YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Nygren

lines on the record: 121
first: 2025-06-22
most recent: 2025-06-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Not quite, but my closest story to that was when I was in college, I worked as a bad boy at the local supermarket. And if you worked a five-hour shift, you would get a half hour break. And I would always buy a Wall Street Journal and go down to the break room and read that. And one of the stock boys was just, again, bent over in laughter coming down and tastes like, oh, big time bad boy thinks he's a Wall Street genius. And I remember about 10 years later, I was at my parents' house for Thanksgiving and was running to the store to get something that my mom had forgotten for dinner and saw this same guy loading up frozen food into the frozen food aisle TV dinners into the frozen food aisle and just kind of smiling to myself and”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And at the time I wrote that paper, I never envisioned being surrounded by such an incredible team as I am at Harris Oakmark. So obviously it's a very different position I'm in today than what I had envisioned if I was a one-man shop managing a small amount of money in a mutual fund.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kids in the class. And when I said that the goal would be to get investors to invest $25 million with me, there was such loud laughter in the room that I just walked away dejected with my head down. But like a lot of people who have had successful careers in business, investing, sports, the more people told me that I couldn't do it, the more I was committed that I was going to achieve it.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm like, no, no, no, that's not what I want to do. I actually would like to start up a fund, and I'm writing a school paper project on it. So I wrote about completing my accounting degree, working in the accounting industry for a couple years, working for an investment firm for a couple years, and then trying to start a mutual fund. And we had to come up with financial statements. I said back then the average fee was about 1%. If I could get people to trust me with $25 million, that would be a quarter of a million dollars in fees. And if expenses ate up half of that, I'd be able to make a very nice income and be off to the races on a successful fund. And the presentation was oral, so it wasn't just a written paper to the professor, but gets in front of all the other.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the University of Minnesota offered an entrepreneurship class probably ahead of its time. There weren't a lot of them back then, and they're fairly common today in college programs. The class was mostly business school students, and I was one of the few seniors who was in the class. And for our, instead of a final exam, our final project was to write a business plan about a small business that we thought we could start. So I wrote about starting a mutual fund. Part of my research I contacted mutual shares and asked if I could speak to somebody about starting a mutual fund. They put Mike Price on the phone and he had no idea what I was talking about when I said I wanted to start a mutual fund. He said, I don't take orders for it, but if you want to put in more than $500, I'll connect you to somebody who will help you invest in our fund.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“5% interest rate, money market funds were at 12%. So that was an arbitrage I took advantage of. And then eventually decided I'd be better off if I put that money into stocks that were selling at four or five times earnings rather than the money market fund. So for me, that was kind of the start of the personal investment journey. It all started in this time where we had double digit inflation, very low economic growth. The Jimmy Carter Malays years. And that was all I knew. So it didn't feel that abnormal. I was not a great student of history. So I think I know much more about the pre-1975 stock markets today than I did back then.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very conscious of the backdrop, oddly, it didn't seem that out of the ordinary at the time because there were consecutive years that were tough years for the economy, very high inflation, and you kind of just got used to it. I think what probably struck me more than anything was how few people were interested in a career and investments. And again, being kind of a natural contrarian, that was part of what attracted me to the area was that none of my friends were interested in pursuing the same avenue. And I think back at that time, lots of high quality, stable businesses were selling at four or five times earnings. Student loan money was available to anybody. You didn't have to have need. And it was available at like a”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think I am. Like I said, I've always enjoyed math more than English or any of the non-quantitative subjects in school. Statistical analysis made sense to me before I even started applying it to businesses. And I think everything we do as an investor is you're looking at an uncertain future and a range of possible outcomes and you're trying to assign probabilities and you're looking to capitalize on those where you've got a different view of the possible outcomes than the average investor does.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say probably not. It's been about flat, but oddly, another hobby of sports gambling has been successful enough that I have a difficult time placing bets on teams that I want to. When the app-based sports gaming apps came out, so it was mobile and you could do it from home, all of the different companies had their own odds engine, so they all had different odds. And if you looked for the opportunities, there are opportunities to bet on both sides of a game and profit no matter who won. And I did that very aggressively to the point that most of those apps don't let me play anymore.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I mean, it wasn't about the money. The money was great, but it was solving a puzzle. And to me, like casino gaming is the same thing. The only game in the casino that you can get an edge on the house is Blackjack if you're card counting. And it's one of my frustrations, an unmet goal in my life. I've always hoped I could get kicked out of a casino for card counting. And I make no bones about varying my bets based on what's left in the deck. And I've managed to attract a lot of attention at a blackjack table by the casino management, but have never been successful enough that they haven't wanted my business.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because, I mean, by its nature, we're buying stuff other people are punting and giving up on. So you have to be comfortable taking a position that isn't in the majority. And that's something I've been comfortable with since I was a kid.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My close friends in high school were kids that were in the National Honor Society. And that was never the group of cool kids in high school. But it was kids who were confident in their own intellectual ability. And especially in things that were quantitative or mathematical, if you worked out a solution on something, the fact that a bunch of people disagreed with you doesn't trigger you to think you made a mistake. You know, your first thought is I did this work. I'm probably right. And I don't really care that a bunch of other people came to a different conclusion. And my interests were different than other kids were. My focus on math because it was something I was good at was different than other kids were. So I never really felt like I needed the support of the crowd. And I think that's an important attribute in value invest.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a great insight into how lots of different people with different personalities had found a way to be successful in investing. But I could kind of listen and hear the ones that I could imagine myself thinking like. And that my thought process squared a lot more with how John Neff talked about how he talked about companies and the decision to involve. Things being more out of favor made them more exciting to him or the way John Templeton talked about taking advantage of when other people were getting overly concerned about the environment. So yeah, that had a tremendous impact. And I feel very privileged that I had a chance to be on Lou's show twice before he passed away and to go out with him and talk about his career dealing with all these successful investment people. He was one of my heroes.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first, it probably says a lot about me in my high school years. That was before we had even VCRs and time shifting and there was no on-demand. And at 7.30 on Friday nights, I was sitting at home in front of the TV watching Wall Street week. The appeal to me first, Lou himself was such a different personality. Most of the figures that we have on TV today. Lou had access to you in your home once a week for 30 minutes. And he was always the calming voice. Even in the midst of stock market crashes, he was the one who had come on and tell you to think long-term, tie yourself to the star of America, and eventually your investments would do fine. And he tended to have guests on that reinforced that point of view. And again, it was.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Around them that would be predictable and successful. So I was pretty pessimistic about the efficient market theory books by the time I did read them. The growth books, like the Phil Fisher books, I knew that wasn't my personality to find something that was great, dream about how much better it might be a decade from now. So those never resonated with me. John Templeton, Ben Graham, some of the stuff that it wasn't necessarily in book form yet, but like John Neff's interviews in Barron's, Michael Price at Mutual Shares, those thought processes made a lot more sense to me.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe I was lucky with the order that I read the books in, but starting out with intelligent investor, that laid out the framework for a different way of thinking about stocks than the kind of things University of Chicago or Burton Malkiel were saying didn't work, where you would look at it as a business, you'd try to understand what the business was worth, and then only consider investing in the stock if it sold at a significant discount to your estimate of business value. So what I would read, like some of the things that Malkiel or the professors at UFC were testing, like if you bought a stock after it went up 10%, would it continue to go up or down 10%? And they were testing all these things that really had nothing to do with underlying intrinsic value of the company and showing that those things, there was no way to build an investment philosophy.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Arbitrage has always had an appeal to me just because of the very low risk level and the certainty of it. But I think the opportunity in investing in companies tends to put you in a better spot because you have a much stronger tailwind.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And for me, it really even started before I knew what the stock market was. One of my grandfathers was a milkman back in the day that they actually delivered milk to the door. And he would have to make collections. And so he would come home with this bag of coins. And I was six years old in 1964, the year that the U.S. stopped making silver minted coins. So in 65, the coins were made of some metal blend that wasn't really worth anything. But people who were paying with older coins were still paying with the silver coins. So I would save up my allowance, go through my grandpa's bag of change, and then substitute the less valuable quarters and dimes for those that were silver. And ended up when I was in college, I bought my first car with. Money that I made from arbitraging silver coins.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that followed me into school when I started writing in the security analysis class and we had to pick a company to write up. I wrote about National Presto, the small appliance maker out of Eau, Wisconsin that was selling below its cash value. And that kind of getting something for free aspect of value investing is something that's still part of our process at Harris Associates today. But I think the reason it works for all of us is because it's kind of the way we live the rest of our lives. It's not asking us to be somebody different when we approach an investment decision than any other kind of purchase decision that we make.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And shopping specials. We might go to two or three different stores because each store would have something different on sale. And if it was summer and nobody had grapes on sale, then we didn't have grapes that week. And if cherries were at half price, we'd have lots of cherries and wait for the next week for the grapes. And that method of trying to stretch dollars applied at the grocery store. It applied when we went out to dinner. It applied buying clothing. So when I started reading investment books, the books that were more growth investment oriented, kind of dreaming about how great the future could be, never really resonated with me the way the books like Ben Graham, Warren Buffett, John Templeton, have basically buying”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First, that's not nearly as heroic as it sounds now. Back then, at a suburban branch of the St. Paul Library, the investment section was probably about this big, only maybe 30 or 40 books. Today, as investing has become so much more of a national hobby, the collection of books about it has grown exponentially. But going back then, the book that was probably most influential to me was intelligent investor by Ben Graham. I've always felt that you're maximizing your chance of success in investing if you behave the same way as an investor as you do in the rest of your life. And I had grown up in a middle class family. I remember from a very young age being dragged along to the grocery store on trips with my mom.”
2025-06-22 · We Study Billionaires · RWH058: Winning Ways w/ Bill Nygren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT