YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Zweig

lines on the record: 96
first: 2015-09-11
most recent: 2015-09-11
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

“This is based on a series of fascinating experiments done by a psychologist named Paul Andreassen in the 1980s. He was at Columbia for a while and Harvard, and he took experimental subjects and divided them into two groups. Some got essentially no updated information on their chosen investment portfolios. And others got frequent, in fact, almost constant news updates. And then he tracked their investment performance. And he found that the more often people got news, the more often they trade.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what we did. And secondly, look, you're raising an incredibly troubling question and we don't yet know the answer because we don't know how this is going to play out. I think ultimately the better emerging news organizations, and we could all think of some of the candidates, right? Like, you know, maybe Vice or some outfit like that. We'll get the capital and the experience and the professionalism that they need to build something that competes with the traditional newsroom like the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg. And that could take a long time, though. And ultimately, those organizations are going to have to. Cannibalize the existing great news organizations. To staff themselves up with people who have the experience and the ethical background to run proper news organizations.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that show, over and over again, you see these journalists at a newspaper clearly modeled after the Washington Post. Doing things that are so unscrupulous that That if you did them once at the Wall Street Journal, you would be summarily fired. And it now just goes without passing, without mention. I think the American public sort of takes it for granted that journalists are sloppy creeps who invade people's privacy and lie to their sources regularly. And in fact, believe it or not, journalists in a traditional newsroom environment are phenomenally ethical people who would, you could put most journalists' thumb in a screw and tighten it before you would get them to tell a lie.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's not the press is not called the fourth estate for nothing. And Charlie Munger's fear, and this is the fear that I share, is that When reporting gets atomized the way we see it unfolding on the internet and in social media, you don't have that institutional memory and historical tradition. And most importantly, that professional training in newsrooms the way you once did. You don't have reporters doing two, three, five years of understudy with a master. And so the attention to fairness and detail and proper methodology falls by the wayside. And if you think about House of Cards, for example, the TV, I'm going to call it a melodrama that's very compelling with Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only seems that way, right? And the internet and the advent of social media have democratized the spread and for that matter the generation of news and information so that anyone with a cell phone can become a broadcaster or a reporter. The problem is that anybody who has done shoe leather investigative reporting in one of the great newsrooms of America like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or the Washington Post or the LA Times, any of the great or once great newspapers in this country or magazines for that matter can tell you that reporting is brutally hard work.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think, you know, All of this is sort of like a Newton's law of thermodynamics, right, Barry? I mean, for everything created, something is destroyed.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's really the central question that has obsessed me for the past 20 years is why do smart people become stupid when money comes into the room?”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no. I realized around 1995 that I was running out of interesting questions. I didn't think by any means I had all the answers. But as someone who didn't have professional training in finance or economics, but who sort of sat at the feet of the smartest people I could find, a lot of the questions were starting to feel repetitive to me. My questions and other people's questions. And there was still this fundamental mystery that nobody seemed to have an answer to, which is why do smart people do such stupid things when it comes to money?”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure Yes, whose wonderful books, These Oral Histories, and there's a series of them, there's four or five of them, I think, are among the most engaging books on how to think. I believe you could find anywhere. And of course, Danny Kahneman, the.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of them are now of another generation. Charlie Ellis was a very big influence on me. Ben Graham, of course Probably the single biggest influences on the way I try to think would be Richard Feynman.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's very worried about the institutional impact of the decline of the traditional great newspaper. And we don't know yet what's going to replace it. But the fact that really talented, bright young people have been able to sort of rise to the top, I think, is a hopeful sign for the future.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think this is a very hopeful sign for the future. You know, there are a lot of people, and Charlie Munger is one worrying.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out, that's his blog, Wealth of Con. Another guy we really does great stuff. James Osborne at Basin Asset Management does also really cool stuff. There's a bunch of other people as well who are terrific.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And mine, too. You know, the first person I would name would be Morgan Hausle of the Motley Fool. I think. I think he does just incredibly sharp, really insightful stuff.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, people are machines, right? And they're machines that are designed to optimize a few things. Pattern recognition? Self enhancement And self-delusion. I mean, human beings are really good at those three things. We almost certainly have evolved to maximize those things. And that's why people are so susceptible to bad advice, because bad advice preys on that stuff.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it boils down to something very simple, Barry. I think humans have a profound desire to believe in magic. People want to be lied to.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the way you, in the short run, the way you attract attention to yourself, if you're providing financial advice, is by encouraging people to bet against regression to the mean. So if an asset is rapidly going up in price, you tell people buy more while you still can. And if it's going down, you tell them to sell before it's too late. But if you're trying to help people get on the right side of regression to the mean, then you give them counter-cyclical advice. When an asset is going up in price, you tell them to be cautious. And when it's going down, you tell them to become more aggressive.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Financial advice keeps people from being their own worst enemies. Benjamin Graham famously wrote about that in the introduction to the intelligent investor. And I think it all really boils down to one very, very simple thing, which is that markets regress to the mean.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, content. Content. And if you can't do that, if you believe that the right thing to tell people to do is nothing.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, probably not because, you know, as I also mentioned in the same piece you're quoting from, you know, 99.5% of the time the right thing for people to do is nothing. And there's a financial media that exists all day long, nonstop, having to provide people with what appears to be information.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a simple reason for that, Barry, and I think you and I think alike on this. There's really only a handful of things you can tell investors about their portfolios. That are true before you get into things that are bad for them. And, you know, we could disagree about the number. There might be six things that are good for people. There might be But there aren't a hundred. And there's at most a couple dozen.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd read almost all of Graham's shorter writings as well and all the biographies of him that existed at the time. But ultimately it was luck like everything else we've been talking about. A friend of mine had written a book for Harbor Collins, one of the top editors at the publishing house was out to lunch with her and said, you know, we have this book. Who do you think should do it? And she said, oh, well, there's only one person who should do it. And she told him to ask me. And why did she do that? Because we had both been at a party about a month beforehand. We hadn't seen each other in years. I had seen her across the room and I said, oh, I haven't seen her in years. And so I made a special point going to say hi. And if I hadn't said hi to her, she would have recommended somebody else.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it hurt that I was a Graham aficionado. I mean, I first read the intelligent investor in March 1987 when I started as a financial journalist at Forbes magazine. And I'd probably read it, covered a cover at least six times”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“True definition. Yeah, exactly. And so, yes, I did a lot of historical and archival research trying to figure out when a certain term was first used, where it came from. I spent a lot of time with the Oxford English Dictionary and all kinds of historical research as well.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in a lot of cases because it is a true dictionary. So I was trying to get at where a lot of these terms derive from. And in many cases, people who use these terms all day long don't really know what they mean.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, really, everybody, there's a lot of inside jokes in this book that I think only a professional audience will get and will certainly be annoyed by, and I hope amused by. I think one of the wonderful things about the Wall Street community is that people do have an ability to laugh at themselves, at least the better people in the field do. And there's a lot to laugh about.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I'm trying to do with this book is in each case when I define a term, I'm saying to myself, you know, after more than a quarter century of researching and reporting on the financial markets, can I take everything I've learned and boil it down into 150 words or less? And then if I can do that, how about 50 words? And in some cases, I got them down to a single word.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stockbrokers. Explained Hugh asking me, a client of the brokerage firm born rich and how, I put two children through Harvard by trading options. Unfortunately, they were my broker's children.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Barry, maybe I can read one quickly. I'll read the definition, the part of speech, and then I have to warn everybody. what I call flights of fancy in these, which are these little imaginary Passages featuring people who bear no resemblance to anyone you and I might not. Okay. All right, so option noun the right to buy or sell a financial asset at a fixed price on or before a specific time from the Latin optio I choose a boon for stockholders whose clients don't understand how options work and generate a fortune in commissions as they attempt to learn and here comes the flight of fancy”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you're going to get some That might be my favorite too. And maybe we can maybe get into some of the longer ones a bit later.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I was bothering her, I must be having fun. And I just kept at it. And, you know, my goal was to try to do something like what Beerce did and bring it to the world of Wall Street. And, you know, a couple of definitions from the original Devil's Dictionary are worth keeping in mind. I mean, bear in mind, I'm going to read these, and first comes the word, then comes the part of speech, then comes the definition. So this is Ambrose Beer. Ambidextrous adjective able to pick with equal skill a right hand pocket or a left”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know Beerce is maybe the most unjustly neglected author of the 19th century in America. He was a contemporary of Mark Twain's. He was at least as brilliant. He wrote some of the most devastating epigrams ever written. And he was brutally cynical about American society and institutions. And he took on a few, he basically compiled the devil's dictionary as a collection of satirical definitions of terms most people think of in a very conventional way. And he just blew up every Sort of bid of conventional wisdom and turn them all on their head. And it just occurred to me about two years ago that this project that I'd had in mind for about 15 years would be easier to do than I realized. And I just started doing it in my spare time and my wife heard me cackling in the kitchen at night. And I realized”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But isn't it remarkable, Barry, how hard that simple algorithm you just expressed is for so many people to understand? I mean, every day... On Twitter, you see recommended lists of people who tweet. And then you look at them and you see, oh, here's somebody they're recommending because he has 50,000 followers without even noting that he follows 80,000 people and he's tweeted 40,000 times.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I know. But I wasn't referring to them in particular. Is that it's much harder today to make qualitative judgments as a consumer of news about what's reliable and what's not because you're just drinking from a fire hose all day long. And I think the value of Twitter is that by giving you those micro bursts, Of information and opinion from people. You get to see what they think in short spurts. And you can fairly quickly form a judgment about how objective they are, how reliable their information is. And I think ultimately it's going to help people separate the good from the bad.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comments. Just not somebody spouting or repeating information generated by people with an axe to grind without checking at first. And I think the danger that we're in a world dominated by social media and kind of insta pundits through the blogosphere.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's really big, Barry, and it's good and bad. And maybe let me talk about the bad first, you know. Up until a few years ago, certainly until 10 years ago, probably five, the reading and investing public could rely on major media outlets to be their filters of information. If you saw something in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times for that matter, you could be fairly sure it was reliable.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Appeared to be confirmed. It turned out later to be McAndrews and Forbes Ron Perlman's original takeover vehicle, and I think this was around the time that he was first amassing shares. So I bought it for the wrong reason. I made money in it for the wrong reason. And I got stopped out at 12 and 7 eighths. But this was 1975. So I didn't know I'd been stopped out until the trade confirm arrived in the mail about a week later, and I went bonkers. I was like, I'm riding this thing all the way to 20. And I called my parents' broker and I said, get me back in. And then he flat out refused. And my dad had to buy it for me. And it went to 14 and a quarter or something. And my dad brow beat me into selling it.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, and it turned out to be a perfect Darvis stock. And I bought 100 shares at nine and five eighths with my summer earnings. And it went up to 12 and 7 eighths in a matter of days. And I didn't know a thing about the company other than this ridiculous theory that...”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the first place. Nope. And I found a stock that was called, and I'm saying called, Mac AF. I didn't know what it was. The S&P stock guide said that it produced licorice and I”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at least I was. This is actually an interesting story because I did exactly what he suggested. I took graph paper And I tracked 10 stocks and I had a copy of the SP stock guide. This was 1975.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read that a long, long time ago. Yep. And you remember that thing he talks about where, you know, increasing volume on rising price. Volume procedure.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I bought my first stock when I was 16, Barry. And it was a fascinating experience, especially in hindsight. I bought a stock based on an absolutely god-awful book that when I was 16 thought was pretty persuasive. It was called How I Made $2 million in the stock market by Nicholas Darvis.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I learned early enough in my career as a financial journalist that luck is supremely important in investment management. And very early on, I had a hard time distinguishing luck from skill, and I still do. You need a long period and lots of data and the right decision-making environment to stand a chance of telling whether something is luck or skill. But that's just a long way of saying that I didn't want to go into investment management because I felt I sort of knew where the fundamental body was buried. And the body that was buried was that a lot of people who think they're skillful are just lucky. And I didn't really want to go through my professional career with that on my conscience. Have other things on my consciousness, but not that.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And I think it's probably worth pointing out that one of your former guests, Charlie Ellis, also spent some time studying art history. What a delight.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Statement, isn't it? Yeah, it's, and I think it's totally true. And we all like to pride ourselves on our abilities and our skills, but without luck, I'm not sure any of us would be where we are today. I mean, I always wanted to be a writer. I was always fascinated by business. I have no formal training in business or economics.”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think like a lot of your guests, Barry, I'm going to talk about luck. I think anybody who has done reasonably well in just about any field who doesn't credit luck first and foremost is kidding himself or herself. Isn't that?”
2015-09-11 · Masters in Business · An Interview With Jason Zweig: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source