YouSaid · the spoken record

Charles Ellis

lines on the record: 59
first: 2025-02-21
most recent: 2025-02-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Oh first that the whole world is going to be changing, so don't stay with what you think is really great about the early 1960s because all of that is going to be upended and all the lessons that you would think were just great about how to do things in the early 1960s will work against you. And by the time you get to the this time of the year, you will be making mistakes one after another after another after another by doing things that are just completely out of date. And the world of investing will change more than most fields will change. Computer technology will change more. Airplane travel will change more. But candidly, investing is going to change so much that if you take the lessons that you're learning for how to do it in the 60s and try to transport those into the...”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their objectives, what are their financial resources, and how can they put those together into the best for them investment program? And the same thing is true for every college, every hospital, every church, every organization that has an endowment needs to think carefully about what is the real purpose of the money and how could we do the best for our long-term success by the structure of the portfolio that we have.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about what really motivates you to be interested in investing, if it's because it's a high income field, that's okay, but candidly, it's not an inspiration. And you only have one life to lead. Is it your desire to lead your life making money or doing something that you would say was at the end of your life, I'm so proud of having what I did or I'm so glad I did what I did. If you're thinking about investing because it's a profession, where you help people be more successful in achieving their objectives, then candidly you could have a fabulous time. It won't come because you beat the market, but that's not the problem for most people. For most people, beating the market is very clearly secondary to what's their real need, which is to think through what are the”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite books tend to be history. And the one that I've most recently read is a wonderful biography of Jack Kennedy as president. And the things that he did that made America the most popular country in the world.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outside market decisions have to do with what's changed in your life, most obvious being when you retire, but sometimes it's when you get a better job, higher pay, or even you get a significant bonus because of the wonderful achievement that you'd had during the particular year. When your circumstances get changed, oh, and getting married is another real change. When the circumstances change, you really ought to rethink your investment program just to be sure that it's really right for your present total picture.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I ought to be careful in my securities part of the portfolio to rethink things and probably be substantially more committed to equities in my securities portfolio because I've got these other things that I was never counting on before, but now that I've been told about it, I really want to include that as my understanding.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's inflation protected. So it's even better than most people would imagine. That's the single most valuable asset for most people. The second most valuable asset for most people is the value of their home. And I know people would say their first reactions, but I'm not going to sell my home. I'm going to continue to live there. Fine. True, but someday, either your children or your grandchildren will say, we don't really want to live in that same house, so we're going to sell it. So it does have an economic value, and it will be realized at some point down the line. Take those two and put them side by side with your securities, and most people would say, my God, I've got more in the way of fixed income and fixed bond equivalents than I had ever imagined.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's one of those ideas that once it pops into your mind, you'll never walk away from it. Most of us have no idea what the total value of our future stream of payouts from Social Security are, but you can do the calculation fairly simply. Most of us would be really impressed if we realized how much is the real value of that future stream of payments that are coming from the best credit in the world, federal government.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really candidly just been pay attention to what the numbers say and pay attention to the data. The data is so powerfully consistently strong that active investing is an exciting idea. And in the right time and circumstance, the 1960s, it worked beautifully, but the circumstances now are so different that it doesn't work beautifully. It works candidly negatively.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The impact of compounding really is terrific, and the only way you get to be have the time is to do it yourself. Save enough early enough, and stay with it long enough to let the compounding take place. But it's inevitable power of compounding is just wonderful to have on your side.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's a brilliant and wonderful human being. All of us can learn great lessons from paying attention to what Warren says or has said in his annual meetings are a treasure chest of opportunities to learn. But he did start as a teenager, not in his mid-20s, but in his early teens. And then he is not stopping at 65. He's roaring right past that. And when you bolt on those extra years, it gives him a much larger playing field in which to double and double and redouble and redouble. And all of us ought to pay attention to that one most powerful lesson. If you've got the time.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time to be able to have the experience of compounding where you each Compounding round, you double what you had. Does it really pay off to bin it for the long term and have saved early enough so that you compound a larger amount? But that leap from one to two is not very exciting. Two to four is not much. Four to eight is not really all that much. Eight to sixteen starts to attract your attention. Sixteen to thirty-two. That's really something. 32 to 64 and to 128? Holy smokes, I want that last doubling. That's really a payoff. Only where you get there is start early and stay on course compounding away as best you can.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me what you think was happening forty three years ago. Today's date forty three years ago I have no idea why do you ask? Well, I'm asking because you have no idea and you have no idea forty three years out into the future. And the reason for that is because you don't care. It's the long-term trend that you care about and you care greatly about that, but you don't care about the day-to-day to day fluctuations.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when I advise people on investing, I always start with what do you most want to accomplish? And then the second question is when do you plan to sell the Securities Most people say, well, what do you mean? When do I plan to sell? Well, when are you most likely to say I need money out of my securities investment for life spending? Probably in retirement. Oh yeah, and then they'll give you a date. And then you say, and how far out into the future is that? And then really want to be difficult for somebody to say, okay, it's 43 years out into the future. Let's go back 43 years.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, you have to recognize. When you select out the most extreme days, it does have a really big impact. The second thing is, when do those days come? And the best days usually come shortly after the worst days. The bounce, the hey, wait a minute, this market is not as bad as everybody's saying. It really does have terrific opportunity. And that's when the best days typically come. The time that we all get frightened, and all of us get unnerved, is the most wrong time to be taking action.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's partly livelihood, it's partly religious faith, it's partly cultural. Conviction is partly what I've done for most of these people would say I've been doing it for 25 years and I want to keep doing it for 25 years. Oh, by the way, I get paid really well to do it and I like that job.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you're an active manager and you were life-threatened by something that was a better product at a lower cost, you might have some negative commentary too.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They just used what they thought was the sensible terminology, and then other people who had not realized where it came from saw it as being a negative. I don't want to be passive. I want to have an active manager who go out there and really do something for me. That's a complete misunderstanding, and it really did terrible harm for indexing vesting to be called passive.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Glad to. Indexing is to me the right word to use. Passive has such a negative connotation. I don't know about you, Barry, but I wouldn't want anybody to describe me as passive. I'm going to vote for so-and-so as President of the United States. It's not going to be because he's passive. Passive is a negative term. However, if you're an electrical engineer, it's not a pejorative. There's two parts. Two prongs or three prongs on the end of a wire. And there's a wall socket that's got either two holes or three holes, depending on which electric system you have. The one that has the prongs is called the active part. The one that has the holes is called the passive part, and because indexing was created by a group of electrical engineers and mechanical engineers,”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It sure does in compounding is really important for all of us to recognize. Some people call it snowball, and I think that's perfectly fine because as you roll a snowball, every time you roll it over, it gets much thicker, not just a little bit, much thicker, and you do compounding it one, two, four, eight, 16, 32, 64, 128. Those last rounds of compounding are really important. So for goodness sake, think about how can you get there so you'll have those compoundings work for you.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're talking about 20 years, and many people say, oh, gee, that's a long time. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You start investing in your 20s. You'll still be investing in your 80s. That's a 60-year horizon. And if you're lucky enough to do well enough, you might leave some to your children and grandchildren. So it might not be sixty years, it might be 80, 100, 120 years. Try to think about that long term because that is a marvelous privilege to have that longer time to be able to be an investor.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the more I tried to scratch it out for the church investment committee, I realized this is something that could easily be used by virtually everybody else. There are some major changes that have taken place, and the world of investing is very different than it used to be. And the right way to deal with the world is really different than it used to be. And I owe it to other people because I've been blessed with this wonderful privilege of being able to learn from all kinds of people what's going on in the investment world and how to deal with it and add it all together. I should put this together in one last short book. And my wife laughed and said, you never get this down to only a hundred pages. I think that's all it takes.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really an interesting experience for me. I love helping people with investing. And I keep trying to think of how can I be helpful. And what are the lessons that my children, grandchildren ought to learn? What are the lessons that my favorite institutions ought to learn, my local church, whatever it is? What could I offer that would be helpful? And I thought to myself, you know, the world has changed a lot and some rethinking of what's the right way to invest might turn out to be a good idea. I should try penciling that out.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leave it alone. And you leave it alone. And it's a little bit like when your mother said, don't pick at that scab. Let it heal by itself. Well, but mom, itches. Just be a little bit tolerant and don't itch it or don't scratch it and it'll heal faster. And sure enough, mother was right in the same way if you index, you won't be excited by the same things that other people get excited by and you'll just sort of steadily flow through and have all the good results come your way. That's it.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in my view, and it's part of the rethinking investing concept of the book, is if you find a problem that's a repetitive problem and this sure is, attack the problem and try to reduce it. So what could you do to reduce the cost of behavioral economics? And the answer is Index or ETF and the reason why it would index where ETF would help is because it's boring. You know, if you own an index fund, you don't get excited about what happened in the market. Anything like you would get excited about if you had just had five stocks or if you had two or three mutual funds and you were tracking those mutual funds because they changed more. The market as a whole kind of goes along in its own lumbering way, a slow, wide river of flow over time. It's nothing to get excited about. So you leave it alone.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By making mistakes with the best of intentions, trying to do something really good for themselves, they make mistakes that are costly. And that cost think about it if you think the market's going to return something like six or seven percent. You lose two percent, maybe two and a half, maybe three for inflation. Call it two and a half. Whoop, that's something down. Then you've got fees and costs. Gee, you add on to that. If you did add on another two percent that you've made mistakes, you're talking about a major transformation to the negative of what could have been your rate of return.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we're human beings, as any behavioral economist would point out to you, we have certain beliefs. And those beliefs tend to be very, very optimistic about our skills. And we We think we can help ourselves get better results, or at least to minimize the negative experiences. And the reality is that over time just doesn't work out to be true. The average investor in an average year loses two full percentage.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what you should have done in the early sixties was go find an active manager who could knock the socks off at the competition. But it just, the competition is so damn good today that there isn't a manager that can knock the socks off.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Managers and investment opportunities that were so different that you might get a higher rate of return, attacking, reaching for higher and higher rate of return. Vanguard was reaching for lower and lower cost of executing a plain vanilla proposition index funds. Keynes once had somebody say, you seem to have changed your mind. He said, yes, when the facts change, I do change my judgment. What do you do when the facts change? And the reality is we've been looking at a market that has changed and changed and changed and changed. And the right way to deal with that market has therefore changed and changed and changed and changed. Then what you could have done in the early 1960s, you can't do today.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely different. Each one was doing what they were capable of doing really well. Vanguard was focused on minimizing cost and they really systematic at it. Different orientation. The orientation of the Yale endowment was to find”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typical relationship or duration, many of these managers, when they were just getting started. So it's the most dicy period in any investment organization. Very, very unusual and creative guy said to me after he'd been doing this for quite a long time, you know, the nature of creativity payoff is getting less and less and less because of everybody else's doing what I've been doing. It's not as rewarding as it used to be. And because I've been choosing managers and other people are trying to get into those same managers, they're not as differentiated as they used to be. The rate of return magnitude that I've been able to accomplish 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I'm not going to be able to do in 10 or 15 years into the future. And I think he was right.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was creative and disciplined in a remarkable combination. And he was the first person of size to get involved in a series of different types of investing. And then he very carefully chose the very best people in each of those different types. One day I was thinking, you know, he's really done some very creative work. I wonder what's his average length of relationship because the average length of relationship with most institutions was somewhere between two and a half and three and a half years. turnover of managers. The calculation it was fourteen years on average and they were still running so it would probably be something like 20 years of”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, you have to understand that David Swenson was a remarkably talented guy. He was the best PhD student at Jim Tobin, Nobel Prize winner ever had. He was the first person to do an interest rate swap, which is the first derivative transaction that took place in this country between IBM and the World Bank, which just to show you. Everybody had told him, you'll never be able to do that, David. So we're talking about a very unusual guy. And”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go out of one family, friends, into another family. Friends, they would all understand it. And that was what was done. And of course it involved a substantial amount of ownership being shifted. And I've always thought to myself, wow, in that one specific recommendation, I earned my keep for several years.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got a real problem here, and you're going to have a tough time keeping up the kind of growth that would justify selling for 30 plus times earnings. Whereas IBM was guaranteed to be virtually guaranteed to be able to do that because they didn't have very much the way of competition and they really knew what they were doing and they kept cranking it up. What do you do? I came back and said, I know that the family, the Rockefeller family, has many friends in the DuPond organization. But they also have many friends in the Watson family of IBM. I think it would be a great thing if we would sell off the holdings in DuPont and use the money to buy into IBM.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They hoped to build one terrific business in a leather substitute called Corfam, but as I talked to the executives, they kept talking to me about we're having difficulty getting people to use Corfam. We're getting people who make shoes to think about using Corfam. We can't get sales outside the United States to really get going. And we're having a difficult time getting sales inside the United States. And candidly, it doesn't look like this is going to turn out to be the bonanza we had all thought it was going to be just a year or so ago. Well, it doesn't take a genius, and it doesn't take a very experienced person, and I was not a genius, and I was not an experienced person, but I could see the handwriting. Wait a minute, if you only reinvest half your earnings each year, and your major business is going to be more and more commoditized, and your major new business is not taking off.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One company I saw it was sure to continue growing, and the other I wasn't so sure. So I got permission to go down to Wilmington, Delaware, and for three days I had nothing but one interview after another after another after another with a senior executive of the DuPont organization, and they were very candid and they told me about their problems. They told me about their opportunities. They told me about their financial policies. The financial policies were that they would always pay out half their earnings in dividends, long established, and that was the way they did things. The second thing is they had a major commitment to nylon. But nylon was no longer patent protected. And so the profit margins of nylon were going to come down for sure and come down rather rapidly because competition was building up pretty quickly.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've realized, you know, IBM has got an ability to generate its own growth because it is creating one after another advancement in computing power, and they've got a terrific organization behind it, and they are able to create their own growth. IBM is a true growth company. Dupont needs to invent something that other people will really want, and it has to be something that's really new. And then they get patent protection for a certain period of time and then they lose the patent protection because it's completed. Got a different situation. Both companies were selling at $30, $32 times earnings.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ooh, boy, that's a complicated question. First of all, in the early 60s, when I was working for the Rockefeller family, that was the old world. All kinds of changes have taken place since then and virtually turned every single dimension of what was the right description of the investment world into a very different opposite direction. Version and it changed like that makes it almost a waste of time to talk about what was it like but just for instance I did some analysis of a company called DuPont which was one of the blue chip blue chips of all time and I had also been studying IBM which was a wonderful company”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really above average at various kinds of skills, they get up to 90%, 95% saying they're very, very, very good. If you look at any college group, are you going to have happier life than your classmates? Yes, by far. Are you going to get divorced as much as your classmates? Oh no, that won't happen to me. And all kinds of other things that anybody looking at it objectively would say, you know, Barry, that just isn't the way it's going to happen. These guys aren't that much better drivers than the normal crowd. In fact, they are part of the normal crowd.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terrific book by Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, there's several hundred pages, and anybody in the investment world ought to read it because it tells you all about what we need to know about ourselves. And I've got one chapter that just ticks off a whole bunch of things like 80% of people think they're above average dancers. 80% of people think they're above average drivers. If you ask men a question, are you...”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It puts everybody in a position of being able to compete more and more skillfully all the time. And therefore, candidly, I think the fees are a big problem. And then the second problem is, yes, we've got opportunities to be more and more skillful and more and more effective, but actually what we also have, which really drives anybody who's serious about examining the data, drives them nuts. And anybody who is an investor wants to deny it. And that is that we make mistakes. We get scared by the market after it's gone down. We get excited about the market positively after it's gone up. We interpret and make mistakes in our judgment. It's a wonderful section in this little bitty book that I've just finished. Wonderful section on”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we all know about life. We're tempted by Beautiful men, beautiful women who are tempted by whiskey, gin, other drinks, where some of us get tempted by drugs and other things like that. So there are lots of temptations out and around. You think about all of us in the investment world are striving to be rational, which is a terribly difficult thing to do. Warren Buffett is rational and is brilliantly rational. He also does an enormous amount of homework. He also has terrific ability to remember things that he studied. And he spends most of his time reading, studying, memorizing, and reusing. Very few people have that kind of ability, natural ability that he has. But most of us now have equipment that'll damn near do the same thing. And you could call up things from historical record anytime you want to.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their job is to beat the other guys, but the other guys are getting better and better and better all the time, striving to be best informed. They get up early, they study on through the night, they take work home on weekends, competition, competition, competition, competition. How are you going to do better than those other guys when there's so much in the way of raw input is the same? And the answer is no, you can't.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the data did come, but it came later. And fortunately, it proved out to be very strong confirmation for what I'd been thinking. But I was in institutional sales, and I would go around from one investor to another, to another, to another, to another. And I knew pretty quickly they're all really bright guys. They're all very competitive. They're all very well informed. They're all very serious students trying to get better and better and better.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So trying to recover those fees while trading and you can only trade successfully by beating the other guy when he's just as good as you are, he's got just as big a computer as you have got just the same factual information you have, then all those other different dimensions. There's no way. That you could think, oh, yeah, this is a good opportunity to do well. That's why people increasingly, in my view, sensibly turn to index funds to cut down on the cost.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't just whisper it to, and everybody gets the same information at the same time. So basically what you've got is everybody in the game is competing with everybody knowing everything that everybody else knows at exactly at this same time. And you can be terribly creative and wonderfully bright and very original. But if everybody knows exactly what you know, then they've got computing power so they can do all kinds of analytics. Then they've got Bloomberg terminal so they can do any backgrounding that they want to find. It's really hard to see how you're going to be able to beat them by much, if anything. And the truth is that people who are actively investing are usually making, they don't mean to, but they are making mistakes and those mistakes put them a little bit behind, a little bit behind, a little bit behind the market. And then, of course, they charge fees that are high enough.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we were proud of him and we were skilled at it, but it's nothing like having computing power behind you. In those days, there were very few in the way of federal regulations. Now it's against the law for a company to have a private luncheon with someone who is in the investment world.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The participants have more information when the information is really accessible. And that's what's happened to the securities markets. The ability to get information from a Bloomberg terminal, if you don't mind using Mike's name, but seriously. Bloomberg Terminal will spew out so much in the way of factual information, and there are hundreds of thousands of these terminals all over the world. So everybody in his right mind has them and uses them. Everybody in his right mind has computing power that would knock the socks off anybody who came from 1970, got dropped into the current period. They would just be amazed at the computing power. And they don't use slide rules anymore. Back in the early 70s, everybody used a slide rule.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the purpose of any market, a grocery store, a drugstore, filling station, the purpose of any market is really to find what's the right price that people will buy and trade at. And the security industry is a very strong illustration of that. Lots of buyers, lots of sellers. What do they think is the right price to do a transaction? And they put real money behind it. So that purpose of a market gets better and better and better when the participants are more skillful.”
2025-02-21 · Masters in Business · Rethinking Investing with Greenwich Associates' Charles Ellis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source