YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Hunt

lines on the record: 128
first: 2026-01-09
most recent: 2026-01-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't, right? So my goal is not to. Do the trades. My goal is. Mr. Hedge Fund Guy, Mr. Asset Allocator, you know China, right? You know your companies. You know your commodities. Here is data I think you'll find useful. The efficacy of it, though, is up to you. I don't know what you want to do with it. I want to sell the picks and shovel Honestly, for this vast new data set that we all know is important, but we have”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to be careful with what I say. Which is that There are a number of high frequency stat ARP guys. Where, if it's important for you to note the difference in word choice on a millisecond level I think you can get something out of that. I do. And so there are firms that can do that very well. That's not our game, right? This is not the... What we're trying to identify is not just sentiment, not just word choice. This is not Google Trends and how many times did they mention AI in the earnings report? We're able to track the actual stories that drive behavior.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my God. But I was just looking today and not to pick on Bloomberg, but it was their live coverage of the Fed. Statement. They were analyzing the sentences and the Fed statement for hawkish and dovish sentiment.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we think we've discovered is an entirely new source of data. And what we're confident is that we've built the systems that are very different from what you see with this sort of Analytics that are out there for anyone else, right? So this is not sentiment. Right, we're not tracking or using mean words or nice words.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but it's interesting, right? Because they've had ups and downs, a business cycle before. But this is the first time where You saw consumer behavior that really was kind of similar to what you might find in a Western consumer behavior. Point being, you didn't hear that from LVMH or the Macau gaming guys until... February. And we were picking that up in November from the domestic Chinese media.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often it's very different. So we were able, for example, picking up, we were able to pick up way before it got picked up in Western press. The demand for luxury goods in China went off a cliff.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over 100x. And now we've had a multiple of that again. It is hard to describe in the expansion of the net is in so many different directions. Everything we were doing before was just English language. So now you're Anything that an AI has been trained on. Read it, and we can say we can.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a small data set. And it's a pretty small data set. So we rebuilt all of our software using AI as an operating system, context engineering, control, how you dole out the text data, how you test it, how you allow it to think. And we thought, all right, you know what? We're building a bigger net. I bet we see five, maybe even six X improvement in our signal capture.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is the whole notion of embedding so that there are a million ways to say, I'm bullish about the management change at company XYZ. There are million ways you can say that. And if you're in the business as we were, of kind of handcrafting, let's write down all the ways you can say that.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, we did our first models and our first versions of this, and we license it to some big banks. Here's the problem, Barry. We had constructed a net, and it was a pretty good net. I mean, when we would dip it into a data stream, we'd catch a fish, meaning a signal And the signal works. Good hit on the signal that we put up. The problem was we were missing too many damn fish. Our net was too small. And we'd say, Oh, we got this one. And then we'd look back at whatever it was we were designing the model. So we'd say, well, how did we miss all these other fish? And the answer was the small language model we were constructing, it's incredibly complex if you are Building these models without Probabilistic approach that modern LLMs allow you to take.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is AI. So, what we were doing in our early stage, we were basically doing small language models. We were making the language models essentially by hand.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get a lot more ups and downs post that discovery phase. Than you do when you're enjoying the discovery phase. It's a lot harder once you have the now you may say, oh, but this other catalyst and then say, well, but that discovery.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the rest of the world wakes up to something that you had noticed and identified before, that's when the money is made. Once it gets out there,”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I found in my Experience as an investor is that you make the most money on a trade during what I call the discovery phase of a trade.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When a value investment only works when the market recognizes it. And we are tracking when something like that gets discovered by the market.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, you've got something I've got. Here are the companies where I think I've identified something special, something that's valuable, that the market does not recognize. And so I want to buy it, and then I'm just going to wait. I got to wait until one day the market realizes the market comes to their senses and says, oh, wow, that should trade at a higher, multiple, or a higher price because that special thing that you saw, that source of value, the rest of the world comes to see that. What I can think I can show you is when the rest of the world starts to wake up to whatever it is you're looking for.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't think it matters. I want to provide this information to people who do have a view on the truth. Let's say you're a value investor, right? You're running a fund. You've got your views. You've done your homework. You've done your research.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it wouldn't be on the sell side. Now, so I'm interested in reading the sell side research, not because I think there's some nugget of truth in there, but because I want to see what they're all talking about. Right.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some are better than others, but none of them are really If there was, I'll call it kind of significant alpha there, they wouldn't be.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things that's happened on Wall Street is that the banks and the sell side have become very jealous of their publications because they tend to think, and they're wrong, that they're good at it, right? That they're good at analysis. Personally, I don't think they are. Well,”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You remember those machines? Yes. Remember those machines? I would code, hand code the coded data. I would type it into Remote access for a digital equipment mini frame and the next day, you know, something would churn out for me. Today it's processing hundreds of billions of tokens. We get millions of documents overnight like that. And we have infinite computing resources available to us.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crazy, right? And it used to be, it used to be crazy. I mean, Barry, I really do remember in the academic days, I would literally hire grad students and give them a cup of dimes so they could down to the microfiche machine. I remember them.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to tell the reader how they should think or how policy should go. That we find Has a lot of predictive capability to it.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's high resolution and very descriptive, right? Was surprisingly hawkish today. And he was that's a description. There's another type of story we tell Barry, and that's prescriptive. Meaning the Fed should be hawkish. The Fed should cut by 25 basis points. Those are the stories that are indicative of an effort being made to move public opinion in a certain direction. That's like the forward guidance that. The Fed still does, right? Using their words for effect. They're using words to nudge you and how you should think about the world, how to think about the world. So the crucial thing when we're doing we're asking AI to here's all the text in the world, here are the stories that we want you to identify. We can also boil that down into Identify the stories that are”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No idea. So, what you're able to do if you're able to, again, put the genie in the bottle. Tell it how to think about a problem is you're able to identify, and this does go back to the work from 35 years ago, the type of stories we tell that we humans tell about stocks or politics, we tell two types of stories. We tell descriptive stories. Oh, the fed Rates by 25 basis points today, a descriptive story. And we can also tell a descriptive story.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me what was To treat it Well, that's right. This is why I mean you treat it, you need to treat it as an operating system. You need to constrain every bit about it, particularly in how you allow it to think, because it wants to please you so badly. It does. So if you ask it what's interesting, it will look back at its history of communication with you and it'll think, what will Barry find interesting? And it will give that answer to you. And if it can't find it easily, it'll make it up. It'll make up an answer that you will find interesting”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around the AI because you want to limit it to being that linguistic calculator. You want it to be your operating system. That's really the way the thing. And if you do that, then it will give you the same answer twice for the same inputs and the same question. That's the crucial thing. For this to be true, for it to be consistent, for it to be real signal. So this is a human directed process. You can't ask AI an open-ended question. You have to control all the inputs. You have to control the output, meaning you judge it, you run it back through a different AI system to say, had they do, did they go off the rails here? But the most important thing is you have to give it the scaffolding. You have to give it the”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It includes prompt, but the phrase that's used in this world is called not prompt engineering, but context engineering. Okay, that makes sense. So you want to control everything.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a good one. It'll hallucinate a lot, yeah, right? It'll go out, it'll find its own data. The secret to using AI successfully is to take this magic genie because it's a magic genie. And you stuff it into that bottle. You do not let it out. You constrain it dramatically. You don't let it go out and find data. You give it the data. Crucial thing, you don't allow it to You tell it how to think. So, the most important step that we do is we don't ask AI what are the narratives that you look at. We tell it, this is human direction. You have to have human control. So I'm hearing.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The crucial thing is you can't just ask AI an open ended question, say, what are the narratives in? For this company or for this sector, don't do that, right? And this is a mistake that people make all the time. They ask open-ended questions of chat GPT or whoever. The problem is chat GPT will give you an answer.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The point is, there's a finite number of stories. You can drill down so you can get a couple of dozen about any sector you want to talk about. But it's a finite number. And so what we do and what I think is really interesting is to track that finite number of stories. And you're right, it's not just around markets. We track several thousand of these stories today.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right Tolstoy is supposedly Tolstoy. He said there were only two stories that a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Those are the only two stories in the world.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My hero, right? There are only so many stories in the world. And that's a now. I like to talk about in Hollywood. Famously, there are only like five scripts. That's right.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that story You just change the name, that's the same story that's repeated over and over again about any pharma or biotech company. The stories, we think that they are amorphous and variable. The fact is that the core of the story, what we call the semantic signature, the meaning of a story. They're amazingly. Constant over time. So, what we're looking for is for, and it could be dormant for a long time, but what you want to know is when that story starts picking up again, when Someone starts playing that story when it appears on Kramer and starts happening in the financial press. That's the stuff we can pick up with real precision. So it's both the stories that are starting to fade. But I think the really interesting stories are the stories that have been dormant for a long time and they start picking up again.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you identify the narratives because the narrative, the stories don't ever change. So the story Gold aside for a while. Think about we're talking about your bullish on company XYZ because There are about depending on how, again, how finely you want to resolve that, there are only about a dozen stories for why you're bullish on something. They can be management change, top line growth opportunity, consolidation in the industry.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Meals ready to eat It becomes a security and its meaning changes from That apocalyptic modeled water And the meaning of gold today is Or government error. That's the meaning of gold today.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When that ETF came out, right? Which A very similar pattern because once it became a table at the Wall Street casino. Then It takes on a different meaning. Specifically around gold, gold changed from being okay something that Bury in your backyard, or you're having your vault, you know, along with ammo and seeds for when the hard times caught.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are no fundamentals with crypto. And people will say there are, but there aren't, right? It's driven by the waxing and waning of stories. And do they find purchase? Or do they kind of people get tired of them?”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started Percy in 2018. My partner from, we were at an asset manager spun out there to take the... The technology that I've been working on for years and really been writing about with epsilon theory. So we started that in 2018 to do the basic research into processing enormous amounts of financial news data and to track the stories And how they rise and fall and wax and wane over time. So that was the goal.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the LLMs are. They're linguistic calculators. And so we've processed several hundred billion tokens. Again, it's not complex, but it is at scale. And what we're doing with that is we're reading the world's news. To understand the world's stories and narratives. And you're right, it's much bigger than, or it's much more... Focused that we have much higher resolution than just saying, oh, I'm bullish on financials. I mean, that's a narrative, sure. But there are 20 different variations of that. You're bullish on financials. Why?”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A token is like a word or a phrase, and so that's the kind of the unit that you talk about when you're putting through something through a linguistic calculator. Which is what... All of the”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whole lot of stuff. 100%. So, what we're able to do today, and this is the crazy change in the world back from when I was. Doing this on microfiche back in The 1980s. Yeah, exactly. Week it, we have access to everything that's published publicly in the world. There are a couple of big data aggregators, Dow Jones 1, Lexis Nexus another. Everything that gets published in the world, all these languages available to you. And it's not cheap, but it's not crazy expensive like it used to be. It's always getting cheaper. So we're able to take everything in the world that gets published, all the newspapers, all the websites, all the transcripts, everything that's published publicly. We can pull in. And then we can process it. Process it with really it's the same math that I was using 30 years ago. Nobody's invented cold fusion here.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are three, I think, real secular changes we've had. Markets become this political utility. The success of constructing a story. Structural changes in social media and the devices that we insist on caring with ourselves all the time.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's my dopamine machine. And we do it to ourselves. It's not that someone forces us to hear these stories over and over again. We do it to ourselves. I mean, I get a little nervous if I, you know, where's my phone? Where's my phone? I get a little nervous. And it is absolutely a neurotransmitter addiction. I think it's so important to keep that from our kids. That's a whole nother.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Washington Post And here's the thing there's not enough hard news to fill the time or to fill the space. So what takes the space? Opinion. Story.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To that audience, enormous change. Change, structural change in our media, both quote unquote, news media, but also financial news media. The Wall Street Journal today is a 24-7 news financial news organization. What isn't news?”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, you've got a segment. You're going on Kramer. You got to get him say bye, bye, bye. You got at most four minutes, right? How are you going to tell that story that sings?”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It changes the time horizon. It is a very different skill set because you're not telling the story of, oh, I'm getting another turn of leverage in our operations or our capacity utilization in this factory went up by 5%, which are the kind of stories you would tell even on earnings call or certainly to a board. Now, this is the story where you've got a segment.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if it works So it was the fact that it works to tell a story and people got good at telling stories It's the growth of 247. I want to use air quotes here. I'm glad we're taping this. Well, it's medium social.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when you see that something's working, they're getting a multiple by telling the story and going on Kramer four times a year.”
2026-01-09 · Masters in Business · Using AI to Find Investing Stories with Perscient Co-Founder Ben Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source