YouSaid · the spoken record

Joel Greenblatt

lines on the record
116
first
2018-04-20
most recent
2018-04-20
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

  1. Take a longer time horizon. That is the big secret that I could share. And the sooner you learn that and the sooner I learn that, the better off that they and I will be.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. I just never tell them when. Cobe a couple weeks, could be two or three years, but if they do good work, the market will agree with them. And to keep that in mind, to continue to do good work and have patience. And, you know, since you can check your stock price 30 times a minute now, we used to get when I was coming into the business, used to get a quarterly statement and throw it right in the garbage. You didn't really care that much. Now you minute to minute, you know, even our best investors, you know, $20 billion endowments expect weekly returns from us in our private fund. I have no idea what they do with that information, but that's what they're asking for. And everyone's judged on very short time horizons. So if you can step back.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. I would say probably the secret to being successful is patience, the big secret that no one bought him might as well tell everyone is really just having a longer time horizon than most people and understanding what you're doing, meaning you're buying businesses

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. We get way overpaid in this business as we're successful, and if they're successful with what I teach them and I'd say that to any young person, if they're successful in this field, I think they should really think of different ways. They're clearly smart people. They're clearly driven people. They're thoughtful. And so they should be able to think of a way to give back and use those skills for that. That's what I tell young people who want to go into the investment business.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. Well, you know, I've taught at Columbia, as I mentioned, for the last 22 years, and so I tell my students that first day at class, actually, I tell them that. You know, I don't think there's a lot of social value in being an investment manager. It's not that I don't think investors who do work help set prices and allocate capital and all those things. But I just think, A, they're not very good at it. And B, it would all get done without you. And smart people doing this too much horsepower rather than them go into other fields. I have loved being in this field. I enjoy it and there's nothing wrong with it. But what I tell my students is I'm even one step removed from doing something I don't think is that socially valuable because I'm teaching you how to do something. So what am I doing here? And so what I make my students promise and I think they take to it well is that if I do teach them and I am helpful in learning how to do this and they enjoy it, there's nothing wrong with it. It's a great thing, but they should think of a way to give back.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. And that's called operating leverage. And I just thought I'd describe that to you so that people would realize that on the way up, just like financial leverage, it's a lot of fun. And on the way down, operating leverage on the way down is not very much fun. So I got out of most of my stock at about a dollar. So I'll just leave it at that to say.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. And that's what I loved about the business, and I think people are very familiar with financial leverage, right? If you put up a dollar and borrow $9 and buy something worth $10, you realize that if that $10 thing you bought falls a dollar or two, you're going to go broke. And everyone understands that. That's very straightforward. So this was my lesson in operating leverage. Unfortunately, after 9-11, right before 9-11, the trade show bought another trade show that borrowed a lot of money to buy it. And then 9-11 happened and people didn't want to travel. And so I learned a lesson in operating leverage where when you don't get that $62 in and it only costs you $2, $60 of less earnings dropped straight to the bottom line as well.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. In Las Vegas. And I love the business because plenty of space in Las Vegas, if they got more clients to display at their trade show, they could just rent more space for $2 and resell it for $62. They didn't have to commit it. So it was like a $60 contribution for every... Incremental sale they could make, and that's generally called operating leverage.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. I'll talk about my worst investment, not specifically what it was, but it was an investment in a trade show company. That I bought through was really, I created through a spin-off and I shorted one thing and bought another and I actually paid $3 for something that I was immediately going to get $6 for. But I fell in love with the business and it actually ended up did I paid $3 for it eventually in short order went way past the $6 because I loved the business. It went to $12 a share, which was pretty good, but I had a very large position in it at that time. And what I loved about the business was they ran a computer trade show called Comdex in...

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. That was laid out, and I always assigned that in my class, which I just think is a great, great book. And you've mentioned my three books three times, and so you have to read those two.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. Always creating, you have to be a little more creative when you get older to create those new things, but those are the things you think about, which I think are quite important. I'm also reading another book now, which I think I'm having a lot of fun with, which is, I think it's called Never Split the Difference. And it's by The ex chief hostage negotiator for the FBI just about negotiating and also thinking of Know how you can apply some of these concepts to business to be effective, so enjoyed that. Everyone has to read news interested in investing, intelligent investor. I think it's chapters 8 and 20. Buffett always points out, and I agree with that. I think Buffett wrote a bunch of letters that were compiled by Lawrence Cunningham into topics.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. Seminal moments in your life really come between the ages of 15 and 30 because you have a lot of firsts You know, it's the first time you graduate and leave home might be your first girlfriend You're graduating college you're getting your first job you might be getting married you might have kids all happens in that kind of compact period for most people and people think back for the rest of their life about those seminal moments and it's really about a book about creating your own moments. In other words, those happen because those are natural first those happen naturally because of evolution but can't you create those kind of important moments in your life and it really comes down to creating doing new things

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. He probably does haven't followed that. It is a book about economics. It's a fictionalized book about a high school economics teacher. But it's just a pleasant short book way to learn basic principles. So I'd highly recommend that even if you don't want to be in no formulas, just you want to be, you want to understand basic economic principles. I think that's one of the best that people haven't seen. I think for investing. Money ball was one of the great if you like. You're a sports fan at all. Just understanding how to buy undervalued players is very similar to buying undervalued stocks. And so that's a really helpful book for most people. I just read a book called The Power of Moments, which I really enjoyed, which says that most of your...

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. Yes, no, I know the reference, and that's partially true. It's just discouraging to me that the understanding basic economics is kind of necessary. And so there's a book that's a fiction book. Russ Roberts wrote it called The Invisible Heart. Not that many people have read it, but it's a very short book that I think most people should read. So I would read that. I've had my kids read that.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. Yeah, well, there's a book called The Invisible Heart, which explains basic economics to most people, and most people today, you know, especially young people are kind of more socialists. Oh, is. Isn't that?

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. Well, you know, one of the reasons I write books is because my mentors really came from reading people who were kind enough to share with me their wisdom over time. And that's, you know, people like Andrew Tobias and. and Benjamin Graham and even Buffett in his letters and David Dreman, you know who wrote contrarian investment strategy and John Train who wrote the money masters and all these people really were helpful in forming and getting me involved in investing and you know I wanted to share some of the things that I learned too because that's how I learned it really wasn't so much you know some of the people were dead and they were still sharing with me and and some of the people just kind to do so and I you know one of my ways you know besides the fact that I enjoy writing it was another way that I felt I could give back

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. That's probably how I spend most of my leisure time as well as along with my family. So there's nothing really too fascinating.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. Oh, well, I don't know what they don't know. I've written three books, and I always tell personal stories within the book, so I think I've included lots of embarrassing things. I don't think I've ever written that. I enjoy playing tennis. I did write that I enjoy sailing and that I'm not very good at it. And I've been in a bunch of close calls with that.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. One Google CoJam, you know, out of 25,000 people. Another guy as smart if not smarter than those guys. So I get to work with a tech team and they help us trade efficiently. They help us trade tax efficiently. So we're very, very tax efficient. Help us put together the systems where our fundamental analysts can cover a broad range. So it's been fun building a team to do all these different things. So I'd say we fundamentally value businesses, but our tech team helps us put together risk-adjusted portfolios very well and trade efficiently and be tax efficient in all those things and just building this whole thing has doing something with the same principles that we've always used has been really just fun.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. Yeah, so if you can be right, they want to be right on average. So they want to be right over hundreds or thousands of people. And so when we realize that we could make more money being more diversified when you go long, short and put on leverage, you want that. It didn't hurt us to take outside money because diversity was good for us and to cover so many companies. We need a big research team. So we built up our research team and our tech team. They help us trade. tech team one guy we have you know was mit chess champ another guy was

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. Aberrationally bad returns. That's why insurance companies don't insure five people. Because even if you do great underwriting of those five people, if someone steps off a curb. You can tell I don't sell insurance, but if someone steps off a curb and ruins all your numbers, you know, it didn't matter what kind of underwriting you did of, let's say, life insurance or health insurance.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. That were trading way above what we thought they were worth, when we discovered that we could actually make more money having diversified portfolios and that our bad days would be 20 or 30 basis points of underperformance, not 20 or 30 percent down. That was A, it wouldn't degrade our own returns taking other money when we had hundreds of stocks on the long and short side. And B, it wouldn't hurt our own returns because more diversity helped our returns. Because when you don't get what you expect, meaning you get aberrationally bad returns, sometimes that ends up in negative compounding. So when you have hundreds of stocks, more diversity on each side, you get less.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. Maybe they wouldn't be so kind when that happened and it did seem to happen every two, three years. And I think that's unavoidable. So when we develop the strategy to take advantage of our principles, meaning buying good, cheap businesses and shorting expensive ones that

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. Well, you know, when you own six or eight names, one of the issues there is that every two, three years, pretty much like clockwork, I'd wake up and... Who's 20 or 30% of my net worth in a couple days because one or two things weren't going our way? Either we were wrong or just, you know, they went the wrong way for a little while. We knew what we owned. We were going to get paid back. And that's a little more stressful. And it had to happen. When you're that concentrated, that has to happen. A little more stressful with other people's money. Since I know what we owned, and A, I'm a big boy, so when I make a mistake, you know, I just chalk it up to a learning experience and move on. Let's just say I think my investors were great, but...

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. Well, I think, you know, I left out. You had asked me how we did 50% a year, and one was I said we stayed small. Two, we were concentrated. And three, really, we got lucky. Right. Okay, that you have to have some luck to get those kind of returns during that period of time. So one of the most fortunate people on the planet, I have a large family with five kids. I love doing this. I like to do really well. So there's pressure I put on myself when I'm running other people's money. Maybe I'll have a little less so when I'm not running it. So I don't think it was really a calculated plan other than You know, how can I continue to enjoy what I'm doing in the best way and still get to do what I like and still work with the people I like to do? And so it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, I guess, is the best way I can.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. You know, that's a great question. I thought about that a lot. I love investing. Never was going to quit. We had gotten to a size, I suppose, after 10 years of having nice returns that we could keep our staff and continue to run our internal money. And for me, it's just fun to do. Did you think

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. Yes, so that was with small cap stocks, which unless you're an individual investor, it would be hard to take advantage of. As an institutional investor, but I also did a similar study for the thousand largest companies, you know, the Russell 1,000 companies, which are very similar to the S&P 500. And that was 22% versus about 12%. Still also pretty good. Yeah, I'll take that. And possibly a little more realistic for

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. And so what I did for the books purposes is something very crude. I ranked all companies based on how cheap they were. And then I took another ranking of how good they were, what kind of returns on tangible capital they were getting. Then I combined those two ranks and bought the best combination of cheap and good. And I showed how well that works. It worked so well just using these crude metrics that the top 10% combined score for cheap and good did better than the second 10% did better than the third 10% in order all the way down to the bottom 10%. Just showing you the power of.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. Just broccoli, selling just broccoli in your stores, probably not a good idea. I never tried it, but it's probably not a good idea. But you still have to buy the land, build the store, set up the display, stock with inventory, still going to cost you roughly the same $400,000, but because it's a dumb idea, maybe you only earns $10,000 a year, that's a 2.5% return on tangible capital. And all I said in the book was all things being equal, if I can get the same price. I'd much prefer to own the business that can reinvest its money in 50% returns than 2.5% returns.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. but for the purposes of the little book that beats the market we just did cheap on a free cash flow basis just like how much rent And it's a very simple metric. And then we said, I described this a little bit earlier. We talked about it. I was trying to describe, I wrote this book for my kids and I said, how do you describe how good the business is? And if you read through Buffett's letters, it's very clear that he's looking for businesses that earn high returns on tangible capital. And I describe that as every business needs working capital. Every business needs fixed assets. How well does it convert its working capital and fixed assets into earnings? I said if you're building a store, you have to buy the land. You have to build the store. You have to set up the displays. You have to stock it with inventory. And if all that costs you $400,000, and the store earns you $200,000 a year, that's a 50% return on tangible capital. And I compared that to a store I called in the book just broccoli.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. No, so return on capital would be how the business invests its own money. It's really, as the investor, what price do I have to pay for the house and how much is it going to earn me? So as an investor, it's my return on capital. But I don't want to confuse that with how the business itself invests its money, which is really how I look at return on capital. So it's really a return on investment. Okay. I'm laying out a million dollars, getting $80,000 a year in rent. That might be 8% net of my expenses and interest rates are two or three percent. That may look pretty attractive. There are other questions you'd probably ask, you know, if we were really doing this analysis, you'd probably say, hey, what are the other houses on the block going for in the block next door in the town next door? How relatively cheap is this? And we do the same thing. We say, how cheap is this business relative to similar companies? How cheap is it relative to all companies? How cheap is it relative to history? That's what we do at Gotham.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. And they're asking a million dollars. And your job is to figure out whether that's a good deal or not. So there are fairly simple questions you'd ask if you're trying to figure that out. One would be, if I rented out this house, how much could I get for it after my expenses?

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. And we have used that philosophy. That's what I teach at Columbia. That's what we've used to make money over the last 37 years buying good and cheap businesses and wanted to share that with everyone else. And so we ran a statistical test just to show that just using crude metrics for cheap and crude crude metrics for good and crude metrics and crude database that we could do very well. And so that's what we showed in the magic formula. And we said the magic formula only really has two parts. Cheap. And for cheap. We really rank companies based on a simple metric that was earnings before interest in taxes to enterprise value. And I usually describe that as rent. So in other words, You're buying a house

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. Sure. Well, I'm glad you brought it up that way. So I wrote a book called The Little Book That Beats the Market. We don't think of ourselves as quantitative investors, although in the little book that beats the market, we use some simple quantitative methods to show people concepts. Ben Graham said buy it cheap. His best students, a guy named Warren Buffett, who said if I can buy a good business cheap even better, and that made him one of the richest people.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. We have a very disciplined process to value businesses, and that's what I was teaching them to do. And that's what stocks are. Ownership share is a businesses, and all the noise, 99.9% of the noise you read in the paper every day, excluding this podcast is really noise. And so that's... You know, that lesson really resonated, I think, and I did much better than the doctors.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. And I explained to the kids that the second guess was actually the stock market. And what I was going to teach them to do is be the first guest. Be cold and calculating. Count the rows. Be very disciplined in valuing the businesses, not influenced by everyone else around them. When the second guess what happened? Well, everyone heard what everyone else was saying. And in the stock market, everyone read the newspapers. They talked to their buddies. They see what everyone's saying and doing and reading and seeing the results in the news every day. And they're influenced by everything around and they're not being cold and calculating and disciplined. And so I was going to teach them how to be cold and disciplined. And that's what we try to do.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. So that was pretty good. And when I went around the room one by one asking each person publicly how many jelly beans they thought that average guess was 850 jelly beans

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. And I went around the classroom and collected the three by five cards. Then I said, I'm going to go around the room one more time and ask you in front of everybody else how many jelly beans you think are in the jar and you can keep your guess from your three by five card or you can change your guess. That's completely up to you. And one by one I went around the room and I asked each student how many jelly beans they thought were in the jar. And I wrote that answer down. So let me tell you the results of the experiment. The average for the three by five cards, you know, the first guess. Was 1771 jelly beans. That's what it averaged to. And there were actually 1,776 jelly beans in the jar.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. And so the first day of class, I brought in a big one of those old time jars filled with jelly beans, you know, big glass jar, filled with jelly beans. And I passed out three by five cards. And I passed the jelly bean jar around and I told them to count the rows and do whatever they had to do, but write down how many jelly beans they thought were in the jar.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. Well, I was asked to teach a much easier group. This was a group of ninth graders from Harlem. This was a couple of years ago. And it was just for one day a week, for an hour a week, come in and teach them about the stock market. And this was right after I'd crashed and burned with the very learned, educated doctors. And I didn't want to fail with the kids But as you're saying, I had fresh opportunity blue sky with them to know anything about the stock market. So I really thought long and hard about how I was going to explain the stock market to them.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. Problems. There's a lot of other issues going on, but it's not because we're not getting really great pitches all the time. People are still emotion. If you're cold in calculating, go back to what we talked about in the beginning, where stocks are ownership shares of businesses and you're just cold in calculating about what they're worth, you can really take advantage of the market. I actually tried to explain this concept, a friend of mine who's an orthopedic surgeon asked me to speak to a group of his buddies at a big dinner that he was hosting for orthopedic surgeons. He said, talk about the stock market for half an hour, try to explain it, and then take Q&A. So I talked for half an hour. I started taking Q&A. And when I was done, the questions were something like, hey, oil went up $2 yesterday. Should I buy some? Or market was down 1% yesterday. Should I get out? And my conclusion from that talk was that I had just crashed and burned and I had not really gotten through to these very learned doctors.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. And it's a way of stating the case because the SP 500 is an average of 500 companies. If you lift up the covers and look at the dispersion going on between those 500 companies, between which are in favor at any particular time and which are out of favor, the price movements are much wilder than what the average of 500 companies doubling and having, doubling and having, that doesn't even begin to tell the story. So if you drew a horizontal line and called that fair value like Ben Graham said, and then you draw a wavy line around that horizontal line and call that stock prices, the market is pitching us opportunities all the time between stocks that are way below fair value and way above fair value. The reason investors don't beat the market has nothing to do with the market is not throwing us pitches and that it's not still emotional. There are behavioral problems. There's agency.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. Those would be the SP 500 stocks. And let's take a look at what's happened to the SP 500 since you guys learned how to read. So I take them back 20 years when they were seven years old and I say from 1997 to 2000 the S&P 500 doubled. From 2000 to 2002 it halved. From 2002 to 2007 it doubled. From 2007 to 2009 it halved. And from 2009 to today it's roughly tripled which is my way of telling them that people are still crazy.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. I didn't actually leave. I said, but then again, Warren Buffett doesn't need index, and neither do I how come. And I explained the real opportunity set that's still out there. You know, I get, you know, is this still any good? Does this stuff still work? I get a hand raised in my classic Columbia every year, at least for the last five, six years. A student will raise their hand and sort of say, hey, Joel, congratulations on a nice 35 or 37 year career. But isn't the party over for us? There's more computers' ability to crunch numbers, hedge funds, smart people doing this stuff. You know, are we going to have the same chances that you had? And so my students are second year MBAs roughly 27 years old on average. So I tell, this is the way I answer. I say, I'll tell you what, why don't we just go back to when you guys learned how to read? Let's take a look at the most followed market in the world. That would be the United States. Let's look at the most followed stocks within the most followed market in the world.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. You know, anyone over 30 That was just my way of saying that you have to be your own boss. You have to look out for your caveat emptor in the investment world like everywhere else. Most people are trying to sell you things they have an angle. It's very hard for you to discern who is or who isn't on your side unless you do the work yourself and know what you're doing And so it's very important to know that. And that's, you know, I gave a talk at Google a number of months back. And I started it this way. I said, Even Warren Buffett says that most people should just index.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. Well, when both of us were growing up, that was a saying never trust anyone over 30. I think anyone who's younger than we are probably doesn't even know that expression. Not as funny to them. Yeah, back in the 60s when we were growing up. That's what you were saying, you know, don't trust the man.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. You're looking in plate, your bargain comes because you're looking a little harder than other people. You're looking at things that are a little harder to do, a little harder to find, probably smaller than most people are willing to look at. Not the main idea. Usually these are discarded things. And these are all things that are ripe for mispricing.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. Yeah, artwork and sculptures and all these things. And they're looking off the beaten path. They're not looking at Manhattan on Madison Avenue or Fifth Avenue. They're really looking off the beaten path trying to find things that are undiscovered. But I made the point of saying they're not looking for the next Picasso. They're not finding a painting in some yard sale saying, hey, this guy's going to be the next Picasso. That's really hard to do. What they're really looking for is a painting that they found the same artist had done a painting that's of the similar idea that just went up for auction for three times the price that's being offered for over at Sotherby's. So they recognized that right now a similar painting just went for three times as much. That's a lot easier to do than to project or predict the next Picasso. And so that's what they were doing. And that's what you're doing the spin-off area.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. And there are a lot of other areas in the market that does that. But the idea behind the whole book was sort of look where, you know, I started off with my in-laws. The first chapter was about my in-laws who used to shop in Connecticut for Antiques and yard sales and country auctions and things like that

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. What I was really trying to show people is places to look where things may be mispriced. And here where people have never followed this company before. It's not being sold by an investment firm given to people who don't really want it. It's ripe for mispricing. It could be underpriced, could be overpriced. It doesn't matter which one. I described in the book that it's no fun to take a shovel and dig holes. But if you're digging for buried treasure, it gets more interesting. And so this is an area where it has a big red X on it, where there could be a nice treasure underneath if you dig here. So it's worth doing the work in these areas. So ripe for mispricing is what I'd say. It doesn't really matter how the average spinoff does. However, they have done very well. There are some things, as you mentioned, built into the system that make people get rid of them.

    2018-04-20 · Masters in Business · Joel Greenblatt Discusses the Thrill of Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source