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Jonathan Clements

lines on the record: 79
first: 2025-01-17
most recent: 2025-01-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So I grew up with that great family story about how you shouldn't waste money, how you should think about the future. And then added to that was when I got out of college and I got into the workforce, I ended up getting married and having kids really quickly. I was a father at age 25, supporting a graduate student wife and living in New York City.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was based out of Liverpool, and he and his brother had launched a cigarette company called Cope Cigarettes. And they made a ton of money. That fortune ended up with my great-grandmother. And she lived the Downton Abbey lifestyle. She hadn't established in the Cotswolds on which there were five mansions. She lived in one and her various children lived in the other houses on the estate.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are two reasons why I became very focused on saving money. First, what I call the great family story. So when my great-great-grandfather died in 1888, He was listed in the newspapers as one of the richest men in England.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really the latter. And I think it partly depends on the economic comfort in which you grew up. I mean, I grew up in a very comfortable middle class or from middle class household, so money was never my priority going into the workforce. I wanted to cover the costs, obviously. I wanted to save for the future, but I was never motivated by money. If I was motivated by money, I would never have ended up in journalism.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that in this case, I probably did not express it to people that way. I'm not saying that I don't like getting paid, but...”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I became part of this new business and I did a lot of writing and a lot of public speaking over the next four plus years until I realized that I really wasn't doing much good in the world. I was collecting a nice paycheck, the biggest paycheck in my life, but I really felt like I was wasting my time. And I've never really done anything in my career solely for money. And I suddenly dawned on me that really I was just living for my paycheck. So I made a plan to get out of there. I realized I had enough to retire if I wanted to. I was 51. So I spent 10 or 11 months preparing to leave. I contacted the journal about writing for them again. I also started working on a book. After I got my lost urine bonus in early 2014, I walked in and handed my notice.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then on top of that, of course, we ran straight into the 2008-2009 Great Recession. So the business was pretty much dead before it began. And by the summer of 2009, they'd pulled the plug on this venture. And suddenly, you know, I've thrown away my journalism career to join the Citigroup. You know, what would happen next? Well, this group of people that were part of this startup called MiFi were rolled into the traditional bank-based brokerage business. If you can imagine two completely different group of people. And then on top of that, they decided they were going to try to turn these bank-based brokers into fuel financial advisors.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in the couple of years running up to early 2000s, To do something else in life, and I coughed around, I talk to various people about different jobs, nothing quite rang a bell for me. And then I was approached by Citigroup about being Director of Financial Education for this startup called MiFi. And the idea was they were going to help small investors with their entire financial life in return for a fixed monthly fee. That was the notion. Lovely notion, but two things went wrong. One is the idea of doing a startup within a large corporation is absolutely absurd. Companies, large companies are incapable of innovating in that way. It was just a struggle from day one, particularly in the regulatory environment that is the securities business between lawyers and compliance people. Everything was a headache.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We know how vessels behave, which is they extrapolate recent return. So if the market's going up, they think it's going to keep going up. If it's going down, they assume it's going to keep going down. And that, of course, is what everybody around them is doing. They're also extrapolating returns. It's very hard to step aside from the narrative of that time and think independently, but that's what you need to do to be a successful investor. At a bare minimum, at a bare minimum, if you can just stand your ground, you'll probably do a whole lot better than most investors who will tend to be buying and selling at just the wrong time.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“metrics have become unreliable over the decades as the nature of the stock market has changed. But the one thing I have learned is that if the market is off 20, 30 percent, things are a whole lot cheaper than they were prior to the decline and what you should do Is”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, guilty is charged, Mary. I mean, I can't entirely justify it, but over my career as an investing, the things that I've learned is one that you can't win through stock selection. You can't win by buying actively managed funds. What you need to do is indexing. But one way you can tilt the field in your favor is in periods when people are panicking is to, as I like to put it, overrebalance, to move even more into stalks. It's a temporary move, but I've done it repeatedly. I did it in 2000, 2002. I did it in 2008 and 2009. I did it during the coronavirus collapse in 2020. And I did it again in 2022. You don't know what the bottom of the market looks like. I think it's very hard to say stocks are objectively cheap because all of these valuations.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And said to people numerous times when we have a period like 2008, 2009, when everybody thinks the world is going to hell in a hand basket, well, if it really does go to hell, it doesn't matter what you own. Right, that's right. More than likely, you know, we humans being humans, we'll figure out a way to solve this problem and the market will come roaring back. And what you want to own at that point is stocks. So I just backed up the cart and bought stocks like crazy”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coming into sort of late 2008, I think, if I recall correctly, I was somewhere between 70 and 80% stocks. By that point, I'd left the journal and I was working at Citigroup as Director of Financial Education for the Wealth Management Business. And a number of things happened. One was I was working on Wall Street, so I was earning a whole lot more money. Two, I got my first Wall Street bonus. Three, I sold another book, which meant I got a big advance. And four tragically, my father was killed during this period and I inherited money from him. And I took every one of those dollars and put them into the stock market. And it was a time when the sequence of returns, that combination of what's going on in the market and whether you're pulling out money from your portfolio, putting it in work like magic.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know this probably sounds like I'm an ambulance chaser, but you know what the periods that I enjoyed the most? It was when the stock market was going down. I tot”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Topic that we call financial journalism is expended enormously over the past three plus decades, and that's good news for somebody like me because if I'd still writing only about index funds, I would have been out of a job a long time ago.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to serve your read as well. There are only a limited number of stories to be written. You know, if you're a reporter who spends their career writing the stock of the day, the funder of the month, just flogging one thing after another, trying to predict the market's direction, you'll be plenty busy, but your readership will be a whole lot poorer. So if you want to do the right thing, you're basically going to have to have a set of sound principles and focus on them again and again. And one of the things you discover is that you start to sound like a repetitive blathering idiot. And that's when... For me, and I think also for Jason, you start casting around for other things to write about. So when I go back to the late 1980s and I started as a financial journalist, the sole topic was investing. It was all about which to buy, which.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when I left Forbes, Jason ended up with a mutual funds. Then he went on to Money Magazine. And then when I left the journal for the first time in 2008, they said, well, who should we hire to replace you? I said, Jason's wife. So Jason and I have known each other for over 30 years. I consider him to be one of my best friends. And in fact, through my recent diagnosis, he's been a super supportive. We remain great friends after all these years, and I'm a huge admirer of his work for the journal and elsewhere. So yes, Jason has the same joke that I do, which is, you know, there are only 20 postal finance stories, which means that by the time I left the journal and writing a thousand columns, I'd written each of those stories 50 times each. If you are...”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you're right. I mean, the sort of traditional brokers were much slower to adopt ETFs than fee-only financial advisors. But today, a lot of brokers, whether they're with the big full service brokerage firms, now have advisory accounts that they flog to clients where they can buy ETFs. And as long as they're getting their fee, whether it's one, one and a half percent, whatever amount it is, they now have an incentive to sell those ETFs. And remember, if you're an advisor and you're selling ETFs, I mean, there's no reason to ever say sorry, right?”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so you're right. Spiders, SPY came out, I believe, in 1993, but it was just the S&P 500 and it was just that single fund. The exchange-traded index funds really did take off thanks to what was then Barclays now part of BlackRock with the iShares series. And suddenly you could buy index funds that cover all of the major asset classes. And because they were stocks that traded on the market, you didn't have to have an agreement with Vanguard or with Fidelity in order to sell those funds. You just needed a brokerage account. And suddenly every broker, every financial advisor where they were operating through Merrill Lynch or Schwab could sell those funds and indexing was available to all. Prior to that, there were a lot of brokers who would never have sold an index fund because they didn't have access to Vanguard's platform.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the numbers you can't argue with. I mean, we all know that the brutal math of investing before costs, investors collectively will earn the market's return, after costs, they will earn that market return less whatever they're paying. If you can just match the market's return minus some tiny amount for an index fund's expenses, you're going to outperform the vast majority of investors. annual advantage snowballs over time. Until probably the early 2000s, that message didn't resonate as widely, in part because index funds were the preserve of Vanguard and a couple of other fund companies, but then these ETFs came along, these exchange traded index funds. And at that point, any financial advisor, any broker could sell index funds to their clients. And it was really the ETF revolution that took indexing and turned it into...”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yes, I was given my own column, and by that point, having seen all these star managers come and go, I had become an index fund devotee. And in column after column, I bang the drum for index funds to the point where my editors were asking me, hey, could you write about something else?”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in 1994, at the lofty age of 31, the journal gave me my own column, which in retrospect is absurd. It's about 31 year old their own. It seemed to have worked.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This, of course, with the experience of many investors across the US, and that was in many ways the seeds of the index fund revolution that people bought these style managers, one after another, managers started to flame out. They bought new star managers, they ended up with these portfolios that were just a hodgepodge of X-Star fund managers. And that really set us up for the boom in indexing in the late 1990s and into the 2000s.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was at Forbes after this initial spell as a fact checker, I was given the mutual funds beat and the core article as the mutual funds reporter for Forbes magazine and subsequently when I covered mutual funds for the journal was the star manager profile and it was very formulaic. You went and you interviewed some star manager, usually a man, and you would have a couple of paragraphs about their investment, philosophy, and strategy. You would offer three of their stock picks where they were probably touting stocks they wanted to unload from their portfolio. The managers you selected were all based on past performance. And one of the things I started to realize in those years was the star managers, well, their stars started to flame out pretty quickly.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“London is also a really expensive place to live. And in any case, at the time, I was actually living out in Princeton with my graduate student wife.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With my parents' encouragement, I stayed on a boarding school in England, went to Cambridge, worked there for a year, and then after a year as a journalist in London, I realized the standard of living for reporters in England seriously sucked. And that's when I decided to move to New York City. And I joined Forbes magazine as a glorified fact-checker. Immediately doubled my salary moving from London”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both places. I was born in London, and when I was three and a half, my father got a job for the World Bank in Washington, D.C. So we all moved to Washington, D.C. Then just before my 10th birthday, my father was posted to Bangladesh for four years. So my mother and father and my sister went to live full time in Bangladesh and my two brothers and I got packed off to Boarding School in England, which explains everything. You know, we'd go out there during vacations. Four years later, my parents moved back to DC.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you said to me, you know, what advice would I give to somebody who wanted to go into journalism? My answer would be, don't. I really feel like I was the last generation that got into journalism and made a career out of it and made a living wage. But anyway, going back to your question, yeah, financial journalism was always on my radar screen. And even before I went to Cambridge, I actually spent eight months working for a little suburban newspaper outside of Washington, D.C. And in many ways, it was the most fun and the most educational experience I had in journalism. I worked for this rinky little paper that came out every other week. The circulation was 25,000. But as a 19-year-old, I was able to not only get involved in writing stories, but also I was involved in the pay stuff of the paper for people who remember what pay stop was.”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, from a relatively early age, I actually thought about being a financial journalist because my father had been a financial journalist. He spent 10 years in journalism in London. He worked for the Daily Telegraph. He was city editor for the Glasgow Herald. His first job out of college was at the Financial Times. In fact, and this will blow your mind, Barry. My father graduated from Cambridge in 1956. He decided he was going to take the highest paying job he was offered. And the highest paying job he was offered, the second highest paying job he was offered at £700 a year was as a management trainee for shell oil. The highest paying job he was offered at £800 a year was as a cub reporter for the Financial Times. Can you imagine a world where the highest paying job you get offered out of college is a job in journalism?”
2025-01-17 · Masters in Business · Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source