YouSaid · the spoken record

John Rogers

lines on the record: 60
first: 2017-02-28
most recent: 2017-02-28
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

“I always like to try things. These fantasy camps, as you know, have gotten quite popular around the country. And so Michael Jordan had this senior flight school fantasy campers over 35 years old. And best coaches in the world would be there. You know, the Mike Shuszewski's of the world and Roy Williams and everyone you could think of was there coaching. And one day each year at the camp, he would challenge any camper to a game of one-on-one. They were very short games. They were to person to score three baskets, would win. In the first seven years of the camp, no one had ever beat them. I think through, obviously he's so much better than everyone else, but also people would get intimidated. You're in front of the whole camp.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, as you talked a lot about, you know, my coach, Pete Carrill, and when I got to Princeton as a recruit, I was a very minor recruit. Number 15. I was convinced at the time that I wanted to be a basketball coach. That was going to be my life's work. And the coach of the Bulls during those early years, Dick Mata, was another role model. I like coming to work every day thinking about how I can coach the team and that it's so much fun to be hiring these dynamic young people and sort of pulling them together and getting people to where they need to be or trying to help them get where they need to be and teaching, coaching, preparing. That's the fun of it for me. I really do love it. I feel like I'm getting back to what I always wanted to do is just doing it here and not within the basketball world. And yeah, so that's what I love. That's what I look forward to.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think that those early days, there was people who really looked out for us. And so Cecil Partee was a city treasurer at the time, and he gave us our first million dollar account. And here I was 25 years old, and he didn't have to do it, but he had influence over the city of Chicago pension plan. And he told my parents, I'd gone to grade school with his daughter. And he said, I've been waiting for someone like John to come through the door. and hoping I could be helpful to someone like John getting going in this business. And so that's probably one of those best memories of real kindness that helped us to make it to another level.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the president of the United States is starting to form the government and working out of our offices that morning, I think that's something that all of us here at Aerial could never forget. And it's kind of psychic income. You talk about how do you try to make place fun where people want to come and stay. I think people remember that. This is kind of like a little bit of a special place. It doesn't happen to every LaSalle Street or Wall Street firm.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a professional career day, geez, well, I mean, clearly the day I remember most was in the stock market crashed in 1987. I was actually at my wedding planner planning my first wedding. And we're getting these calls constantly that the market was collapsing. And I remember at the time thinking that Warren always said you want to buy when there's maximum pessimism, or John Templeton talked about the same thing. I guess John Templeton said that. You want to buy when there's maximum pessimism. And Warren always said you want to be greedy when others are fearful. So I was trying to execute that from the wedding planner's office. We got to be buying another memorable day, though. It was this, you know, after the president got elected, he spent three days here at Ariel. We were the temporary transition headquarters. So that first day after the celebration in Graham Park to walk into our little offices here in Arizona.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make a contact and a networking opportunity that will lead to a career in financial services that wouldn't have happened otherwise. So I think that's what we can start to do is we need to get create opportunities where kids get exposed to these careers at an early age. And then final thing that we have to do, and we have to do this ourselves, is we've got to ask, if we're on an investment committee at a university or museum or a hospital or you're on a corporate pension plan to ask your advisors about the lack of diversity. Because if the customer asks, then all of a sudden those institutions will start to look more diverse. The customers don't ask, it doesn't change. And so I think that that's the other part of it. Got to have more supply, but we also have to have the demand side that often people forget about, and that's critically important.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now they're here full time after spending a summer internship here. And we think if all financial institutions did that kind of thing, there would be much more diversity in their executive ranks. Second thing we've done is a relatively new thing. I gave a gift to the University of Chicago where minority students are now going to have paid internships and endowment offices. So the University of Chicago has agreed already to have four of our interns work in the endowment office and we're hoping they'll be at the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation and other universities and nonprofits throughout the United States. And a lot of these minority students might have come to the University of Chicago thinking about careers in law or maybe they were going to be a traditional banker or go to medicine. But now as they get exposed to this world of the endowment world, maybe they'll think, well, maybe I'll be a career and try to become the next David Swinson or they'll say once I'm in there at the endowment office, maybe I'll learn about hedge funds or private equity.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do is, like my friend John McCarter said a friend who said, You know, you shouldn't admire the problem, you should try to figure out solutions. So one is this idea of being a model of how financial services companies can partner with urban public schools. We think that if we get actively engaged and involved with public schools, not only are we teaching kids financial literacy, which is important, the kids get to see us in our day-to-day work worlds and start to think about financial services careers. So we've two full-time employees here now”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the first part of the answer is things have not gotten better. Here in Chicago, there's still the major private equity firms. I've never had an African-American professional or Latino professional, let alone partner. It's kind of like baseball in 1940. It literally is like that. Some of the major investment banks have 200 partners. There will be one African American, again, very few female Korean Chicago business did a cover story on the private equity world and the lack of female representation. It's just in lack of partners. It's embarrassingly low. Again, it's similar in investment banking. It's similar in hedge funds. Things have not gotten better and in some ways they've probably gotten worse as so much of the wealth and jobs and influence in our society comes through financial services in these specific areas of getting investment banking hedge funds, private equity, et cetera. So an ariel though, what we try to do is try to”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can then compare yourself to them and figure out what you need to do better and how you can try to emulate or learn from those folks. So all those things come from being a volunteer, which sometimes people criticize, geez, John, you're so active. You're not sitting at your desk, you're at that investment committee meeting. I was like, wow, I'm here with Daniel Kahneman. Like, where else should I be?”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then getting to be on the investment committees. So being on the Princeton Investment Committee, I got to meet Daniel Kahneman when he came after he won the Nobel Prize to talk to the investment committee about behavioral finance. You know, it's like, wow, I'm learning about this firsthand from this genius that if I wasn't volunteering for Princeton, I would have never had a chance to meet Daniel Kahneman and learn all about behavioral finance from that perspective. And then to be involved with the University of Chicago and then get to know Toby Moskowitz and Dick Thaler and other Steve Kaplan, other people who've thought deeply about the investment world and how to be better, how to be better investors. And then to be on the investment committees with other leading investors who were running private equity firms, running hedge funds, running quant shops from AQR to some of the biggest firms in the world. So you're learning about their thoughts on the markets and their thoughts on the world.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Barack Obama became president of the United States was just magical. But then the experiences of like, you know, walking on the stage as co-chair of the inauguration and getting introduced with my daughter, two million people out there and getting a chance to go to Camp David or hang out at the White House a little bit and just see that world. It was just such a great return. something you'll never forget. You feel like you're part of something special. You're part of a special team. Hopefully you're making a contribution for the country. But then you end up with these memories that you could never replace. See my best friend, Arnie Duncan, get to be the Secretary of Education and go visit with him and hang out with him and see what that life is all about. And then the final area where it's been fun is that I've done a lot of volunteer work, like being a trustee university of Chicago into Princeton and other places.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way the memories are just magical. And similarly, you know, getting to co-chair, the Illinois Finance Committee for President Obama in the first term, and then getting to co-chair the inauguration, the fact that you feel like you are part of this team that helped, you know,”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One I already talked to the volunteer work for Princeton and for the lab school makes me feel great to be a part of those families, but the rate of return has been amazing because of all the gifted people that have ended up here at Ariel that have made us a better firm that I met through my volunteer work at Princeton. I mean, I met, as I said earlier, I met Melody as a volunteer helping to make sure she got interviewed for Princeton. And she's now our most valuable player. And, you know, our president of our company. So those things have just been clear, have been extremely important. The other parts of where I've been active politically and some of the best experiences of my life have involved being involved, helping a progressive candidate being the finance chairman for Carol Mosley Braun. She became the first African-American woman in the United States Senate's history, and to feel like you were a part of that in some small way.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was where you adopt a sixth grade class from an inner city urban school and promise to help those young people get to college, basically, and make sure the college is affordable for them. And so it's a very enhanced nurturing program for one specific group of students. Eugene Lang made this famous in New York City. He created the first I have a dream program and it became kind of a national program. Arnie decided that starting in sixth grade was too late and that's why the aerial community academy starts in kindergarten. And it's 20 years old and as I mentioned earlier, we're teaching kids about the stock market there and giving kids real money to invest and it's kind of fun.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever, all the different things we have to do, and I'm not looking over her shoulder and second guessing her judgments or her decisions. Arnie Duncan worked here for six years before he became a school superintendent in the city of Chicago, and we allowed him to create the aerial community academy, a small public school that he thought that was the thing to do. And we teach financial literacy there. But we kept Arney here for a long time because he was able to find creative things to do that he could own and be proud of. And things I would have never thought of on my own. It's like Arney and her sister thought of this idea of the school and the guy and I have a dream class and we did all kinds of things like that. So a long way of saying...”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talent. Now, the next part to be successful is how do you keep it here? So we mentioned earlier that we try to make sure that everyone's an owner in the business. I think that's been really, really important in keeping people as a part of the team. The second thing that I maybe alluded to earlier is we try to give real responsibility to our leaders so that sometimes they think of the founder as someone who's going to be micromanaging everything and involved in all aspects of the business and people, I think, are surprised when they come here to realize that I think part of the reason we'll be able to keep Melody Hobson here is that from the very early on, I just kept giving her more responsibility, the things that she owned that she could feel proud of and get excited about and make decisions on her own and not have to run everything by me to the nth degree. And then as now that she's president, she runs all the non-investment parts of the shop and allows her to pick her team and negotiate the real estate lease in New York.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think, I mean, as you know, this business is all about performance. So we were just talking about this earlier today. I'll start with that, is, you know, the aerial fund, our flagship fund, started in 1986, and it's in the top decile of all mutual funds that go back to 1986 and number one in its category. And I was only like eight funds in our category that go back that far. So to be open about that. And then since the March 9th, 2009 lows, there's a story in the journal a couple weeks ago that showed we were the 13th best performer out of, I think, over 1,700 funds. They go back to 2009. And again, number one in our category out of 251 funds. So I think performance is really great to be able to show 11.5% compounded since 86 and over 25% compounded since 2009. That's been extremely helpful to our success. I think the second part is, you know, how do you get the best talent and keep it? So we talked about trying to...”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it gets easier, but it's still a challenge. But that's how we've been doing. And finally, we use Princeton as another institution that I'm close to, and we find talented interns through that. Melody Hopson, our president, started out as a, I met her, we're 17 years old as a prospective Princeton student when I used to be involved with making sure that the local Princeton students got interviewed by alumni. Again, Charlie Babrinsko, our vice chairman, went to the lab school with me. That's how we do it.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And watch them grow and had them as an intern, not only as a May project student, but then later as a college intern or a business school intern, and then hire them full time. And several of our best people here at the firm were people, again, I've known since they were 14, 15, 16, 17. And you pick the ones that you think fit the culture and have the values. And we work at it, though. It's not easy. We just actually helped start, we helped advise and fund the investment club at the university of Chicago Lab School. And we just had a whole series of the kids were here for an afternoon and we're starting to get to know all these young people and some of them I already knew, but we're pleased to be a part of all of that. And then finally, as you can imagine, because we've hired so many lab school people in University of Chicago people in Bo School, they tell their friends and then it becomes kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“24 years, and so actually had lots of contact and access to up and coming talented lab school people. Eventually that led to me being on the University of Chicago board and started to have an internship program where we would have University of Chicago college students as interns. And then business school students from the booth school as interns. And funny thing is a lot of the parents of lab school students are professors at the business school. And so we really are kind of in this ecosystem of the University of Chicago all the way from high school to college to business school to law school through the faculty, through the administration, and being able then to get deep insights of which students are special and which people really are, really loving the investment world. And they send us those students. And so we've had several people that we've got to know when they were ninth or 10th grade.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we've tried to do is to, and we're still learning. I mean, this is a constant, constant battle. So we've tried to be involved with a few key institutions and build institutional knowledge and relationships within those institutions that can help us to identify talent. And by far, the best example of that is that I was fortunate to go to the University of Chicago Laboratory School, which is owned by the University of Chicago. I went there for high school, but it's a pre-K through high school. And I got very involved as an alumni of the lab school and started having students here at Ariel for what they call the May project where the kids in senior year take off a month of May and they come and work in a business somewhere or do something creatively or philanthropically. And I got on the board, became chairman of the board, was on the board for”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's just so easy to fall into the groupthink of the moment. So I think at the end of the day, I think these things are born in you and grow into you at an early age. Coach Curle used to always say, you know, by the time you're 18 or 19, I can't teach you to see. But I think he was also saying if he had gotten to you when you were nine or ten, he probably could have helped you to see.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would wish and hope that you could teach and train But I do think my coach was right, the hard stuff is really, really hard to teach and to change people's DNA because whether it's selfishness, people are going to, during tough times, going to show up, or this idea of being contrarian. You could be a contrarian and contrarian, but then when the stock market's collapsing like an 08 and 09, the headlines are horrible and Kramer's screaming on television and stocks are going from 30 to 20 to 10 to 5.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ability to see that far into the future, and other people don't. And I don't think you can teach that. Warren has the greatest vision of all time. He makes it sound simple. But he has that ability to see five, seven years down the road which of those brands that are the ones that are not going to be damaged by new technology, that are not going to be damaged by a new international competitor, something that can't be foreseen.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having a strong brand is not going to keep you, it's not going to the moke can disappear, even though the brand name is strong. We always use the Obvacy examples of the blockbuster videos of the world, you know, the Blackberries, great, great brands, and the moat just disappeared overnight. That's the big part of the art of this, is to be able to see which companies are going to be able to use their brand strength to maintain that mode. And that's the art. It really is. That ability, it's funny, going back to what Coach Currell used to teach, he used to always say, vision is critically important to being successful as a basketball player to see what's happening before it happens. And he said, if you don't have vision, I can't teach it. If you're legally blind, I can't teach vision. I think determining whether the brand's going to be strong over the next five to ten years, it takes vision. Some people have”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've mentioned the term the moat during our conversation today. And Warren Buffett, I think, is the one that sort of invented that term and Morningstar uses it effectively. And when we look at our, it's in the Morningstar universe, our higher percentage of our companies are higher remote companies than our peer group by a very wide margin. We really are doing what we say we're doing, buying wide remote companies or narrow remote companies and staying away from the companies that don't have a moat at all. So I start with that to say that to your question of the brand, if you have that strong brand, you should have a strong moat and they should go hand in hand together. And we spend more time than anything in our research trying to determine whether that brand is going to be able to continue to maintain the moat over the next five to seven years. Now, sometimes certain industries, the”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Significantly since what happened, and you know, like a lot of people, they went into 08 and 2007 and early 2009 not ever dreaming we could have the kind of catastrophe that we had and so they didn't have the margin of safety with the balance sheet they should have. Well, like a lot of companies, they've learned their lesson. And so now they're going to have a bulletproof balance sheet so in case there is another economic downturn, they'll be able to weather it. So all those things come together to make this company a much more stable, consistent business for the long run than it was 10 years ago. But the market is evaluating as if it's still the company it used to be. And that's in particular when they get put into these different indexes and real estate indexes or financial services indexes or high beta indexes. And it really shouldn't be traded that way. And we've often said they almost are hoping in some ways for a recession just to be able to prove that they're going to have much more consistent cash flow.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These companies underperform dramatically. But that's based on their past, not the future, because now these companies since then have diversified their product lines much more dramatically than people have imagined. So they're not so dependent on capital markets for buyers and sells of real estate, but their outsourcing business has become quite huge. Their real estate money management businesses are quite large, and that goes nicely with their traditional leasing and capital markets businesses. So they're much more diversified product-wise. They're much more diversified geographically. They're both worldwide companies, and they've gone out and acquired strategic businesses throughout the world. So two things have happened. It's become kind of a duopoly, two big global brands when it comes to commercial real estate, and you get all the diversification of all the different economics economies around the world. And then finally, the balance sheet has been strengthened.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one that we've been talking about a lot, the one sector is the real estate services sector. And over quite a long time, we've owned Jones Lang-LaSalle or JLL, and then we added over time CB Richard Ellis or CBRE. And we were on the phone with the management teams of both those companies in the last few weeks. And talking about the fact that this exact phenomenon was happening, their stocks were trading based upon the fundamentals based upon how they traded in the last downturn. So because these companies didn't do well during the financial crisis, when real estate collapsed, people thought people wouldn't buy and sell real estate anymore. People wouldn't be leasing real estate. People wouldn't be doing outsourcing and everything. And so everyone just gave up on these companies. Now whenever there's a de-risking type of environment or when people start to get fearful about the economy rolling over.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would go with the ladder. I think the difficulty of executing it and thinking independently does allow for the moat that you suggest. And, you know, there's been times over the 34 years we've been in business where you underperform and you sometimes wonder, is it because there's more competition and games gotten harder? But in this last 10 years or so, to watch what's happened, these even go a little bit longer. If you go back to the internet bubble bursting and how value investing came roaring back, you saw what happened and we also have during the financial crisis that if you had the courage to buy during the spring of 2009 how everyone had given up on names and stocks that people said weren't worth $2 a couple years later were worth $50. And so you've seen this in real time how the group think takes over and the momentum takes over and everyone just gets completely convinced that this way of thinking.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Read on Daniel Kahneman and Torchki, behavioral finance, I think, really got going under Dremond's leadership about psychology in the markets, and it didn't have a title. It didn't have a payable finance. Exactly. It wasn't a farm. You didn't have a Dick Thaler and others doing this kind of work, but I think he really was the early pioneer that hasn't gotten the appropriate credit for how it's all evolved.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment strategy, and then the second one that he came up with afterwards, and they were amazing, the idea, and it was so consistent. And I think it was consistent with my own personality, of course, of being someone who could think independently that didn't feel the need to follow the crowd. And the idea that you could be a true contrarian, you know, it has to sort of be in your DNA. And so I love that book, and I used to send that to all of my friends and talk about it, write about it. Some people I got to meet like Ralph Wanger and Bert Malkiel, and then there are others that you ended up reading about like David Dremond and Warren Buffett. And then as the years have gone on, one of the nice things is then you get to meet people like Warren. And he's been here to the aerial offices, and he has a conference room named after him. So he's seen his conference room. And those people just had a tremendous impact on me. And the final thing I would say, David Dremmond's book, I think is directly tied now to the recent book that I just read.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the managing partner William Blair, and Mr. Blair was still alive, and the idea of focusing on smaller, faster growing companies, they had a big impact on me in those early days as I was thinking about the markets. But the first book that really had a big impact was The Money Masters by John Train, where you read about the great value investors in that book. You could read about John Templeton, you could read about Warren Buffett, you could read about Ben Graham. They were all there. It had just this extraordinary impact on me. I just loved that book. And I would send it to everyone, give it to everybody. I just said, you've got to read the Money Masters. It's the best ever. And after that, I evolved and I read everything I could, of course, on Warren Buffett. That's what we all do. We read for a living. You read every book. I read two investment books this last month. And then I ended up reading David Drimmonds, the contrary.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those early days, you're exactly right, and you captured it perfectly. There were some people you read about and some people you got to know. So I'll start with the people that it wasn't a whole lot that I could talk to early on because who wants to meet with a 24-year-old kid who's just started a money management firm? But I had this newsletter that I had at the time as we were trying to build a track record and get people to take it seriously. It was called a patient investor. That was the how we got our going with our turtle theme. And I remember going to interview Ralph Wanger because he was one of my heroes and he had built the acorn funds into one of the most successful top performing funds in the country. He focused on smaller companies for value-oriented, but extraordinarily creative genius. Just even today, when you go and talk to him or read things that he says, he's so original in his thinking, just fascinating person. So Ralph was one of those early mentors. Nejanata, who”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simple businesses, things you would find in your desktop that you could know really, really well which worked and what didn't work. And it was a great sector and all those companies got bought up. They all got sold and they did extraordinarily well, you know, just phenomenal. And then the other sector was the sort of toy related. I was kind of a kidd at heart and we remember owning Kenner, Parker Brothers, and Tonka Viewmaster Ideal tops the baseball card company Hasbro but a lot of these smaller ones all got bought up also. And it was interesting now it's kind of like Hasbro Mattel are the big giants. There's not many left. But back when I was getting going there were all these independent toy companies that were doing extremely well and the stocks did extraordinarily well and they all got bought which gave you a nice exit. So those are two of the sectors that really worked well for us in those early days.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's interesting. No one's talked to me about those early industry sectors. And as I think about it, that was kind of really fun to have a couple sectors that you thought you knew better than your peers and your friends. So you're right. I had a friend who was my deputy who sort of ran the office and I was, her name was Jessica Berger, and I was there doing the stock research on my own, going and visiting companies and talking with them on the phone and thinking about the markets. And the sectors that I focused on early on where one was the, you know, I borrowed some concepts from William Blair, some of the ideas that were there on their better buy lists and things and the office product sector was a sector that they knew really well and that I sort of took with and ran with. So it was those early companies like United Stationers and companies like General Binding that made binding machines, one of our great companies, Sanford that made Sharpie highlights.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had to read a random walk down Wall Street in our corporate finance course, and Bert Malkiel was actually the head of the economics department at the time. So I went to see the author of this iconic book and to talk about the markets back in 1979, 1980. And I look back on that time feeling, geez, I had this great experience to have that kind of exposure to one of the great thought leaders in stock market history.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On Lasalle Street, and I would watch the ticker tape go by, the old Trans Luxe machines, you know, and it was just fun. It was exhilarating. And so then finally when I went off to Princeton, my father turned the portfolio over to me and let me trade it on my own. I found a broker across the streetham campus, Mike Perkins at Laidlaw Adams and Peck. And I would just go sit with him whenever I had a free moment. And he took me to the library at Princeton and showed me where I could find all the publications and all the other newsletters that I didn't even know existed, where you could get data and information and ideas of what stocks to buy. And I just loved it and just had so much fun with it. And so that's why at the end of the day, as I was graduating, I thought, well, if you love the stock market, you became a stock broker. I wanted to be like Mike and Stacey. And that's where I went to work at William Blair here in Chicago and got my career started. Only another add thing I'd add was an advantage. While I was at Princeton,”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks for asking because it is a well known story, I think, here in town in Chicago around the fact that my father bought stocks for me every birthday and every Christmas after I was 12 years old instead of toys. And I always joked that it wasn't a lot of fun to go to the Christmas tree and find an envelope instead of a toy. But it got to be kind of neat after a while because what he did was he let me keep the dividend checks that would come in the mail every three months. And my parents are divorced. So when I go visit my dad on the weekends, I would read through the quarterly reports and annual reports of the blue chip companies he had bought for me. And I just loved it. And we would talk about it. And then he subscribed to different newsletters and I would read the newsletters when I was there. And it just became this passion. And then that led me to going to visit his stockbroker, a man named Stacey Adams at Freeling and Company.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shareholder value. And so when you see people who just drank the Kool Aidor and are going down a path without being thoughtful about it, it's something that, you know, we want to be away from, we want to stay away from group thinkers. We want original thinkers as our management team.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rates can go higher. Maybe the economy can get weak. Maybe there will be a problem overseas somewhere in one of your divisions. And now you don't have that margin of safety because you've levered up to make the strategic acquisition. So that's where this whole idea around capital allocation is critical. And then the final thing, I guess, there's so many things, you know, you could be, but one of the things is how much are they groupthink people? Or how much are they doing what's right because they know it's the right thing in their heart? So you see management teams now all the day all the time, making decisions to buy back stock. Because everyone else is buying backstock. And they've been taught by the investment bankers or the sell-side that if you keep buying backstock, you can goose your earnings growth rate. People will be happy. You'll keep activists away from you because you're buying back stock. And they're forgetting that you've got to be buying that stock back at a significant discount to its intrinsic value or you're going to be destroying”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Managements that are, instead of thinking about how to build a stronger, better business and do a better job of their customers, are constantly looking to make acquisitions all the time, and they're willing to leverage up to make the acquisitions. And so we think they're making bad capital allocation decisions. And so watching carefully and understanding which management teams understand that if they're going to make an acquisition, it should be within their circle of competence and that the leverage should be something that they can manage. And we try to really look closely at that. And when management teams often, they stretch the balance sheet, they try to justify it. They've got everything primed for perfection. You know, it's like, okay, we're going to be able to handle this because the economy is going to stay strong for the next seven years. There's not going to be a recession. Everything will be perfect. Interest rates will stay low. We'll be able to redo our debt and not understand that maybe things can be...”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, yeah, weather. It's like, you know, come on. You guys, if you're working your plan, you should be able to overcome most of those kinds of challenges. But I think the other things we're looking for, clearly one of the things we've learned over the years hopefully we've improved on is that”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that one I touched on earlier is when management teams are giving you excuses. The weather was bad and things that exist.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they know that we are big shareholders and they know I have a responsibility and we have a responsibility to our customers. And I found that when I found those management teams that are rooting for us to be successful and realize that they have a responsibility to deliver results to help us be successful, that's where we've gotten the best results.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which management teams deliver on what they said they're going to do? We talk to managements every quarter and you can see which management teams are doing what they said and executing their plan consistently and not finding excuses when things go off track to explain away why things didn't go well, but are going to be saying, you know, we had to make this adjustment. Here are the reasons why. We made a mistake here. Here's how we fixed it. You want to see that kind of directness as you're looking for management teams. And I think that's more of an art than a science. And then the final part of it is when you're talking to management, and again, this is something that I think we can do well. And we've actually used BIA associates to help us be better questioners. They really help advise you on how to ask the best questions and determine whether people are telling you the truth. You really want to be with people where you can sense that they are truly committed to doing what's right for shareholders.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a couple things are critical here, and I think these are things also that's a second part of the edge is that one, we learned this from Warren Buffett, we borrowed this clearly from him, of staying within your circle of competence. He often talks about this shouldn't be like Noah's Ark where you own two of everything. And so number one, if you know your sector really, really well, you know the companies within the sector, you're going to know then the management teams within that sector and be able to determine by talking to all the companies who are the most outstanding managers and who are the weakest. And who's been there for the long term? Who's had the best experience? Who are the honest brokers who are going to tell you the truth as they know it? And I think, again, that sense of expertise allows you to evaluate managers from top to bottom. And I think that's really, really critical. I think also this idea, we talked about earlier being long-term, we build relationships over time. And so you really get a chance to see.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not get caught up with all the recency effects and all the noise of the current moment that can sometimes distract from making the right judgments about the quality of that company. Because we're going to be buying companies often when there is that temporary bad news and that ability to look out over the horizon and see what that business can be like once you get back to normal is something that I think is rare in this industry. I think maybe that's probably at the heart of our edge is that ability to look out further than others and to see kind of what things would look like once the sun is out again and the clouds have drifted away. And I think most people have a hard time doing that. They just get caught up in the now.”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do that are different that maybe start to get at what the edge is about is the number one theme here when you walk through our offices you'll see turtles everywhere and so we are one of these rare people who looks at this business with a long-term perspective through a long-term lens and we do it by wanting to own names for sometimes we don't own stocks now for over 20 years and that's highly unusual today and when we go out and talk to management teams they all tell us you're one of the rare firms that comes in and wants to talk about three and five year and seven year strategic plans not the three and five and seven month results and that that ability to have that long-term perspective is something that I think really does distinguish us and it helps us to build better relationships with our management team and it helps us to you know from a behavioral finance standpoint”
2017-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · John Rogers – Slow and Steady Wins the Race - [Invest Like the Best, EP.26] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source