YouSaid · the spoken record

Jon Fortt

lines on the record: 86
first: 2021-02-16
most recent: 2021-02-16
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

“Okay, well, the business model is that you get to trade for free because the powers that be on Wall Street get to see what you're doing before it gets done. They get to cheat off at your test in essence. And when you can do that at scale,”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's two technology platforms here, right? There is Reddit, which is a community of people. Multiple communities of people, right? There's Wall Street bets, and then there's also our personal finance, and there's our long-term investing. Reddit is not a monolith. We're specifically talking about Wall Street bet Here's this subreddit that drove the entire news cycle. That's just a community. The tool that most of them were using.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put down what this is because I think there's a potential for on social media, online people to research better and more quickly, for people to develop systems of credibility where individuals can become highly rated analysts because of their charted reputation. There's the potential to encourage behaviors in communities that haven't had it around saving, around investing. But I don't think that's happening on Reddit yet. I hope it does. I think the spark of what's happened here could lead to long-term healthy behaviors, but I think it's an open question whether that's actually going to happen.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really. I mean, I remember e-trade, you know, like if you want to talk about a revolution, that was what I can just log into a website and click some stuff around and connect my bank account and buy this stuff myself. I don't have to get on the phone with a broker. And I can control this and I can type in the numbers. Like that was a whole different scale of revolution than this is in part because it was also a revolution for the long term. It allowed people to dollar cost average in and control it themselves, to shift their plan quarterly without having to schedule a meeting with their financial advisor, et cetera, and do their own research, read reports online, not have to wait for things to come in the mail. Read sec documents off the website. That was amazing.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, we've talked a lot about the media side of it. Let's talk about the actual market. So, Robin Hood is an app. There are lots of apps like it. They're a startup. Whenever there's a news cycle about a startup, it's always a good bet that they're just flailing. It's just a startup being a startup that feels like a lot of what happened here. You've watched the tech industry grow up, basically. This is new, right? This amount of interest in financial technology, this amount of interest in democratizing finance, letting people trade for, no?”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The media and how the GameStop story was covered is only part of this whole thing. The market and technology's ability to democratize finance is the other part of the story. John is less surprised than I expected by the effects of Robin Hood because he was there when E-Trade launched and he thinks E-Trade was a bigger disruptor than Robin Hood and pushed him on that because obviously, and I think it led to a pretty interesting conversation about the market, technology, and regulation. So we have been talking around retail investing because I just feel like the dynamics of the Game of Stop story had as much to do with the media as the market”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hedge funds are not short. Hedge funds love to eat their own. There are some people who are eager. To be a part of this short squeeze and drive this up, and then those same people will reverse at the appropriate time and help drive it right back down and make money both ways. Because like, is that corrupt? That's how the market works. And if you're going to kind of play in the market, understand as much as possible how it works.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“otherwise you can get taken in. If you're just reading a press release or believing what an investor is telling you or what a company is telling you without understanding how the underlying business works, the mechanics of the market, et cetera, then that's dangerous territory. So I think another thing that is important for me to remember, for us to remember, and as much as possible for the viewing public to understand, is that, yes, our job is to report the facts. Our job is also to bring historical understanding into the picture, and our job to some degree, I know it sounds paternalistic, but is to try to protect at least the interests of the retail investor by saying, you know what, things go up quickly, they can come down. Here are some of how the mechanics of a short squeeze can work. You know, this might be set up as the little guy versus the hedge fund. The hedge funds, I guarantee you all of the hedge funds.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we got to be careful in what I try to do is be careful not to forget what our place is as observers of and interpreters of the story, not as lead actors in the story ourselves. Sometimes we end up sort of getting cast in a moment, but that should be the exception. And so what I try to do and what I know my colleagues try to do is be as aware of as possible of the motives of various people who are promoting certain narratives and storylines so that we can try to make the audience aware. Well, you know, here's where this person is coming from. Here's what they're invested in. Here's some of the actions that they've taken in the past. Here's how activist investing works. You know, we try to educate about history and the tendencies of the market as well as informing about what's happening right now. And I think that's important because”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to buy the failing restaurant chain. I think Olive Garden is the example, right? We're going to buy all of, we're going to take a position in Olive Garden. We're going to say they don't salt the pasta. This is a real thing that happened. We're going to drive a new cycle about how Olive Garden is horrible, crush the stock, take a position. Now we own Olive Garden. How do you reconcile those two things, right? We don't move the stock market, but there is an entire sort of sanctioned information ecosystem that's there to manipulate prices such that people can get rich on the end.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the reason I ask is you said you have a heightened sense for misinformation. You just have a lower tolerance for it. I feel like, again, after the past year or so, all of us feel that way. But there are stories of an activist investor showing up driving a new cycle to pull a stock down, taking a position in a company, and then firing everybody and clipping it. This is a cycle that happens all of the time. The financial press is usually involved in this cycle, right?”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Try to act as if the real-time content on CNBC might move the markets, but I don't flatter myself enough to think that it really does. I mean, honestly, the stuff that you guys publish on the Verge probably has more market influence in many cases than a lot of the stuff that we do on CNBC. But I think it's incumbent on us to hold as a sacred trust the fact that investors, companies, people in the markets are depending on us for accurate real-time information. So I don't know to what degree what airs on CNBC moves the markets outside of it being breaking news that's material to a company. Yes, that clearly moves. I don't know, but I act as though I try to act as though it does.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, CNBC, you've got an ethics policy the way the Verge has an ethics policy. The justification for our ethics policy, right? I can't own any Apple stock because we cover Apple. Often I know things that might move the stock or just because of the size of our platform, I could publish a lie and like tank the stock and then receive some financial benefits. So just get rid of it. I don't own any of the stock. We're prevented from owning a lot of things. Do you actively think about how much the minute to minute content of CNBC moves the markets in real time as you are producing the news?”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really. I mean, I'm fine with guests, especially guests like Tyler and Cameron, who have plenty of credibility and plenty of experience expressing their opinions, right? I mean, Yeah, people got opinions. They're prominent. They have opinions. People want to hear what their opinions are. What I'm not okay with is misinformation, right? Because part of my job as a journalist is to not only have that filter on myself, but to provide that filter for the viewer. So if somebody comes on air and says political leaders are preventing you from trading, my filter says, well, is that true? Because I don't know that to be true. Do you know that to be true? What's your evidence? And if it turns out that that was just a bit of hyperbole or an opinion, he could have said that. We could have moved on. I didn't have a problem with him saying it's the end of centralized finance. That's an opinion. It's not a statement of fact. But in a month where we had had a mob, you know, stage an insurrection at the US Capitol based on what they thought political leaders were doing. I'm not going to have somebody on my show accusing political leaders of something that there's just no evidence for without a challenge.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we got some of those answers that the Winklebos twins were really wanting to hear. So I hope they watched Sorkin's interview. Also, our reporter who covers hedge funds was also reaching out to Robin Hood and got a statement from them about what happened. Now people could choose to believe or not believe that statement, but to say that John Fort is not doing his job because he's talking to the Winkleboss twin supposes that John Fort is the only... At CNDC, and therefore I ought to be calling everyone at that very moment. Unfortunately, that's not how the operation works. We've got lots of people, lots of them smarter than me, so that we can get multiple things done at once and still be on live TV”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, you say that journalism is slow. It can be. Sometimes it's pretty fast. And I think on this story, on that particular issue, it actually turned out to be pretty fast. I'll allow that journalism is a weird business and you can't expect people outside it to understand it. But there's more people at work at CNBC than John Ford. And it just so happens that as we were talking, Andrew Ross Sorkin was in the process of booking an interview with the Robin Hood CEO on CNBC, which happened that very same day.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This to me is indicative of kind of the entire relationship between the media and the market and society right now because we're inherently slow. But markets, stocks move really, really fast on sometimes bad information. I mean, that's just to me, it's like the sign of bad faith to ask a question or to insinuate something. And for me, the journalist or you or whoever to say, I don't know if that's true and then be demand and then have it demanded that you ask the question.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I haven't done my job, then you're implying I'm wasting my time talking to you. But all I'm doing is if you're putting a statement out there, I want to know what its basis is in fact. If there is none, your mistake, whatever we can move on.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Who is saying all of those things? That sounds like some attempt at whipping up something populist that's not based in fact.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And frankly, the hypocrisy of the political leaders who say, you can't open your business and run your business and make a living during the pandemic. We won't pass a stimulus bill in time. And, oh, by the way, now you can't trade. What's the next thing they're going to control and say you can't do? And what it really does.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Politician is telling people they can't trade. If you've got private companies that are shutting down trading them, blame the private companies, but why are you blaming government for all those things? Be accurate.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“filter because I've been through a couple cycles where it was different this time. I've been through a couple cycles where people said this can't possibly blow up. And, you know, I have a little bit of that benefit of saying, well, if anything like this happens again, here's what my filter is going to be and here's what I'm going to say because I wish I had said it back then.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the early experiences, I moved to Silicon Valley in December 1999 right before the dot-com bust. So I got to see people going all in, believing in this. It's different this time. Stocks running up an enormous amount. And then I saw a lot of people lose their shirts, right? And saw the flip side of that and heard about how the market works. A few years later, about five years later, I was a real estate and personal finance editor during the housing boom and didn't really see the bust coming. I was a little too young and inexperienced. But then when the bust hit, I looked back and thought, wow, where were all of our stories about that as the editor at the time? What do I wish I had said? What rocks do I wish I had turned over? And so when I see another moment of excitement like the one that we're in when I'm live, that becomes the history becomes part of my...”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's a couple things that come to mind. Number one is the filter, right? Unlike when I was primarily a print reporter, which I was for the first half of my career, there your filter can be slow, right? Your first draft is in your head, you jot things down, you can ask questions and sort of a roundabout meandering way. When you're on live TV, you can't do that. It's got to be crisp coming out and you've got to filter stuff in real time. And part of what I use to do that is history. So, you know, I started in the journalism business, I guess in a way you could say in 1994, that's when I had my first internship. I was 17 years old. I was working for Night Ritter Washington Bureau on Capitol Hill covering Lloyd Benson and Robert Reich giving testimony, trying to, you know, hear anything I could about interest rates, jot down notes, run to a payphone, and call it in, right?”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't know who these people are, but we're just believing a lot of what they're saying and we're piecing that together into a narrative. I run a website, though, and I get to sit back and maybe wait a day and tell the reporters, go find out what you can find out.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've had a couple of years of conspiracy theories driving the entire narrative of the United States. This one was, I kept on describing it as fight club fanfiction. Like, we just keep writing the story about how the little guys are finally banding together to take down the big guys. And all of my, because of the year of conspiracy theories in America, all of my disinformation, misinformation, alarm bells kept ringing. Like, I don't know if this is true. I don't know if the guy on Reddit who says that he's being driven by his anger at the 2008 financial crisis is real. Like, I don't.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that really grabbed me though from the very beginning was the incredible rush to build a narrative around what happened with GameStop. Disconnected from the company GameStop itself, but from the notion that Melvin Capital Management would go under, that it would be bailed out, that the regulators were stepping in in some way, that another company would pressure Robin Hood, the retail trading platform, to stop trading like it just quickly felt like a conspiracy theory to me. But in the way that felt good, right? Not like. I don't know how else to describe it”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To smart people because I've been right over time. Like hedge funds are just not part of the equation for me. No contacts from hedge funds in my phone. I don't call any hedge fund managers. There are people here who do, but that's because they cover hedge funds. So my interest primarily is in technology, but also the business around technology, the public companies that are so big that we talk about so much when you come on Squawk Alley and Le. So, I mean, is the market complicated? Yes. Do people with a lot of money and power have outsized influence in the market? Yes. Does that mean that the little guy can't win? It absolutely does not mean that.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, there's something to be said for that. I mean, one of the kind of disturbing but semi-hilarious things to come out of this is so many people who are kind of new to the market and very smart people were accusing me of being on the side of hedge funds. I don't know anybody at hedge funds. I don't care about hedge funds. Hedge funds don't pay the bill. You know what pays?”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of people are going to hear that from you. And instantly tweet at both of us and probably send me emails because I read my email address at the end of every show. They're going to say what we actually learned is the market's rigged. It's a casino anyway. The rich people always get richer. And retail investors having this kind of access and moving as a collective to run a short squeeze is actually a necessary and good corrective to how corrupt the market is.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's going to be years before we kind of sift through this debris and do the CSI and figure out what really happened here. So in a way, it's still too early to see what we really, really learned, but I think part of what we learned is it's not really that different this time. And this supposed revolution in access to trading and markets, it's interesting, but we got to keep our eye on the ball here, which is that most people should not day trade, right? Like most people, you get rich slowly in the markets if you do it right, not overnight. And, you know, mom and dad at home probably shouldn't be attempting short squeezes on hedge funds as a routine thing. Maybe every once in a while, but not.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feel like I am still trying to figure out what I learned from a story about a subreddit trading at such volumes that a stock went up way higher than it should have and crashed back down and everybody went along for the ride. What have we learned?”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you've got Fort Media and you just use that to launch a course about the Black experience in America, which I definitely want to talk to you about. But I want to start with the news. It's been two weeks since GameStop. It feels like both a minute and a lifetime”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a podcast, but it's no longer a podcast. It's mostly on LinkedIn. You can also catch it on YouTube, but one-on-one interviews, and then I release clips too. So lots of fun.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has learned or what there is to learn. So I wanted to talk to John about two specific parts of the story. First, how the media handled the GameStop story in the moment because it was noisy and chaotic and a lot of narratives turned out not to be true. I really wanted to know how he dealt with that while being on live TV. He had some testy exchanges on air with some powerful people about GameStop. And second, I wanted to get a sense of where he thinks the market is going now that more people have access to tools like Robinhood and communities like Wall Street Betts. John has a keen sense of history in his perspective there is surprising. Lastly, we talked about John's own new business. He just published an 18-part course called The Black Experience America, which he's selling at FortMedia.com. There's a deep connection between our conversation about the market and investing for the long term and his ideas about how to build up.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I'm a CNBC contributor, and I usually go on John's show to talk about big tech companies like Apple and Google and Facebook. But I really wanted to have John on Decoder this week talk about something else, GameStop. Well, not GameStop the company. GameStop the idea. GameStop the moment in time when it felt like a bunch of Redditors might alter the US financial system by buying up shares of stock in a struggling video game retailer.”
2021-02-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · CNBC’s Jon Fortt on GameStop, Robinhood, and wallstreetbets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT