YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Pyle

lines on the record: 61
first: 2026-04-10
most recent: 2026-04-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Each can generate, understand how they're correlated, how they move with one another, and then build a portfolio of those insights that is going to deliver the right risk, the right return for clients. And that's the art and science of portfolio construction, which to me is, at the end of the day, the art and science of what it means to be a good investor and to serve your clients well.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you know, I would say, you know, we've talked a lot about diversification and portfolio construction across this conversation. And that to me, I think, is the piece that I most climbed up a curve around that I've been kind of most struck by learning about during my time at BlackRock across the Stinton Briar One. What I expected learn when I left government the first time was, okay, how do I do deep macroeconomic research? What I expected when I left government the first time around is how do I take deep macroeconomic research and turn that into an insight that I can put on as an individual position or individual trade? What I hadn't appreciated and came to really love learning about was, okay, how do you actually take five or six or seven of those insights, put them into portfolio, understand how much return”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is still going to be the case that the net amount of alpha in the market net of fees is zero or gross effes is zero. It is still going to be the case that the fundamental law of active management, that that mix of forecasting skill, breadth, and the ability to translate in the portfolio is what's going to define active management. Being steeped in those timeless truths, I think is valuable. Last point I'd make is, you know, you can never emphasize enough what is always going to be human. Trust is hard to build. It is built on the back of relationships and relationships across time. Spending time, building your relationships, building trust, being seen as somebody who acts with trust and integrity. It's not just a way to live a good life. It is also a pretty good piece of, I think, career advice as well.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I'd say, you know, a mix of the timeless and the time lay. You know, I think on the timely side, you know, it is clearly the case that working to be at the frontier of how the tools of technology, the tools of AI are getting used to expand and augment the productivity of workers in finance and government is kind of table stakes. But I'd also emphasize the time less, you know, in investing.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I would put in a pitch for my friends Jake Sullivan and John Finer, their new podcast called The Long Game about U.S. national security and foreign policy. I'd say I like it for three reasons. I mean, one, you know, I think they really try to offer a pretty just the facts perspective on the choices confronting policymakers here in the United States and more broadly. Two, it's a real window into the craft of foreign policy. I mean, I think there's a lot to be learned from the craft of how professionals, whether they're policymakers or investors or business leaders, kind of think about doing what they do. And this is a window in that. And third is a personal one. You know, I spent two years of my life, spent many years on top of that being in dialogue with both of those guys. And for me, once a week to kind of tune in for an hour and hear two familiar voices talking about stuff that I care about is a pretty”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To world anew, and I do think that Tyler's right that this is a moment that because of technological transformation, because of changes in the world writ large, is going to require that type of thinking again. And so revisiting that book and revisiting some of its lessons is something that's been important to me in the past couple of weeks.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I've been revisiting a favorite of mine called Wise Men by Walter Isaacson. I was listening to a podcast that Tyler Cowan did a couple weeks ago where he talked about AI, the geopolitical changes that we're seeing means that the world is going to have to be reinvented anew, not unlike perhaps was the case after the Second World War. That's a book about the group of Americans that really constructed the post-war world, constructed the security architecture, constructed a world built on American leadership and integrated global markets and helped to build that 80 years of peace, of prosperity that we as Americans have enjoyed. And I think that revisiting that is a reminder of what it takes to rebuild a world, what it takes to invest.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Service as well, and somebody who's, again, been an important source of counsel advice. But I would say beyond that, I mean, My mentors both in government and BlackRock, you know, I'd really look into those organizations writ large. You know, when I was in government, the career civil servants at the office management budget, the career civil servants at the Treasury Department, they knew more about their corner of the federal government, their corner of the world than anybody else in the world. And if you just sat down,”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I'd off a couple of thoughts here. Parapeters in my life. A guy named Peter Fisher, who's responsible for bringing me into BlackRock as an investor. To me, he had been a senior official in George W. Bush's Treasury Department, a legendary Federal Reserve official, had led the fixed income platform at BlackRock, had really that type of career bringing together public and private. And as the person kind of most responsible for bringing me into BlackRock and somebody who's been an important counselor to me through the years, spent some time yesterday with my very first economic policy, Boston, Washington, Peter Orzag, part of President Obama's cabinet as the director of the White House budget office, now the CEO of Lazard, similarly somebody to me who's brought together public service with financial and commercial.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For China, something I worked on. But I think if you talk to pollsters, they would say AI is rocketing up the list of issues the voters are focused on in the United States more broadly. And I think an important dimension of what it's going to mean to invest in AI is understanding that this is going to become a risingly important political and policy issue and an additional dimension of uncertainty that investors are going to have to confront as we make choices around where impact is going to be felt and values going to accrue.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There, I mean, I'll offer an answer that kind of puts on both of my hats and say we've obviously been talking about AI. We were just talking about it as applied to BlackRock. I think that the investment implications of AI, as I said, have huge kind of uncertainty bands around them, where value is going to accrue at what pace, what transformations to the macroeconomy, to the labor market, to geopolitics. These are all extraordinarily first-order questions for investors. I say one piece that I think is being underappreciated is the degree to which I think AI is going to become a first order political and policy issue in the quarters couple of years ahead. We're seeing the beginnings of that, you know, talk about data center moratoriums, talk about things like chip access.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we think can really move the needle for our clients, really move the needle for the farm and think about what it means to put her shoulder behind those as an organization”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is opening up the prospect of being able to do that with more granularity at greater speed and allow us to get in front of our clients with solutions that are really oriented to their goals, their dreams, their ambitions, their concerns in a way that's different than before. Last point I'd make is one of the cool things about being a BlackRock is it's a big place filled with a lot of smart people and a lot of the excitement is just giving tools to our researchers, to our professionals, and seeing organically what they come up with. And I think a lot of the excitement of the moment is seeing so much innovation, seeing so much experimentation, seeing so many cool applications of this technology and our data to solve problems for clients. Now we're at the stage where we're kind of saying as a firm, okay, what are the handful of things that have bubbled up organically?”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are very busily deploying tools that empower individual researchers to access more of the collective intelligence of BlackRock to go deeper, to go broader, more rapidly around researching individual securities, researching individual companies, researching macroeconomic trends, and come to more judgments, better judgments more rapidly in ways that we think can help drive investment performance. Third, I think one of the ways in which BlackRock continues to seek to provide solutions that make sense for our clients is to do what we call customization at scale, to be able to look at an individual investor, listen to their concerns, listen to their needs, and design a solution that's customized for their particular circumstances. Again, whether that's an institution or an individual, technology AI.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I would say the The uncertainty bands here are extraordinarily high. And so I think in some ways it's hard to venture a forecast around what this means for productivity, what this means for the labor market, what this means for geopolitics. One year from now, much S5, eight, ten years from now, you know, I think what I might helpfully do is zero in a little bit within a domain that I know better, namely BlackRock. And I think about kind of what are we doing? And I make maybe a couple of observations. I mean, one, we've already talked about the work ongoing in the systematic platform and really they continue day in and day out to define that frontier of what technology, what AI means in terms of how to manage portfolios and generate investment insight. I look across our active investment platform more broadly.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a very good question. I will say it is clear that President Trump and the administration have been working to achieve a stable economic footing between the US and China. I think that that, if it were to be achieved, would be positive again from the perspective of the type of stability, the type of predictability that allows businesses, households, individuals to plan and make choices. I think that plays into one of the things that we've been talking about, what I've been talking about last week, even with some of your colleagues is the summit between President Trump and President Xi is scheduled for May 14th and May 15th. I think that as we look about events in the Middle East, that's it. Date that I have in my own”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“44 portfolios. What does that mean? You know, my boss, Larry Fink, has talked about the role that private assets can play in building more resilient, more diversified portfolios. I think as part of that, talking about the role that hedge funds and liquid alternative strategies can play in public markets, as we've done here, that role that uncorrelated alpha that's not exposed to broad market directionality can play in portfolios. These are the types of solutions that I think investors of all types are going to need to reach for to build those portfolios that are designed for a world shape by supply, designed for a world of geopolitical shocks, designed for a world where diversification is harder to come by. And the answer isn't as straightforward as the traditional 60-40. The world is going to have to be thought of in terms of that broader set of tools.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think this gets to some of the themes we were talking about earlier, that diversification is an extraordinarily important tool as an investor. And diversification is harder to come by today than it was in the 2010s and has been historically. Again, that's true around the role that government bonds can be relied upon to play in portfolios, like in months such as March 2026, like in 2022. It's also true, as we were talking about in terms of equity markets and how concentrated equity markets, especially in the United States, have become. And so, you know, building portfolios means building portfolios that achieve diversification in a world where diversification is less available than it has been in the past through straightforward means like balance 60.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been a turn in the world from just in time supply chains to resilient supply chains, that type of stockpiling behavior is what it means in important ways to be spending more resources than you otherwise would a day for an efficient outcome today in service of greater resilience over the long term. And then I think the third is I do think that countries and companies around the world are going to be looking at their energy mix. And I think to the one of the points we've made about investing diversification is a really important precept in investing. It is perhaps the only free lunch that's out there. And I would expect a lot of different players to be thinking as they think about their energy securities. They think about how to build strategic stockpiles, what's the right diversification to ensure that I'm not subject to choke points to supply shortages.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Post COVID, post Russia's invasion was already front of mind for countries, companies, economies around the world is only going to become more so. This is, I think, one of the important trends of our moment. Secondly, I think what we're going to see both from countries and from companies is increased focus on strategic stockpiling. Obviously, we're seeing economies make use of things like strategic petroleum reserves. I suspect that in spaces like energy, but much more broadly across a much wider set of critical inputs of raw materials, you're going to see companies and countries really turn to using resources to build stockpiles of those critical inputs. And that is, again, we've talked for a long time about the ways in which”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd say, you know, you talk about three or five years out, you know, to quote the potentially apocryphal story about Joe and Lai. I think it's too soon to tell. We're going to find out again together in the years, maybe even the hours and days ahead. But I will say, I think we're spending a fair amount of time trying to think about some of these questions in BlackRock. What are the more durable economic themes going to be coming out of the shock? I mean, I guess I might highlight three. One, I think energy security, which I think”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the thing I need to put on my sort of policy observer hat at a minimum. However hard financial problems are to solve and they are hard to solve as the GFC is the Eurozone crisis made clear. They are fundamentally not engineering problems. They are problems of political and policy will. Supply chain problems, those are a different beast entirely. This is about rewiring the way physical things atoms get produced, get transported, get consumed. And that is a much harder, much slower, much more difficult economic and market problem, much different and harder policy problem. I think, again, I would highlight this is one of the ways in which I think the US is proven.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inflationary, even deflationary trend in the way government bonds were getting priced. We saw big cross-sectional moves in the equity market reflecting the potential disruption from AI around a range of business models. And so really 2026, I think, highlights both on the positive side and on the negative side in terms of supply shocks, what it means to be living in a world shape by supply.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was true not just in 2021, 2022, after COVID, after Russia's invasion. You know, it's true today as well. And I would sort of draw attention to, you know, really two episodes that we've seen already in 2026 that highlight this point. One and most obviously is what we've seen in markets since the beginning of the military intervention in Iran and the world pricing to a greater or lesser extent a pretty traditional negative energy supply shock, higher inflation expectations, lower growth expectations, a pullback and risk really across different types of asset classes. But if you roll the clock back just a couple of weeks before the beginning of hostilities in Iran, you saw market priced for a different type of supply shock, a positive technology supply shock from AI. We saw that disinformation.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you asked about the role that the BlackRock investment institute plays. I mean, I think one of the things that they have done and built on over the last four years is a piece of work they did back in 2022 called a World Shape by Supply, which basically talked about the ways in which the 2010s in particular was a world defined by aggregate demand. I mean, this goes back to the very start of our conversation when we talked about the struggles that the US and global economy had after the GFC because perhaps of the lack of a forceful fiscal policy lever being pulled. That's a story about aggregate demand. That's a story about there being insufficient demand in the macroeconomy to achieve full employment and inflation at target. The story post-COVID is not that. It's a world, as they said, shaped by supply. And I think that wasn't.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This critical input to industrial production in the United States, this critical input to the way houses kind of heat themselves and cook. All of this is basically untouched by what we've seen in the war over the last five weeks. Again, I think that's in some ways the most dramatic data point, but it highlights the extent to which even in the face of this global shock, there are very important dimensions of the US that look different than other economies around the world and makes us on balance more resilient than those other economies as well.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Russia's invasion. And this is a global shock. This is a global supply chain shock. It is going to have impacts on the United States. But I do think it's fair to say that in a real economic sense, the US is relatively more insulated from this shock than other economies around the world, whether that's in Europe, whether that's in East and Southeast Asia, whether that's in the emerging markets broadly. And you can look at one number, which I spend a fair amount of time looking at and marveling at in some respects, which is the price of natural gas in the US. And if you look at a chart of the last three, four months of the natural gas contract in the US, it basically hasn't budged. You would be hard pressed to identify where on that chart the military intervention in Iran began. And I think that highlights the extent to which this critical input to electricity production in the United States.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We will all find out together. But I do think that this point about U.S. resilience is an important one. We've seen it on display at many moments over the past number of years, including the last 12 months, the diversity, the breadth, the innovative potential of the U.S. economy, the quality of our corporate sector, these are all things that are pretty extraordinary. I think one of the things that I would highlight in the here now with respect to what I think is fairly described as a historic energy shock, a energy shock, the dimensions of which I think are going to only become even more clear in the weeks and months ahead. And we're seeing physical supply disruptions in a way that, for example, we didn't see in 2022 post.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We benefited from this. We want our clients to benefit from it too, and let's produce work that based on what we use internally allows our clients to enjoy the fruits of that research as well”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That comes from risk management, that come from trading liquidity, that come from operational backbone. And a big piece of that is something like the BlackRock Investment Institute that's able to really dedicate itself to the question of how do we research and source valuable insight across a full platform and deliver that to our portfolio managers. And so the purpose of the BlackRock investment in suit is one, to inform those alpha research discussions to really inform and drive the investment debate within the firm. But then also to open up the curtain and let our clients see and consume a lot of the research that our portfolio managers are using day in and day out to inform their own thinking and their own investment decision making. So to answer your question, it's a little both and it's about driving the investment debate, driving the alpha discussion within the firm, but then saying,”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's a really powerful tool at BlackRock. I mean, I think one of maybe to take a step back, as I've been doing a couple times in this conversation, I think one of our observations about the asset management industry, the hedge fund industry over the last 10 or 15 years, is that 10 or 15 years ago, people viewed hedge fund alpha alpha more broadly perhaps as the province of small niche players who understood some corner of the market deeper and better than anybody else. I think 10 or 15 years on, I think we've come to see that Alpha is more the province of scale. This is the story of the rise of the multi-strategy hedge funds, of the Citadels and Millenniums. But we think it's also true of the asset management industry writ large, that there are a lot of benefits of scale that come from inside.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One another to come up with a portfolio that is optimized to achieve client results. I think that taking some of those lessons of portfolio construction into the fundamental realm with a set of investors that at the end of the day, I think on balance view themselves as having conviction about companies more than portfolios and having them kind of take some of those portfolio optimization frames of mind and apply it to how they build portfolios on the fundamental side there I think is also a real source of complementarity and something we're spending a lot of time on in PMG.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is statistically likely to be the case across a full universe of stocks on balance across time? Now, where do I think these things can be complementary to one another? You know, one, I would say is, you know, these are just kind of pretty different sources of insight. And again, we've talked about diversification, you know, putting yourself in a place to put different types of insights into a single portfolio can be additive, can be diversifying, can mean that the alpha that you're generating is more diversified and resilient. I'd say another thing, and this is something we're spending a lot of time on with our fundamental teams, just by virtue of what systematic investors do, insights that apply across many hundreds of stocks, packaging, as you talked about, many hundreds, if not a thousand types of signals into one portfolio, they think a lot about portfolio construction. They think a lot about how do I take those different insights and size them versus”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really harnessing all potential sources of insight to go as deep as humanly possible, as technologically possible with respect to understanding an individual company and individual asset. And it's likelihood of outperforming or underperforming the market in the years ahead. That's different than the type of, I think, insight that our systematic investors tend to kind of think about. They think about sort of what they call high breadth insights. So insights that basically apply to a wide range of stocks, 300, 400, 500 stocks, we found an insight that we think on balance over time across a universe of many hundreds of stocks is going to outperform. That's not about deep research in one company and coming to a highly convicted view on one company that's coming to a view about”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a great question. I'd say a few observations. I mean, one, you know, BlackRock, we believe in individual PMs and teams that are empowered to make judgments that they are accountable for. And so it may be that our systematic investors are coming to a different view on markets on a range of stocks than our fundamental teams are. That's okay. We believe in empowered, like I said, portfolio managers who are making the best decisions they can for our clients but are armed with a common set of tools to come to judgments. But I think to abstract away from that further, I'd say I really do think that in some pretty important ways, what systematic investors do is just a different kind of thing altogether from one fundamental investors do. If I think about the work that our fundamental investors do, it's, you know,”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Became a part of BlackRock, became BlackRock Systematic. And so there's that kind of continuity, that legacy across time. And at the same time, they're also every year adding young professionals, young researchers, fresh off their PhD with new perspectives, new innovative techniques, new ways of looking at the data, new ways of looking at AI. And I think that really special balance between experience, continuity, depth of knowledge built over decades with new voices, new perspectives, new ways of”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New to using data, using tools of AI, machine learning to generate alpha for clients. This is something they've been at really defining the frontier for four decades. They were doing natural language processing more than 10 years ago. They were doing portfolio optimization with machine learning more than 10 years ago. This is not a Johnny Come Lately story of the moment. This is a story of a crude excellence and expertise built over decades. The only thing I'd say, and maybe it's funny to talk about it with respect to a quant team, to a kind of hardcore systematic team. But I think one of the things that really sets it apart within BlackRock within the industry is, you know, the culture that they've built. This is a core set of investors and researchers that, as you say, have been together for decades that have been together in many cases since before.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so I'd say a couple things. I mean, one, you know, this is a team that really is at the forefront of Pulling in a bunch, taking advantage of the fact that the availability of data in the world, structured data, unstructured data is stepwise different than it has been ever before in history. And the techniques available to analyze, process, identify consistent, valuable investment signals from that data is also given expanded compute, given the changes in techniques including around generative and agentic AI to make sense of that data and bring order to it. This is really at the heart of what our systematic researchers do in building signals and portfolios. I'd sort of add a couple of additional points. I mean, one, building on what you said, they've been at this for now 41 years. So, you know, they are not.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like low volatility, like some of these other kind of well known factor exposures and really focusing on true uncorrelated alpha. And also macroeconomic strategies, macro strategies where skilled managers are navigating a much more complicated macroatomic environment to deliver alpha through that skillful navigation. Those from our research are the two types of strategies that are perhaps best poised to offer that different type of return, that different type of diversification. And that's what we're seeing not just with the farm, but across the industry, the places that are attracting client interest are systematic strategies, are macro strategies, and we think precisely because they best correspond to the opportunity set that markets are offering us.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I think some work that my colleagues, the BlackRock Investment Institute did highlighted the type of world that we're investing in now. And they basically made the point, which goes to why we don't see the diversification across stocks and bonds we have historically, that, you know, some of the macroeconomic and the macro underpinnings of markets have become unmoored in recent years. It is a less predictable framework, whether it's around trends on growth of inflation, trends around monetary and fiscal policy frameworks, the geopolitical environment and the like. And as a result, hedge funds and liquid alternative strategies provide tools that allow managers to navigate that environment, either, you know, like with my colleagues on the systematic side, running strategies that are not just market neutral, but neutral to broad market factors like momentum.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think that exactly as we were talking about what's resonating is the availability of diversification, of diversifying the diversifiers.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vehicles that are designed to be run with much less leverage to recognize the types of clients and the types of needs that those clients have, which are for greater diversification, but also liquidity, transparency, availability that is different from an institutional hedge fund clientele.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tools that can help diversify portfolios in a world where bonds aren't perhaps serving that role as well as they have at different points in history. And secondly, on the equity side, facing market. Individual stocks can be short individual stocks the same on the bond side in order to generate alpha and investment return that is independent of the movements in the broad markets. Liquid alternatives are vehicles that have exactly those types of strategies. They're very similar in this respect to the types of strategies that we deploy in our direct hedge funds and offer similar types of uncorrelated return. Now an important difference between something like a direct hedge fund and a liquid alternative, these are different types of vehicles meant for different types of investors. They offer daily liquidity as opposed to hedge funds which have different liquidity terms. That means running strategies that at their core are the same across liquid alts and hedge funds but are designed to be in daily liquid.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. So maybe to take a step back, you know, if I think about the challenge that investors face today, and this is true whether we're talking about the most sophisticated large asset owners on the planet or mom and pop investors saving for their retirement, it's where can they find a diversification. Obviously, one of the core precepts of investing is the free lunch of diversification, the value of diversification, and yet it is increasingly hard to find out there. And I think that's true in a couple of ways. One, you know, traditionally we think about government bonds being an important hedge against stocks in a portfolio when stocks go down, bonds go up in value. That's not what we saw in 2022. That's not what we saw in March of this year. And so finding.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean day to day. I'd say it's a mix with some share of my time. I am working with our portfolio managers, working with our lead researchers to try to offer what I can to help them frame what's happening in the world, to help them, as we talked about understand the world as it is and what that might mean from markets and help them think about the choices they're making in portfolios on behalf of clients. But really the lion's share of my time is about making sure we've got the right portfolio managers and teams, the right strategies, the right investment process and research process sitting beneath those teams so that we can deliver for clients in a lot of respects it's a lot more about being the GM or the coach than being the player. And I think that's a pretty exciting mix of things that I get to do as a result.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the portfolio management group, as you talked about, is really the organization within BlackRock that oversees our active investing strategies in public markets, been entrusted with over just about $5 trillion in client assets to manage through those strategies, but really spans asset classes, fixed income, equities, multi-assets, spans styles, as you say, both discretionary and systematic spans both long only as well as long short hedge fund and liquid alternative strategies. So really it's that full umbrella of active strategies in public markets. You know, in terms of what do I do, well, I directly oversee what we do on the hedge funds and liquid alternative side directly oversee our efforts in fundamental equities and directly oversee our internal think tank, the BlackRock Investment Institute. But what does that mean?”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, I would say a couple things there. One, I do think that investing in policymaking are different exercises and need to be kept separate. Policymaking is an exercise of attempting to make a world as you want it to be, or at least.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Week out, you know, persuading skeptical allies to join us in some of the policy steps that we thought were important to protect our technologies, to protect the national security applications that they offered to protect our economic well-being against that competitive threat and bringing those allies along through, like I said, the hard work of diplomacy, through the hard work of persuasion, day in, day out, week in, week out, I think was ultimately quite fruitful and something that was an important part of how I spent those years.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way that made sure that it wasn't just the United States acting, but all of our allies and partners together around the world acting in concert, delivering a stronger force of policy than the United States for all of its power and might could have delivered by itself. Similarly, I think with respect to a kind of different type of problem, thinking about our United States competition with China lichen domains such as technology and artificial intelligence, the type of thing that's very front of mind today, you know, a lot of our European allies came to that with more skepticism. They have a different perspective on their relations with China than we had and the United States had, both across frankly, the Trump administration and the Biden administration. And it was the hard diplomatic work day in, day out, week in.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, I work for two years as President Biden's Deputy National Security Advisor. I think President Biden started from the place of believing that the United States acts with greatest impact in the world when it acts alongside our closest allies and partners. And I think that's part of the reason why the G7 during the years I was serving was perhaps at the height of its impact and influence across time. I mean, I think of two things that really highlight this. One was after Russia's invasion of Ukraine really acting with force with one voice, not just as the United States, but as a set of allies, to put historic set of sanctions on Russia to put a historic economic pressure on Russia and to do that.”
2026-04-10 · Masters in Business · Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source