YouSaid · the spoken record

Charles D. Ellis

lines on the record: 105
first: 2017-04-13
most recent: 2017-04-13
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

“That's very generous on your part. I think it's more lucky than brilliance figuring it out. But do what you really, really want to do is something that I was getting close to understanding then. Now I know it's absolutely.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, there's so many different things that I didn't know that I wish I'd known, but the main item for me is how sensible it is after everything comes in to change the nature of investment management. All those people, all those tools, all that information, simplify your life, concentrate on the really important questions and index your operations.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Warren Buffett's going farther than that. He said, I give my children enough so they can choose to do what they really want to do. Not so much that they don't have to choose something.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest financial problem over their lifetime, they may be poor when they get started, but over their lifetime their biggest financial problem is how to protect their children from too much money when they die.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finances are pretty broad field. Be sure that you've gone to business school. Think seriously about doing more than business school so you might do a joint law school business school combination or do business school and then study economics for an advanced degree afterwards. But be sure you understand knowledge is a very important resource. The second thing is look to be with people you admire greatly for their basic values, how they live year in, year out. In an organization that really wants to teach and train young people how to be the best they could be because if you've got talent, you want to maximize that talent. Key to that is fast learning curve, particularly in the early years. Third thing is do not do anything because it pays well. Choose what you want to do because you love it. If you're doing what you love doing, you'll get better and better and better at it as you get better and better and better you'll be paid well. Anybody in finance who's really good is going to be paid so well that the”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, we're married to the most wonderful woman I've met, so I really have a nice time with her and that doesn't take long hours at just a few minutes with her is always a treat. Second thing is I happen to love the work I do. I don't do anything I don't like. I often say to my friends, I quit working at 30. I'm not quite able. I think learning is always a treat, and I don't know as much as I should know about music, and so listening to music is a wonderful opportunity to learn something that's new to me. And then books that come out year after year after year, these wonderful books that are available and chance to learn that.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Changes that we see now are going to continue, but the changes we don't yet know because we haven't seen them, artificial intelligence being an obvious illustration of that are going to come piling in on top of, it's going to get to be a finer and finer, faster and faster market, harder and harder to keep up with let alone beat that can be converted to your benefit if you just say that's the way it is. So I'm going to go with the flow and I'm going to use indexing and that's why people ought to join the index revolution”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the change forces you just picked up on are going to continue. So called robo advisor, very, very helpful for the lower wealth individual part of the market, indexing being more and more accepted is going to continue. We're going to take the cost out of investing so that the returns that were available will go mostly to the owners of the capital so that people have more money in their retirement years or more money to spend in the meantime. Those would be positive.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's obvious, and that's the easy access to the expertise of large numbers of brilliantly talented people working hard as hell to figure out what prices ought to be called an index fund. You get all the best people working their tails off every single day, every single night for nearly nothing.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One way of saying the most positive is that things have gotten better and better and better. The markets have been going up. So that's got to be a big, big positive.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're very lucky people put years and years and years into learning and then a couple of years into condensing into a relatively short package and you can buy the damn thing in your own local store or you can buy it over the internet for less than 50 bucks and there's all that knowledge you can carry with you wherever you want to go. I mean books are an unbelievable bargain.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Arthur Stone doings, wonderful two volume corporate finance, mostly for the footnotes, which are about half of every page, unbelievably rich body of insight and understanding as things went along through the Late eighteen hundreds through the 1900s, it was just a terrific source of learning. Ben Graham and David Dodge, Graham and Dodd, is a terrific book, particularly the 1934 edition, which just is a dream come true. Jason Swag's books are all really worth reading. Jonathan Clements writes a very nice continuous book that I think is really worth anybody paying attention. Andy Tobias wrote a wonderful book on individual investing.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we all ought to read Robert Carroll's wonderful books about Lyndon Johnson because they are insightful in the details as well as conceptually useful, fabulous lessons all the time about this is where it really, really is.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll start with an author like Ron Chernow, but most people think of he did Hamilton, but he did some wonderful, wonderful books on business organizations that are”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd love to read biography and history. I have to be responsible for reading investment books, and I like to be responsible for reading business books. But what I really like doing is biography and history because I can learn forever lessons by doing that.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've been very privileged because I've been all over the world working with a lot of different people. And if you started going through the list Hangcoxong, who for many years was chief investor for the GIC in Singapore, a very large sovereign wealth fund. You go to London and Peter Stornwith-Darling would be another top of the deck. He was the guy that was in charge of Warburg investment management in its glorious and great days. Across the United States, all kinds of different people have been terrific. Jim Rothenberg at Capital Group would have been one of those individuals. David Testa Tiro Price would be another large number of really, really gifted people.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do it with intellectual rigor, do it with objectivity at all times, and do it for the long term. Once you get those things down, Pat, as this is the way we're going to do it, it leads you in a particular direction. I think that's been really important. The second thing is the governance, the oversight of the Yale Endowment has been very, very consistent and contributing in a very nice way. One reason it's been so consistent is that David Swenson has been carefully picking and choosing the people that ought to be candidates, and the candidates have been then selected by the present university and David Swenson jointly so that they've had a very nice capability in governance, and that's bringing a stability that's been enormously helpful.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you go back to the really great days of the Harvard Endowment, Jack Meyer, who was your Harvard manager, David Swenson, the Yale manager, they became very close friends because they realized they were both motivated by the same values. Do the right thing for the client?”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ways he uses it is not just for the Yalen Dama which gets undivided first attention, but then he also has been very, very helpful in teaching people how to do that kind of investing. And if you look at the top 50 universities, about a third of them have got a David Swenson. Educated, developed, and certified individual doing the investment management at that university. He's done a lot of people, a lot of good for a long time.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he's very good with people, and he's probably the best client anybody ever had. Tough, really tough as a client, but so honest, so straight and so helpful. That everybody wants to have David Swenson as a client. So he gets to pick and choose from all the very best. And he's very, very careful at his selectivity, largely on integrity of the discipline of your investing and the integrity of the people who are working in the organization. When you get checked out by Swenson and his team, you get checked out more carefully than the CIA would check you out if you were going to be Secretary of State for the United States. It's an unbelievable process. Trying to be sure they don't make any mistakes. Last part, David Swenson and his team have a scuttlebutt network that goes throughout the investment management world. There's no one who has more people who say if I could ever be helpful to David Swenson, just a little bit sometime once I would love to. So he gets all kinds of people feeding him ideas, insights, possibilities, things that might be useful because he's such a good user, and one of the best uses is”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“David's got Midwest values, so he's all about integrity and doing the right thing for the right reasons. Deep, deep, rooted. And he's devoted to the idea of doing a great job for Yale because thousands of people benefit from that. All the kids are on scholarship, get better scholarships because David Swenson has done such a great job for that university. All the faculty members who are teaching courses have more financial support for what they're trying to do. The head of the university has more financial resources to build back the facilities of the university. It's one after another after another. Everybody's benefiting. And why is he so darn good at it? Well, yes, he's brilliant. Yes, he's well educated. And he's been doing it for a long time and he's very, very disciplined. But watch the part that's really important. He's completely objective and rational.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little too strong a statement. There's some other people who've done a very good job, but David is really unique. First of all, he's brilliant. Really smart. Secondly, he's really well educated. Did his economics PhD at Yale and was top of the deck Jim Tobin was his dissertation advisor and Jim thought so highly of David that they had a great personal father-to-son kind of relationship.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When Warren Buffett says that for his wife and her retirement years, he's going to use primarily index funds, makes a lot of sense. When he says for most individuals, that's what they should do, makes a lot of sense. And then when David Swenson, who is the chief investment officer for Yale, has done a wonderful job of investing as an active client in investing, says most everybody should be using index funds to Smart enough to realize Eric some guys are really, really good at this, and they say that's what we ought to do, probably ought to pay attention”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've learned a lot by reading Warren Buffett's reports which I've learned a lot from Warren himself and And I have had an unbelievably positive experience.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd love to have you tell me how you think about investing yourself. He said, That's easy. I said, Thank you. Tell me all. He said, I'm invested in Berkshire Hathaway because I think Warren Buffett has figured out how to do investing in a way that is different from anybody else can do.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Sandy ran a firm called First Manhattan, fine New York firm, and he was a client of mine when I was at Greenwich Associates. And one year I recommended they not stay in the institutional brokerage business and concentrate on the investment management business. The next year I went to see him and he said, you're right, we shouldn't be in the institutional brokerage business. We're just going to do investment management. I said, well, sorry to hear that in one sense, but I'm awfully glad you took the message. He said, well, that completes our business conversation. Now, what would you like to talk about? Lucky, lucky, lucky me. I said, Sandy, you're one of the best investment managers in this city.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there are a whole bunch of them, but I'll tell you the one that I think is obviously the best. Sandy Goddysman, who for many years was on the board at Berkshire Hathaway as chairman of the board.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the other guy was a fellow named Robert Strange, as in Robert Strange McNamara, they were cousins, and Bob Strange was also brilliant, and he was my direct supervisor and a wonderful experience to work with two really brainy guys who were very, very well connected because people thought the world of them as individuals”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to Name was, well, there are two guys actually Jay Richardson Dilworth. Dick Dilworth was a fabulously talented guy. Many people confuse him with the once time mayor of Philadelphia, completely different friendship.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was very lucky to work for a guy who was a brilliant person, and he happened to be in investment management, and he happened to be working on investment problems. So I was there to learn from him what I could learn. Honestly, it didn't make very much difference if he'd been in real estate, that would have been fine. If he'd been in retailing, that would have been fine. This was a guy that could teach me a lot”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's in some of the details in the specifics. And the difference between a forgery and an original is, of course, really important. And being able to look carefully was helpful. But I wouldn't give too much. It was more in the recreation. Why do I love to put when I was growing up? I love to play golf. And then I played tennis. Why did I play tennis? Because my wife likes to play tennis. Easy. So I wouldn't try to draw too much out of it. So you're an art history major and then you got into investment management. There's no real linkage at all.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not very much, honestly, but it helped me in the sense of when I had I travelled a great deal in the work I did as a consultant on investment management, so I was in London a lot and other major cities. So if I had a meeting cancelled, I knew what to do. I'd go down to the art museum in that particular city and have plenty of time to look at the beautiful pictures and stuff like that. So it was life-enhancing? Yeah, it was great fun Also taught me a little bit about how to look more carefully because the difference between a really great painting and a pretty good painting is not obvious”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New York Stock Exchange, they had a small set-aside library of all the filings with the SEC, page after page after page you could trying to figure out what's going on in this company or that company. You go out, meet with management and they would talk with you for hours trying to help you understand their company was a very different world in the world we live in today.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'd probably left. We use slide rules in those days. We didn't have calculators when we wanted to do research. We went to the...”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Willing to be assertive and do your very best you could really do a lot better than the market. Those were glorious days for active investing. But they're gone.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How will insurance companies were managing compared to banks compared to investment council firms? And when that data came out through a firm called A.G. Becker and Merrill Lynch in those days, the performance measurement, all of a sudden the data, my God, Barrett, look at the data. This is really important. And people started saying, let's go find managers who can do a really good job for us. And that's where active investment management started to take off because if you're an active investment manager and you had access to really good research, which was just being created in those days, and you're willing to act fairly quickly instead of waiting for the monthly investment committee meeting where you try and join, if you were willing.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the 50s and 60s, what would have been done is you look at the Dow Jones average and say that's probably about it, or you look at what you hoped to be able to earn your return assumption. And think that was about it, that the data was not available on how well pension funds were performing compared to other pension funds.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So be realistic about that. But if you're looking at what should you do as an investor today, first of all, think long-term. Secondly, take a look at the total picture. Don't look just at your stock and bond portfolio. Look at your home, social security, and your income as an earning person, so-called intellectual property. Those are all really important assets. What are they worth and then try with that total portfolio to make a sensible decision as to what would be right for you as an individual, knowing we're all different?”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, we all ought to know it's not easy now because prices of bonds and prices of stocks are high. and the Federal Reserve has done all of us as a nation real good by getting the interest rates down enough so that the employment has gone up enough so that we're really starting to see the economy come back to its full capabilities and potential. It has been terribly painful for the people who depend on interest income. because they've seen interest income go from five six seven percent down to three percent.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This country a lot of good doing that really, really smashed the markets from 13% inflation On a treasury bond all the way down to two percent on a treasury bond. That's a long sweep of real pain and anguish for people own the fixed income.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was worse in bonds and it wasn't stocks because you do a lot of damage to a bond portfolio if you take interest rates from 13% to 2%. So it was terrible everywhere. All the way around.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, stocks didn't go nowhere. Stocks went down. The drop in the value of the Dow Jones average, just to take any measure. The drop in the seventies was greater than the drop from twenty nine to the bottom of the thirties.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is an astonishing number and it's a shame we don't all know it. It really helps to have started early and have the accumulated power. Einstein said that he thought the most powerful thing he knew of was compound interest, compound rates of return. If you're in it for the long term, and we all are whether we like it or not, in it for the long term. If you're in it for the long term, that's a wonderful thing to have going for you. All you need is time. T-I-M-E”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we don't as a nation take care of our problems, we will have those problems fester and get worse and worse, and they can show up in politics very rapidly.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think how badly this country would feel if there were a large number of people in their seventies, eighties, and nineties who were highly focused on the fact that they really were hurting financially, and they turned to you and other people who are experts and said, you Us real harm it's all your fault, and we're really angry and we're going to express our views at the polling place and we're going to do whatever we can because we got hurt and you knew we were going to get hurt. You knew it all along. Why'd you do that to us? They won't say, gosh, you know, I made a mistake. Years ago, I should have done something. I've created this problem for myself. That's not going to happen.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that you obviously identified earlier is opt out versus opt-in if every retirement plan you automatically did the sensible thing unless you said, no, I'm different from most other people, so I've got a real reason for wanting to do something different on this item or that item or that item. Fine. You could have the freedom to make a I'm different decision. Otherwise, you can have the super freedom to say somebody else has thought about this pretty damn well. They've done a good job of figuring out what most people need. I'm going to take what's the blue plate special.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is really pretty simple. And if people didn't get confused with only smart people know that sort of stuff or the language always bothers me. I don't know what a PE ratio is. And they talk about earnings yield. I don't know what that is either. And pretty soon people say, ah, hell, I'll come back to it later, but I can't do it today. If they knew what the problem really is and boil it down to the simplest kinds of decisions, this is how much money you need to have when you're retired. Okay. And invested in this kind of sensible way, if we could teach people those four or five things, they'd be all set.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, some, but the problem we have, all of us have is we're all too busy. We've got too many things on our mind. So we, yeah, you know, I should lose 10 pounds, but, you know, I just don't want to do it today. Yeah, I know I should do more exercise, but I just don't want to get started today. Yeah, I know. And so many things that are crowd in on, you got to get a job. You got to pay your taxes. You got to do this. You got to do that. It's hard for people to set aside the time to say, now I'm going to learn enough about investing. And the shame is that investing is basically the stuff that's really important.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Help people understand what the impact is when they are retired of how badly hurt they will be if they don't save more, and we ought to be teaching that day after day after day. Teach it in high school, teach it when people first join a retirement plan, teach it in the public domain all the time.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would be great to raise the ceiling, it would be really, really great to help people understand how good that could be for them and why they should take action and take advantage of the higher ceiling.”
2017-04-13 · Masters in Business · Charles D. Ellis Interview (Replay):Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source