YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Bessent

lines on the record: 88
first: 2024-11-04
most recent: 2024-11-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Who pick you up when you're down and rein you in when you're getting to your fork, you did a good job of it when we work together. I hope I did the same for you. And that's really the key is to stay balanced and have people who keep you in a good equilibrium.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long term relationships are the most important. One of my college roommates, we've been friends since we were 17. We've been there for divorces, marriages, children's births. And it's just these relationships over your life that are so important. When you talked about what was it like going back to Soros, I was the most popular person in the 212. Even when I retired in 05, the great people like Ed Hyman at ISI, you know, Scott, we're just going to leave you on the mailing list because smart people never go away. And I'm still speaking to Stan Drakamar every day. I'm still speaking to Nicarodini every day. So all of a sudden, when I'm the most popular person on 57th Street, it doesn't really mean a lot when somebody disappeared. These long-term friends are the same people.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to believe that anything can happen, you never know how things are going to change, you've got to be ready when they change, and you have to be prepared to get lucky. So if you've done a lot of prep and the big event comes along, you're prepared for it. And then the other thing is I've never done anything for short-term money. I always try to think over the long term, is it going to keep me engaged? And there's probably a bigger pot of gold further out.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stand Rock and Moore? Probably the greatest investor of all time. It's humbling, never a down year, but also wonderful mentor, human, family man, the charities. And then Byron Wing. Byron never had children. And as a result, he had a group of us who he doted on. He counseled. He criticized. It was incredible because his mental flexibility was he never got rigid. I remember after the 2016 election, 10 days later, when Trump won, he and I were having lunch. I said, so Byron, what do you think? He said, Scott, just to know, you know where I am on politics? I cried when Trump won. I think the market's going straight up. Who can do that?”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a big influence. I had an appointment to the Naval Academy that I decided not to take in 1980. And we were broke. And so it was free. But Yale was very good to me. I worked three jobs in summers and things worked out. And I think maybe subconsciously one of the reasons I was attracted to money management, the numbers are the numbers. It's not a sales job. You don't live next to clients in Greenwich and they're going to give you commissions because you're at the country club together. I always thought your P&L protected you. And if I could add one more thing, I am probably the most quantitative person you'll ever meet who's also very religious and very superstitious. I don't think they're mutually exclusive, but a lot of people do. I pray and have a rabbit's foot that my quant analysis is right.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's been modified as I got older. I remember when we worked together, I was doing triathlons. I will tell everyone, if you have a middle-aged crisis, don't do triathlons because I have two new hips. I am rebooting my favorite outside of work. So trying to do more lifetime sports, whether it's hiking and walking or golf.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of a Bretton Woods realignment's coming in terms of global policy, global trade. There's a lot of what I taught at Yale. I've been studying my whole life. I'd like to be part of it, either on the inside or the out. And then three, I think that this new Republican Party that's been reconstituted with these new constituencies is the party of the future. It's a melding of working class and business class people. I'm determined that these new constituencies get treated well. I started out. Our family was very affluent. My dad saw to it that we weren't. And now that I've made it back, so I've known economic anxiety. And I want to see for these constituencies and for working people that things go well.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question for the fund. I always do that there shouldn't be zealots in the market. And a lot of what I'm doing now is just a continuation of what I've done for 35 years. It's the geopolitical analysis. It's macroeconomic analysis. It's following trends. And I decided to come out from behind my desk because I do believe this election, there's a big choice and we are going to decide whether we are going to grow our way out of this debt burden. And I think we can through deregulation, energy, independence and dominance in the US and a growth mindset. We can get back to growth. I feel very strongly that this is the last chance to grow our way out of this. I also felt very strongly that we're in the midst of a great realignment.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turn off our nukes and make ourselves more reliant in German energy. I'm very interested to see what the German mighty industrial export machine does over the coming years.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Europe is a big question mark in terms of policy and deindustrialization and especially politics. I would predict that in the next 18 or 24 months, Marine Le Pen, the Bet Noir of European politics, is going to be President of France. And she's going to be president of France because the alternative on the left is worse than she is. So these populist politics that are a backlash to trade and immigration. And also it's just some very bad choices that have been made by the Europeans. German industrial policy, we're going to sell into China. We're going to use Russian energy to fuel us. We're going to keep a cheap currency because the Southern European states, which are now doing much better than Germany, we're going to”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Japan. I believe that this could be a secular bull market, one of the few in the world. Abe had great policies, but he also had great stability. And then he was assassinated, unfortunately. He was out of office when he was assassinated. I believe he would have come back. So now the Japanese are maybe back into this game of musical chairs with prime ministers. And then I think”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you're going to get the policy change. And as I said with President Xi, one thing in the Reagan White House used to say policy is personnel and personnel is policy. So you always look at whether it's the management or the policy makers. At the end of the day, they're human. They want to be judged. Some of them are elected. They want to think about how history is going to remember them, so they are very susceptible to external pressure. And many times if you have an ongoing dialogue with them, if you observe them for a long time, it's easy to detect when they are going to slam on the brakes, which is also a very good risk control metric because many times something has gone so far out of equilibrium you get a very good entry point.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would allow for a sustainable Chinese economy, then I think we are in a long-term bull market in gold. I think we're seeing reserve accumulation by central banks. I follow it closely. It's my biggest position. And even I was surprised the other day when the central bank of Poland came out and said that they want to take their gold reserves to 20%. And you know, Ted, over my career, Some of my best investments have been when a policy, when a government, when a management is driving 90 miles an hour at a brick wall, you assume that they are going to hit the brakes. So that's how you get the big policy changes. A couple of times I've been in the car when they've hit the wall. That's less fun. But I think that many of my best investments have been”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope that they don't have to reverse and start hiking, which I think would be a big loss of credibility for the Fed. Then on the other side, if Vice President Harris were to win, likely you're going to have divided government, Republicans will probably have the Senate, and we're going to have to figure out what happens here with a 7% budget deficit that's likely continuing to go up. My strong feeling is that Chinese have moved tactically to stabilize the economy, but that Xi Jinping is a different kind of cat, that what we saw in the aughts up until 2012 or 2013, with capitalism with Chinese characteristics of communism, with capitalist characteristics, he's a Leninist. So he's not going to allow a clearing function in the market that will”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That if I had had the real newspaper, would it have been obvious what the trade is? If you had said, okay, there's going to be this war in Israel. It is going to go on for a year, but oil prices are going to be lower. That's not obvious. If you were going to say that we were going to have a 7% budget deficit, that rates would go way up, but there'd be a MAG 7, that there'd be a tech bubble. So thinking about what's going to be in the newspaper and then the right investment vehicles, I think the big challenge is for the next couple of months are going to be very path dependent on the election if Republicans, which I'm pulling for, get the trifectum. I think there could be a growth shock and animal spirits are back and maybe the Fed's jumbo rake cut was a mistake.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I will also compliment you because back to having great colleagues, you were very good. You're getting it exactly right what's going to happen in six months. You don't have the positions. And that was super helpful. And the other thing too is I often think”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“those who judges more on a three year average there was a very good study from the common fund. It said one of the most successful strategies for allocators that when you believe in the manager and I always tried to do this when I was at Soros or any investment committee that I'm on when a manager has one two three blow it out of the park years you pull in some capital pull it back and when they are in a slump you add and I've found that over the years the best results that I've given to investors are those who add when we're down the other thing that we've done in our business is we have a relationship with a lot of larger funds where we will go to them with episodic once a year maybe once every three years big ideas and can leverage up into the situation. And then when that opportunity passes, we give the money back.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great observation it really goes back to the Ted Williams and the Babe Ruth comparison. Ted Williams four hundred batting average, and he could see the scenes on the ball season after great season. Babe Ruth was a home run hitter, but very low batting average, but the home run king for, I think, five or six decades, the Sultan of Swat, and a lot of macro tends to be more babe Ruth than Ted Williams, and the investors grow impatient, they pull out, you have a big year, big two years, the money comes back in, rins and repeat. I think that we have created a business model that works well for us. We have the general hedge fund, which is family, friends, long term investors.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Illiquid and leveraged. I prefer to be liquid and then to use leverage. I try to stick with a set of rules. I want to be able to get out within 24, 72 hours on part of the portfolio.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly it. I don't know because of my dad's poor risk management whether I'd have a lot more money because I'd be less risk averse or I've gotten to where I am because of the risk management. Like the wolf's always at the door. But I'm a big believer in Nasame Telebs definition of risk, probability and severity when we think about investing in China now. What's the probability that you're going to lose all your money one day? that you're going to have a Russia-Ukraine kind of day, which seemed unimaginable that Russian equities would go down 95% in a day. So it's always probability, severity, how are you measuring liquidity? Because correlations go to zero when you may think you're hedged. One of my risk management techniques have been You could be one thing, but not many. You can't be concentrated”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do that as a discipline, reset the chip stack. And when I'm doing it in December, especially currencies, be making a lot of money in December, like really whipping them and driving them. And whether it's the traders or the risk team or other people saying, well, you know, it's December 15th. We got to start taking this down. I was like, God, boy, this could really go in January. When I look back almost every time that I've taken it down, it's been the right thing to do because there's always a counter trend.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Curious about the relationship between the duration of the trades and that betting chipstack. You mentioned if you're up on the year, what does that imply about the types of positions you take on so that you'd say, okay, it's January 1, we're starting, we're resetting our chipstacks?”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the world's greatest stockpickers, Warren Buffett, rule number one, don't lose his money. Rule number two, don't forget rule number one. It's really this idea you earn the right to take a risk, whether it's backgammon or you're at a poker table or playing bridge. How's your chipstack? If you walk in and say, all right, I'm bringing $10,000 to the poker table and that's it, then you're going to bet differently if you've got $20,000, you're going to bet differently, then it's $30,000. It's really Annie Duke thinking in bets.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a very different notion than a lot of people think about fundamental investing, which is that the size of your P&L in a given year will determine your position. Talk me through how that portfolio management methodology works.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tend to trade in thirds, and a lot of the position sizing is what's the market giving you in terms of this ball fund wanted to sell us these digital options, they move very quickly. Is there asymmetry in the ball market? What does the market giving you? And where's your P&L in the year? Then a lot of times we'll keep adding if the P&L is good.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“George asked me, Do you think this is going to work? I said, I have no idea whether it's going to work, but it's going to be the market ride of the lifetime. That's the thing. The policy decision doesn't have to work, but it can cause a lot of price gyration”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe the ball on the screen was four, and they thought, well, if these guys would pay six, we'll sell them as much as they want. So I think they thought we were crazy to buy these things at a six ball, like with a stock, the end was bouncing around between 78 and 82. I thought maybe it could go to 95. And then when this thing got in motion, maybe it could go to 105. Maybe it could go to 115. I remember George and I went up to New Haven. This was a proprietary piece of research that I thought we had. One of the architects of Abiomics was a Japanese professor emeritus in the Yale Econ department who had been a student of Tobin's, complete Keynesian. And I think Professor Hamada, who was old when I was there, he was in his 80s now. And we went up and had lunch with him. And he just mapped the whole thing out. And at one point.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had started putting on a short yen position. One of the brokers had seen us doing it and called and said, oh, well, we have this VAL fund that will sell you all the yen puts you want. Great. And I think this Vol Fund thought they were picking us off because the yen had been very steady.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like with a stock trade, we set up the fundamental picture. So this is what could happen to the current account. This is how cheap the currency is if it just got back to the historical level. So you actually have a framework and reference points for where it could go. And then there are technicals involved, which can be very different than stocks, what would happen if the end started weakening. Could there be a cascade effect because exporters have a certain position? When you get one of these big major changes, a lot of times there's been a lot of position build up over time. I think it was Nasine Taleb who says that lack of volatility leads to volatility. So you're also trying to figure out, okay, where's the market? And not unlike. The subprime trade”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great segue. I have no interest in being short JGBs. When I thought about the macro ponopoly of potential instruments, okay, what are stocks going to do? What's the currency going to do? And everybody, because they had so much scar tissue on JGBs, he goes, what doesn't this mean JGBs are finally going to go with it? I don't know. It might mean JGB yields go lower before they go higher, but it was very clear to me that the yen was the ultimate expression and that equities would be a good derivative of that.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went and met him, and I believed he could probably do it. It was also a great setup back to your question of conviction. The Bank of Japan, the way the board runoff was working, he was going to be able to reconstitute the Bank of Japan without the prime minister being able to appoint new governors. He would not have been able to get the reflationary mindset. So he was able to reconstitute the board in his image.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it goes back to my dad in the science fiction. What could you imagine could happen? I remember one of our consultants telling me there's this. Guy in Tokyo used to be prime minister. His name's Abe. He's going to run for office and break Japan out of disinflation since the Fukushima tragedy, which, as you remember, unfortunately is 3-111. The Japanese yen had strengthened significantly. There was a series of prime ministers. I'd started going there, I think, in 1989 or 1990 during the bubble. And it's really been more of a trading chop malaise with a general downward trend. The yen had become the most expensive purchasing power parity currency in the world. And when this photo said, well, Abe is going to break the deflation cycle, and here's how he's going to do it, the three arrow program and its 222, 2% inflation, 2% growth in two years.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the investment side, we just wanted to have a couple big positions, manage them well, and pick out the big themes, try to keep the noise out. We had a small tight-knit team. And then we had 30 consultants around that. Those are people some I'd work with since the mid-80s. We probably had three new ones, three out every year. And the idea would be, okay, we don't need a Latin American specialist in the office. We have a great consultant in Latin America. We don't need a Tokyo office. We have a great Tokyo specialist. The other thing, having been on the allocator side was to be an asset to the partners. So a lot of times we would have a major endowment come to us and say, we're going in on this private equity deal in Brazil. What do you think we should do with the currency?”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Morgan Stanley, all rights reserved. And now back to the show. This card's backgamut analogy, and you're investing now, you're taking on the full macro strategy from everything you've been through, everything you've learned, how did you set out of what you were trying to do at Keysquare?”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like she knows Chesmos from 1913 from a Cuban grandmaster. You could probably go back and look at some of the things JP Morgan had done or some of the great industrialists. If you're looking at Mellon or Phipps or Rockefeller, they're doing the same things in a lot of ways that the private equity people are doing. And that's chess.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is luck, and how are you going to manage the hand you're dealt? You don't know what's going to happen in Israel. You don't know when the Chinese Navy is circling Taiwan. Is that a drill or is that the real thing? What you're going to be handed every day. You can have good luck. You can have bad luck, but you've got to manage these things that have been thrown at you, whereas private equity is much more chess. All the moves are on the board. What is the move you're going to do? It was quite humbling. We had the highest ranked female player in the world come in. And I think she played 12 or 13 of us at once. And I was very happy. I was a penultimate person still standing. She fortunately didn't do it blindfolded. But afterwards, she did this tutorial and she was showing us famous chess moves.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Key square is a chess move. So it's at the end of the game where there are two kings, a couple of pawns, and there is one square that the king can go to. And I think about that and investing a lot. There is one thing you can do. It's a simple move. It could be at the beginning of the game. It could be at the end of the game. The funny thing, I'm fine at chess. I'm not great. I don't love it. And I don't think that chess is the liquid markets game.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of things you have to think what's the level of administration you're doing is that impacting your returns might telos in my career has been I want to do things I'm interested in I want to keep learning and I don't want to be bogged down I don't want my day to be things that I don't like every day is not a good day every week's not a good week but you want to have good months and years so if you're on the wrong trajectory there's that then I think that I had some differentiated views that maybe one other person at the firm didn't have It's a real challenge as we get older to not become more negative all the time”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I arrived september two thousand eleven and the bond market in general just melted down European bond markets, especially the Italian bonds were still in melt mode. The idea was for me to reacquaint myself with the firm. It was 320 people to manage, 120 investment professionals, and many of them not happy to see me there. So it's supposed to have 90 days to get in the seat, get to know people, the firm, I ended up doing. Think five days in, the biggest trade I'd ever done was John Corzine's firm got liquidated out of their Italian bond position. And it was a $3.5 billion trade. I still had the index card that I worked it out on. JP Morgan called us and I was able to say, we'll take the whole trade with the repo right now.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brought in a good team, revamped the outside manager portfolio, made it known that we were open for business, that you bring us an idea we will not big foot you and go around you. I can give you an answer in three days, whereas Blackstone or somebody might have to take it to an investment committee with five memos in three weeks and build it and they came. We had a good internal team and then the hub and spoke system for the external managers was very successful.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went back and I really wanted to see if rather than size being the enemy of performance, whether you could turn size freeform capital, so no mandate, and the ability to make quick decisions into an asset. And I think we were able to”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So after that run, I know you were going to go launch a fund again, and then George calls to take the big seat. By that time, Soros had gotten big. And I'm curious how you thought differently about a large scale asset pool.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't not do this. And he was right. That was my to come and work with you, a protege. I thought I could be halfway back in with the fund of funds model, with the best ideas model. Because for me, a lot of it, it's a competition making money, but also what we do keeps you stimulated. A lot of people do crosswords. A lot of people play bridge. I find this just so stimulating. One of my mentors, but Byron Wayne, said, I'm going to work until I die. And Byron kept working until 10 days before he died.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happened was I went back to the investors and said, we're going to do macro if you want. I'll take the lock off and you can have your money back. We had a good run after that. But at that point, I've been working since I was nine years old. I was 42. I had been financially successful. And I was just tired. There are two components to a hedge fund. They're managing the portfolio, running the business. I thought I had an A team on the portfolio side. I didn't have an A team. On the business side, so there's always this anxiety. So I thought I wanted to retire. I might have been a professor right out of Yale if I hadn't had a lot of student loans. I wanted to go back and teach. I remember having dinner with Stan and his wife. And he said, F you, you'll be back in a year.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was just a loss of asymmetry. If I had a bullish view in oil, okay. Probably be better off owning crude because I remember at a point I did have a bullish view on oil and the oil stocks didn't move because they were looking more at the mid curve or analysts were waiting for a price whereas the oil price was going up.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the mistakes that I made and over time caused a big philosophical change was never do what the investors tell you to do, do what you're good at. So when I started in 2000, I was able to raise a billion dollars because I told investors I wouldn't do macro. Macro had become a bad word. Long-term capital had blown up in 1998, and that wasn't really macro. It was more RV, gone amok. I think some macro positions had hurt Tiger that Soros had had a big drawdown. It was just long, short equities.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at the end of your first run at Soros, there was a lot of change. Stan left, and you go and launch what I think was the largest hedge fund at the time, a billion dollars at Bess and Capital. What was your initial thoughts of your investment style after all of that experience?”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was great because it's really affected my strategy in terms of the kind of organizations that I like. We were able to have a small tight knit, high performance team, but we could leverage. When I eventually took over its sorrows, my philosophy that a very good manager is someone you're proud to be invested with, they have good returns and you never have to worry about the phone call that things have gone pear-shaped. So that's a very good manager for an outside manager, great manager would be someone who one, two, three times a year, maybe only every other year would come to this is a big trade idea. You should have it in your center book or let me do an SPV for you.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So alongside all of this trading and search for asymmetric activity, sort of spec then was also known as one of the most successful backers of early talent of investment managers. What did that look like under the Soros umbrella?”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a year when he was up over 140. And these currency, the realignments, the plaza cord, the Lubacord happened. The things moved 6% a night. And he would add a 300% position because things really used to trend a lot more.”
2024-11-04 · Capital Allocators · Scott Bessent - Macro Maven (EP.415) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source