YouSaid · the spoken record

Karen Karniol-Tambour

lines on the record: 94
first: 2024-10-10
most recent: 2024-10-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I agree. I was thinking about this the other day, which is it's always interesting in the markets, and there's always things to work on. But if I think about the current environment, the past several year, it's called the COVID post-COVID environment, and I compare that to the period, you know, the kind of secular stagnation new normal. So let's call it the post-Lehman pre-COVID period. Not the things didn't happen. We had a European crisis. We had an oil and gas boom and bust, huge parts of what we're seeing blossom today were born in that era. But there were some very lean years, low velocity, low interest rate, low volatility. I don't think people necessarily, the younger, if you will, the younger generation probably appreciates how good and interesting things have been of late and hopefully will continue to be relative to the cycle that preceded us.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you look at, we talked a little bit how AI is going to evolve. I mean, like, what could be more interesting than figuring that out? This might be the biggest event in the next couple decades. Clearly, geopolitical tensions constantly feel like at the edge of a knife. And it feels more like known unknown than unknown unknowns, meaning we know that there's a lot of dissatisfaction we see incumbents being voted out everywhere. We see all these pressures building up. Where are they actually going to go? Where are they going to build up to? And so being in a world where you can kind of take whatever one I'd say broadly agrees, which is we're in a different secular paradigm than we have been, but getting to actually break that down to what's this literally going to mean and when? Very excited about that.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is a really great time to be doing what we're doing because, back to that curiosity point, there's just so many things happening that feel. Unprecedented and indifferent. And so honestly, I feel lucky every day that thinking about those things and reading about those things and reflecting on those things is actually my job and not just what I choose to do on my own spare time”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to give you a little bit of a counter to advancer, I think, which is when you look at the largest institutional investors out there. Are a few of them, and I'll name GIC in Singapore, CPP in Canada, FutureFund Australia. It's a different kind of investing than we do, right? But they've really admirably broken the box of kind of what was expected, what people thought was the right way to think about things, whether it is not being stuck with market cap, not being stuck with asset classes, thinking of their goals in a different way, in an environment that's very different than Bridgewater, right? Different sets of stakeholders, different governance. But I really admire that because at the end of the day, what we do feeds in the whole point of investing money is making wealth for the next generation.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I would say from Radalia or a founder. Early on in my career, he sort of said, Look, you're overly trained the way a lot of college kids are trained, which is to answer questions based on the information you know is available to answer questions, you write book reports, you write papers. And actually, often the right thing to do is just ask the right question and realize you don't have the data to answer. You have no idea how to answer and just sit and wrestle with the fact that that's the important question and you don't know how to answer it versus being drawn to where there is a question that you know how to answer because the data is there and you see the path on the analysis. I think that was probably the best advice.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Yeah, I always find it interesting when you're reading something which may be far afield from what we do, but your mind stumbles into something more related to what we do do. I won't have off the top of my head, but there is some quote from Churchill. You know, he read a lot, including during the war, and then kind of said, like, we have a job to do. How do you have this time? He said, because, you know, my reading time is my thinking time. And I think there's huge value, again, in terms of how you do connect back to work, even if the subject matters not entirely germane to what we do day to day. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To get time to just sit and read uninterrupted But yeah, I'm just there's a lot of things that don't directly super directly relate to literally my job where I can't make a linear connection of I should read this because this will affect what I'm doing in the market. Sure. But that I'm curious about and I get interested in, and then some period later starts really connecting for me. And then similarly with markets, you kind of have to pick up and read and think about things that aren't like literally your priorities tomorrow to have ideas.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it is the thing that made me effective in going from kind of working on one piece where, for example, you could work on the copper market. And there's a limited number of things that matter for copper, and systemizing them well could be a lifetime. You could spend a lifetime following that. It's a little of a different skill set to look at it entirely from market and say, you know, there's like kind of echoes of what I see in this other market that might give us insights. And I think that made me strong earlier on in kind of widening the aperture and movement between areas. But honestly, it's so hard to speak about your strength in visual or context and easier to speak about where you need to get better.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And is the first piece of that answer, is that just kind of the mosaic of how your mind works or the ability to put the mosaic together, I should say, or is that the systemization part of the process, or is it both?”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think putting lots of disparate pieces together. Making connections across things and probably just curiosity. You have to be interested in the world to invest money.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Okay. We'd like to end these sessions with a lightning round, so we're going to run through a couple quick questions, a couple quick answers. What's your greatest strength as an investor, Karen?”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%, and not just that there's a deep sense of insecurity and fear that if we don't do that, look, there have been tons of investment firms out there, right? Like you fail. This is not a business for kind of resting on your laurels. We are not a toll booth, right? People will only keep coming to us if they get excellence. And so you have to have that fear that if we left it up on ourselves, if we're constantly like, it's good enough that the firm just won't survive.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know some elements of it are never easy, right? Nobody likes hearing feedback. I think there is a breaking point a couple years in. Where people feel comfortable that this is their home, where they've had enough rounds with the other people that they're sort of in the mentality of like, we're really all on the same team here and this is meant to make me better. And that really helps. On day one, you just can't expect someone to feel that, right? Like they just walked in the door. How could they have that? Over time, that is a core part of what makes it. It's like you have the relationship with people. You know they're really trying to push you to be great, that they want the firm to succeed. You know that's where they're coming from.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These guys had held back. If they had said, Well, she's new, she's young, I'm going to embarrass, I'm going to be upset about this, let me like really sugarcoat it. I would never have gone as far as I did. I needed all that fuel to figure out what to do next and how to get better and find the mistakes. You need it.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That really makes you better. Because the most important thing about the culture is that we really believe in that. And so there is a requirement for people to open themselves up to that. And people will say things to you. They'll say them to you straight. You'll do something you really love. You'll have an investment idea. People say, this is a stupid idea for these reasons. They don't hold back. And you kind of have to have the equanimity to be like, this is what makes me great, right? Like getting that feedback at the end of the day, the market's decided we're right or not, right? And so it's not about proving yourself to your colleague. We're all here to be on one team, make each other better. So you have to really be willing to be part of that. And I think once you do it, you look back and you say, man, that really made me better, right? All this set of feedback and whatnot. And I look back at my career and think,”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, honestly, what I tell him is you have to really be committed to what it's like to take hard feedback. And you have to know it's not easy, right? People like their own ideas, think they're great. You have to actually be in that spot where it can feel overwhelming. Like lots of people are going to come at you and say, let me tell you all the things I like and don't like. You have to really believe that it makes you better.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having that ecosystem of investors that care about this topic has created some self-reinforcing mechanism where more players are considering that and making choices to tilt in one direction or another.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other thing I'll say is that we've definitely gone to the world where because a large number of investors around the world care about this topic and they want to use their capital to influence the world to move in a certain direction, particularly on climate, it is a factor that plays into decision making. So you see, for example, today with tech companies that they have tough choices to make if they want to kind of keep up with what they think AI CapEx should be, they got to choose how much they care about their environmental equipments as well. And they have an ecosystem of investors, but also employees and all these things around them to tell them, well, I do actually care about how I go about AI.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we've shifted from a world where people who talked about quote unquote ESG investing were making sort of the argument that, oh yeah, anything more sustainable will definitely win to one of our people understand this is a real factor in the world, but like any other factor in the world, whether or not it wins depends on where the world will go. Sure. Where the world will prioritize these things, not, what regulation will do, et cetera, and what's already priced into the markets, if that's already expected or not. And so it's a real factor and something that as an investor, you have to ask yourself that question. And it's intuitive in markets like, you know, I don't know, commodity markets that you want to basically say, well, is there going to be an energy transition?”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they gas completely different questions. Women founders get asked a lot more about risk management and what if the company this goes wrong versus vision and excitement. And so they get put, and I think it just, again, I don't think it's mean spirit at all. I just think it comes from this idea that not just the leaders have seen. And so you want to celebrate the cases where leaders look a little bit different, partly to change people's views about what that might look like.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that you kind of have to see a range. And I think often when women make it to the first time deposition of leadership, they bring something a little bit different, partly because people for a while just didn't quite see that possibility that you could kind of get that in that role. And one of the reasons you mentioned angel investing that I like doing that is I think that is particularly hard when you're talking about, say, a new company and just an idea, right? People are really going from their gut feel. So a lot of what they're imagining is, does that feel like a strong founder CEO to me? And so there's a great article from Harvard Business to School about what questions women versus men founders get asked.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think that you want to take the women that you have who are capable and put them front and center partly to give people a sense that the image they have of what's required in these roles is not necessarily what the right image is.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that it's really hard to break the bias that people have that they just sort of have an intuitive feel of what a leader should look like based on what they've seen before because it's not mean spirited. No one's going around being like, I just don't like XYZ women, minority. It's just that the image they have just doesn't quite line up with that. And it shows up in all these subtle ways. I got a lot of feedback in my career that was kind of circling like, you just don't feel like what an investor usually feels like to me because the image of like the hedge fund gambler was just not. What sat in front of them?”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When he joined Bridgewater, you were the only woman in the investment department and you were the first female CIO at Bridgewater. You're also an active angel investor focused specifically on technology startups led by women. I'm interested in this because I co-sponsor our women's network within my division within the Global Banking Markets division. And so I'm just kind of curious, how do we collectively, how do we help put more women in leadership positions within our industry”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years in. Do you think so? I started in 1999, and then, of course, 2000 hit and from March of 2000 to October of 2002, it felt like the stock market went down every day. I do think having those experiences earlier in your career is a really valuable lesson. Now, you don't want to get overly programmed to those because it's not the natural arc of the economy or the markets, but to only know up into the right early in one's career, I think, can probably form other bad habits that to have some of those scars and some of those ghosts is probably not the worst thing in the early part of one's career.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those experiences and so on. And by definition, that experience was very cross cutting because you talked about all the money and credit in the economy and where it hit and why. And so I think it came out of that well prepared to start overseeing with a wide aperture different parts of our research process and bring new ideas in.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was lucky to start at Bridgewater before the financial crisis and then get to live through those pre-financial crisis days where we were wrestling with, can this be sustainable? What do you make of how much leverage is being built up? And wrestling without a time where the world wasn't so concerned about it and we felt a little bit crazy for having these views, then living through the financial crisis, it was an amazing stress test of what we often talk about as money and credit or the idea that literally how much money is printed and where it goes and how the debts are changing ends up being the driver of what is spent and what happens in the economy and markets. And so I kind of started as an analyst on fixed income team and then got the experience as we got thrown into the financial crisis to really be a part of almost the SWA team that was in a safe place. We weren't under risk kind of as a firm and really drinking from a fire hose because so many things that were Coretical, this happened in the Great Depression kind of stories were suddenly living in front of us and we got to live.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, Will said. After graduating from Princeton so you joined Bridgewater straight away as an investment associate on the fixed income team, and then you progress really rapidly within the company to become head of investment research, I think just seven years after joining, which is remarkable and it made you at 31 years young one of the highest profile women in the industry. And so I'm just kind of curious, how'd your role in managing the investment process evolve over that time?”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because that's kind of what they intuitively felt most recently. And what they forget is that just because that was the last few years of performance, that must mean the prices already know that and are incorporating that and tend to extrapolate the same thing will happen again. Which by definition means it's harder to do next time because it's in the price. And so it's almost like you need the opposite bias of what you psychologically want to feel, which is that the past will just continue. Yes.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An investment that's even more extreme because I think in investing, people are anchored to what the last couple years performance is like”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looks back to the point you made earlier, which is we all have an anchoring bias to the present day and think the future probably won't look that much different than today and then you flash forward 40 or 50 years and the world looks dramatically different.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sit back and think a lot about what other assumptions do I have that can be broken in that way and realizing that that happens. That happens periodically and the world and knowledge change and evolve all the time.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's the classic, the beautiful thing the college campuses want to accomplish, which is that you're at the point of your life where you hear a new idea and it actually really makes you pause and shape your thinking and see the world differently. I remember going to that first lecture that he gave and basically being really taken to this idea of reflecting on decision making and thinking about all the flaws in our decision making and how important that is in what we do day to day in life and being able to study that and actually have a perspective on that. And it connected me immediately to Bridgewater. It's the thing that made me say, wow, these people are thinking really hard about making decisions well and what the human challenges are of making decisions well. I also think that Danny Common, he won the Nobel Prize because he really did create paradigm shift in economics. He thought about things that were assumptions people took for granted, people's rationality and so on from a totally different perspective and it kind of broke the paradigm. And being exposed to that, it does make”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. You attended Princeton, you studied under Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who's the author of Thinking Fast and Slow. He was your senior thesis advisor, and I think when you were at Princeton 02, he won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. How did your work with him influence you?”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had a lot of appreciation of how lucky they were to be alive and kind of making the most out of what life has to give, whether it was obviously surviving World War II in the woods and the ways that they did, or even my father who had been in numerous wars and said to me, I didn't think I'd come out of the 1973 war alive. So, I think it gives you a lot of perspective about how much the world can change, how lucky we are to be alive. And then both my professor parents had a ton of passion for what they did. I remember being a little kid, my mom would wake up at six in the morning because she had an idea and she'd want to be writing it up and finishing a paper. And it just gave me a sense that you want to do something you feel that way.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I'd say that the arc of my parents and grandparents' life, they saw such tremendous change, right? I remember my grandmother talking to me about the first time she saw a train. And what it was for her. She was like, I saw houses moving on wheels. And the arc of her life going from literally like barely running water, seeing a train being a big deal to then surviving the Holocaust in various, you know, difficult ways of surviving it. Sure. And then ending her life in a world that's not that dissimilar from where you and I are today, sure there were no iPhones, but very similar in other ways. And it just gave a lot of perspective about how much the world can change. Also, you know, across these folks.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, let's talk a little bit about your life before Bridgewater. You were born and raised in Israel. You are the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. Both of your parents are professors. So can you tell us a little bit about the role your parents and your grandparents have played in shaping how you think about the world?”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Challenges with China that are intended to say again, this is mishap, this isn't everything great in the world, but it's intended to kind of plug a hole that'll help you shift from where you're concentrated.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, having applicability outside because you have similarities, the broadest kind of pictures I put around that are the biggest things that drive variability in most large institutional portfolios have to do with how the economic environment is going. One approach to that is find when in your alpha you have opposing views. For example, if you know that your stock is going to do really well if growth is strong, put on views, they'll do really well in growth this week. So you end up with something kind of misshaped, but specifically shaped to fit that purpose. Another perspective is, well, can you just make investments somewhere that have different growth or inflation and monetary policies and have different exposures? So we've offered kind of packages of things like, here is an Asia exposure, sometimes without China for all the.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you look at our offerings, we try not to do too much, right? And so we have core flagship, if you will, that's pure alpha that is just our best ideas. That's intended to be uncorrelated to anything and just good, consistent, uncorrelated returns. But then there are a couple things we do that were really designed to meet a need that is different from that. The most obvious example is if you just look at someone's portfolio and say, what's the best thing you can do for me? Your answer is probably going to say, well, what's negatively correlated? What's actually going to go directly at my biases? And so we have a few things that we're doing that are really intended to say, how do we go at your biases and poke at your biases and try to offset them, not give you just an uncorrelated, regardless of what you hold this is the best answer. And so that is very satisfying for both sides to basically say, okay, you're with me at top of house. You're understanding my whole portfolio, and you're really building the right thing. Now, that ends up.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Excited about and vice versa. Sure. And does that mean at the end of the assembly line you have a bunch of distinct client portfolios? Or does it mean all that kind of bottoms up feeds into a portfolio to serve all?”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes that really ends up down the line of an asset class or an area, but other times then you end up shifting because if you spend, you know, a decade really driving through new ideas on a certain topic, you may feel like all my ideas are already here. What I really should do is a different set of ideas somewhere else. And so it's been more fluid in that way. I'd say I have a lot of passion around this question of what's the right way to think about our partners' portfolios and what's the best way to use our insight to do that. And so I might end up taking a lead in something there because it's something where I really kind of see a path and get excited about and vice versa.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not necessarily. It comes and goes. I'd say that the three of us have known each other for so long, right? I've been there close to 20 years and Bob and Greg, my two Co-CEOs, worked together for more than 10 years before I joined. So this is a cumulative many decades. So we know each other really well. We understand each other's strengths and weaknesses. We both like bringing in the others to look at our things. And then we like picking the things that each one of us is really going to take on our own and drive.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With three CIOs, do you tend to split up duties in that one person say may kind of major more in equities and one person may major more in currencies and someone in rates or is that not division of labor kind of by asset class how it works necessarily?”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And often that means working with them to build what's the right way to use our insight given their particular circumstances. Sometimes that becomes broad strategy, sometimes not. But I think that's a really satisfying part of the role, a sense that we're kind of taking what we know about the economy and the markets and using it to really actually make a difference in how endowments are managed or pensions are managed”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the role of the chief investment officers in that context is very much orchestrating that, both generating ideas, but then also working with the research teams to basically do a great job to take those ideas all the way to what it means to really bring them to life, whether that's asking tough questions about them, elevating them, and thinking what are the most important things that we're missing. And it's an incredible role because you're kind of working off of 40 years of Bridgewater history that has everything thought about before. But trying to say, what are we missing? And like, you know, kind of how do we innovate beyond that? The other piece I would say importantly in the role is that we take really seriously being partners to our clients who are generally very large, sophisticated institutional investors and thinking about what we truly do in their shoes.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first thing I'll say is just you have to kind of anchor yourself to our investment philosophy, which is we are fundamental and systematic, which means that we take ideas and the kind of concepts you and I have been going back and forth on and think really hard about how to go from idea to an algorithm, a system, something that reflects the conversation we just had by writing down our thoughts really rigorously that lets us both stress test the ideas, see how would they have happened through time, make sure the ideas can then be kind of looked up by other people, examined from different perspectives. and have the idea live on beyond just you know i had it in my head so i put on a trade”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I agree with that. The first part, and I know you referenced this in some of your benchmark work on this, but I sometimes wonder, are we in the moment right now? Is this the happiest possible moment of the cycle in that every company is spending more and more money, which has created an incredible opportunity set in the public market. It was very accessible for everyone. But we haven't rendered many, if any, jobs obsolete just yet. But if you were to use that analog and if anyone grew up in the parts of the US that I spend time in, which is like the Northeast, kind of a different but a traditional industrial area, all those jobs were hollowed out. And that 10% metric that you mentioned had huge societal impact in localized areas. And so if we're talking about something that could be multiples of that, your mind can run pretty wild with what the forward state of that is. As you say, though, in the moment, it's very exciting and has created an enormous amount of, I would say, homefield advantage for the US. We'll see how that plays out in the next phase of the game.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you look at the In a very particular set of exposures. May or may not be if you start saying, What are all the ways that profitability might get created from AI? And so I'm not saying you shouldn't told market. I'm saying at least that question should be there and you should be saying, what is my neutral position here and how do I want this to be set up? People also have different setups, right? Some people have lots of private exposure. Has no AI in there. So when they actually step back and they say, I don't have any exposure to AI. So it's just a question that needs to be asked proactively and not just take the assumption that whatever I have in my private side is no index, whatever I have in my public side just use the index and that's it. You really want to push back against.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At least that template of what it means to have something like that happen that's so structural, I think is roughly the right one. And then as an investor today, I would say there's a couple of main implications I'd be looking at. One is this big question of like, when does this period of pressure on the cost of capital go up end? How big of a pressure does this come behind us to become deflationary? When does it start popping up to actually matter that this is a deflationary impact? We're not there yet. It has to be watched and monitored. And one of the ways I do that really is kind of sector by sector who's incorporating it. The other is kind of not living with equity indices the way they are because your neutral view, not knowing where AI is going to go is probably not just holding market cap the way it is.”
2024-10-10 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How to find alpha: Bridgewater Associates' Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT