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Dominique Mielle

lines on the record: 80
first: 2023-03-24
most recent: 2023-03-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yes look, I'm not saying that France is much better, but over the last thirty or forty years, probably 40 years since the Reagan years, if you look at the wealth and the income distribution in this country, it really has sort of gelled at the top.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. And now we've gone full circle berry to what we were talking about just a second ago. If you have 10 white guys from Harvard, What are the odds that one of them will be completely outside the think tank? That is, you know, this team. If you again want to be uncomfortable, if you want to be outside the box, you probably need people who look different, who think different, who were raised differently. And I'm not just talking about women, I'm talking about minorities.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not going in the right direction. Either the left side of the balance sheet, the assets have something to, you have to fix something, or it's the right side with the capital structure. But something is awry in this situation. And to most people, it would be a sign that you shouldn't touch it. And you have to feel comfortable being in the minority. That's probably true for probably every investor who's a bit of a contrarian. It's very uncomfortable to be. To be in the minority and with conviction say, I'm going to buy this company. That's the right thing. There's something that I see that others don't.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was at the time. I like to think that I'm more, you know, after 30 years in this country, I'm a little bit better Acclimatized to how the That people live in this beautiful country, but I still do feel somewhat foreign in this country. And frankly, when I go back to France, I feel equally foreign because I'm not really French either. But look I think it is an important quality to have to be an investor because an industry or a business of conviction In the face of facts that are sometimes very damning, sometimes very contradictory, especially if you were thinking about investing in the stress, you're going to buy a company that is not doing well, where all the signs are telling you.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From many different situations where, you know, being French, I grew up with different culture, different habits. You're an outsider.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of, I don't want to speak ill of the guy who I greatly admired, you know, from the, he's obviously in the book of Michael Lewis, who you've interviewed. But that's the thing. Even the guy you think of so highly after three hedge funds opened and closed, you got to wonder if there's some risk management issue there.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. The survival rate of an emerging manager is low. There are a ton of expenses and they're getting higher with compliance and marketing and reporting and investor relationship, et cetera. And you typically have one anchor investor, maybe two, three if you're lucky, but you're really living month to month. And that's great fun when you start. That was the great adventure of Canyon in 98 for me. But it's also a, you know, every month is make a break. You have a terrible... Couple of months, your anchor investor pulls his or her money and you're done. You have a few star traders and analysts who quit, very hard.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. That leads to a difference in outcome. At the very least, I would take those studies and say, Look, having more women in your investment teams in hedge funds is not a matter of fairness or equity. Who cares on Wall Street?”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that's right. The study you're citing is actually called Boys Will Be Boys over confidence in trading. So there you go. But it's interesting that you really can pinpoint the difference in return because there's this sort of impatient or over zealousness in trading your portfolio, whereas Standing still and second guessing yourself and really doing quiet studying and reading would produce better returns, which is what women in those studies generally tend to do. So, look, my point is very far from saying women are better investors than men. That's sort of a generalization that I wouldn't make.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's private equity, it's everywhere. Across the board, and the reason those studies exist is they're trying to answer the question, are men better investors than women? Because if it were the case, then you would understand why there's a preponderance of men in the investing jobs. And it turns out not to be the case. Not because You can answer that men are smarter or not as smart as women, but strictly because the friction of over trading costs a lot. And so, why do they overtrade the studies don't say, and I wouldn't venture to.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Interestingly, it's interesting you're saying that because Kenyon has since moved to. Dallas, Texas. There you go. That makes a lot of sense.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different and similar at the same time. If you're talking about female representation in hedge funds, it's very similar. There's been nanosteps, but it's nowhere near. What you would expect for an industry that's grown so much and that's become so institutionalized. And that's something we may want to talk about later. But they took a chance because, look, hiring a woman was exceptional. It wasn't the typical profile. It still isn't. And on top of that, hiring a foreigner was an additional hurdle and a French person, which they probably didn't realize at the time, but made me probably a raging socialist compared to the average hedge fund political mind.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cases. So there just was a ton of distress and therefore returns were easier to come by. It's a lot harder when you've got a few 20 billion distressed situations to pick from. And meanwhile, the giant of distressed have raised funds. That are alone $15 billion.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So short, you got to be positioned and ready and have the cash. And second, it's shallow in the sense that the biggest distress companies are very small historically. If you think of the biggest bankruptcy in 2020 was Hertz, that's only $25 billion in assets. Compare that to the Lehman Brothers at $600 billion. Compare that to the period of 01 where we had corporate malfeasance, you'll remember Enron, Conseco, World Cup. Exactly. But those were 100 billion.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and that is, of course, due to the Fed intervention. But if you think about it QE is a relatively novel tool, it wasn't invented in 08, but certainly before that it hadn't been used so massively, so widely, so systematically. And so, you know, since 2008, the Fed has consistently used QE to rescue the bond market and with bigger and bigger purchases in more asset classes. And so what that's done is a couple things. One is the period of time where you have the stressed bonds available has shortened, right? It was a few months in 2025 before that, 2016, the energy crisis same before that, if you remember the taper tantrum in the summer of... 11, I think, also a few months.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do less of that and more thinking about the business of hedge funds in general. So in other words, I'm less interested in bond picking at this point and more interested in what's going on. For example, you talk about the 2020 distress cycle. interesting to me that it was so short, so shallow. We had about five months of.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so all those don't even exist anymore. And these were real bankruptcies led by a supply-demand imbalance, too much leverage and not enough demand for the products. And the demand was sort of tardy to come. So those companies restructured or liquidated. But it was not a liquidity issue. 08 was purely a liquidity issue. So the formidable trades were to buy companies that were actually very viable the way they were and bonds were trading at huge discounts because there were no buyers anymore.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, which isn't crazy. Exactly. That kept my colleagues occupied and making a lot of money. By 0809, look, there were bankruptcies everywhere in every industry, from retail to telecom. And the great bonanza of late 2008 and 09 is that there were companies that were not stressed at all. It's just the bonds were trading horribly just because Liquidity was gone from the market. So it's It was a pretty different situation from 2001, the whole dot-com bust, but more importantly, the telecom implosion. That's when all the wireless cable, some wireline companies went bankrupt names that maybe your listeners today wouldn't recognize.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, financial institutions were not my industry to cover, but of course Lehman was a huge restructuring and bankruptcy liquidation. Still”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaning the insurance owns a claim against PG&E, and that they want to sell it and get the cash immediately and they sell it to Ba Post at a discount to what they're entitled to. That could be a trade. So there are infinite ways to position yourself in this sort of game of throne type.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's correct, and it can be a lot more complicated than that. Of course, it can be a simple capital structure like PG&E in bankruptcy, which had one layer of equity and one layer of bonds. And it can be very complicated like Puerto Rico that had 19 different debt issues by different entities with different terms. So not only can you be long one bond, you can be long and short two bonds, you can be long different maturities, you can be long claim insurance in insurance claims. That's the English insurance.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And anything above the par value of the total debt on the capital structure belongs to the equity guys. And so there are a lot of cases where it's really interesting how this sort of game of strategy, this game of risk starts with a sudden change in volatility. It can be a bankruptcy, but it also can be an M&A event. It can be an LBO, it can be even a change in regulation or in market where suddenly volatility picks up and the interest of bondholders and shareholders are at odds. And that's really what made the job absolutely thrilling. I'm less of a business lover. I invest less because I'm interested in what widgets a company does and more in the capital structure and how to position your What the other guy is going to do at the bond level or senior secured level and how to position yourself to make money. That's the thrill.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if the value of the business of the company falls below the par amount of the bond, Then the bondholders are going to repossess the company. It's as simple as that the equity guys give you the keys and it's yours to run.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean It was a fairly Asset class I think It's not until probably fair lawn came into existence. Became a real Acid class in itself that's stressed and distressed was Category that was thought as investable, but it was very tiny. I mean, I think there were. Probably 15 billion in assets in total of hedge funds investing in distress at the time in the mid. And so if you compare that to today, if you remember oak tree raised fifteen billion dollar fund, 2020 on its own. So the magnitude is not even comparable. So it was a starting industry, very much a sort of venture capital type of business.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brought to me through a couple of classes that were incredibly illuminating, one taught by Bill Sharp and one by Darryl Duffy. Exceptional minds. So I sort of narrowed down. Finance to buy side, buy side to hedge funds, hedge funds to something that had to do with junk bonds, Because I was a great Admirer of Michael Milk had read books about him and so I thought that seems a very interesting mix of finance but also strategy.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first, I sort of zoomed in on the fact that I wanted to work for a hedge fund, that I wanted to go to the buy side. That was first. And that was sort of.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sounds tedious. Square. And I thought what happens to the diagonal? Do they merge with themselves? You want me to model that too? But that was kind of the sort of... Almost mindless brute force job that I was doing.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course I was, and it was particularly ruthless because I was in a group called FIG Financial. Financial institutions group at the time there were still a lot of savings and loan institution thrift lots of mergers. So what I did basically was model the Mergers of any combination you could think of. I mean, I remember it got so bad that there was a spreadsheet with all the different institutions vertically and horizontally and I had to model them in each.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, by the time I got to Stanford, I pretty much knew I wanted to be in finance. But where I started was at Lehman Brothers in New York before Stanford, and that was completely, that was serendipity, really. I wanted a job that would take me away from Paris. I wanted to see the world. And whether it was... investment banking or basket weaving really had absolutely no bearing on my decision. So I ended up as an investment banker, you know, like every analyst I hated after a few years. And so the MBA was sort of a way out of that job branching into hopefully what I thought were better pastures, but still in finance.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it started with an article that I wrote as a hobby about my experience as a woman at Lehman Brothers. And it was picked up by business insider And I realized a couple things. One was that I really enjoy writing. And two was that I had never really taken time to think about the lack of women in the business and that there really wasn't a voice To tell the story of female investors. And so that's when I thought, you know, there might be a hole in the market.”
2023-03-24 · Masters in Business · Dominique Mielle on Luck and Resilience in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source