YouSaid · the spoken record

Henry Fernandez

lines on the record: 40
first: 2023-01-25
most recent: 2023-01-25
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

“Well, I hope that what my tombstone will say, right? Nice guy. We miss him. He was fun. But he made a difference in the world. His life. So, I want people to say his life made a difference. He devoted his passion, his energy, his skills to the right cause. And that made the world and society move an inch closer to being better and his life was worth it. This person was born and eventually died. And that trajectory through this planet Earth was not in vain. The life of others.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're 90 years old, nobody's going to ask you what was your salary when you were 50, right? What was your compensation when you were 35? Well, people are going to ask you, what do you contribute to make the world better? That doesn't mean that you end up in a career in government or in an NGO or whatever. I actually believe that the vast majority of the contributions to our societies are in the private sector.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is I should have taken more risk. I should have taken more risk by speaking my mind, by investing in this thing or by this. It risks tends to magnify in a short period of time. But when you look at it in the context of a longer term risk kind of dissipates a little bit. So take risks. If you're already fashionable about you do and you take risks and for some reason the risk pans out negatively, you're going to recover no problem. You're going to find another job. You're going to find because your passion will be there. The last point is clearly all of us have responsibility to our families, to our children. You got to make money to put food on the table, pay for education and things like that. But try to be an agent of change in the world.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Follow your passion. There is no life less fulfilling than to follow a career that your parents gave you, that your siblings gave you, or that your friends gave you, follow the thing that is going to motivate you. Follow the thing that when you wake up every morning, you are going to be excited. You are going to go give everything you can. Work is already difficult enough with so many challenges and all of that that if you wake up and you don't want to go to work because you don't like what you do, that's a tragedy, right? So follow your passion. Secondly, is once you have that passion for that, throw everything you can at it, be the best you can at it. If you were to ask me, what are the two or three regrets that I've had in life?”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think your investment scope is too narrow. You could definitely start expanding your horizon and create a higher return. And at the end of the day, if you end up with a 25, 50% return higher for 10 years, that is an incredible amount of money.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Equities and bonds or things that are tangible like real estate, the world is a lot bigger than that. I think that given your size, you will do well by following a little bit more the Canadian model, for example, which is actively managing more of the portfolio, going into new areas that are not going to, that given your size are not going to hurt you, infrastructure investing, you are so sophisticated, you're so large, and you run the fund so well that you have the discipline to be able to look at newer investments that are going to create higher return for you compared to what you're doing today, but you're giving them up because you, you.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a social choice. That is a political choice that the vast majority of countries haven't done well at all. And some have done well, but not to the same extent as you have. The second part is obviously how you run the fund. And the fund has been run with meritocracy, with people that are professionals, overseen by professionals and the like. And as you know, many pension funds around the world, the overseers don't even know anything about investment, right? And that becomes a big problem because there is a disconnect between the governance. In terms of investments, I think that clearly your large and therefore impact markets and therefore it's a tendency to put money in passive and in liquid investments like”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Central bank went in and grabbed the money 15 20 years of savings, you know, the central bank grabbed the money in order to pay debt or whatever. So that discipline, it starts there, right, to begin with.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You meaning the Norwegian fund had done a phenomenal job? I mean, think about my own backyard, Central America and South America, Venezuela had the ability to create an endowment like you did and make it last for generations to come. And they did it. So the first thing that the country has done is the ability to be disciplined about putting a pool of money on the side and let it run professionally, keep feeding into it, and each successive political party hasn't used it as a pi ⁇ ata to go out and go out and pull money out. I remember many years ago when in Argentina, they had spent 15 years putting money into defined contribution plans of individuals.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, sometimes that can be a little opinionated. And the reason that becomes important. For a good debate with others. Sometimes I can get pretty passionate and I'm a Latino by background, so sometimes you can get emotional about things. And you got to sort of tone it down so that people don't think like you're upset, right? And you create a reverberation through the thing.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, fair play, honesty, accept mistakes, recognize the bad things you may have done, give credit to people, respect somebody's opinion, don't infringe in the freedom of others and the like. And those sounds like cliches. The question is, do you live those values and principles? So in my mind, you have to do the right thing regardless of the consequences. And I've had a lot of examples in my life in which I've had to do things in which have hurt me. And, you know, either personally or financially or family-wise, because it's the right thing and you got to accept the pain or you got to accept the price to pay for that. That's when those decisions, that's when. Real test comes when you have to make a decision.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Since I created the company, was very conscious that I wanted to institutionalize the company. When people would come to me and say, I came to MSEI because I wanted to work for you, Henry. I normally tell them, no, you don't work for me. You work for MSEI. You work for our institution. You work for our company. On one hand, leadership is about personalizing the torch and the involvement, but on the other hand, you got to make sure that you're creating a company that will survive your tenure in the company. So it can go on and build greater things. Leadership to me also is about values and principles.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Live by example, I normally don't ask anybody to do something that I'm not prepared to do myself. Secondly, leadership sometimes means solitude of decisions, but doesn't mean solitude of debate. How you create an environment in which people feel safe to debate matters, to bring things that they're not going to be fun or people are not going to make fun of them or recriminate them or whatever. Three to me is, yes, there is the focus on the leader, but sometimes you have to take away that focus and put the focus on the team. You know, sometimes leaders tend to take credit for a lot of what they do, but a lot of the work is done by their teams.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smaller company, we're searching for talent all over the world and our ability to offer remote working has improved talentally our ability to attract talent, but there are no bricks and mortars. There is no physical presence”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the pandemic hit, there were two shifts that took place. The first shift was that you went to work virtually. And the second shift that the base of your virtuality, so to speak, was your home. So MSCI had already made the first leg of that, which is we were virtual, but working from offices. The only thing the pandemic did, which was a big deal, obviously, was that instead of two people in one location working with 10 people in other locations working virtually, that it went, you know, from being in the office to being at home, there is a limit for sure of what somebody can do in the hybrid world. So the combination of those two are going to be, it's like the risk can return. Where do you want to be in the efficient frontier? There are a lot of different places to be in the efficient frontier. In our case, we are.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I am. I probably go to the office once a week nowadays and gradually, I travel a lot now because the world is opened up. My team is global. I mean, the corporate headquarters is New York and I have a few people in New York, but I have a lot of people in London. I have other people in Geneva, other people in California.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I interview people, I ask them questions like, what do you want out of life? You know, if you have a problem in your family, how are you going to solve that problem? If you have a problem investing, how are you going to solve? Now, these are very generic questions that the person being interviewed sometimes doesn't know what I'm looking for. But that's what I want. I don't want a prescribed answer. I want an ability to see how that person thinks how that person that, you know, importantly is what do you want to achieve in life? But anyhow, we like people that are eclectic. We like people that are passionate, people that are intellectually curious, people that are not afraid of innovating and not afraid of asking the tough questions or even the simple questions. Because, you know, a lot of our clients, as you know well, are this matters people in this world.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, we have about 5,000 people on the company, 20 plus countries, and therefore we have large presences in some big countries. We have not been very good at recruiting directly from undergraduate or directly from graduate school. We tried to hire people with graduate degrees that are already have a minimum of two or three years of experience. They know what they're looking for. They know what they want. And now, as we grow, that scale, that model will be challenged. We'll have to recruit directly from university. But a lot of our people have graduate degrees. And we bring them into the company. But the key thing here is absorb them into the company right away. Secondly, respect. If you spend so much time looking for somebody to hire them, you're not going to come and tell the person what to do. You want them to tell you what they want to do, tell you to contribute.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally uninvestable. As we discussed, the definition of an index, it has to be investable. You have to be able to buy and sell the securities and to the extent that you're frozen and you can't take your money out, you can sell to anybody because of the sanctions. Therefore, the investment is rendered worthless.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we've been politically criticized because people say, you know, China is not a free market. It's got a regime that they don't like. I understand all of that.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the basins that we are in at MSCI is in the free flow of capital in the world. We are a company that helps our clients mobilize capital from low return investments to high return investments from high savings countries to low savings countries that provide a good investment opportunity.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's about, you know, but also let's think about this. The reason I go through that whole process, Nikolai, is that it will be, the ESG in its general form will be political and it will continue to be political.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's exactly what I was saying to you. The reason I'm mentioning this in politics is because ESG is way beyond capra markets. ESG is about a society holding all its institutions accountable.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The difficulty, especially in America, is that the left, you know, the extreme left have tried to use ESG as a way to change the mandate from the people that give you capital to use the capital to fight social causes and other political battles. And then the right is now countering that and saying, no, all of that is a threat to democracy, a threat to free markets. It's a threat to capitalism because they see a counter reaction to a lot of this.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I will continue. It will continue. Because then the second part is we in the capital markets, we're not in politics, right? We're in the capital markets. We're in the investing business. So the question is, how do we apply those principles in our own lane? Our lane is not politics. Our lane is providing high returns to our fidel sharers, to the people that entrusted capital to us. So therefore, the way we apply those principles to our own lane is along the lines of saying, well, I am not a government agency. I'm not an NGO. I am an investor. And therefore, I'm going to incorporate this ESG principle that are applicable to a society, to my way of investing, so that I can achieve sustainable, short, medium, long-term returns to my fiduciaries.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but the reason I said that it has to be political is because my definition of politics is what is the best organization in a society? What is the best in ways of dealing with, let's say, the different cultures in a society, the different, you know, now, as we know well, a business, whether it's a dry cleaner or a restaurant or a multinational, is the unit of economic organization in a free market society, right? So, you know, so therefore society should be interested in the way that the economy is organized, right? A lot of businesses in a society have a license from society to operate. So anything having to do with social issues, you know, how do you treat minorities? How do you treat handicapped people? How do you treat social environments in companies? It is the purview of politicians. We have to recognize that it will be political.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, 100%. And the reason is that this externalities that are being created need to be factored into the cost of capital of those companies. And to the pricing of the assets of those companies and therefore into the allocation of capital. And if you don't do that and you ignore those costs and therefore you invest in a company or you lend money to a company based on the run or lower cost of capital, and then the things then get internalized, your return is going to be lower.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creates externalities. And the benefit of free markets is that you need to be able to incorporate all available information about companies and their externalities and try to cost them out into the pricing of assets so that it will lead to a better allocation of capital and therefore better economic growth.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so he was saying, can you build us an index so that we can measure the performance of this? So I said to him, well, we don't know anything about this. But what we can do is take your research, analyze it, and build an index based on your research. So he and Storabrand, you know, there have been a number of other Scandinavian clients that have been calling and we have been ignoring them to some extent, but it was Torobrand who actually got to the point in which we said this is something that is coming. This is something that makes sense. So when I got into it, you know, as an economist that I was in my prior life, they began to analyze SRI then and now ASG investing more on economic terms, which was any economic system.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Believe it or not, it all started in Oslo, Norway. I was living in Geneva, Switzerland, having recently taken over this money losing product line called Equity, MSCI Equity Indices. And there was a fellow, a store brand, who called me up and said that he had an international portfolio that he was running and that he needed, you know, that was according to SRI principles, you know, what they call at the time socially responsible investing principles and that we should create an index.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know where that limit will be, Nicolai, but it is far, far from what it is today. You could have a minority or even a small minority of active investors creating liquidity, so to speak, in the market, creating a bid and asks and having different points of view about the value of that company and still have a large percentage of indexation going on. And if anything, I believe that indexation will continue unabated for a long time to come and there are a lot of new”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think index investment is one of the best things that ever happened to our civilization. As long as the institution has assets, that institution will be invested in that company. And as that company has a market cap. So that makes index investors the definition of long-term investors.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The vast majority of people in life have to put food on the table to feed their family and survive. But some of us were privileged to have had an education and an upbringing. And the question becomes is, what are you going to do with that? So when you are in your 90s and you're sitting with your grandchildren and your grandchildren say, grandpa, what do you do in life? What answer would you give them?”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was growing up, my father was an orphan, and then eventually joined the Military Academy and made a career in the army there. And he tried to pass on to me a sense of purpose, a sense of mission in life, because of all the hardships that he had had. And I took on to that. I took on that ambition, that desire to make a difference in the world. I remember when I was in my late teens traveling through Europe and going to Greece, for example, and going to Rome and going to other places and looking at all these civilizations that have been created. And I said, what would my contribution be in a small, very small way? So a lot of us go through life. And many of us obviously”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my father was actually a member of the military. There was a civil war between the two sides and his side left. And the whole family left the country because we were free market people. We were broke capitalism, so to speak. And a lot of the people that ended up winning were socialist and had a different view of organization of society and organization of the country. We emigrated and my father is now 96 years old. I'm going to say him in a few weeks. My mother passed away at 92 a few years ago. So hopefully they tell me I have good genes. So I got to make something good out of those jeans.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was, can I be an agent of change? And initially that motivation was a social political change, but unfortunately the country went socialist in a violent revolution. So that's when I emigrated to the US.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I was born in Mexico and left as a child. I was probably three, four years old. My father was a diplomat there for a brief period of time. But my parents were Nicaraguan. My father was the grandson of a Spanish immigrant and my mother was the granddaughter of a French immigrant into Nicaragua in Central America. So I grew up in Nicaragua until I was 16. And it was a very interesting, it's a small country, right? And not unlike Norway, but it's a country that was always in social turmoil and political turmoil. So I grew up there with a conscious that it was important to be an agent of change in the world. So some people ask me, what were motivations when I was growing up besides making sure I didn't get in trouble?”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there was a lot of skepticism in the 90s as to whether indexed investing represented any value added in the investment process. And there were a number of people that were optimistic that it will add value over time. And the optimists obviously were right. And the reason is that it's very hard to beat the market, as you know well. It's very hard.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is our representations of markets and in some respects they represent general equilibrium, so to speak. Demand meets supply. The demand for security meets the supply of securities at a particular price. So if you are looking for just an exposure to a market, let's say Europe, you buy the market. You buy the indices. So the interesting thing is that a lot of people say they ask you every day, what did the market do? Not a lot of people know what markets do because it's a lot of securities, but what people will know, what the MSCI Europe index did, what the MSCI emerging markets did. So a lot of references to measurement of market, to the performance of markets, is all related to indices.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So basically an index is a collection or a basket of securities that represent a particular market. That market can be Norway, can be Europe, can be the world, can be a merger markets. And the way we look at each security, the weight or the percentage of that security is measured depending on its full market capitalization with certain adjustments like float and the like. So that's what the synthesis are all about. We applied a couple of filters for investability and float and foreign ownership. There's some companies that have limitations on foreign ownership and other companies that have a lot of securities, but they don't trade. So we apply certain liquidity and investability filters, as we call them, but that's what indices are all about.”
2023-01-25 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Henry Fernandez CEO of MSCI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source