YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Gitlin

lines on the record: 78
first: 2026-01-05
most recent: 2026-01-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Morgan Stanley Investment Management is the asset management division of Morgan Stanley. Statistics as of December 31, 2025. All investing involves risk of loss. Views are subject to change. Not investment advice or a recommendation. Copyright twenty twenty six Morgan Stanley All Rights Reserved. And now back to the show.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To lead businesses, it was the inflection in capital's tenure, if you think of the company as a whole, where full-time CEO is able to manage a complex global business and work with his senior partners and work with management committee can do all of the above. So I don't think there was anything necessarily special about me other than my experiences and then being able to partner with folks who've been at the company for decades and decades is a really good combo.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talk about everything all of the time. We have a management committee of ten people. We meet twenty five ish times a year. We talk about everything. It's a super open group at the end of every meeting. We have a session called What's Up, where we talk about what's up. It's a very collegial group that makes strategic decisions together. And we have so many leaders across the enterprise too. And I'm not just saying that to be self-deprecating or to be humble. It's just the way the company's managed. We're meant to write a chapter of the book together as senior leaders, as management committee members, as senior business leaders, pass it off to the next group who writes the next chapter. They've both been a capital group more than thirty years. It's important for the culture to have people who've been here so long help lead the enterprise. And for me, I've had the opportunity.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to live in different places around the world, that makes you a better candidate to do other things in the future. I didn't get to capital group at 22, like some folks. I got to capital group at 44, but I had an opportunity when I joined to lead the fixed income group, which is an amazing group of people. And we had a lot of success as a team, they managing the money, me, hopefully adding some value and managing the team through that period of time, I was asked to do some more things. An organization with so many people that have full careers within the same organization, why do you think you were tapped to be the next leader? I was tapped to be the CEO, but that's one of several senior leadership roles at Capitol Group. We are not super hierarchical as a company. Jody Johnson is our vice chair. Martin Romo is our chair. They're my senior partner.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know in your 20s what you're going to end up doing in your 50s. Too many people think too far ahead and try to figure that out. I'd spend other time on just being good at your job in your 20s and not trying to determine that. I was fortunate in my career that people gave me an opportunity to do different things at early stages. When I was in my early twenties, I got the opportunity to trade the Asian markets overnight from East Coast on the US. What an amazing opportunity it is to trade billions of dollars in your twenties, even if you're up in the middle of the night, it's still an amazing opportunity. Some of those opportunities are harder to come by today than they were in the early 90s, but I was able to do buy side and sell side and hedge fund and long only and international and US. Over thirty three years I've had so many opportunities to do different kinds of things.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Success we can have. If you've joined in technology and you've been at the company for two years or if you've been a portfolio manager for 35 years, one of the things we ask all associates is what you're doing impacting the long-term strategic plan and impacting clients. And our most recent engagement survey, that came back as one of the highest scores of everybody having a sense of what their job is doing to enhance the long-term strategic plan and to help clients. That's the one CG mindset. We're not perfect at it, but I think we get better and better at that. A lot of family-owned businesses start with the Lovelace family. Someone in the family leads it over time. I'd love to hear a bit about your story and coming into what is currently the leadership seat for the organization as a whole. If you ask me thirty years ago what I AB Capital Group and B be in the position I'm at, my answer would have been no and no?”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone as well. We try to share the wealth amongst as many people as we possibly can. If you come and work at Capital Group for the entirety of your career, we generally have benefits that are top decile or top quartile. It's a good place to work. It's a good culture, but it's not only about the set number of shareholders or the fluid number of shareholders. It's about everyone sharing the profitability. So it sounds like you're maybe minimizing that. You think of like a Goldman Partnership in the old days, everybody would aspire to be the Goldman partner. It sounds like maybe that's not quite the same mindset. The mindset that we talk about in the hallways is one capital group. And we said this on a town hall when we announced the increased participation in the profit sharing program. We want everybody in the investment group, the client group and the operating group to be rowing in the same direction. We have three groups, but you all have to row in the same direction for us to have the most amount of clients.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His point was it should be owned by the people who were working at the company at the time who were driving the client outcomes. That is a very powerful statement to make nearly a hundred years ago. That means you're so aligned with the client's interest. That was a brilliant thing to do nearly a hundred years ago. What goes into determining who can become a shareholder? We don't focus as much on the exact number of shareholders we have because we have a very generous profit sharing program for our 9400 associates. Not all 9400 associates can be shareholders technically by the rules as well. It's really about sharing and profitability of capital group. I don't love to focus too much on shareholder non-shareholder. It's more profit sharing. And if we're successful for clients, how do we make sure everybody participates? Last year in our profit sharing program, we increased the formula forever.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“60 years ago, it was in the hallway. It is different today. If you become a shareholder of capital group, you hold it for your entire career and upon retirement over two, four, and six years you then sell it back to the company and we sell it on to the next shareholder. It's not a liquid holding. It's not meant to be. It's meant to be with you for the entirety of your career. And then it's meant to be passed along to the next generation who will do the same thing again. That's a really important mindset. The mindset of the Lovelace family was not optimizing for the Lovelace family. When JBL founded the company, he said in nineteen thirty one, When my grandkids, who didn't exist at the time, when my grandkids pass away, no one in the Lovelace family should own any bit of capital group stock. There's very few founding families that would say that.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pull things out and at the same time be reactive when needed and make sure they know it's going to be okay. I'd love to turn to the ownership model. This private partnership. Mentioned that John B. Lovelace sold chairs back in the 50s when the business was profitable. How does that work today with a much larger organization and more people involved?”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's two things it's proactive. The proactive part is finding that individual as the mentor and spending time with them and asking them questions almost as if you're the analyst, asking them questions about what's going on in their portfolio, how they're thinking about things, what are things that have gone great, what are some things that haven't gone as well. Being proactive in that conversation, you'll pull a lot out the same way as if you were interviewing a management team. Then the reactive part is clean up IL5. Something happens. They come to you and say, how did I miss this? I miss this theme and the stock's down thirty percent since I bought it or the bonds widen 100 basis points in spread something I missed. Let's talk about it. Either way as a mentor, you have to be prepared to be proactive and go in there and try to”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most people, if you give them time and you have the right intake process and the right mentoring process, most people make it. But not everybody. We don't have a standard of perfection where everybody makes it. You can recognize after five to ten years if someone's not able to generate differentiated investment outcomes, they won't survive a capital group forever. But we give them five plus years. It's not as if we try to make that determination after one or two years or having a great success in a short period of time or great failure in another period of time. We give them the time. We give them the mentoring. We give them the support. And if you do that, your hit rate tends to be a lot higher, but it's not 100%. We know that. What does mentoring For an investment Professional account.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Responsibilities 10 or 15 years later, you have a book of record on them that's 10 or 15 years long because they were already managing money. So how you put them in a certain strategy are they growth tilted or they value tilted, it helps you by knowing their history because you can look at their results and their pattern of results. You optimize it by putting the right people in the right portfolios, by managing them over the long term, not the short term, and by managing a certain number of assets, but not having to pay anybody on the assets they manage. You put that all together and you can generate the right outcomes by putting the right people in the right portfolios. And what happens with all that? Data if it's Showing”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your hiring decisions up front. Part of it gets back to the incentive system. First of all, you and I manage money in a portfolio. Ted manages fifty billion I manage five billion. If our investment results are the same and our tenure at capital groups the same, our bonus is the same, meaning we don't incentivize a money grab to manage as many assets as you can. You optimize it by allocating it to individuals in the way that best suits the portfolio and their style. You don't have to manage a lot of money to do well for yourself. You have to do well on the assets we ask you to manage. That's part of the culture. We don't pay on assets. We pay on investment results. And bonds, you know about them as an investor. By the time you've asked them to take on diversified portfolio management responsibilities.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Done more of that in the last decade, but they have the same stats they come and stay forever. It's the same outcome regardless of how they got here. How do you think about optimizing the talent in the organization? Because you can imagine you're probably not going to have that high of a hit rate.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attrition rate and asset management thirteen or fourteen percent, ours is half of that. This is across the entire nine thousand four hundred person entity of capital group. In the investment group it's even lower. Its low single digit attrition in the investment group. It's very rare someone would leave capital group as an investment professional and go to another company to do the same thing. They may retire early to do an entirely different career, but they wouldn't go work at XYZ asset management company. It doesn't happen very often. It's not never, but it's almost never. So they come and say the average retirement age of a portfolio manager, a capital group is in their sixties. It's not in their 40s or 50s, and they tend to be a capital group for the entirety of their career. We do make some lateral hires, not just out of business school or not just in our early career programs.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the investment edge, like I mentioned with Rob Lovelace. Then I ask about lessons learned, and everyone has a story. Investing is a humbling effort. They'll say, I was three years in, I was looking at this consumer company in Brazil. I believed in what the management was saying, and the stock went down eighty percent. And here's what happened, and here's who I leaned on internally and said, oh my God, am I going to get fired? What's going to happen now? And here's what they said back to me. So everyone has that story of how did I learn? How did I make a mistake? Who put Humpty Dumpty back on the wall after that and said, it's going to be all right. Take this lesson away so you're a better investor in the future. That's really important to be able to be self-deprecating, to be honest, to make mistakes and come back and be better thereafter. You mentioned that people stay their whole careers. You look across the firm, how pervasive is that?”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And two, you want to ask people who ask different questions. We're very intentional how to form that cohort of those who are going to interview. Then we also ask people to ask different lines of questioning. I want you to focus on leadership. I want you to focus on culture. I want you to focus on their investment philosophy. So focus on something different and come to it with a different perspective so that we can come with a holistic profile of the individual. And someone who comes in and let's say it's out of school and you say, okay, you're investor, you have three to six months, come back to us. How do they train and get better? We give them an open door. We give them a mentor. We give them a couple folks to lean on during those early days so they don't feel lost. And making mistakes is okay. The two standard questions I'll ask to investment professionals on our podcast, which is meant to show the secret sauce of capital group and the mindset of our investors.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“but not too too quick. We want you to meet a lot of people. We want you to interview us. People say a capital their whole careers. This is not a job to leave for another job. This is a job to stay. If you knew at the onset, you were going to be at a company for thirty or forty years. You'd want to do your diligence the way we want to do our due diligence. We're both doing that. And that takes a lot of time and a lot of meetings. Occasionally could we lose a candidate because it takes too long? Yes. Is it worth it over the long term to find the right people and have the right people self-select into an entity that leans into and favors long-term employment here? Yeah. How do you structure that interview process so that you're learning what you want to learn about that candidate to make a decision? We try to make sure we have a diverse group of interviewers. One, the candidate doesn't want to see everyone is the same.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then initiate your portfolio by sharing it with the entire investment group. That's part of that long-term nature. It's not you've joined, here's your desk, where's your portfolio? It's you've joined, get to know your colleagues, get to know the managements of the companies that you're going to invest in, and then show us your optimal portfolio six months later, not six days or six weeks later. That's a mindset. It's a process of saying, let's do this in a calm, efficient long-term way. Let's not rush to judgement. You can be a quote unquote productive person tomorrow morning. If you tease apart that one example, so the first is the recruiting piece. How do employees generally find their way to capital? Our process is not an easy one. It takes time. It can take six to twelve months of the interview process. to join capital. We're trying to be quicker on that today than we were 20, 30, 50 years ago.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be on that same long term journey and not say to you, Why'd you lag last quarter by 18 basis points? That's not the mindset of what we do. It's a different way to manage money. On a day-to-day or week-to-week, month-to-month basis inside the organization, what are some of the norms or processes that reinforce that long-term nature? I'll give you an example. Someone works in a job in their 20s. They go to business school in their late 20s. They come for a summer associate program in business school. We make them a full-time offer. They join capital group at the age of 28. And they're an investor because if you join as an analyst, you're managing money right away. Instead of saying be productive tomorrow morning when you join and manage money, we say take three to six months. Look at this specific industry. Get to know all the managements of this industry. Look at the history of the coverage of it from everyone who had been a capital project.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business. The incentive system drives behavior of any entity. Doesn't matter what it is. That culture of long-term, calm, and an incentive system says don't shoot for the lights for one year and don't risk your client's capital just to optimize your own one year quantitative outcome. It's a whole mindset. If you want your clients to do well, we know you do better over time if you stay invested. That's not a cliche that everyone says. It's a statistical fact they're trying to time the markets is impossible to do well. So if you have that advantage of being private, you can think long term your clients know you manage money for the long term. The whole ecosystem is different. How you think about five and ten and twenty year outcomes versus every individual quarter of your earnings, that is a massively different mindset and it allows your clients”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then the same token on the client side. My first podcast I interviewed Rob Lovelace, who is the grandson of the founder, Jim Lovelace also works at Capital Group. He's also a grandson of the founder. Both of them have been at Capital for more than forty years now. I interviewed Rob and I said, what's your competitive edge? What makes you different? He said, Time. One word at time. And he's measured on his eight year result first and foremost in his quantitative bonus, not as one-year result. What a massive advantage for you to be calm and build conviction and not have to be so reactive and selling at the whim of someone else's short sale, for example. You can invest in your long-term conviction. He just said, my edge is time. It's both how we manage the enterprise, but also how we manage our clients' assets. What does that do to the culture of the organization when it's set up and that thought process is so much different from what you see most of the time in the business?”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Changed since then. There are a couple things that have been the same. The first in a world that's changing is the business is still private. How has that model impacted the investing? We talk about being private as a differentiator, but also a competitive advantage in our business of asset management in that it's how we operate the enterprise and how we manage our client assets both. In the former, we don't have to worry about quarterly earnings when other folks are pulling back and they're trying to meet a quarter. We're not going to stop a technology project to meet a quarter. I've seen companies run like that in the past. That is not the best way to run a company if you don't have to. When other people are pulling back, we can lean in. We can gain mind share and market share. And we tend to do that. We tend to take the opportunity and market drawdowns to invest in the business. Why would you ever give up that advantage?”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to manage money differently. We can't have key person risks. What if I hadn't come back? What if I hadn't survived my heart attack? That wouldn't have been great for our clients. Let's think of doing this in a different way where there's no key person risk, and we have other folks also expressing their conviction in portfolios so that capital system was born in nineteen fifty eight coming out of that. The whole concept was, can we have this collaborative research process where there's no hidden secrets? Everyone sees what everyone's doing. And the analysts manage money. They're not credit raters. They're not stock rators. They actually manage real client assets, which is different. Can we have portfolio managers express their own conviction in the same portfolio? Same benchmark, same mandate, but your own convictions. Then can we measure folks for the long term as opposed to the short term? That whole system was formulated post his heart attack, and that was born sixty plus years ago.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super successful in scaling assets in the 30s and 40s, it was right after the Great Depression which had a long tail to it. Part of the secret of the capital's success is he kept the entity a hundred percent owned by himself until it was profitable. He didn't want anyone else to share in any of the losses that would come in any calendar year. Only after in the fifties capital group became profitable did he begin to sell little pieces to people at the company to share in the profitability as opposed to share in the losses. What was maybe still is that original idea of how you can manage capital better than others? His view was managing for the long term as opposed to short-term trading was a better way to generate results, which we all know now. He also, in the fifties, Jonathan Bell Lovely, at a heart attack, survived, came back and said.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Please enjoy my conversation with Mike Gitlin. Mike, thanks so much for doing this. I'm glad we got together. Why don't we start with the capital story? We were founded coming out of the Great Depression, which is a really interesting founding of a company, especially one that's in financial services. So we were founded in 1931 with the view that we can manage people's money in a different and better way. There was a lot of speculation in the roaring 20s that led up to the Great Depression and the crash of the stock market. Our founder thought before the Great Depression that there were excesses and this didn't make sense. He had written about it in the 20s, liquidated ahead of time, preserved his capital, and launched the entity afterwards. Even though he did that for the first twenty-ish years, it was largely a break even business.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be left with someone's less high conviction parts of the portfolio. The bottom 25% of their conviction names, why would you want those in a portfolio? You have analysts who are subject matter experts in a certain sector, and they have high conviction. You want those stocks in the portfolio. Your analysts who have conviction in their subject matter expertise? Great, those names make their way in to the portfolio. You have portfolio managers, five of them, ten of them, whatever the mandate would be, all expressing their conviction, all seeing whatever one else is doing, all using the research that we have internally, all having their own individual conviction, what you end up in a portfolio is everyone has the same mandate, but you have the strongest convictions of individuals not being left with any of their lower conviction ideas. Think of it as a multiple portfolio manager and analysts run best ideas.”
2026-01-05 · Capital Allocators · Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source