YouSaid · the spoken record

Bruce Martin

lines on the record: 74
first: 2021-08-19
most recent: 2021-08-19
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

“An equity guide because I had a job in bonds and was paying well, so I stayed with it, so I said, okay, the business is worth a billion, and the loan is five hundred million, so I'm covered two to one. So I was looking at the world the opposite, which is not how much can the company grow, but how much can the company shrink? How much trouble could it get in without me being damaged? And then if I concluded there is no way we're ever going to lose money on this loan from a permanent capital loss, then the question was, am I getting paid enough for it? And so we would fill a CLO with 100 loans. I had five analysts, they would each cover 20, and the question was always the same. What is this business worth for every one of those hundred? How far below that are we lending? Are we really secured? How much are we getting paid? Got it. So the pivot to Still Lake for me wasn't a mental pivot in terms of how I'm doing what I'm doing. It finally freed me to apply the...”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm smiling from the moment you ask the question which is how did you go from being a Bongai to an equity guy? And I would answer by I was never a Bongai. I was always an equity guy. From the moment I read that Berkshire Hathaway report in ninety three, and I think I have read everything written about Warren Buffett, everything written by Warren Buffett, every letter, every book. So I basically took that and said, how do I apply that in Bond World? And the way I applied it, and you've probably, you may remember when I say this because when you say transparent, this is what I explained everyone. I'm like, look, the first thing we do when I was a portfolio manager when I was an analyst, we value the business, okay? So if companies coming to raise debt and they want to raise a leveraged loan, we have to be able to value the business. So I've been valuing the business since the beginning. Now, typically that's what an equity guy will do. And if he can buy the business at a discount and thinks it'll compound, he wants to own it.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the dream has matched, dreaming about some of 23 years I was nervous it wasn't going to all line up, but it has. And so here I am today with a portfolio of 25-ish securities, mostly stocks, and that vastly between 20 and 30. I've got about eight outside investors, or I refer to them as partners. It's about 250 people who get my writings every quarter and other musings I send out.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what I want to do. And she's like, What? I go, I want to manage money the way Buffett is managing money. I want to have a big enough pool of capital. I don't have to raise capital. And then I would ask people and people who have known me from that beginning time when I left Angelo Gordon five years ago to do still lake, which is what I'm doing now. People have known me that whole period of time sort of laughed and like, Bruce, you have been talking about this from before you even started. This is what you wanted to do. I'd ask people, like, how much money do I need? That's a personal question that's different for everybody. I mean, I had four kids, so I needed more money than I thought at the beginning, but once I got it, I knew two years before I left Angel Gordon I was leaving. And I was questioning whether I should do what format, what style, and boiling it all down to, I'm talking to you from my office a mile from my house where I work for myself, by myself at Still Lake Capitol, and I've been doing that for five years now. And the reality.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“credit fund and unlevered credit fund totaled about thirteen different vehicles, and then I started a direct lending business before I left. And hitting rewind all the way back to when I started at Hancock, there was a guy I was interviewing with Arthur Calvertinos. He's still a weird guy, and I think he would smile if he heard me say that, but it was a quirky interview, so he was boring me, so I looked behind him and I go, what is that life-size cutout behind you? And he looks, he goes, Warren Buffett. And I'm like, who's Warren Buffett? And he hands me a Berkshire in a report. It literally is like, get out of my office and go read this. And that night I was reading it in bed and I'm elbowing my wife going.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what do they say? He goes, Well, those are the guys who completely cleaned our clock on Trump and Angelo Gordon took it because they had the secured debt. Putnam lost it because they had the high yield bonds and Angel Gordon ended up with the company. So again, I go to Angelo. I'm there. So that's a 99. Six years later, Jeff Aronson leaves and I didn't think Angelo Gordon after Jeff Aronson was going to be a thing. He was probably the smartest guy I ever worked for. But of course I was wrong again and I got handed co management of the CLO business with a partner at the time so this is 2005 and I stayed for another eleven years and from the CLO bus we raised a bunch of CLOs. We went through the 2008 nine crisis and then we raised some credit opportunity funds. I think for me I think I was running 13 different funds CLOs separate accounts.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I go to Angel Gordon and I start learning leverage loans. He had just started a CLO business. So now from high yield bonds, I would say if you're doing high yield bonds, you sort of have a black belt in credit. And so to do loans, in my brain was much easier, the wrinkle being we then took those loans and put 10 turns of leverage on it in a CLO. So the stakes of being wrong were just 10 times higher. And again, that appealed to me. And then I learned how to deal with stress and distress credits. If something got into trouble, Angela Gordon, their biggest business at that time was distressed. So they knew how to do workouts. So again, my learning curve went mad. Massively up. In fact, when I told the guy who hired me at Putnam that I was leaving, Steve Peacher, he was like, where? And I said to Angelo Gordon, he goes, Who the heck is Angelo Gordon? And somebody whispers in his ear who's in the meeting and he goes Oh”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really interesting firm. Sounds like it does some really, I think I'm going to learn a ton again. Thought I knew everything after six years and I was open.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But nobody's getting paid this year because of what happened with earnings. And that just didn't compute with me. I'm not working this hard to be beholden to something of that magnitude. It just doesn't make sense to me. And so again, my wife saw my wheels turning and I knew a guy, actually Doug Ostrover, who's at Al Rock now has built another incredible business, who was at GSO. He was my DLJ sales guy when I was at Putnam. And he had told me in some negotiation I was having, he said, you strike me as a guy who really cares about what he does who spends a lot of time and energy. And if you ever want to make a move, let me know. I let him know. He introduced me to Angela Gordon. I had never heard of Angela Gordon again. At that time, Angela Gordon had $3 billion under management against Putnam's four hundred billion. I flew to New York, I met with Jeff Aronson, who now is at Centerbridge, and a week later I took the job. In that week I made a bunch of phone calls, and I said to my wife, it's small, but it sounds like it's”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got there, I think Putnam had eighteen billion, and the whole firm of Putnam had 400 billion at the time. It was a machine, and it was a very impressive company. So I decided to leave Putnam two years later. So now I had been working for six years in the Boston area, come up through high grade, through high yield, picked up multiple industries probably covered more than half the industries out there, if not three quarters. My wife is pregnant with our second child telling me she's feeling a little isolated. I can see Bruce and you're getting itchy. So the year was 99, and I forget, I don't know if it was the Russian debt crisis or long-term capital, something blew the markets up that year. And the only reason it was relevant for me that I know it is when we got paid that Geroputnum, and this is what made me leave, in addition to it being difficult, we did all these 360 reviews and they told me I was doing this incredibly great job.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And said, If it doesn't work out at Putnam, please come back. I tell that story to younger kids also too, because part of my whole, I don't know, philosophy is the right word, but there's a lot of acting that goes on in life, and there's a big part of life that you have to recognize is just a game. Don't take it personally. If I could play you back the film of the vitriol with which he was screaming at me when I told him I was leaving, to how docile he was when he came back in three weeks later. And I was a young kid, and I'm a sensitive person. I was upset, and I laughed when I left instead, I can't believe he just said the opposite, from you'll never work in this, you know. So again, all good life lessons. And good lessons when you talk to CEOs and people are putting on shows, and you have to be able to read through the BS. So I did a couple of years at Putnam. Putn was a very difficult place, but it was big. I mean, Eden Vance, I think, had six hundred million in high yield when I”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a lunch at the Meridian Hotel and 30 accounts will show up and sit at all these tables and listen. But Putnam won't go to that lunch and Fidelity won't go to that lunch because the company's going to go to your office and you're going to sit down at a table just one-on-one and you're going to get to know the CEO, the CFO. You're going to have such better meetings. It's going to be so great for your own brain, your own career. I felt bad. I had a mentor. I always tell young kids find mentors, a guy older than me. I was racking my brain going. I spoke to Putnam for four months. So now it's six months I'm at Eaton Manz and I said, how can I leave? I just got here. And my mentor said, look, once in a career, you can do something like that. You looked under the hood, even though you like Eaton Vance. It's a good career move. And so I did it. Eden Vance was upset like he told me there was an older guy there who told me I'd never work in that town again when I first told him he was screaming at me. I told him I'd give him three weeks. At the end of my third week he came.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I had a friend who was a sales guide Lehman Brothers in Boston who's like you have to go to Putnam. I'm like, why? He goes Bruce, when companies come to Boston that want to raise a high yield bond issue.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Heard me asking questions, spoke to me, sat next to me on the plane home, and basically offered me a job to just be a high yield analyst. So I left John Hancock after three years. I told them why and my bus said, Look, we've trained you to be high grade, I don't want you to just do high yield. I said, believe me, I understand that I'm appreciative, but I really want to learn more industries, more sectors, and high yield is just way more fascinating to me. Eaton Vance had a pure high yield fund. And to me, I was like, I can spend all my time doing high yield. I go to Eaton Vance, I pick up more industries, so now I'm covering paper, packaging, auto parts suppliers. I was only at Eaton Vance six months because two months after I got there research at Putnam, guy named Steve Peacher, who's now at Sunlife building a very big business, and he again reached out to me. He's like, I didn't know you were leaving Hancock, I want you over here. I'm like, well, I just went to E.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Liquidity earnings, I went to conferences, I talked to analysts, so I understood the competitive analysis nature of okay here's Bank America okay here's Chase okay here's this and lining up all these banks seeing where they're trading at a spread over treasuries that was my original training ground and I spent three years at John Hancock Mutual Funds and after the first year and a half two years I picked up two high yield industries supermarkets and home builders home builders being a little related to finance supermarkets viewed as one of the easier sectors to get your head around I really got a taste for that I really enjoyed the high yield again at a conference and up and coming portfolio manager at another company Eaton Vance.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First job is analyzing investment grade bonds focused on the finance industry, the investment grade bonds of banks, later insurance companies and finance companies, and everything grew out of that, but it was funny. The boss who hired me looked at myself and my friend Tom, who I'm still close with and said, Look, Bruce, I don't expect you to add value for two years. And then when you do, Tom can move on and do equities. And then he laughed, and Tom looked at me and said, Please don't take two years. I really want to go do equities. And so it took me six months, and then they let Tom move on, and I really just read annual reports front to back for the six months I would read at that time it was Chase. It wasn't J.P. Morgan Chase, and then I would read Bank America, and there's tons of banks that don't even exist today. And from each one, I would learn the next. And he taught me the Camel approach to analyze which they teach with the Fed, which is capital asset, quality, management.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harvard management, and I met with each of them, but they sort of nudge me to the side. My MBA was at Northeastern, and they're used to hiring Ivy League exclusively. And, you know, okay, maybe we could do something on the money desk, Bruce. All of that was irritating but helped kind of formulate sort of like that marine commercial. You hammer the metal long enough it gets stronger. So I was getting pretty fired up to do this. Total fluke, I got a job from a professor at Northeastern who also managed money at John Hancock Mutual Funds mentioned to the professor that I really liked that he was looking for someone that they could teach because they had just trained an investment grade bond analyst who now wanted to go to the equity side and they said he has to train a young guy and then he can move on. So they brought me in and I took the job and the guy who was training me he had worked at the federal”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do whatever you want as you figure yourself out over the next four years. So I do that. My first job is as an actuary, which I think is near and dear to your heart. I think we share that background. And I kind of knew before I did it I was not going to like it, but it paid well. I had a very close friend from college who was a year older who was doing it. It got me down around Wall Street area. I had a serious girlfriend at the time who is now my wife. I said give me a year, let me see what I'm doing. Did the actuary went to business school? Still no intention of working on Wall Street, thought I'd be a financial analyst at a company. I really enjoyed my investing class. I'm still close with my professor from all the way back then I graduated in ninety three. And I said, all right, you know what? I'll give myself six months to try and find a job on Wall Street. My mother had remarried, her husband was a Harvard business school grad who had all these friends in very serious jobs at Goldman Sachs.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So with all of that I go to college, and a footnote which may end up being relevant or not later in some of the discussions, so my father passes away my senior year in high school sort of suddenly, got sick and went quickly, so I was going to go to West Point, which is another total fluke has nothing to do with a military background or anything. I just thought, wow, great education. I'll get in shape, I'll serve the country, this will be cool. I'd gone there for basketball camp. Father passes away to decide not to go, I go to a very liberal arts college, and I was going to major in philosophy because I loved the philosophy classes I was taking, and I had a cousin who worked on Wall Street, who was the only one in my family who said Well, don't do that. What are you going to do with a philosophy major? Don't you have math skills because I had taken some math in high school that I got college credit for? I said, yeah. He said, well, why don't you be a math major? He goes, people will at least think you're smart, and then you'll have much more opportunity.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Michael, I want that, and he'd push me backwards and said, We'll give you thirty dollars for the table and I looked up at him and my head I'm like, wait, you can do that. And so that also fascinated me, the fact that not everything is what it seems. You can negotiate. You can have a price you want.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny when people ask me that, I always never know exactly how far to go back and then people take a breath when I'm like, when I was a child, but it sort of factually true. As a kid, money was always a big topic in our family. When we drive down to Florida, stay at our grandparents, early bird specials. So I always knew money was a thing that everybody wanted. Nobody had enough of, at least in my family. We all lived a good, happy life and childhood, but money was just always a big topic. So it fascinated me. I had a grandfather who had gotten divorced and married a wealthy widower and supposedly lost all the money and I never understood that, and I really interviewed him about it, and I said mental note that's not going to happen to me. I really ought to understand money. I had an uncle who used to take me to garage sales all the time. That's how I furnished my first house, and the reason it's relevant, watching him haggle, I think I saw a table on sale for whatever, one hundred twenty dollars.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is so great to have this opportunity to chat with you today. Thank you for agreeing to join me. Would love to start with your background, how you got into investing. You and I met a long time ago, bonded over our backgrounds in actuarial math, but there's so much more to your story. Walk us through how you ended up being an investor.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Portfolio right now is where I'm doing the diligence right now. And then if we move forward on an investment, we would have to have that conversation of the institutional platform, operations platform.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. So, as an individual, like you look at his education, his career background, he's clearly grown up in institutional firms and he knows what it means to be institutional. I want him to develop into that at still like, that takes a lot of investment. You know what it takes to invest in back office and all the systems and support that you'll need. That's going to be critical, I think, to gain institutional money. And it's something that I'm watching. I haven't had that specific conversation with him. Like, all right, Bruce. If you really want institutional checks, let's go through this kind of a list. Because that I view is a very easy to solve problem. No institution is going to invest if they don't believe in the person and the process and the portfolio. Once we get that right, then we can say, okay, are we going to invest in all the back office that supports this? That's the much easier one to solve than the person. And I'm a big fan of Bruce. And so continuing to stay in touch with them and watch how he's investing them.”
2021-08-19 · Capital Allocators · Bruce Martin – Still Lake Capital [Manager Meetings, EP.7) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source