speaker 1: and that you should hold through that period. I remember
- 34:27Speaker 1: in nineties was when Louis Rukaser's elves first kind of
- 34:32Speaker 1: turn barished because they I remember the phrase the market
- 34:38Speaker 1: is now fully valued, as if that is significant, Like
- 34:42Speaker 1: markets go to fair value and then stop and that
- 34:45Speaker 1: that doesn't seem to happen. Sometimes they do, and at
- 34:48Speaker 1: some point they will. You just don't know when it's
- 34:50Speaker 1: gonna be so on your firm brochure, there's a line
- 34:54Speaker 1: um that I have to ask you about putting investors
- 34:57Speaker 1: long term interest first is a whole mo of our
- 35:00Speaker 1: firm's unique culture. Tell us what that means, what is
- 35:03Speaker 1: putting investors first mean it means sometimes you can make
- 35:07Speaker 1: more money for yourself and you shouldn't say that. Again
- 35:10Speaker 1: sometimetimes you can make more of money for yourself than
- 35:13Speaker 1: your client, and you shouldn't because we have a fiduciary
- 35:16Speaker 1: duty that should come first. That's what fiduciary duty is.
- 35:19Speaker 1: And by the way, that this is the financial services industry,
- 35:22Speaker 1: like some of this is law built into the forty Act, right, However,
- 35:26Speaker 1: it's true of any industry like this should always be
- 35:28Speaker 1: the case. I have a friend that says business is
- 35:31Speaker 1: a platform for community and service. That's a good way
- 35:34Speaker 1: to think about capitalism and what we're trying to do.
- 35:37Speaker 1: Putting our customer first should be how we wake up
- 35:40Speaker 1: in the morning, like that's that's what they pay us
- 35:42Speaker 1: to do, and it's and it's a beautiful thing to
- 35:46Speaker 1: be able to do that and to create wealth and
- 35:48Speaker 1: opportunities and employment and services and goods that people value
- 35:53Speaker 1: and need and want. So two and with gated withdrawals,
- 35:58Speaker 1: not a big fan, not a big and uh soft
- 36:01Speaker 1: dollars would be you know the an example from day
- 36:04Speaker 1: one where you know, in the early days of Bridgeway,
- 36:06Speaker 1: we could have paid for our Bloomberg terminals with soft
- 36:10Speaker 1: dollars and you know, like that would have flowed straight
- 36:13Speaker 1: through to our blind Frankly, it was a big deal,
- 36:15Speaker 1: and we just said, no, it's not the right thing
- 36:17Speaker 1: to do because this is really our customers money. It's
- 36:20Speaker 1: it's it's their money, and it's a it's a poor
- 36:23Speaker 1: structure that leads to poor decisions. We just don't think
- 36:26Speaker 1: we should have anything to do with it. That was
- 36:28Speaker 1: twenty five years ago. We've never paid uh soft dollar
- 36:31Speaker 1: commissions for research and terminals and the other things that
- 36:34Speaker 1: you can do. So let's talk about your annual report.
- 36:37Speaker 1: I've been reading Warren Buffett's most recent annual report and
- 36:41Speaker 1: some of the ones from the two thousands. You've been
- 36:44Speaker 1: doing an annual report for quite a while. Tell me
- 36:48Speaker 1: about quote the worst thing of the fiscal year. What
- 36:53Speaker 1: is that? Well, you know, I like to think that
- 36:57Speaker 1: we listened to our our investors um and I had
- 37:02Speaker 1: an investor conversation that wins something like this, you know, like,
- 37:06Speaker 1: so I'm the like this in the forty Act fun
- 37:09Speaker 1: I'm I'm the shareholder, I'm the customer, and you're the
- 37:13Speaker 1: manager and you work for me, and I think that
- 37:18Speaker 1: I have the right to know like the bad stuff
- 37:20Speaker 1: like most you know, here's the shareholder letter, all this
- 37:23Speaker 1: great stuff we did and look at this and yes,
- 37:27Speaker 1: and he said, spare me the accolades. Tell me what
- 37:29Speaker 1: you guys messed up. I just I like, think about it.
- 37:33Speaker 1: You have a boss. Your boss wants to know the
- 37:35Speaker 1: stuff that's good, but also the stuff that's bad. I
- 37:38Speaker 1: just couldn't get around that logic. And I thought, you know,
- 37:41Speaker 1: there's just gotta be some way to do. So we
- 37:43Speaker 1: brainstorm that this was probably coming up on twenty years.
- 37:47Speaker 1: It wasn't the very beginning bridgeway, but it wasn't too
- 37:49Speaker 1: long after that, and we thought, well, we're just gonna
- 37:51Speaker 1: put in our annual report the worst thing that happened
- 37:54Speaker 1: in the year. We'll just you know, own up to it.
- 37:56Speaker 1: Our law this by this drives lawyer's nuts. It's like
- 38:01Speaker 1: admitting a liability. It's like you're putting on a silver
- 38:04Speaker 1: platter stuff for people to see you everything. But built
- 38:07Speaker 1: into that is otherwise is the implication that we're flawless.
- 38:11Speaker 1: We never made any mistakes. It's not only that, but
- 38:13Speaker 1: you can't learn from the mistakes if you don't get
- 38:16Speaker 1: them out in the open and on the table. That's
- 38:18Speaker 1: the bottom line, and we are absolutely committed to learning
- 38:21Speaker 1: from mistakes. We have this ball called the Mistakes Ball
- 38:23Speaker 1: that we passed to the newest partner coming into Bridgeway.
- 38:26Speaker 1: So whoever is the latest one has got it. And
- 38:28Speaker 1: it's on the ball it says it's a baseball, and
- 38:30Speaker 1: on the ball it says mistakes are the jewels. We
- 38:33Speaker 1: expect new people coming in and by the way, old
- 38:36Speaker 1: people that have been there at Bridgeway for some time
- 38:38Speaker 1: to make mistakes. If you're not making some mistakes, then
- 38:42Speaker 1: then you're not going to achieve the mission that we've
- 38:44Speaker 1: got in the world. That that's that's fascinating. Not to
- 38:48Speaker 1: confuse Bridgeway with Bridgewater. Yes, many years ago I had
- 38:53Speaker 1: read something that Dalhio had written, so actually I had
- 38:57Speaker 1: I was complaining about things in in the media. I
- 39:02Speaker 1: won't mention the outlet that were just wrong, and they
- 39:05Speaker 1: were consistently wrong, and every time I brought it to
- 39:08Speaker 1: their attention, they refuse to acknowledge. It very simply had
- 39:14Speaker 1: to do with um annual home monthly home sales. And
- 39:19Speaker 1: there's a pattern very clearly the due to weather or
- 39:23Speaker 1: whatever home sales start out pretty weak in the beginning
- 39:25Speaker 1: of the year, they start to the spring is where
- 39:28Speaker 1: it kicks up. And every year April is better than March,
- 39:31Speaker 1: June is better than April, August is better, you know,
- 39:34Speaker 1: peaks around July August, and then it fades and and
- 39:37Speaker 1: people were saying, oh, look, you can't look at it
- 39:40Speaker 1: month a month. You have to look at it July
- 39:43Speaker 1: oh nine to July eight, not oh, look, July is
- 39:46Speaker 1: better than June. And I couldn't get these people to
- 39:48Speaker 1: understand the math. And I was whining about it, and
- 39:52Speaker 1: and somebody emailed me and said, well, it's it's good
- 39:55Speaker 1: that you're bringing these errors to their attention. What are
- 39:58Speaker 1: you doing about your own mistakes? And I said, that's
- 40:02Speaker 1: a fair criticism. And every year I started publishing my
- 40:06Speaker 1: own mea culpers Here's what I got wrong, and here's
- 40:10Speaker 1: what I learned from it. What the person had sent
- 40:12Speaker 1: me was something that Dahlio had written about, which was
- 40:15Speaker 1: exactly what you just described, which is you have to
- 40:19Speaker 1: make mistakes and learn from them, otherwise you never improve.
- 40:23Speaker 1: We're all going to make mistakes, it's a given, yes,
- 40:26Speaker 1: But the lawyers give you grief about it. Well, not
- 40:30Speaker 1: in in fairness like our lawyers are at the the
- 40:33Speaker 1: high end, Like we're still doing it like without a conversation. Uh,
- 40:36Speaker 1: we're doing it. Um. But this is also human nature.
- 40:40Speaker 1: It's not just lawyers. I'm putting them on the hotspot. Uh.
- 40:43Speaker 1: There we all you know, we all tend towards being
- 40:46Speaker 1: defensive and like it hurts, so you walk away from
- 40:50Speaker 1: you know, the stuff that hurts. But if you want
- 40:53Speaker 1: to improve and grow and be really great, and I'm
- 40:56Speaker 1: an engineer, so I think of continual small improvements, Um,
- 41:00Speaker 1: then you've got that's that's like, that's your fadder. That's
- 41:03Speaker 1: where you can really learn from and grow. There's there's
- 41:06Speaker 1: one other principle that relates to this I just want
- 41:08Speaker 1: to mention, and that's diversity. So we all know you
- 41:10Speaker 1: don't want to hire a bunch of yes people, right,
- 41:13Speaker 1: but there's tremendous psychological pressure to hire people that look
- 41:18Speaker 1: and and feel and think just like you. And there's
- 41:21Speaker 1: all this you know with the media, there's all this
- 41:23Speaker 1: research and and and people are thinking about it with
- 41:27Speaker 1: with respective news stuff. That's what it's who you know,
- 41:30Speaker 1: and it's also who you feel most comfortable with. If
- 41:32Speaker 1: you're in finance, you want to associate with your people,
- 41:36Speaker 1: your stuff, with people whom you trust. Who do you trust?
- 41:38Speaker 1: Trust people that look just like you. That is a
- 41:41Speaker 1: formula for disaster. So under our servant Leadership program at Bridgeway,
- 41:46Speaker 1: part of what we're trying to do is hire people
- 41:48Speaker 1: intentionally that don't agree with us, people who have a
- 41:52Speaker 1: different view into things. The cool thing about that is,
- 41:55Speaker 1: like this is, you know, diversity of ideas and frame.
- 41:58Speaker 1: If you look at the what people look towards as
- 42:01Speaker 1: the physical diversity around gender, um, rays um, you know,
- 42:07Speaker 1: skin color, We've got more diversity there as well at
- 42:09Speaker 1: Bridgeway than the vast majority of our competitors. I'm proud
- 42:12Speaker 1: of that. It's not something we set out to do.
- 42:15Speaker 1: On my team of eight people at Bridgeway, I'm the
- 42:19Speaker 1: only uh male WASP on the team. And again there's
- 42:25Speaker 1: there's no rule that you know that that has to
- 42:28Speaker 1: be case. We're not you know, we don't have quotas
- 42:30Speaker 1: or anything like that, but we're looking for diversity of
- 42:33Speaker 1: viewpoint and opinion and people that don't agree with us.
- 42:36Speaker 1: And and I have some people just like do you
- 42:38Speaker 1: know that this other team member doesn't agree with you
- 42:41Speaker 1: on X Y is you know, like yes, and that's
- 42:43Speaker 1: a good thing. That's what. That's how you have different
- 42:46Speaker 1: ideas and helps you, uh get out of your own
- 42:49Speaker 1: silo and and moves you forward. Tell us about the
- 42:52Speaker 1: Jam accountability group. Okay, So, um, I have an amazing
- 43:00Speaker 1: support network in my life in general. So you can
- 43:02Speaker 1: start with my ninety four year old mom. I'm her
- 43:05Speaker 1: baby still at you know, age sixty one. Um, friends, Uh,
- 43:12Speaker 1: that is that is Uh, you have to work on
- 43:14Speaker 1: that because my father's my father passed away at nearly
- 43:16Speaker 1: my age. So you know, I try and lean towards
- 43:19Speaker 1: really taking care of myself. Um. But part of part
- 43:23Speaker 1: of a great support network for me over the last
- 43:26Speaker 1: eighteen years has been a group called Firewood. Uh. And
- 43:30Speaker 1: it's an accountability group. And and it started when a
- 43:33Speaker 1: friend of mine called me up and said, so I
- 43:36Speaker 1: want you to be on my board. And like, Charlie,
- 43:39Speaker 1: what board are you talking about? Like he worked for
- 43:41Speaker 1: ex son and he wasn't in a position to invite
- 43:42Speaker 1: me son at the time. Uh. And he said, well, no,
- 43:46Speaker 1: the board of directors of my life. And I said, well,
- 43:49Speaker 1: what's that? What does that look like? So he kind
- 43:51Speaker 1: of got me into the conversation. Um, if I examined
- 43:55Speaker 1: my life, I had a lot of areas of support,
- 43:58Speaker 1: very little accountability. So this group is one that still needs,
- 44:01Speaker 1: eighteen years later, um about once a month every three
- 44:05Speaker 1: four weeks, with the specific purpose of holding each other
- 44:09Speaker 1: accountable to what our life dreams and goals and milestones are.
- 44:14Speaker 1: So if you take on homework, people will suggest homework.
- 44:18Speaker 1: If you take that on which we document, you come
- 44:20Speaker 1: back the next meeting, you you better have done your
- 44:23Speaker 1: homework or you know, like you're gonna be actually held
- 44:26Speaker 1: accountable for that. Um. And I think it's just I
- 44:30Speaker 1: know I need that in my life, bottles. And I
- 44:32Speaker 1: don't know that everybody needs that. I think probably to do,
- 44:34Speaker 1: but I know that I need it in my life
- 44:36Speaker 1: to stay on track or I just I'm gonna get
- 44:38Speaker 1: off track or procrastinator, all the kinds of things that
- 44:41Speaker 1: come up that that's really fascinating. And and before I
- 44:45Speaker 1: get to my standard questions, I have two last things
- 44:49Speaker 1: I have to ask you about. One is how you
- 44:52Speaker 1: track your time, and the second is your trip to Africa.
- 44:57Speaker 1: So I'll let you pick, okay, whichever one you want. Well,
- 45:00Speaker 1: Tracking my time is something I do about every year
- 45:03Speaker 1: and a half uh cycle, just to see am I
- 45:06Speaker 1: am I spending the resource of my time? How I say?
- 45:09Speaker 1: Does it line up with my life goals? And when
- 45:10Speaker 1: I say it's most important? You can do the same thing,
- 45:12Speaker 1: by the way, with your check book if you you
- 45:14Speaker 1: know you want to, you want a litmus test of
- 45:16Speaker 1: are you actually living the life that you intend to?
- 45:18Speaker 1: And say you are? Those are two views in so
- 45:21Speaker 1: how I spend my time is is something i'm you know,
- 45:23Speaker 1: I'm a quant so but but but with my checkbook,
- 45:27Speaker 1: I could export it to Quicken or am X or
- 45:29Speaker 1: whatever and it will give me a breakdown. Y, you
- 45:32Speaker 1: spend this much on t n A and this much
- 45:35Speaker 1: on you know down the list. How do you physically
- 45:37Speaker 1: track your time? Yea, I wish they were a mint
- 45:41Speaker 1: dot com for you know, my time because it's a
- 45:44Speaker 1: real pain to do. I do it in a spreadsheet
- 45:47Speaker 1: like it's kind of fifteen. You update that every day
- 45:50Speaker 1: for for a three month period, so we have quarterly
- 45:53Speaker 1: for a three month period. Every year and a half
- 45:55Speaker 1: or so. I do that to get accounting of how
- 45:58Speaker 1: am I really spending my time and is it in
- 46:00Speaker 1: line with what I want and what can I learn
- 46:02Speaker 1: from that? I mean, it's like, what are the takeaway?
- 46:04Speaker 1: Do you find that? Oh gee, I'm spending a lot
- 46:06Speaker 1: of time doing this and I didn't realize it. Yes,
- 46:09Speaker 1: I would imagine if people actually did that, they would say,
- 46:12Speaker 1: I watch how much TV? I think it would be shocking.
- 46:15Speaker 1: I watched very little TV. And that's that's one reason.
- 46:19Speaker 1: You know, I taped some things, so I watched it
- 46:21Speaker 1: kind of on my schedule. Did the time tracking lead
- 46:24Speaker 1: to last TV? It reinforced it very strongly. Yes. And
- 46:28Speaker 1: then tell us tell us about the trip to Africa.
- 46:31Speaker 1: So this was in June of this year. Uh and
- 46:34Speaker 1: a dream we'd had for a while of taking seven
- 46:37Speaker 1: partners at Bridgeway. So this is out of thirty people,
- 46:41Speaker 1: we took seven of the members of our firm to
- 46:46Speaker 1: um Rwanda as a base and then Eastern Congo. Eastern Congo. Well,
- 46:52Speaker 1: let me back up a little bit. We give half
- 46:54Speaker 1: of our profits away. The core mission of Bridgeway is peacemaking, reckons,
- 47:00Speaker 1: afiliation and ending genocide. We have a focus area which
- 47:03Speaker 1: is sub Sahara Africa are least Our last conflict we
- 47:06Speaker 1: worked on was um the l r A, the Lord's
- 47:10Speaker 1: Resistance Army, which you may remember from the Cony video
- 47:14Speaker 1: and uh everything that came about from that. But this
- 47:20Speaker 1: was the longest running conflict in Africa, and we engaged
- 47:23Speaker 1: with partners on the ground in Africa to try and
- 47:25Speaker 1: reduce the violence there, which we got an independent assessment
- 47:28Speaker 1: that said, yes, between depending on how you measure it,
- 47:32Speaker 1: for six year period, UH, decrease the violence around this conflict.
- 47:37Speaker 1: So ahead, like you actually can make a difference, move
- 47:40Speaker 1: the needle on this stuff. Um. We're in Congo on
- 47:43Speaker 1: this last trip to just bring partners in to see
- 47:48Speaker 1: you know, the arian kinds of things and potential partners
- 47:51Speaker 1: were working with. This is the area of the highest
- 47:53Speaker 1: incidents of rape as a weapon of war in the world.
- 47:56Speaker 1: So that hits my radar screen. A life goal of
- 47:59Speaker 1: mine is ending on aside. This is a stepping stone
- 48:02Speaker 1: toward that, um and UH. And it was sharing that
- 48:06Speaker 1: Uh that was led not by me but by Shannon Davis,
- 48:09Speaker 1: are our head of our foundation. Is amazing, amazing, passionate, engaged, creative.
- 48:16Speaker 1: UM woman who's who's got our mission written all of
- 48:20Speaker 1: her heart and and and her actions. Wow, that that's
- 48:24Speaker 1: quite astonishing. Would you would you recommend people visit that
- 48:30Speaker 1: part of the world? What? What is that? Actually? That
- 48:33Speaker 1: experience actually like so, um, Rwanda is an easy place
- 48:38Speaker 1: to go. There's a genocide there, you know, in it's
- 48:41Speaker 1: been some time. What's happened in that country is inspiring
- 48:44Speaker 1: and amazing. Uh, So definitely recommend that. I wouldn't go
- 48:47Speaker 1: into the specific areas that we did unless you were
- 48:49Speaker 1: with people that really know what they're doing. But the
- 48:52Speaker 1: inspiration that comes from that, the coming back to the
- 48:55Speaker 1: US and knowing where you fit into the world is
- 48:57Speaker 1: worth It's it's just worth its weight in gold. Wow.
- 49:01Speaker 1: That that that's really um inspiring. Let's uh, let's jump
- 49:05Speaker 1: to our standard questions that we ask all our guests
- 49:08Speaker 1: in our last twenty minutes or so. UM, tell me
- 49:12Speaker 1: something important about your background that most people are unaware of. Okay,
- 49:17Speaker 1: my father was the president of an oil exploration firm.
- 49:21Speaker 1: From him, I learned, UH, risk management, because you don't
- 49:25Speaker 1: survive in the exploration business, especially when he was doing
- 49:29Speaker 1: it without a real strong controls around risk management. Also,
- 49:35Speaker 1: integrity is the number one business business value. I learned
- 49:38Speaker 1: that from him. Uh, And we spend that out in
- 49:40Speaker 1: a lot of different ways at Bridgeway from my mom.
- 49:44Speaker 1: My mom was a soldier in the War on Poverty
- 49:47Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties. I was a young kid at
- 49:49Speaker 1: the time, and she kind of like I was her
- 49:51Speaker 1: fourth child. They were all in school, and she kind
- 49:53Speaker 1: of put me under her arm and and go out
- 49:55Speaker 1: doing volunteer work. Um. I remember a daycare center, you
- 49:58Speaker 1: know that I volunteered with along with her. She did
- 50:02Speaker 1: a number of things across um, racial, gender, other other
- 50:08Speaker 1: boundaries lines. So I learned from her, if something's wrong,
- 50:12Speaker 1: like you don't have to live with it, step across
- 50:14Speaker 1: that line, makes something happen, makes something happen, move the needle. Um.
- 50:19Speaker 1: She was a great model, is still at ninety four
- 50:22Speaker 1: an amazing model of that. Uh. Some early mentors tell
- 50:27Speaker 1: us about who your early mentors were. I have learned
- 50:30Speaker 1: something from every boss I've ever worked for. So the
- 50:32Speaker 1: very first boss I was a paper boy at age eleven.
- 50:35Speaker 1: But my first boss um was at Baskin Robbins, this
- 50:38Speaker 1: guy from Argentina who was just a great entrepreneur and
- 50:42Speaker 1: great with kids. Uh. And and what I learned from
- 50:45Speaker 1: him was getting the hard stuff on the table and
- 50:48Speaker 1: dealing with it in a constructive, not oppressive way. That's
- 50:52Speaker 1: the principle I've used everywhere the rest of my life,
- 50:55Speaker 1: and I'm thankful for him teaching me that. More recently,
- 50:58Speaker 1: I would say last night, I was at dinner with
- 51:01Speaker 1: Ruth Messenger, who is the UM. I'm a big believer
- 51:04Speaker 1: in mentoring, and she's been a mentor for some time. Uh.
- 51:09Speaker 1: She's fifteen years older than me, so she's like a
- 51:12Speaker 1: window into what I need to be paying attention to
- 51:15Speaker 1: in the decades head very bright, boots on the ground, committed,
- 51:22Speaker 1: believes things that can can change. And she was the
- 51:24Speaker 1: last head of the American Jewish World Service. And I've
- 51:27Speaker 1: loved studying how she does what she does and mixing
- 51:30Speaker 1: it up with her. So tell us about some investors
- 51:33Speaker 1: that impacted your approach. Who who's influenced you over the
- 51:37Speaker 1: years You've you've mentioned Eugene Fama, Yes, who who's affected
- 51:42Speaker 1: the way you look at at investing? So Eugene family
- 51:45Speaker 1: would be one. As in terms of a framework for risks.
- 51:48Speaker 1: Prior to that, Jack Bogel around costs um Um, I
- 51:52Speaker 1: love managing costs down uh, and he's a great model
- 51:56Speaker 1: for that. UM. Jeremy Stiegel stocks for the long run,
- 51:59Speaker 1: so staying in a diversified way uh in stocks as
- 52:03Speaker 1: as the growth engine over decades, not months and years.
- 52:07Speaker 1: And then probably um, Daniel Kahneman on the behavioral finance side,
- 52:12Speaker 1: I'd say he was the you know, one of the
- 52:14Speaker 1: fathers of behavioral finance. And that opened up my eyes. Um,
- 52:18Speaker 1: let's talk about books. This is everybody's favorite question. Uh fiction,
- 52:23Speaker 1: non fiction, classics, recent stuff. Tell us, tell us what
- 52:27Speaker 1: you're reading and enjoy it. Um. So I'll give you
- 52:30Speaker 1: three titles. One is the Bible, so great, uh, mapping
- 52:34Speaker 1: for life in general, but especially finance. There's a lot
- 52:37Speaker 1: written in the Bible about finance. The thing I mentioned about,
- 52:42Speaker 1: you know, borrowing, for example, is but that's tying, and
- 52:45Speaker 1: you're doing five x tie things, so you're over and above. Yeah,
- 52:50Speaker 1: I've got a friend who says tie thing is a
- 52:52Speaker 1: bad deal. Uh. Like, if if you're all in, you're
- 52:55Speaker 1: all in. That's a hundred percent. So whether you're spending it,
- 52:58Speaker 1: you know, on you know, uh something, you know, going
- 53:01Speaker 1: out for dinner tonight or not, you still need to
- 53:03Speaker 1: be all in. So I think that's an interesting way
- 53:05Speaker 1: of thinking about that issue. And then that's before we
- 53:08Speaker 1: get to the issue of the debt jubilee where there's
- 53:11Speaker 1: forgiveness of debt is at every seven seven years. Uh.
- 53:14Speaker 1: So that that's a fascinating uh. It is topic. It
- 53:19Speaker 1: is and we should think seriously about that. So maybe
- 53:23Speaker 1: maybe not literally because I think you know, our large
- 53:26Speaker 1: banks and small banks too might have a problem with
- 53:28Speaker 1: that bond hole, but not thinking about what underlies that
- 53:31Speaker 1: and showing up as generous and not um holding holding
- 53:36Speaker 1: something over other people in a way that's disempowering it.
- 53:40Speaker 1: We should spend a lot of time on that, and
- 53:42Speaker 1: you should do that if you're a bank in my
- 53:44Speaker 1: in my opinion, two other books titles Daring Greatly, which
- 53:47Speaker 1: is about shame and guilt. Daring Greatly, Yes, Burnet Brown's
- 53:53Speaker 1: book based on ten years of her research, which is fascinating,
- 53:57Speaker 1: like as a research guy at the research itself is
- 54:00Speaker 1: just fascinating. But the topic is about shame and guilt
- 54:03Speaker 1: in our culture and what you can do about it.
- 54:05Speaker 1: And I highly recommend the book. And the last one
- 54:07Speaker 1: would be, um, uh, The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. So
- 54:13Speaker 1: this is uh, this is a book that gets into
- 54:17Speaker 1: anybody that's in science or research should read some chapters
- 54:21Speaker 1: of this book that deal with that. We all think
- 54:23Speaker 1: that because we're doing numbers and statistics that were objective.
- 54:26Speaker 1: This book would say not so much. Your biases come out.
- 54:31Speaker 1: You're human, like we are just as human, and if
- 54:34Speaker 1: you think that you don't have that problem, it's going
- 54:36Speaker 1: to creep in more not less. So as a research team,
- 54:40Speaker 1: like we live and breathe this stuff is like, how
- 54:42Speaker 1: do we hold ourselves accountable to not letting our natural
- 54:45Speaker 1: biases come in? So we have a we have something
- 54:48Speaker 1: we call confessing our biases. So sometimes we'll come in
- 54:51Speaker 1: with an insight, but it starts with I need to confess,
- 54:54Speaker 1: you know, a bias. And it's like I'm a contrarian.
- 54:56Speaker 1: So like I would come was like, guys, I'm I
- 54:59Speaker 1: love you know, this is a contrarian situation. Of course
- 55:01Speaker 1: I'm gonna love it, right, That doesn't mean it's the
- 55:04Speaker 1: right thing to do. So since you've started managing money
- 55:07Speaker 1: on a quantitative basis, what has changed? Oh, so we're
- 55:13Speaker 1: talking about UH, you know, twenty four or thirty years,
- 55:16Speaker 1: depending on when you want to start counting. Bridgeways UH
- 55:19Speaker 1: celebrating its twenty fifth anniversary next year. In that time frame,
- 55:23Speaker 1: certainly UM passive UM and indexing has really taken off.
- 55:29Speaker 1: That has very significantly reduced costs. That's good, not bad
- 55:33Speaker 1: UM for investors. More attention to tax efficiency, which I
- 55:37Speaker 1: think and will continue to grow. Technology. So in this period,
- 55:41Speaker 1: the Internet came in, which just transformed research and how
- 55:45Speaker 1: you do it. It's been a really wonderful thing. Robo
- 55:47Speaker 1: advisors would be, you know, part of the technology part,
- 55:51Speaker 1: and there's some good things about that. There are also
- 55:53Speaker 1: some bad things about some of these technology things that
- 55:55Speaker 1: the top of the list would be if you make
- 55:57Speaker 1: it easier for somebody to day trade, that's how actually
- 56:00Speaker 1: a bad thing. I agree. I agree with with Jack
- 56:03Speaker 1: bogel Um on that point. We should be worried about
- 56:05Speaker 1: being able to day trade UM E T S and
- 56:08Speaker 1: the implications of that. So those are some of the
- 56:11Speaker 1: things that have changed in in my investing. So UM
- 56:15Speaker 1: along the lines of your annual fiscal disaster or annual
- 56:20Speaker 1: fiscal confession. Shouldn't say disaster, Uh, tell us about a
- 56:24Speaker 1: time you failed and what you learned from the experience.
- 56:29Speaker 1: Oh wow, so UM. You know, we've had a lot
- 56:33Speaker 1: of different categories. We've had compliance um uh failure at
- 56:39Speaker 1: least disappointment. Um to the to the tune that we
- 56:43Speaker 1: said we want to become a top quartile player in compliance,
- 56:47Speaker 1: and my compliance officer says, John, you can't say that
- 56:49Speaker 1: because like how do you measure that? And like, you know,
- 56:52Speaker 1: what's the accountability on that. That's a great point. That's
- 56:55Speaker 1: an example of somebody coming in with a different view
- 56:58Speaker 1: um on that. But we knew we had to up
- 57:00Speaker 1: our game. We spent a lot of resources to make
- 57:03Speaker 1: that true. The source of some of that, if I
- 57:06Speaker 1: hold a mirror up was I was really cheap in
- 57:08Speaker 1: the early years of Bridgeway. Um. I didn't want to
- 57:12Speaker 1: I didn't want to outsource anything that I didn't understand myself,
- 57:16Speaker 1: and I was new to the industry. So we were
- 57:17Speaker 1: on transfer agent, we were on pricing agent. We programmed
- 57:21Speaker 1: our own software and stuff that people just don't do.
- 57:24Speaker 1: Learned a lot out of that, probably held onto too long,
- 57:28Speaker 1: uh low cost in favor of getting more help in
- 57:31Speaker 1: so we've changed that. That's be an example that was
- 57:33Speaker 1: from you know, the early years of Bridgeway that that's
- 57:36Speaker 1: really interesting. So you mentioned um uh physical fitness. What
- 57:40Speaker 1: do you do to stay fit? What do you do
- 57:42Speaker 1: to stay mentally sharp outside of the office. So I
- 57:47Speaker 1: ran four miles with our president this morning in Central Park.
- 57:50Speaker 1: I'm visiting New York City today to be here with you,
- 57:53Speaker 1: and that's one of my favorite places to run. So
- 57:56Speaker 1: a typical week for me would be uh to two
- 57:59Speaker 1: days running a short run in the long run. So
- 58:01Speaker 1: I ran six miles last Sunday. Uh today, the four
- 58:05Speaker 1: mile is the short run. That's that's my short Yeah. Three,
- 58:10Speaker 1: keep going. Um. Actually ran my first marathon ever. I
- 58:14Speaker 1: only run one last year. UM. That was a life
- 58:16Speaker 1: goal that I set at Um. How was the experience?
- 58:21Speaker 1: I have to ask, because I'm I always remind people,
- 58:24Speaker 1: you know, the first guy who ran a marathon drops.
- 58:27Speaker 1: That is true. That is absolutely true. A very different
- 58:30Speaker 1: lesson from that than you did well. Training is key, Okay,
- 58:35Speaker 1: So excellent training. Um and and and they're I mean
- 58:40Speaker 1: they're great life lessons in that too, that to run
- 58:43Speaker 1: a marathon successfully and do it well and not hurt yourself.
- 58:46Speaker 1: If you can do that, if you have the discipline
- 58:48Speaker 1: and you get the right like though, you can apply
- 58:51Speaker 1: that to any career. UM. So I like that. Two
- 58:55Speaker 1: days a week would be pilates and two weeks, two
- 58:58Speaker 1: days a week would be UM weightlifting, and I usually
- 59:02Speaker 1: try and mix it up with a swim. So I
- 59:04Speaker 1: was going to say, it's always something different. Yeah, Like
- 59:06Speaker 1: I like frustrating on that, UM, but I like research
- 59:10Speaker 1: and so that's the source of some of that. And
- 59:13Speaker 1: now and now our two favorite questions that I ask
- 59:15Speaker 1: all our guests. Uh, So millennial or recent college grad
- 59:20Speaker 1: comes to you and says, I'm interested in going into
- 59:24Speaker 1: quantitative finance as a career, what sort of advice would
- 59:27Speaker 1: you give them? Well, Uh, first of all, I'd say, um,
- 59:35Speaker 1: it's a great industry, great opportunities. Um, people are shying
- 59:39Speaker 1: away from it right now, which means the opportunities are bigger,
- 59:42Speaker 1: extreme competition. So those would be those would be the
- 59:46Speaker 1: things that I you know, uh, you know, overlay somebody
- 59:51Speaker 1: that's thinking about getting in as as far as overall advice.
- 59:53Speaker 1: And by the way, in my family of origin, advice
- 59:56Speaker 1: is the language of love, like if we're not if
- 59:59Speaker 1: you if a fan leamers not giving you advice, like
- 1:00:01Speaker 1: it's something wrong. So I love advice. The bigger picture
- 1:00:05Speaker 1: advice with millennial would be, UM, save aggressively, UM be
- 1:00:09Speaker 1: generous with the results of that UM and have big
- 1:00:14Speaker 1: life goals, pursue them relentlessly within the framework of a
- 1:00:18Speaker 1: balanced life. And our final question, what is it that
- 1:00:22Speaker 1: you know about investing today that you wish you knew
- 1:00:26Speaker 1: thirty years ago? Definitely the behavior gap that we talked about,
- 1:00:30Speaker 1: the cycle of people, you know, chasing hot returns and
- 1:00:33Speaker 1: panicking on the downturn. UM. We're doing a better job
- 1:00:37Speaker 1: with this, slowly, gradually. We have a partnership UM with
- 1:00:44Speaker 1: two strategies with the BAM Alliance. I think they do
- 1:00:48Speaker 1: a superior job of this, and so we're learning from them,
- 1:00:51Speaker 1: but we've got to do a better job. So UM,
- 1:00:55Speaker 1: I wish that I had known the dynamics of that
- 1:00:57Speaker 1: thirty years ago, maybe we'd be farther along with you know,
- 1:01:00Speaker 1: solution UH and a more effective one. We've been speaking
- 1:01:04Speaker 1: with John Montgomery. He is the founder, chairman and chief
- 1:01:07Speaker 1: investment officer at Bridgeway Capital Management. If you enjoy this conversation,
- 1:01:14Speaker 1: look up or down an inch on Apple iTunes and
- 1:01:16Speaker 1: you can see any of the other hundred and fifty
- 1:01:19Speaker 1: or so such conversations that we've had over the previous
- 1:01:23Speaker 1: three years. We appreciate and enjoy your comments, feedback and
- 1:01:28Speaker 1: suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg
- 1:01:34Speaker 1: dot net. I would be remiss if I did not
- 1:01:37Speaker 1: thank my ACE team who helped put this podcast together.
- 1:01:41Speaker 1: Each week, Medina Parwanna is our audio producer and engineer.
- 1:01:47Speaker 1: Taylor Riggs is our booker slash producer. Michael Batnick is
- 1:01:51Speaker 1: our head of research. I've Barry Ridhoults. You're listening to
- 1:01:55Speaker 1: Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio t T take TAMPED
- 1:02:03Speaker 1: into the