YouSaid · the spoken record

Marta Norton

lines on the record: 69
first: 2022-10-21
most recent: 2022-10-21
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

“So, what we do is we have the individual security portfolios. We have our own mutual funds that we use within our model portfolios. And then we have model portfolios that rely on ETFs from third parties. And we mix the two together as well, kind of an active, passive approach. Our fixed income exposure right now is through third parties. So we'll buy ETFs or we will use subadvisors.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Morningstar at the time. Right. So now it's all kind of folded together. What we did is we had these separate strands, these separate capabilities, and there was an effort to think about what do we want to look like globally as one cohesive unit. And so we've pulled together as an asset manager.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That's right. So it's for the asset management business. And in fact, there are four CIOs in the business. There's one for each region. So I sit in Chicago. I have a colleague in London and one in Asia Pac. And then we have a global CIO who we report into. Who sits in London?”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was different kind of histories to different parts of it. The managed portfolio business began in 2001, but we've had consulting arms, we acquired Ibotson, which has its own rich history. And then we also have global groups outside the US and Sydney and London and other places that we've added to the mix over the years.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he founds the company in the early 1980s. His focus is on mutual funds providing data, providing analysis, and generally helping individual investors have better outcomes. And so that general sense of empowering investor success is the same mentality that Morningstar has now taken in its research to ETFs, to individual stocks, to credit, its software, its data, and of course its investment management group.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Morningstar actually has a really rich history, and to hear Joe and Suedo, our founder, tell it, there was a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit. He wanted to be an entrepreneurial. He was in the investing world and he was intrigued by Warren Buffett. And he was looking for kind of that market opportunity. And he found it in the mutual fund space. Now, as he tells it, the mutual fund space was a pretty nascent space in the early 1980s. It's not like it is today where mutual funds are ubiquitous. And he saw it as a really positive good thing for the individual investor to have access.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you know, Barry, I've been spending a lot of time reading about decision making, so I think a lot of folks have read Annie Duke's book on thinking in bets. And I think that perspective of don't evaluate the outcome, evaluate how you're making your decisions, the process. That's something I've learned as a practitioner, not so much as a theorist.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In your day to day. You know, it's a great question. I think the first thing that would come to mind there is that I think when you are a researcher or a theorist or an analyst and you're not putting money to work, it's a lot easier to be an ideologue. And when you are an investor, you have to learn how to have a philosophy but remain flexible, be willing to be proven wrong in real time and know when you're actually proven wrong and being willing to know when you're not being proven wrong and when the payoff is still coming. And to not be so dogmatic. And I think that's a lesson that value investors have learned repeatedly over the past, you know, really since the global financial crisis on, I think there was an assumption that value is always going to come back any second now. And I think people have had to reevaluate how they think about things.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it required us a bit of patience over that stretch. But it was, I think, a very foundational period for me to just have build that experience in the markets.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. You know, I look at my career in kind of three chunks. There's the pre-Morningstar chunk of being an economist, working in econ consulting. And I see a lot of value in that, in part because I think if you're with the same company your entire career, you can sometimes fall into the fallacy that grass is greener somewhere else. And so I was able to have some career experience from that. And then I have the period where I was with Morningstar Inc. doing research and just soaking things up. And then I move into the money management part of my career. And I would say that there was a stretch from 2008 to call it 2015 where I was managing a ton of different types of mandates. I was on the road with clients and financial advisors sometimes once a week understanding who they were, what they were looking for from us. And there was just a very rich development period, which I think at the time, I don't know if I fully appreciate it, I'm someone who likes to see change, likes to see development.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And I think that's why there's so much importance, and this is something that I think is close to the heart of Morningstar, but there's so much importance in the purpose of education and telling people what to look at. Because that's what I benefited from going to Morningstar, learning, investing through Morningstar's lens, you don't necessarily need to take your signals from recent market performance. There are other things that should be your signals in terms of how you're doing as an investor.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the Isle of Hurricane, I've read that investors are really marked by the environment in which they kind of come of age. And so I came of age in the global financial crisis. And I mean, there were so many lessons learned that maybe I had to process over time. One of them was very smart, very credible people with very good backgrounds and experience can be very, very wrong. And I saw that firsthand with some of the analysis that was done at that time. I saw how personal money is. Let me give you some background on Morningstar Manage portfolio is. These are portfolios that we're creating, whether they're individual stocks or whether they're multi-asset portfolios that we offer to financial advisors who in turn offer them to their clients. So these are stocks bonds, ETFs, mutual funds. They can be. Yeah, they can be kind of a varied collection.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's some timing, right? In the middle of the storm, could you time? You said, I know, I want to run assets. Let me catch the falling knife here with no here. So you're about to start the worst six months in a long time. What was that experience like beginning in asset management?”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intense study, intense focus on understanding different investment strategies, what makes a good investment strategy. I think a lot of people think of Morningstar, and rightly so, for the star ratings, which are performance measurements, but Morningstar spends a lot of time actually doing fundamental work analysis on what makes a good mutual funds, you know, the people, the process, and that work. And that's where I was spending my time as an analyst. So how do you find your way from economist to analyst to asset manager? How did that transition happen? So in 2008, I just perceived my CFA charter and I was beginning to look around and think about where else would I want to go in this company or outside the company. And at that time, the Morningstar Manage portfolios team, which as you mentioned, is a subsidiary of Morningstar, had an opening. And so I tossed my hat in the ring and moved over in October 15, 2008.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Directly to the career and maybe have a little bit broader perspective. And I loved research. I knew Finance had a close corollary to Econ. I was in Chicago, Morningstar being a big research firm. So I applied and was hired as an ETF analyst in 2005. They were actually relatively nascent back then. They were back then. Right. You were there really as they exploded 08-09, more or less, after the crisis, right? That's right. And so Morningstar coverage was really just getting started on ETFs right in the 2005 period. And of course, now it's a very robust coverage. It's sophisticated. It has a philosophy. But then we were still feeling our way. And so there was a lot of need on the Active Mutual Fund front. And so my coverage list kind of converted over time to focus more on mutual funds, to focus on 529 plans, college savings. I was getting my CFA charter around that time. So it was a period of, I guess I would call it.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Says something like, We have no idea when the PPI is coming out. And that's the quote that I got into the paper. Listen with changing the model. You got to give it a couple of weeks. Sometimes the mover's late. That's very funny. So from Bureau of Labor Statistics, how did you transition over to Morningstar? Right. So I leave the Bureau of Labor Statistics and I move into economic consulting. And this is distinct from management consulting, which I think a lot of people are pretty familiar with. With econ consulting, at least at the firm I was at, it was a lot of expert witness testimony. So litigation around unfair competition or the like, a company would pull in our expert witness, and I was part of the team to put together the case to explain the market size or the market share or what have you. And it was interesting work. It was demanding work. It was pretty grueling. But the career paths from there were either kind of the PhD routes or the legal routes. And those weren't paths I was necessarily interested in pursuing right then. So I thought, okay, let's stop trying to apply the main.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So sometimes that crosses my mind today when people are watching the CPI. I can't imagine how people would react. Why was it a month and a half late in 04? So we were converting from the standard industrial classification system to the North American industrial classification system. So taking potatoes from one area, moving them into another area, making sure everything was in its right place. And like all things, it took longer, was more complex. Why wouldn't they use the old model until the new model was ready to go? You would think. You would think. I think it was just a bit of poor planning more than anything else. No. You know that that can happen. And it's funny, I had my first brush with media as a professional at that time. Journalists, of course, were calling in. Folks were calling in. Where's our PPI? Conspiracy theories abounded. And a journalist, I think, could tell I was mostly a child and was trying to get the dirt out of me.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So BLS economist, how did that happen? Tell us about that opening gig. Right. So it's a pretty heady title, maybe a generous title for a 23-year-old. BLS recruits, just like all other organizations, recruits at college campuses. So there are a number of us heading in out of college into the BLS. And of course, BLS home to the Consumer Price Index, which we're all watching so closely. I was on the producer price index. So the sister index focusing on the prices that producers are receiving. Yeah, that's right. So I was on the research team. So putting together research, I wrote a scintillating piece on beef and cattle prices. Scintillat. Yes, that's right. Which you can find in the monthly labor review. And I spent a lot of time working with folks helping with contract escalation, identifying the right index for them. And actually, I was at the PPI. Most people may not remember this, but in 2004, the PPI was a month and a half later.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This week on the podcast, I have an extra special guest, Marta Norton, is the chief investment officer for Morningstar Investment Management. They advise or directly manage about $250 billion in client assets. She has a fascinating career starting at BLS, working her way up as an analyst, and eventually head of outcome-based strategies for Morningstar, eventually rising from that position and portfolio manager to chief investment officer. We talk about everything from when do you think about risk, how do you diversify a portfolio, at what point do you really have to rethink the fundamentals of what's going on in the economy and the marketplace? I found this conversation to be absolutely fascinating, and I think you will also, with no further ado, my conversation with Morningstars, Marta Norton.”
2022-10-21 · Masters in Business · Marta Norton on Direct Indexing and Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source