YouSaid · the spoken record

Dominique Mielle

lines on the record: 80
first: 2023-03-24
most recent: 2023-03-24
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

“I think it's mostly that people who speak with authority and great assertive tone don't always know what they're talking about. Other than that, nothing because it was a great adventure. It's sort of a thrill to discover a field, right? That is really what makes a job so fascinating.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what I meant. And I think they were quite a few people that I've interviewed in the later years where obviously the money was the main incentive. And it's not clear to me that you're going to be resilient enough if that's your motivation. And as we spoke, I really think that's an important quality. If you can't stick with it, it's going to be hard to be successful. And sticking with it is what is required. You're not going to get rich in a just a few years.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not very good at giving sort of open-ended advice, but I'll try it. And that would be to make sure they go into the field because they love it, meaning it sounds.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my favorite books are not financed books. I'm a huge reader. I read in English, in French, I read poetry, play, my favorite books have nothing to do with business with the little prince by Santiag and Kim by Rudyard Kipl I am reading now a book called When We Were Orphans by Ishiguro. I mean a Japanese phase and so I'm reading Japanese contemporary authors.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly. So I think it's when I think of mentor, my definition is somebody who takes a special interest in developing your career. And certainly. That didn't really exist when I started. Did people have an influence of my career? Obviously my ex-co partners, Mitch Julis and Josh Friedman. I mean, I grew up with them. ran the business. I learned most of what I know from them. They were interested in my making money for the fund. Were they interested in me Dominique having a wonderful career for the sake of my career? No, not particularly. They had fun to run and money to make and they made sure that I performed.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In France In France, in French, translated, of course. That's quite funny. I recently benched on Silicon Valley. That I had seen before, but it's such a classic. And you'll notice. The first time around, I didn't pay much attention to how the private equity guys are depicted. It's priceless.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I do watch quite a few French shows, there's one on Netflix that's called Standing Up about Stand Up Comedians Standing Up.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smile, right? Unbelievable. Can't argue with that. I said, hello, and I was very excited to have some diversity in the team.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes You know, when you talk about being comfortable, being uncomfortable right there, that was an awkward pause. But no, I didn't recognize him. I saw this really handsome black man with”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slowly, I mean, nano steps and again, certainly not where you would expect them to be for the size and the influence the industry has. I think it takes two things. One is outside push from investors, and we're definitely seeing that. LP Really, do you want diversity and they insist and they ask questions about it. But the piece that's still not completely bought in, I think, is internally, I still don't think hedge fund managers have bought the idea that they'll make more money with a more diverse investing team.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when I got stuck or I saw other women stuck, it's not so much that they were hitting their head against some invisible ceiling, it's that they were sort of pulled down. They just had to, and I had to fight so much for what seemed to be much easier to get to for men. Now, of course, this is just my impression I was not a man, I was a woman, and you could tell me, well, you had the wrong impression. But it was sort of systematic enough for me to think it's very hard to get up because I have to be so aggressive and fight so much for you name it, the capital behind my ideas, the business line I want to lead, the extra analyst I need.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure, for sure. And that was very much in response to the idea or the concept that men are better at taking risks or they're more aggressive. And that may be so, but I don't think risk for the sake of risk is the quality required being a good investor. There's a famous joke by Fran Libois who say, hey, I'm a smoker. I'm great at taking risk. And we'd have all smokers in trading rooms if that was the case. You need to have a return for the risk and return is the ability to think up a solution. Look, the hedge fund business, we're in the business of ideas and ideas are equally distributed. Between men and women.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See the potential of a different cap structure or different type of assets selling a business that's no longer profitable or closing some stores or expanding in an area where the company hasn't been before, that's all stuff that is just thinking up ideas and scenario that has very little to do with numbers. I'm not saying it doesn't help to have some ease with numbers, but it's certainly not the Foundation for success in my mind.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the stereotype of a good investor is somebody who's incredibly quick at numbers or a very ruthless deal maker. And my experience is that at least when you trade and invest in distress, but probably in every other category, there are other qualities that people don't talk about enough, and imagination and creativity and being a good listener are some of them. If you think about what it takes to restructure a company, a lot of negotiations, thinking up a new capital structure, explain in it, explaining it to other stakeholders, having a vote on that. But it takes a lot of thinking outside the box and ingenuity to”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just that's exactly what it is. I'm not saying that there is any other way. I don't have a genius idea to say, you know, those endowments should invest with mutual funds at five BIPs a fee. I just feel like the way you describe it, there's something that is surprising in. The way the world is working.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and those schools have huge endowments that they have to invest. And since, you know, David Swenson at Yale was so instrumental in making allocation to private equity and hedge fund a real pillar of the portfolio of those endowments. It's been systematically the case that those school endowments invest in hedge funds where their students are going and getting paid. And so as you said, look, I'm not saying it's wrong. Obviously, everything is very transparent and legal, but there's something that strikes me as not quite right when this money is sort of recycled.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, there's a ton of this. I mean, if you think about it, you know, the people who work in the hedge funds and make a lot of money are typically Harvard, Stanford, Columbia people, and they go down the list.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that's the kind of thinking that made me widely unpopular with the marketing team at Canyon. You know, them deploring what a sort of socialist French citizen I was even 20 years into being in this country.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. And if you're trading an asset class that is very liquid with sort of unlimited supply, like the stock market, you're going to run out of talent. And it's exactly, as you said, when we started with 500 million in assets, you need 10 excellent ideas. When you have 25 billion in assets, you need 200 excellent ideas. Well, let me tell you, maybe the Are pretty good, the next 150 have the potential to really dilute. Excellency of your top 10 investing ideas.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. There was a study on that that is called, I think, hedge fund, how big is too big. But essentially they claim that there are two issues. One is if your outperformance is related to an asset class that's illiquid, When you were too big, you're going to run out of assets to invest it.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Earnings release webcast on Bloomberg at your fingertip. So there was really an equalization of the information that took away a competitive advantage. There's the fact that there were so many more hedge funds. So not only are they bigger, but also it's a very competitive mature industry. So that was the start of performance that was very subdued, really.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While size is certainly one, and I think probably the biggest one, but also if you think about all those competitive advantages that we had in the beginning, they were taken away from us or competed away. So the information advantage. Before Reg FD That was gone. And not only that, Reg FT, I think, was implemented in 2000, but what happened was that with technology, the information became cheap and available to all of us, retail and institutional investors. It wasn't the case before. You couldn't just Turn on your computer and have your 10Ks and 10Qs on any company”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment managers became captains of industry, became people who thought about their fund not just as shuffling money, but as a business with a marketing team, with a strategic team with different geographic offices, a real business that could offer sort of that one-stop shopping to investors.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happened is in 2008, that was shocking hedge funds that were supposedly hedge. And redemptions started flowing, which led to, you know, Huge number of hedge funds closing or putting up their gates. And I think the realization then became, okay, if we want to survive and have a solid business going forward and also really build equity value for a fund, we need to be large, we need to offer multiple products. We need to think about structure and think less about evergreen funds where people can go in and out without friction and start thinking about locked up funds. So essentially”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not only the family office, the family offices might be the ones willing to take a bit more risk. But think of the pension plans. Think about the school endowments. They really need some safety and some... You know, the thought that they could be invested in a lot of emerging managers that go belly up the year after is. Is not going to fit with their risk profile.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they're very much. I don't blame them because people will act the way they're incentivized. And they're incentivized to advise you to put your money with the safest all-in-one shopping, you know, very well staffed compliance-wise investor relation-wise. Companies, those are the big ones, right? That's what their incentivized to do. It's sort of like Think of a mature industry like fashion. You know, you're not going to buy, why do you buy Gucci sunglasses? It's not because you see better. It's because the brand says something that nobody's going to make fun of you for wearing Gucci glasses. It has a certain cachet of quality. It's probably going to last, and that's why people, but that's all marketing, right?”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, I think it's definitely the case that the biggest hedge funds are attracting the most money and the smallest emerging managers are having a very tough time fundraising.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. The other thing I can think of is that there will always be room for hedge funds in a portfolio allocation for diversification. And that's a perfectly valid reason to invest in hedge funds. I get that. But again, how much do you pay for diversification and how good is it? Because lately diversification has not been good from hedge funds.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of surprising outcome where people put their money really with the biggest funds and paying for safety rather than outperformance. I'm nothing against paying for safety. The question is how much do you pay for that?”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have, but that is the recommendation you'll get from every consultant to every family office, or, you know, because that is the safe thing to do. Because those middlemen are paid for safety. So we've come to this”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's one and 15, but it's really coming down. So there is the awareness from institutional investors that fees are too high. But I can think of a couple reasons of why that's going on. And the main one is that it used to be that hedge funds were populated with risk-tolerant investors. It's not the case anymore. It's mostly institutional investors who are advised by third-party brokers or consultants. And those consultants are not paid to take risks. Nobody's going to get fired by recommending that you put money with oak tree. Right? That's the safe thing to recommend”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, to be fair, there is pressure on fees. So I think at this point, there are very few hedge funds able to charge still 2% and 20%.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's totally true. That is exactly what's happening. Size is the enemy of outperformance. And if you think about it in very simple terms, those funds have become”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100x correct. What I do know is that there's a Handful, or actually a bit more than a handful are still in business today and that have become the market, right? From Apollo to Cedar to Oak Tree these are the mammoth of hedge funds. So is he talking about that? There's a handful of guys who started early and have become huge and are still at it and still racking funds from investors. That's true, but they're not producing alpha. If you look at their returns, you know, it's not particularly, they're not outperforming the market, at least not systematically. And that was really the promise of hedge funds.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually don't know that they're the same funds generating alpha. The numbers are correct. When I started, there were 2,000 hedge funds managing maybe. 300 billion or 11,000 or so.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't. And so a lot of the competitive advantages that hedge funds really capitalized on early on have been regulated away or competed away.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think any investor today would. Gasp at the idea that a company could tell you and me about their earnings next month and not to them.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stay out of jail. That was before socks. That was shortly after Reg FD. It's hard to believe, but there was a time when companies disclosed different facts to different people.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, those companies went bankrupt. And so that was more WorldCom, Enron. Enron, Conseco, Tycho, all Tycho. That's right, I should say. Huge companies that produced”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of work. Lots of work, lots of gold to mine, and the industry was very small. So it was Lot easier to make good returns, and we indeed do did produce amazing double digit 20% return on a regular basis.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's any different from any industry starting out, right? We talk about an S-curve for most industries and there's a very rapid expansion. When you start with a good idea, and few people going after a very large pot, especially for distress when you think of the 2001-2002 periods, I think if I recall correctly, there were some 600 bankrupt companies in one year.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody very smart, I'm sure. It's the probability and the severity of your. Loss, but sticking with it is, you know, what it takes.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's also the average. Do you win on average more than you lose? But you are going to lose. I don't know a single investor who doesn't lose money. Regularly”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's, you know, and by the way, Barry, I do think these are huge qualities for investors. Resilience, the ability to Lose money on a daily basis and get back into it and make up for it. An amazing lesson in life, right? To take Failure and losses as business as usual. It's just a flip side of a winning trade. And you know because you've interviewed so many of those amazingly successful investors that the image of them never having a losing trade is a fallacy.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are my qualities, you know, I'm resilient. I'm in between a dog and a donkey, a persistent You know, I get the bone and I just keep it.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was a tsunami that literally lifted all waves of hedge funds from 90 to 2008 and even beyond, no offense to Kenya, but their growth is very much a beta phenomenon that happened to Faralon, to Citadel, to... Omega to, I mean, you name it. Exactly.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really? I think so. And it's all a matter of how. Wide your definition of luck is. If you're thinking very specifically, did I win the lottery? Did I Meet somebody who offered me a job at Canyon or at another successful, then you could say, well, no, I'm not lucky. I worked really hard. But if you look at luck in the much broader context of I was born in a free wealthy country, France. To parents who were both educated and valued education, not particularly wealthy, but middle class, upper middle class, right? I was born white. Yes, a woman which has came with some difficulties in the field that I chose. But I would say incredible luck. Yeah, absolutely. And then the biggest luck of it all is I joined Canyon in the 90s”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. And so I do recognize that finance and particularly investing in hedge funds has this immense potential for social mobility. But generally speaking, our society is pretty frozen in that really desperate classes of people.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there was a lot more movement, upward movement back in the 60s and in the 70s. There were marriages between the boss and the secretary. There were jobs that allowed people to move up. Strangely, you know, finance is still one of those jobs that could take people from a very modest background if you think about George Soro's guy who had nothing when he An emergency?”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct the 1% probably controls 80% of the wealth in this country. And that's something that most Americans are not aware of if you ask them to describe their country, they'll describe a country of which wealth structure resembles Norway. We're not in Norway. Right.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source