YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Egan

lines on the record: 97
first: 2017-08-28
most recent: 2017-08-28
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

“Over the last bunch of years as your business has taken off, we've had a particular type of market environment. And I'm always curious with all the index fund movement, which we'll talk about in a sec. How do you know, right, when things are going up, it's a lot easier for people to stay the course? Definitely.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are you going to save up for retirement and we're going to hit some balance? We're going to be, okay, I'm 65 and I've got enough money, I'm going to retire. Right then, you've spent your entire life making this thing go up, making this balance go up.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Younger, right? Absolutely. We're far more representative than most people would think. We do have lots of people over the age of 50. But most of them are younger. And I'm a big fan of saying you should definitely think about your goals, but they're not a straight jacket, right? You can let goals go. It's not that big of a deal. But yeah, I think the important thing is sort of sitting down and saying, okay, I think I want to achieve these things. Let me set out a plan and be realistic about it. You know, like doing those goal-based things make you realize I can't save that much. Maybe I need to forego this. Maybe I need to reduce my consumption. Or maybe I need to save more or not have that goal. Generally speaking, though, I think people find it easy to change and switch up goals. There's another slightly subtle thing, which I think is interesting. If you talk to financial planners, especially who work with retirees, one of the biggest problems is that they have a really hard time spending down their portfolio. So most of us...”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what happens when goals change? I think about what I thought I wanted my income to be and my expenses would be ten or fifteen years ago and how different that might be from today. So how do people adjust? Because especially I don't know what the average age or the mode age of your clients are, but I'm guessing it's millennials. Absolutely.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Entirely forward looking. So it basically says if you wanted $100,000 six years from now, we look at how much you're saving, what your balance is today, and what risk level you're taking on and say, let's suppose that we're a bit unlucky. Let's look at sort of like a below average outcome. Would you still hit your goal? And that measure of on-track means that usually on average our customers are going to beat their goals pretty handily. But in the case of a bad outcome, they're probably still going to hit it. So anytime your projected balance starts dropping beneath your target, you're off track.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what does off-track mean? Is that that the returns aren't getting where they need to be, or is it that the person's behavior and how they've moved around their accounts such that it's not consistent with the long-term returns?”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of projection graph goes red. And people, you know, like if you have a small red thing, people might be able to ignore it. But when it's sort of like your plan is red, your plan is off track.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brokerage sites. Green and red. Exactly. And it's going to be yesterday's return or today's return. It's going to be some sort of lagging performance thing. And it's going to be color-coded green if it's good and red if it's bad. And those colors, there's a reason we do that, is because they go straight down to some sort of reptilian part of our brain that says good or bad. Don't eat that run away from it, et cetera. So we do the same thing, except we use it for the future. So when somebody is on track to hit their goal, when they are saving enough and they're taking on the right risk level, they come in and our interface is going to be predominantly muted blues and greens. You can get the information you need, but it's not going to be exciting because everything's okay. On the other hand, if you come in and your plan is off track for any reason, that's going to be highlighted in kind of a warning color. It's going to be more salient and more contrasted. So it's going to be brighter. It's going to pop out compared to other things. You're more likely to look at it. And one of the really subtle things is that it actually the entire”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In theory, yeah, we don't quite do that yet, but already if you come in and you use betterment, our interface and how we talk about things is going to look very different than a brokerage site or any investment report that you get. One good example is that we don't show individual item, individual security returns. You can only ever see the returns of your diversified portfolio. We built this thing so that something zags when other zigs so that you basically rein in the volatility a bit, and we're not going to split it out and let you reframe your performance as a narrow individual security thing. It's something that I actually feel bad for a lot of advisors because they might want to implement some of these insights from behavioral finance, but unless you control the technology, it's very hard for you to do that. We can actually control the screen set interfaces. Another element of it, there was recently a good piece in the Wall Street Journal about this, is that we use color to indicate the future rather than the past. So if you think about most”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely. So strangely, I think one of the great things that I knew about, but I didn't anticipate how big the opportunity was, is that you can change the interface that the client see when they're looking at their portfolio and their performance.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as you started down this road, what are the little tricks of the trade that you've sort of implemented for the clients that either help them? Stay true to the course. Maybe that means trade less, whatever it is, whatever the instincts are that getting people's own way. Definitely.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communicating what we are doing and making it transparent and understandable enough that the sophisticated people feel like they're getting what they need to trust and use us. And then also that we're not overwhelming, that we're not giving too much choice and too much jargon to the other 95%. That's been one of the toughest balances. And funnily enough, one of the things we've learned is that the 95% of normal people, they are asking the 5% of people who they should use. So you can't simply say, oh, well, we'll just target on the 95%. You actually have to provide the transparency and knowledge for the 5% of sophisticated people to feel like they can recommend you. They trust you and they see what you're doing enough because they're the ones who are recommending their friends and neighbors and so on to use you.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the fundamental thing is the relationship with our clients, and this is true of any advisor, is they are coming to us to do things that they don't necessarily understand themselves, but they know are valuable. So when we talk about things like tax loss harvesting or asset location, we don't really usually need to explain the algorithm or what it does. We just need to tell them you're going to have lower taxes this year and you can defer them into the future, and that makes your money grow faster. And the balance of explaining things to people, showing things to people, that's really delicate because I would say 5% of the population is going to be a sophisticated investor. And they want to know how we do it and how we calculated the benefit and everything that you would think is sort of good due diligence on it. The other 95% of people want to trust you. And they just want to be able to offload it into you. So thinking about community...”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So once you started off implementing these tools and textile harvesting rebalancing are very easy to understand from an academic perspective, from a practical perspective, what did you learn along the way that have contributed over the last bunch of years to enhancements in what you're doing for your clients?”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, we did do a back test that looked at there's a balance between if you rebalance if your thresholds are really low, you're going to do it a lot. There's going to be trading costs and various other things. If you do it too little, how often you get it? We did some backtest that looked at it and said 3%. There actually is like a local optimum at 3%. We said, that sounds about right to us. So we're going to go for it.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aside from that, I think that we over time, generally, client portfolios decrease risk. We need to think about the glide path and about allocating funds, sort of skating to where the puck will be, but investing terms, we're going to overbuy bonds if we know that your glide path is going to be less risky in the future. And I think that it's easy to get stuck up on exactly the rebound.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a Hirschmann Herfendahl index based normalization thing. So it looks over the whole portfolio, but also kind of weights them. And the first thing it says is, is this above 3%? If it's above 3%, it'll want to rebalance, but it puts some hard stops on. We won't realize short-term capital gains because usually you just need to wait. And the tax costs are higher than the efficiency benefits. But then we can also say if we're going to rebalance, we can ask you for a deposit. And we don't ask you for a deposit that completely rebalances you. It rebalances you back to sort of 2% drift. So these little small deposits that keep us stepping back from the ledge of rebouncing means that the portfolio drift is always contained, but we're not causing any taxes on them actively.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, the first element is taxes and goals. So individual investors tend to be taxable as long as you're not talking about a tax advantaged account. And rebalancing involves selling generally appreciated assets. So the first really big distinction is we're very thoughtful around rebalancing in taxes to the point where if we are about to rebalance, we'll let the customer know and say, listen, we're getting close to it. So we have a drift threshold-based daily monitoring thing. It goes in and says, if we have more than 3% drift in the portfolio, we want to rebalance.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it makes sense. And how about, let's talk a little bit about rebalancing, which is something that pervades both individual investing and institutional investing. Talk about how you think about it and implement it, and then where is it different for individuals than it might be for an institution?”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But 20 or 30 years in the future, that's not going to be worth anywhere near as much as it is today. So because those embedded gains don't inflate over time, the real value of tax loss to harvesting over a 20 or 30 year period is, I think most people actually far underestimate it.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So it's a tax deferral compounding thing. There's a couple of the way I think about the benefits of tax loss harvesting. Number one, it's a tax arbitrage, a tax rate arbitrage play. So generally speaking, you are using investment losses to offset ordinary income. Ordinary income is your highest marginal tax rate. You embed a tax gain in the portfolio that you then pay off generally 20 or 30 years in the future, and that's going to be the long-term capital gain rate, which is generally about half of your ordinary income. So there's a straight arbitrage play in tax rates. There is the fact that you've reduced your tax rate now. You can take that saved money, invest it, and the compounding does a lot of work for you. And the last element that's really beautiful, this is the only case I found of where inflation works for you. So if you embed in your portfolio a $100 loss, that loss does not grow over the next 30 or 40 years. You then liquidate it. You have a larger gain that is larger by $100 or so.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the sort of thing where it's tough because you can't see graphs on a podcast. Strictly speaking, the value of tax loss harvesting grows over time monotonically, but it is convex. So the tax loss harvesting you do the first sort of ten years of your life will be the most valuable tax loss harvesting you ever do. It will continue to be valuable for the rest of your life because the benefits come.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The tax issue, I was always curious about this. We'd had a conversation about it. I don't know if I got full resolution on it. It always struck me that the longer the horizon, the less valuable tax loss harvesting. If you hold your instruments for a while, as soon as you have an accrued gain, there's no harvesting to have.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sum game there. Tax loss harvesting there's not, right? It's the US government and the IRS, and they do not move quickly, and they're going to declare their rules before they change them. But it's a form of tax management where we say we are going to reduce effectively how much tax you pay now, this year, and some of it's going to be deferred into the future. But by doing so, you get to keep more of your money. Hopefully you're going to reinvest it, and it's going to grow faster. And at the end of the day, the government takes home less of your growth and you keep more of your growth. We can do that till the Cows come home. There's no sort of like capacity or constraints issue. There's no trading issue. Nobody's going to sort of, I don't know how to put it like, you know, zero sum us out from that. And by building it, we know that we're making our customers better off, right? It's not a, oh, this might work some years and doesn't work other years. You write in an algorithm and it works every year. So taxes, costs, and investor behavior are what we tend to focus on rather than the investments themselves.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the key thing there is actually flipping the conversation from being about how investments perform to being about how stable you are as an investor. What are you taking home? What growth are you accessing? And a lot of that comes out of you talk to people about how they pick investments. It's going to be performance chasing. It's going to be what they heard or what's on the news. And it's very hard to be a good advisor, especially if you're just a sort of interface-based advisor, to pull people away from that natural way of thinking. So what we want to start talking about is things where we know they have certainty. If they or we put our time and effort into researching and improving something, there's a very certain outcome that's going to be better for them. So tax loss harvesting is a great example. You talk about like stock picking or asset allocation. Usually there's somebody else on the other side of the table when you're buying or selling something who is another strategic actor.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you started as one hypothesis of textile servicing, which I think a lot of professional managers understand, but certainly individuals don't. What are some of the other core tenets of what you've put in to improve investor behavior?”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, most publicly listed world instruments. So you're looking at all U.S. stocks, international developed stocks, emerging market stocks. We also invest in domestic bonds, municipal bonds, emerging market bonds, corporate bonds, et cetera. So it is the trade-off there is usually about we want to give as much diversification exposure as possible while actually making sure that the end client takes those returns home. So if an asset class has a very good gross profile, you know, if it looks diversifying, et cetera, but the instruments that we would use to access it are expensive, we might exclude it. It's a good asset class, but there's no means of accessing that asset class. We don't do anything too crazy, but we do want to give them a good sort of good, really broad vanilla portfolio.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we generally do stuff that I think is not conceptually that crazy or groundbreaking. There's no amazingly advanced theory behind what we do. But the execution is just really strong. So we start with market cap portfolio. We add in a slight small cap in value tilt in line with sort of long-term research on that. And then we do a fairly straightforward optimization to say if we want to go up to 90% stocks, what should that portfolio look like? If we want to go down to 20% stocks, which should that portfolio look like? We're predominantly goals-based. So in order for us to give advice, the client has to say, how long?”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why don't you talk a little bit about the framework that you use at Betterment? So someone's giving you a bunch of money, small amount, a large amount. Is there a suggested acid allocation methodology? How do you think about that issue of how do you invest this person's money?”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both one of the elements of it that I thought was most important is that taxes represent a fairly certain cost, whereas generally when people are changing their allocation, they're looking at an uncertain future benefit. So if I reduce my risk today, I think that at some point over the next year markets will drop and I will have avoided that drop. I might be right, I might not. On the other hand, the tax is pretty certain. If you do this, this is going to be the tax impact. So it definitely was to reduce the allocation change frequency, but part of it was to make sure that they were considering a definite cost and that they were sobering up a little bit, that it was less emotional because they would have to look at a bill that they were going to get because of this action.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were about 70% less likely to go through with a transaction. If you look at transactions that would have incurred $50 or more in taxes, the completion rate was somewhere around 8%. So you have above a 90% abandonment rate.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pleasure of consuming is divorced from the pain of paying, and taxes do it over a 15-month risen rather than necessarily over just a one month. So we said we know that some people change their allocations in response to market events. They might not be considering the fact that if they do that, they are going to be incurring taxes. And we know that taxes are generally something that people want to avoid. So we worked with the sort of back-end and custody team to put together something that in real time, before you make a decision, says, just so you know, this is how much tax you're going to owe if you go through with this. You can still do it, but we're going to let you know ahead of time. And we split tested that over a period of, I believe, about four weeks to see whether or not what's going on in the market was affecting things. But we wanted to be able to really control out the effect of anything else versus just showing people this tax impact. And what we found was that if we showed them a positive tax number,”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say, yes, if we tweak the interface that investors are using to make these decisions because we have this psychology theory about how they go about making decisions, do we see a change in behavior? Do we see a change in outcomes? And if that's true, feedback into it. So a big part of it was of my joining was I wanted to see if we could do this effectively in the real world in a kind of scientifically rigorous fashion. And that's been a big part of the product development cycle here, where I'll give you one of our best examples is a feature called Tax Impact Preview. So the vast majority of the time when you are trading, if you're selling a security in a taxable account, it's usually not clear what the tax impact of that is going to be to you, right? You know, like if I'm doing this in January, I'm not going to learn about my net taxes until the following April. I might not have really considered the cost basis of what I'm selling right now. This is exactly what goes on with credit cards, right?”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I enjoyed it, but I was lacking sort of a good empirical feedback loop. We weren't sure whether or not what we were doing was helping customers. We weren't sure what effect it was having on the advisors and the relationship. So it was a little bit of a lack of a high fidelity feedback loop, which I saw the possibility for here. So the number one hypothesis was most of behavioral finance operates in some realm where either they look at a lot of observed behavior. So if you look at trading behavior of individual investors, mutual fund flows, you have this sort of natural world thing where you say there's a lot of apparent mistakes going on here, but we can't drill down into precisely why. And at the other end of the spectrum, you have sort of toy laboratory experiments by psychologists saying when you present people with these gambles in this format, this is how they mismake decisions. And bringing those together, finding the middle ground where we can”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do we dovetail the behavioral finance with what the bank actually needs and with what the customers actually need? What are the constraints? What are the liquidity constraints? What products can we use with these high net worth individuals? And that's a nice part of it is that high net worth individuals have a much broader investment set that they can choose from when you're trying to customize it. The downside of it was that there was always that intermediary, that human advisor, and if you're a behavioral finance person, you say, okay, so generally speaking, I know about the issues of the end client, and I'm going to try and be fixing them. That's part of my role. But then I also have the advisor. And so rather than a one-body problem, I've got a two-body problem and two-body problems are much more complicated than one-body problems.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So, one of the most important parts I want to take a step back to give some context to it. So before joining Betterment, I was at Barclays Wealth. I worked both in the UK and Europe as well as in the United States doing behavioral finance for wealth managers. And the framework was generally that I would design a system, basically a client profiling system where the client would answer a number of questions. We would get back a questionnaire like a suitability questionnaire. We would provide the results of that report both to the client but also to the advisor and then they would come up with a proposition of what services the client should get, how they should be invested, how we're going to tailor the portfolio specifically to them. And that was fantastic. I joined Barclays back in 2007 and it's to their credit that they said we believe applied behavioral finance can be used effectively. We had a year our team of three people originally had a year where we had no output because we were trying to figure out”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You from making a rational decision. Yeah, I mean, and obviously that's the reason I was really interested in having this conversation is we started talking about the tools that you've been building here with your team to improve individual investors' decision making processes. I was really curious to really flesh out how you come up with them, what are those tools. So why don't we start with, I was thinking about kind of any type of scientific research process where you start with the hypothesis, you collect data, you test the data, and then you implement. So let's start thinking about basic investment philosophies. What were the key hypotheses you had about human behavior as it relates to investing that you thought you could implement and then improve individuals' decision-making processes?”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being acceptably good at both of them. I'm not an awesome economist. I am not an awesome psychologist. But specifically in the realm of understanding how people make economic and financial decisions, I'm pretty good. So I think that was lucky in that lack of commitment to one specific discipline. I got lucky in that it's paid off now. And so did you at some point in time take a step back as you're studying decision-making processes of people and say, hmm, how come I can't make this decision? Absolutely. That's part of the best part about it. You're always effectively reflecting, you know, we talk about here at Betterment when we build software, dog fooding. Are you using the thing yourself such that you experience what works and what doesn't and what's annoying? And the amount of insight that you get where you read about something and then a day or two later you're like, oh, I just did exactly that thing, that, you know, kind of like little trick that we play on ourselves. It gives you a great lens.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Psychology. And the reason was the same. I was very interested in how people make decisions. And society is just a whole bunch of people making a decision. And economics is a whole bunch of people making a decision about how they're going to allocate resources, how they're going to kind of economically manage themselves. So at some point I realized that the job prospects were a heck of a lot better if you have an economics degree. And you can usually study most of the psychology. You can understand the methodologies, you can understand why they're doing what they're doing, but the statistical and mathematical requirements for economics was harder. So I said, okay, I'm going to major as an economics undergrad, but I'm going to minor in psychology, specifically cognitive psychology. I'm no good as a therapist. I'm no good at abnormal psychology or schizophrenia or anything, but understanding how individuals make decisions. And that kind of inability to decide about which one of those things I really wanted to focus on led me to kind of”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks for joining me. Pleasure. So I was thinking about how we were going to start this and your life as it stands right now as a behavioral finance expert for betterment. I can only think of as like a character in Malcolm Gladwell's outliers. It's not like you could imagine when you were a kid, oh, I really want to study behavioral finance and do it for a robo advisor. So why don't you talk a little bit about how you got to the seat where you are today? Definitely. I think the two points that led to it, and I know this is cliche, but it's really true. I actually have a lot of gratitude for it, is luck. I think I was incredibly lucky. I think of it like surfing in that I happen to be at the right place at the right time and doing the right things and I just happened to catch a wave that a lot of people would love to be on. And I was just very lucky to be there. Of course, you got to do the swimming out bit. And so for me, that consisted of even as an undergraduate, I remember trying to decide if my major was going to be economics or”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As he spoke, Dan had my head spinning, thinking about how institutions and individuals alike could implement quantitative tools in their investment processes to help avoid known behavioral pitfalls during critical market moments. I hope you enjoy the show. If you do, please help spread the word by subscribing to the podcast, writing a review on iTunes, joining my mailing list, phoning a friend, or all of the above. Thanks for your time.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My guest on today's show is Dan Egan, the director of Behavioral Finance and Investing at Betterment, the market leading Robo Advisor. Dana spent his career applying behavioral finance principles to help individuals make better financial and investment decisions. Prior to joining Betterment in its early years, Dan spent six years as a behavioral finance specialist for Barclays Wealth Management. He's a graduate of Boston University and the London School of Economics and lectures at New York University, the London Business School, and the London School of Economics. Our conversation discusses how Dan has created evidence-based tools that improve outcomes for individual investors, ranging across tax loss harvesting, rebalancing, client reporting, mental accounting, commitment mechanisms, and communication during turbulent market times.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hello, I'm Ted Sides, and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. You can keep up to date by visiting capital allocators podcast.com.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital out hitters is also brought to you by admired leadership. Back in April on episode 497, I sat down with Randall Studman, the executive coach behind admired leadership, who advised more than 500 CEOs, including some of the most respected names in asset management. Randall introduced me to Alex, an AI leadership coach's team built on 40 years of proprietary research into what the best leaders actually do. For investment professionals, that means your entire team gets on-demand coaching grounded in the behaviors that drive results, and build the kind of followership that retains your top talent. We use Alex and our team at Capital Allocators swears by it. Try Alex for yourself at the link in our show notes. Try Alex. Leadership.com.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital allocators is also brought to you by Ridgeline. Ridgeline makes your day unrecognizable. That's how refreshingly different it is from legacy investment management technology. With Ridgeline's front-to-back AI native platform, your typical tech pains disappear. No integration headaches, no data discrepancies, and no upgrade cycles. Instead, you get real-time data flowing through everything from portfolio accounting to reporting to reconciliation, trading, compliance, and more. In the AI era, asset and wealth management firms moving to Ridgeline gain a decided advantage. That's why customers call it miraculous game-changing and an awakening. If that's not how you would describe your investment management tech, request a demo at RidgeLine.ai.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To an exact verifiable source because the answer is only as good as what's underneath it, and without the sense you know exactly what that is. See it for yourself. Try a free trial at alpha-sense.com slash capital. That's alphacense.com with a hyphen in the middle slash capital.”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital allocators is brought to you by AlphaCents. Here's something for you. Most AI tools today are very good at sounding right. But can you actually trace it back to a filing, transcript, or specific passage that drove the answer? Or are you just trusting the confidence of the output? For allocators, that's not a minor concern. A missed filing, incorrect source, or context that gets lost somewhere in a retrieval chain aren't edge cases. They're how decisions go wrong. AlphaSense is the AI platform built specifically for this. They own the content over 500 million curated documents from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls. And they own the retrieval layer on top of it. That means every answer can link back”
2017-08-28 · Capital Allocators · Dan Egan – Better Investment Outcomes (Capital Allocators, EP.23) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source