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Emily Haisley

lines on the record: 102
first: 2026-06-28
most recent: 2026-06-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“This feeling that everybody on the team can speak their own truth, be their authentic self, that they can take intellectual risks without fear of retribution. And I think also what's really important is that these leaders are often quite quiet. So they may be the ones speaking last in the meetings, right? You don't want a leader, the key portfolio manager, the key decision maker speaking first and kind of anchoring everybody on their own point of view. They're genuinely interested on the independent points of view of other people. And so they'll listen first and try to stay in a state of delayed judgment. They'll try to really delay their own judgment until they hear other people's.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And of course, it's, yeah, exactly. And of course, it's impossible to take your ego out of the situation completely. And, you know, I struggle with it myself, even when I'm in conversations with investors or speaking with my own team. I've learned over time, and I'm not mastered this, but I've learned over time that the more I am trying to be the one to be helpful or the one I am trying to get to the solution, the more I'm trying to be right, the worse the whole thing, the worst the whole thing is. So what are the habits, I think, of good leaders who can subjugate their own egos. I think that or move past them. I think that one, they have a willingness to talk about their mistakes, to be vulnerable in that way in front of the team. So this is like classic psychological safety by doing that. You promote psychological safety.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that you had asked me the question actually of what makes a really good investor at one point. And I think I'd answered that, you know, I see so many different types of investors and I think there's so many different strengths and weaknesses. And you just want those strengths and weaknesses to be aligned with the particular game you're playing with like, you know, the asset class that you're in or the time horizon that you're investing under, et cetera. But I think something that just reflected on it, something that just really pervades every good investor, I think is not being caught up in their own ego. And is someone that is more interested in markets than being interested in being interested in themselves, being right? They want to like understand what's going to happen next in markets more.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that means that even though the people making the decisions are often the kind of like the most senior people in typically the most senior people in the group, I really try to impress on all of the other members of the team that it is their job to beat up the decision makers, right? It is their job to challenge the decision makers. It is their job to really speak their truth to the lead portfolio managers making the decisions because that is how the wisdom of crowds primarily works is through like a principle of error can flowing, diversity and independence have a function of canceling errors, canceling these biases.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I think it's absolutely essential to have a team or to have people that you work with that can do that. A lot of the decision making processes that happen at BlackRock are in the structure of a team. And the kind of the decision-making authority kind of structure that I prefer is to have, you know, to not make decisions by consensus to have the lead PM or like a couple of lead PMs being the people who are taking the decisions.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he wants to run winners, right? And he's not scared to go about going into positions that have rallied, where he's like, I don't like that. I'd rather buy into weakness. So I think that, you know, there's no wrong or right way of doing it. It always depends on the situation. And it always depends on you making the decisions based on your future expectations, not based on yourself, right? So to counteract the impact of yourself, you would want to try to find somebody to debate, to work with that is going to, that has the naturally has the opposite inclinations that you have.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. What you can learn about yourself in the process, I think, is really important. And then I think on that temptation to break even, right? When you break even, you're out. I mean, I like this, you know, I too, like you, have my inclination is to add into weakness and not to crystallize losses at the bottom right unless it was clear that my rationale really really doesn't hold water. I was really mistaken. There was something that I missed. But then, you know, this break-even effect, I think that's one that you have to be really aware of when you have a kind of temperament like our own. And that's where having the right sparring partner, you know, on your team. I don't know if you make investment decisions with your wife, but my husband has exactly the opposite is me, you know, he wants to, he must aggressively cut loss.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a person, that I think really you have to do a lot of work to continually subtract how much of that cognitive burden is about because you're worried about that 1% of your portfolio or how much of that cognitive burden is about what does it say about you that this position is underperforming. And again, I think it's like so important to take the you out of any scenario and look purely at the prospects for the company. Another thing that example brings up for me is let's say today you broke even Alibelva rallied enough for you to break even on your original investment. What would you do then?”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I might stay with, I might stay with the position because of what it's teaching you. We're actually teaching you quite a bit. The other thing that you mentioned was the cognitive burden of this position, losing money. And that comes into this pain management versus risk management. And if you're cutting something just because it's putting you in pain, I think you need to look at that and make a decision about whether, you know, it's worth the pain if it's that big of a distraction. But I think, you know, for you, you said it's 1% of your portfolio and it's causing this pain. And I think, you know, we talked about for portfolio managers having a job where there is a constant scorecard where the drawdowns are examined by clients, by management, by risk managers. There's a lot of a need to defend yourself.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and almost nothing you said right at that moment had anything to do with Alibaba. It all had to do with you or with other experts, right?”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So all of these things. So, okay, taking the advice of experts, that's pretty rational. But doing things anytime you're making a decision about markets where the reason why you're doing it has something to do with you, then that's when you know that there's a problem, right? So you mentioned it because, you know, is your feelings about them that made you buy the security, right? Not their expertise, but you're kind of affiliative feelings. A little bit of both.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at all. First of all, I love that you did buy Alibaba, right? Because it's giving you all these opportunities to reflect on your own rationality and all these lessons that you can learn. And I think they're like a real believer that in order to learn, to undo these biases, you almost always have to limit yourself. And this is some of my research is also showing and lots of behavioral research is showing like teaching people about the biases often isn't sufficient. You have to like build it into like the structure of the process and like very often you have to like have physical real experience with it and like and feel the experience like in your body as well as go through it cognitively. Okay, a couple of things like go to my mind. You bought the security because people that you admire.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Position and those risks have materialized, but they're still folding it. I think the biggest clue also that someone's doing this is if you start talking to them about it and you're met with some emotion, you're met with some soundness or some stress or some anger. That's when, okay, we know that there's some alpha here we can unlock by addressing this. And that's what I get excited.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Book trade in the portfolio, and there the trade diary might be useful. Is it coming from trades that started out as tactical trades that are actually becoming longer-term trades as the investor gets caught in this pattern of wanting to continuously hold or add risks to positions that aren't working, even though the original thesis is no longer valid. Maybe they're creating new theses for why they should hold it but don't make sense necessarily they're justifications for their previous decisions. Maybe there's something going on in the team dynamic where the positions that are losing money have become a taboo topic and they're not being re-underwritten. They're not being updated. It's not okay to challenge those positions. Maybe in the trade diary, we would have seen that they have put down particular risks to”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To reap your gains and cut your losses that could be consistent with the disposition bias, but will only save the problem if it then turns out to be costly in the portfolio. If it then turns out that the losing positions don't mean revert and come back, right? And by reaping your gains, you've taken profit too soon and you've missed out on future opportunities. So in that case, your cell hit rate isn't good as you're cutting positions, they continue to perform. When we see, you know, if we see the disposition bias, there's a number of different things that we can do to try to like, you know, dig into why it's happening. So we might go through and look at lots of examples that are consistent with the pattern and have the investor talk through them. We might look at, you know, is the disposition bias being driven by a particular type?”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and this is a kind of natural tendency that most retail investors will have that often investors will have early in their career and they kind of unlearn this bias. They kind of learn to run their winners longer and to admit when they're wrong sooner and cut losses or risk manage their losses so they don't get carried out. But it's not always the case. And there could be some investors that are quite good contrarian investors that are just very, you know, they understand when the market has overreacted and overreacted to negative news or negative news is impacting a position where it's not actually relevant. And that's where they'll add risk and the position will actually mean revert. So when we look at it, we're looking at like this, the relative probability of realizing a gain versus a loss, but then we also, that's like if a greater”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So the way that we measure the disposition bias is will loc through time of what's the probability that they realize a gain versus the probability that they realize a losing position. And so we'll take as evidence that the disposition bias could be of interest for this portfolio if we see that there's a greater probability of them reaping a gain than cutting a loss. And this is, you know, this is we're generally looking at this relative to a benchmark.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then he came back, and his manager explained to him that part of the job is taking risks. And those risks don't always work. So you're not here to make money every time. You're here to take risks consistent with your edge. And you cannot expect them all to work all of the time. That this is part of the job and that he hadn't done anything wrong. And so I think that that is a huge part, you know, having the right culture of rational risk taking that can help alleviate some of these biases as well as the more investment process structural things like defaults.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're kind of the default is nudging them towards the correct or the more rational approach. And then you're using maybe a bit of process sludge having to document like deviations from the default to make sure that you're thinking hard about why you're debating and not just reacting driven by emotion. I think also in that what's really important is again the emotion and the mindset and the culture around it. So I was talking about this ads, you know, for a group of investors at an off-site once about myopic loss aversion. And one of the investors took me aside after and he recounted about the first time he had lost a lot of money and that his idea that went into the portfolio like didn't do well and how he had like You know, gone to the bathroom, you know, to hide in shame.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's exactly it. I think there's approaches that have to do with addressing the psychology of like the mindset and the emotions. And there's approaches that are just in line with what you've suggested that are taking from the behavioral literature these nudge strategies that help change behavior. So you set a default position size. So you may say, you know, all new positions, we think about it. We've collectively created the team that each new position should start at this level. And it's okay to exercise our conviction, right? And say, no, this is a higher conviction position or the catalyst hasn't quite started to materialize. So it's going to be smaller. There's good reasons to deviate from that default, but you have to be really clear and perhaps document reasons why you would deviate from the default.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“CEO of a company wants everybody kind of, you know, below them taking risks in line with their edge, taking risks of positive expected value through time. But for that, if you go down the pyramid, for that one individual taking the risk, they're less diversified, each risk is more of a reflection on them and feels riskier. So that is why it's set kind of several reasons why people may enter into new positions in two small size or perhaps scale up a bit too slowly.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That in particular may come not just from kind of going into a new risk, but it may be because maybe in particular analyst on the team is recommending, is pitching this investment idea. And maybe this analyst only has a small number of positions in the overall portfolio. And so for that analyst, right, they have less breath. They're more concentrated. So if any one of their positions doesn't do well, that will kind of like really, you know, that will stand out, right? Whereas for us like a portfolio manager managing across a diversified portfolio, he or she wants to add risk to any new position that's consistent with their edge. And through diversification, through taking risks consistent with your edge through time, you'll make money over the long run.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe it's based on new developments or newly released pieces of information that you want to incorporate into your portfolio through this position. Very often portfolio managers will enter at a small size. And this may be because positions that are new often feel risky because you're maybe not as familiar with this asn't a company that you've owned for years and years and years. This is a company that maybe you've just decided to invest in or a position that you just finished researching, that you want to put into multi-affet portfolio. And so this newness feels risky. I think also for a lot of investors changing the portfolio can feel risky. Like change feels risky. And in terms of myopic loss aversion, very often,”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in one that you just mentioned, in scaling into positions to slowly, which Mile is consistent with myopic gloss aversion, we'll look to compare the performance in a particular position that actually occurred as the investor built up the position through time and compare that to the return they would have achieved if they had entered the position at the peak weight initially. You know, and it may be that going in slowly is the right thing to do because maybe you're building on local sell-offs, right? You know, maybe you're building on that. You're building your position on weakness. That seems like, you know, that could be a very, very smart thing to do. Or it could be that what's most typical in your process is that as you have formed your investment thesis and the thesis is quite sound is quite”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there may be discussions with CIOs about how to take the investment process forward, about maybe resources the team may need, but certainly not about the mistakes of the investor or of maladaptive reactions to stress and the like.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think where there is, to be clear, where there is formal confidentiality is only around the ARA program, they have agreed to participate in this program under strict confidentiality. When we're looking at their portfolio analytics, to be fair, anybody can kind of look at these analytics and see what's going on in somebody's portfolio. It's based on their history of holding and return and risk through time, right? And that data is really public, you know, within the Aladdin technology at BlackRock. But most often, it's really just my team that is looking at these analytics and sharing, you know, sharing the insights with them. And there is a lot of discretion that we apply around what happens in the meeting.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chew and still is that you know this is like a protected learning environment. Again, this isn't something where myself or my team are feeding into whether they are promoted or not or they're compensation or not or the opportunities that they get or denied in their career down the road. This is kind of their time for self-reflection to get to know themselves, to think about how they can improve their process, how they can improve their team dynamics, how they can do better for clients, not a situation where they have to perform or they have to be on or they have to defend themselves or rationalize.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because if our analytics can't find any biases, then kind of we can't help you. You're kind of maybe like as good as you're going to be in your process. And we're not seeing any clear opportunities for you to learn. So I really try to have them understand that they don't need to be afraid of us identifying bias because if we can identify a systematic mistake, we can often fairly easily undo that. Whereas if the mistakes that they're making in the portfolio are just random, then there's less we can do to help them. So that's number one is to really have the mindset that these biases are like our opportunities. And very often, you know, they'll, you know, enjoy the meaning on some level and also find it painful on another level, right? Because isn't it always just, you know, painful to look at our mistakes, but good for us. And the other thing I trust.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the process is not, so there's many different processes depending on where the portfolio manager is coming from. So if it's kind of a routine sort of meeting where we have analytics, like maybe there are new portfolio manager, but now we have enough track record where we have analytics to be able to show them what's working and what's not working in their process. They generally have had some introduction to the team, know that they can come to us if they want help. And when we start to review their analytics, I try to make them understand, and many of them already do understand, that this is a process where if our analytics don't show anything, that's not necessarily a good thing.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We lived outside of the lab to test ideas. So we started working, you know, we were interested in how low-income people make decisions. And so I was collecting data at the Greyhound bus station. We were interested, you know, one of my colleagues was actually interested in how people make decisions when they're under the influence of alcohol. And, you know, George had like a data van set up and she'd go and down if people were coming out of bars and ask them if they wanted to do experiments. You know, with George, we did research, we did field experiments in banks. We did field experiments in low-income populations to encourage them to save. We did experiments related to healthcare. So, you know, he really inspired me to start to move the theory into an applied setting. He really taught me that.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we're meaningful for you that might help you understand something about your own life and how much I learned from George about taking things out of the laboratory and starting to put them in a more applied setting. So, you know, a lot of the early work that was done in the judgment and decision making and behavioral economics and experimental economics, it was all done in laboratory settings. And, you know, either with surveys or with experiments, normally on university students and with Georgia's inspiration,”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so he wrote a paper with others called Risked Ceilings, which I use probably every day in my work. He also talked a lot about differences between hot and cold state decision making. So looking at, you know, and looking at the impact of like visceral forces on your decision making and obviously that feeds a lot into the work that I do in conversations with investors and in the work I do on stress impacting decision making. So, you know, and again, I can talk more about how we apply those concepts, but I just also want to really say how much I learned from George in terms of applying like intellectual curiosity to your work, to researching things that”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I never really thought that there should be any tension from the two and in fact that they could really learn from each other. And actually on a personal note, for many, many, many years, my boyfriend was a PhD student in the neoclassical economics persuasion. And we would learn from each other. Some of behavioral economists might say, you know, sleeping with the enemy. But from my perspective, I was this was like an opportunity to kind of like think about how other people see the world and use both perspectives to move forward.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we might want to kind of like aim for in our decision making, although they did also have a lot of assumptions about people being self-interested that we maybe don't want to model, but at least it gives us some direction and some benchmark through which we could actually compare how people actually make decisions, how they actually behave, how often markets are really maybe out of equilibrium and how often prices may look irrational, it gives us a comparison point that we can learn so much.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there is potentially some. I do believe that to a certain extent, but not completely, not for any one individual making decisions. We shouldn't be assuming that they are rational or they should not be questioning their own rationality. And then in the liberal arts department, there was a department called Social and Decision Sciences, which had behavioral economists who were there and was, you know, and they really almost were two separate groups who sometimes were in conflict and didn't work together that often. And I actually didn't see any conflict between the two. I always thought of it as like the rational agents approach, the efficient market approach might tell us like where we want to go to in an ideal world. It might give us like some clues towards what the right solution is or”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think my actual prior and most people's prior is that humans are not that rational actually. And I might be surprised by the kind of neoclassical economists who believe in at least modeling decision making with the assumption of rational agents. And there really was that tension at Carnegie Mellon. So Herb Simon was like a leading figure there who really, I think, you know, introduced the idea of satisfying and bounded rationality was a core of that. And then there were a lot of neoclassical economists in the business school who would argue that even if individuals aren't themselves rational, markets will become rational and efficient because in aggregate the errors will cancel each other out.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The closest area I could find to that, even though a lot of the graduates went on to be professors as opposed to going into organizations, that was the path I decided to follow. And then once I got to Carnegie Mellon, which was an extremely interdisciplinary school, I could see how much they encouraged you to work with, you know, the economics department, with economists there who were behavioral economists who were studying the impact of psychology and financial decisions and economic decision making. And I just completely fell in love with that area.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, something I talk a lot about as investors. Then, what I came to, though, especially, I think doing research on, what I would have kind of came to is that while I really, really loved kind of clinical psychology and that whole area, I sort of didn't see a place for myself in that system. And I really just kind of, the more I learned about psychology, the more I felt really strongly that there were so many opportunities to apply psychology in policy, in organizations. And I didn't see that really being done. I think it maybe still isn't done that much. But in my mind, I could see such strong links. I just knew that that was what I wanted to do. And so I got a PhD in organizational behavior management in Carnegie Mellon, which was the kind of”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the emotions are too strong around the position itself and the performance itself, or are you cutting risk because you're worried about things happening in the future? So is the emotion coming from something related to a forecast? Or is the emotion coming from something that you're experiencing right now that's difficult or something that you're scared of, maybe that's happened in the past or something you're scared might happen in the future and not related to a worry around what might happen around constraints on like supply and oil, for example. So we really understand what's driving the emotion. Is it coming from something that's related to the investment decision that you're trying to make in a helpful way where it's potentially providing information? Or is it related to the decision that you're trying to make in a way”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even just this morning, having a conversation with investors trying to understand doing a post-mortem on how they were adding risk during the drawdown triggered by the conflict in Iran and talking through that experience of when they were adding risk of how the team, you know, how it was on the team for that experience. And for teams that are cutting risk, you might often ask, is it pain management? Or is it risk management? And to be really clear about your emotions around, let's say, when you're cutting risk, are you cutting the risk because you're adding, you know, during a drawdown and it's just too painful to hold it? I mean, it's not because it's not working. And so are you going to then cut risk because you just can't take the pain anymore?”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the most interesting lessons I took was working in psychiatric hospitals and really having this fascination of being there for somebody who's in pain and also really helping them look at their pain as an experience where they could learn and looking at pain as like an intellectual exercise to really not be afraid of, but to go right into and to understand. So that was really impactful for me. It's funny.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Worked in a sleep laboratory for some time and Ta class on sleep, which obviously I apply in my work now. Some of the work I did involved sleep-depriving children. And so you can see the effects of sleep deprivation, which a lot of, you know, that work now, it's very hard to get IRB approval for sleep deprivation because it is so costly. It is so damaging to the body. So, you know, it's part of some of that early work to uncover that. And I kind of think now my penance for that work is encouraging people to sleep as much as possible and to pay attention to it because I just, we know how critical it is for health and for intellect. So, you know, it's actually, but if I think about, you know, what a lot of all of those things that I did and I took something from all of them. But what I think”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a child, being really interested in science, worked at like a plant molecular biology lab at NYU when I was in high school, worked in neuroscience, neuroscience laboratory at university. My first paper was in neuroscience. Then I hit this wall where I decided I didn't like lab work. I didn't like working with animals and laboratories. And I realized that I had such a strong passion for understanding the brain that also extended to psychology. And so I started to think about exploring clinical psychology and started volunteering and later worked in psychiatric hospitals. It was doing research in psychiatric disorders that were treated in primary care settings. So did a lot of research where I was diagnosing and doing research on anxiety disorders.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I always kind of give the advice to young people to follow their bliss and to follow their interests and to follow their curiosity and to follow their passion. And sometimes that leads you to kind of like you hit a wall of like you realize like I'm not interested in this. I don't like this. And then that tells you, you know, tells you to pivot into something else. And when I look back, I feel like I pivoted all over the show, but I apply everything that I've learned in my role today. So I always just find that interesting is to just, you know, to just keep exploring passions. And if you don't like where you are, chances are you've learned a lot from that and you've also learned that that's not where you want to devote your time 100%, but maybe you can work that knowledge into what does become your life's work. And so I started out, you know, being”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I completely agree. And I think that's true not only in investing, but I think that that's true often in life for whatever we're trying to achieve. We're often our own worst enemy. And whether that's under confidence and questioning one's own intelligence and capabilities and maybe goodness or etc, or it's coming from overconfidence of a fragile ego that's trying to protect itself shutting itself off to other information or information that it doesn't want to hear. I think it's true for almost anything that we're often our own worst enemy.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We use wearable technology. The main one that we use is the aura ring. And on a voluntary and confidential basis, portfolio managers will agree to share their aura data with my team. And then we can link their physiology to what's going on in their portfolios and play that back to them.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of the spiritual teachings that have been passed down over three centuries. And then another thing that we do is very unique, I'd say. We're interested in keeping portfolio managers in the right state of mind, in the right state of balance to have the best shot of making rational decisions. And these are things that are uncontrovertible from like a scientific perspective, but not often applied. Things like we don't want them in a sleep-deprived state, things like we want them aware of when they're stressed and taking measures to rest, to counteract that stress, to stay in balance. We want them in positive stress states where their stress is fueling their performance and not negative stress states where they may be withdrawing or maybe more shutting down or heading choice burnout. And to do that,”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is with maybe private and private assets where there's not enough of a transaction history, new portfolio managers, not enough of a transaction history to quantify biases. And there will mainly work just around what's going on in the investment process, how aligned do we think that investment process is to behavioral best practice, what are the pain points in that investment process. And with every process, even if it's a really, really strong process, there's always something you could do. There's always some work to do to add some discipline or subtract some process that's just bureaucracy and not working. There's always something. And then there's also a team dynamics approach, which is use leveraging the literature from social psychology, for example, on group decision making and the biases that apply there, many of which I found align with like”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That are driven by loss aversion, overconfidence, myopia, is their excess trading. We basically started from the behavioral finance literature and said, you know, what are the biggest problems identified there? And let's try to calculate them in portfolios. And then from there, we will help investors understand systematic mistakes that they're making that are costly, biases consistent with the literature, which then are, you know, a drag on returns in their portfolio will help them understand their edge and try to get them to essentially change their process to help their biases or take less risk where they don't have an edge and take more risk where they do have an edge. So that's the main kind of area that we work in. With some teams, you know, it's not possible to have analytics, maybe just one example.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“may be worried about exposing their biases or talking about their pain points or talking about their mistakes with me because I have this independent function. And within a risk and quantitative analysis, it's very much a quantitative approach. So our kind of first port of call is where we can, where it's available, is shedding light on what's going on in an investment process using our behavioral analytics. So these are suite of analytics that will quantify biases that you may have heard of, like loss aversion and the disposition bias and endowment effect.”
2026-06-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH069: The Psychology of Investing w/ Emily Haisley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT