YouSaid · the spoken record

Seth Masters

lines on the record: 94
first: 2018-01-29
most recent: 2018-01-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Them fast. Now, why is that important? And you cannot adjust your spending quickly, you're guaranteeing that you're going to be forced to spend the”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most endowments don't really think strategically about the kind of spending that they're doing every year. You can make a decision. You can say, look, there have to be at least, call it 50% of the expenditures we make, which are going to be no greater than X in any given year and that will not last longer than a maximum of Y years. Why would you make that decision? Because from an investment mindset, if you have enough of your total spend that's in small discrete lumps that are time bound, it makes it a lot easier for you to have elasticity in your spending policy. Most educational institutions preclude themselves from doing that by having the vast predominance, usually with most universities, it's almost 100%, of their spend being obligatory. there locked into for many, many years and will have traumatic effects if they.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“policy and their fundraising policy to that equation. If you think about it, there's a lot of things you can do that are not about either asset allocation or investment implementation that have probably even more impact on the longevity and sustainability of an endowment program. So for example,”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's actually a great point. And I think there is a lot that each side can learn from the other. So let me give a concrete example. You're right that especially since the fiduciary rule, there is much more focus in the, especially the private wealth business on really having a smart investment plan and also working out objectives and strategies to meet them. You can apply that same kind of thinking in many ways to, for example, foundations and endowments in sovereign wealth funds. So here's an example. I'd say most of the endowments I know are laser focused again on performance. In that case, they're probably also thinking about risk adjusted performance, which is good. That's a little bit better because at least it's looking at both sides of that coin. But what they rarely do is actually link their spending.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something to learn on the institutional side then from the private wealth business because I know spending most of my career in the institutional side there's always this dismissive oh we're the smart money and they're not and yet when you talk to private wealth advisors and particularly after the fiduciary rule there's much more focus on the financial planning aspect and just to your point let's make sure we're at the right goals the implementation we can do from a low cost vehicle we'll figure that out and you know even Jason Zweig has said you know the asset management piece might be becoming commoditized it's the financial planning piece for the wealth advisor I know you spend time on both sides of that table and what are your impressions of is that right that some of the goal based aspects of the private wealth side could be applied”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At a much higher level with huge multi hundred billion dollar investors who are grappling with questions that are even more difficult to define, often very political. And even if you did define the problem, not so easy to measure. So it's easy to understand, in my view, why we've ended up where we've ended up, but the problem is it ends up leading to poor decisions. Yeah.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how would you define success, and how would you define failure? I think what you'd find is that's actually a pretty difficult and sometimes even painful discussion to have. Most people don't like to confront that kind of issue. It's very uncertain, it's very personal, and it's a lot easier to basically say, I'm not sure, but look, my portfolio is only up this much as of three seconds ago. And look, this benchmark is up more. I'm very upset about that. And that same process ends up happening.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, part of the problem is that there's lots of rules and regulations about what investment committees have to do. And they actually, in most jurisdictions, have to spend a certain amount of time looking at the portfolio and evaluating the portfolio's performance versus benchmarks because that's what the rules say. But I think the other issue is it's become sort of behavioral that people assume that's what boards do all the time. You don't need to spend more than a pretty modest proportion of a board's total time budget on these things, but it ends up being very difficult to get into the bigger existential questions because honestly they are so difficult to define and measure.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“News going on. Well, you know, we've sat on an investment committee together. That probably is one of the more functional ones in the scheme of things. Why do you think that's the case? Because when investment committee members come for their four times a year meeting, they all have full-time jobs. They're all busy. And if you could align the objectives with the way that those people are spending their time, probably everyone would feel better about their contribution and that you were steering the ship in the right direction. And yet that isn't what happens most of the time.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Minimizing the risks of failure. They tend to spend a ton of time on let's take this huge pot of money that we have divided it up into lots of little buckets, set a benchmark for each of them, and look at exactly which buckets we are doing a little bit better than that benchmark in or a little bit worse, and then focusing especially on the ones where we're doing a little bit worse because there must be a problem. And to me, that's a massive governance error. It's sort of like someone deciding that they're going to check every newspaper in the world for grammatical and typographical errors as opposed to understand whether or not there's fake news going on.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, anytime you build a portfolio, you really have to think about both sides of that equation and getting the right balance between them is a function of precisely what objectives you're setting. In some cases, for example, with retirement, if you think about it, what you really want to do is minimize the risk of failure. You do not want to run out of money before you die. If you achieve that problem, maximizing the standard of living you have in retirement is nice, but it's not the need to have, right? And so understanding how you set those parameters of maximizing the likelihood of success and minimizing the risk of failure and adapting them to the particular use case you've got, I think is the single most important thing that people do. Now, in my experience, most boards and other bodies that are overseeing pots of money end up spending surprisingly little time on that issue of what are we here to achieve and how do we make sure that we're maximizing the chances of succeeding at that?”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not rocket science. This is very simple, but I think the entire industry, unfortunately, has been very focused on exactly the wrong thing because what's really important to most use cases that I'm aware of Is an outcome. It may not just be retirement. If you're Norway and you're running the sovereign wealth fund on behalf of future generations of Norwegians, there's a lot of elements of what they're trying to fund and how they're trying to do it that matter. But you can always define a set of objectives. And the real issue, if you have a pot of money, is how can you maximize the chances that you'll meet those objectives and minimize the risk of failure, those are not the same thing, right?”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does it matter if you did one percent better than the SP this year? I mean, last year the S&P did really, really well. So actually, if you did 5% worse than the S&P, it's probably great. And there'll be a year in the next few when the S&P will do really, really badly, which means if you did 5% better than the S&P, it's still terrible.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially if you can do your own truck, right? I would argue it's one of the least important things you should worry about. The most important thing is what is the problem you're trying to solve with that money in the first place? So, for example, if you're either a pension fund working as a fiduciary on behalf of the retirees who've taken on that responsibility, or if you're an individual with money in the 401k, the problem you're trying to solve is you basically want to make sure that you're going to actually have a comfortable retirement. Duh, right?”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. So, first of all, I think a lot of people have defined value added historically as your performance versus a benchmark. And that is Very easily measurable. Which makes it attractive to many organizations because it means”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you've had, you know, we've talked about you've had a number of different careers within the same firm and have seen things as a head of asset allocation on the private wealth side, on the pension side. You've spent your career in active management in the public equity markets, and a lot's changed, and particularly in the last decade. How do you think about what value added is for an active manager today?”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where are you going to be in the pecking order? And things do cycle. So when that happens, first of all, they're not going to be used to the issues of constraints and decline. And secondly, what do you think is going to be their response to that? They're probably going to be letting the people go who are the newest arrivals. So it's going to be harder to rise and more risky on the downside. It's not what you think. Now, it still could be a very good strategy to spend a couple of years at a firm like that to learn. But going to actually going to Bernstein for me was sort of the equivalent thing. There were a lot of safe choices in the financial industry. This clearly wasn't one of them. But I think it had a much better upside downside risk profile than most people would appreciate. I think that's probably true today. I would always say find a great company with a great team of people that is currently under stress, but still looking to hire. That's a very wonderful combination if you can find that. And that's not what most...”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or Facebook. But then think about that. You're joining a firm if you go to either of those places or any number of other incredibly successful new media companies or new tech companies that basically has been on an incredible upward trajectory for at this point almost a decade. And it's been the number one destination for really smart, hard-working people for about that long. So if you join them now,”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was really small. Oh, and when I joined, yeah, we managed a little bit less than $14 billion, which was down from $17 billion before the market thanked, which today there are some quarters when the firm takes in more than that. So it's a world where There were at that time a lot of investment organizations, but Brunson to me really stood out because it had such a focus on research excellence, because there was this really talented set of people. Which I can totally understand.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At that time, so I was on the buy side from the beginning, but I think the total number of buy side analysts in the firm was about 10, and the total number of sell-side analysts, I think at that time was actually about the same.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what really struck me was that the firm had come to the conclusion strategically that to be delivering a good service to its customers, to its clients, it needed to offer not just US investments, but also non-US ones. A kind of now obvious point, but back then it really wasn't. Most firms back then were very geographically limited. There was this concept of home country bias. And so despite the fact that the environment was so adverse at that point, Brunson had committed to globalizing its research and embarking on what had been, what was to be by far the biggest investment it had ever made, possibly the toughest time to do that. And so they were looking for people who could be non-US research analysts, and I fit the bill. And from my perspective, I was just so impressed by the quality to people.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there's also many dimensions of this. So the reason I actually joined Bernstein is, like every consultant I'd been looking for opportunities and hadn't found anything that was more, it looked to me like it was more compelling than the work I was doing as a consultant, even though the one thing about being a consultant is a lifestyle is really horrible. So I definitely wanted to find something else. And then I had the good fortune just to really literally trip across Bernstein, which was having an existential moment of its own. Bernstein, this was in 1990, was facing terrible headwinds from the markets. 1990 was a really difficult year for most active managers, but especially if you were a value investor, the numbers looked horrible for Bernstein as a firm. It was underperforming that year by about 20%, or clients like to say 2,000 basis points. Not a good thing.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My boss is a consulting company. But it was a really good example of how really getting the strategy right is first of all very important and secondly much more difficult than you would think if you just read books.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, one of the most interesting ones was working for one of the biggest tobacco companies in the world and doing a bunch of research and then realizing that their strategy, which was to win every single legal case involving lung cancer victims who had been smokers. And part of that strategy was to assert that there was no such thing as an underage smoker. That actually was part of the culture. And it became pretty clear to me that that was not going to work. Sooner or later, it was going to become apparent that that would break down and that the fact that basically the lawyers were running the thought process and the strategy for this were immense, very profitable companies was going to become an existential threat. So I made that case, which is extremely unpopular, interestingly not just with the company, but also with the...”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when I finished my two-year stint in China, I decided to not be an expat, that I wanted to come back to the US and spend five years in consulting, which was a great way to really learn how the real world worked over here and see how big companies of all kinds First of all, encounter sometimes existential problems that they have a really hard time understanding because if they're successful big companies, the idea that they could face an existential problem is a hard one to grapple with, right? And it's also hard if you've had a successful formula for sometimes decades to recognize that.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is so much savings and so few places to put it, you get incredible bubbles in house prices and domestic stocks. And when times are terrible or when government policy is to crack down on excessive speculation, it all goes in the opposite direction. And that means if you're a very careful, active investor, you can actually do pretty well and certainly in a modest part of your portfolio you should have somebody who's a good China stockpicker picking some of the stocks for you. But the beta is so undependable that you want to be careful not to make that too big a part of your portfolio.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but not to a huge extent. Because the problem with the Chinese capital markets is that they tend to be extraordinarily distorted on both sides when they're up. They're up way too much when they're down. They go down way too much. And that's a lot because they're so policy driven and also because they're so constrained. So in China, basically, if you're a Chinese person until very recently, you really only had three options for what to do with your money. You could keep it in the bank, where by Chinese bank yields are a little bit higher, but still 4 or 5% is not all that much. Or you could put it into houses, so people who could were buying houses avidly, or you could put it into stocks. And so when there's only those three investments and they're all domestic, you can imagine that when times are great, given the fact that”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as that occurs, you're going to get the same problems you had in Japan. Savings rates are going to start really dropping very fast as people stop basically working and begin consuming whatever their retirement packages are. And then you're also going to see a whole bunch of other structural changes that drive off of that. And I think it's very unclear that China's done all the things. By the way, China's leadership is very aware of this problem. So it's not a surprise. But that next chapter that starts, call it seven-ish years from now is very unclear. And that's one reason why from a political standpoint have to be really a focus today to keep everything together while they try to engineer that big set of transformations that they hope to have ready by call it 2025.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has gone. The next phase for China is they really have to shift from an investment in manufacturing driven economy to a consumption and service-driven economy. That's definitely in process. And by the way, that part of GDP is actually growing quite robustly and will continue to grow, I think, for another at least five to seven years, maybe even ten, but also not forever. Because that's growing at almost 10% a year now and about half of the Chinese economy, that's why China's economy can still grow 5% to 6% a year. Without growth in infrastructure spend for about another, I'll call it maybe seven years. And I think that's going to be that next chapter. I think the big problem that the Chinese face, there's two”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it depends on exactly whose numbers you truly believe. But call it 7% to 10% growth rates that were typical of the Chinese GDP for most of the last, certainly 15 years. Almost all of it was fueled by that kind of investment driven and export-focused manufacturing type activity. The problem is that can't be sustained. And in fact, that's what's been crashing in China, which people are very worried about because most people take a backward-looking view. If that was the engine of growth, then that must be a big problem because it's over. But that's not necessarily the next stage in China's development. And if you think about other countries that have had successful paths to from poor to wealthy, they've all made phase shifts at various points along that way and was true of the United States too. We went through that same process just a lot less rapidly than China.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On very, very high savings rate feeding huge levels of investment. So the savings rate in China has over the last decade or so been around 50% of GDP. And I'm not aware of any other large country that has ever had a savings rate that high over a sustained period ever. Most of that's been invested. And when you're investing that much, even if there's a huge amount of waste and malinvestment, if even only a third of that is actually productive, you can just imagine that you're going to get a fair amount of growth spinning off from that. And even the stuff that's malinvested in the short run can deliver some call it phantom growth because if you build a bunch of crappy roads that you don't really need to have, you still get some additional economic activity. The multiplier is much lower, but there's some.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember, it's economics, so it's a pretty abstract concept. But essentially, what I was trying to do is figure out, remember at the time, China was viewed as sort of a basket case and viewed mostly through a political lens. The question was, you know, could this be a country that could grow at 5 or 6 or 7 percent for some period of time and become, instead of desperately poor, could it become middle income maybe? And the conclusion was actually there was a really good chance that that could happen as opposed to what most people thought. And I underestimated how much growth there could be. But it was definitely palpable even when I was in China that there were these seeds that were being planted that could really lead to a lot of growth. And I think what we know now is that that model has now delivered pretty much everything it could because the success of China over the last thirty years, thirty plus years, has really been driven by a model that was focused on”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because nobody had told us that when we were studying China, and 10 million people at least had died. And it turns out it was more than that. But anyway, so that was interesting. It gave me sort of a familiarity with Chinese statistics as they really are as opposed to the ones that the artificial ones that are public. But then as I started to play more with what was going on, I realized you could make some, you could model some possibilities for what China might do economically as a result of the fact that it had an extended period when it had been really deprived of a lot of basic technology. And if they could harness that, their economy could grow for a sustained period of time. Basic technology.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's a really interesting question. I think so much has changed between what China was then and what it is now, that that really doesn't tell us so much about China's future necessarily. One of the reasons I was so interested to go to China then too was my graduate thesis was about how China might have a potential to grow way more than people thought, actually two theses like things, one which was shorter about the China famine in 1959, which at the time was not something that people had been talking about, but it was possible to deduce from the data that did exist that a lot of people had actually died and starved to death or died from, most people actually in famines die from other things like disease. And I remember being quite stunned when it turned out, yeah, you could figure out that there had been a”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How did that experience inform over the last decade when China has really set its foot onto the world stage in a big way? What did you learn from that experience that might have a different lens than someone who's, say, just been in the US looking at what's happened in China about their success and where you think it goes from here?”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had to spend actually a lot of time both with the administration, but especially with my students explaining my macro was actually almost useless for people in China because it was all based on a set of institutions that didn't exist there and actually still don't in many ways”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I remember one haunting question, which I think is particularly interesting and relevant one for all of us to think about now, which is once a student came up to me and asked, is there any way that economics can help us understand why it seems to be so much easier to destroy things than to build them? And on the other hand, when it came to a lot of the basic aspects of economics that we think are so important, they really had a hard time understanding them. They were all drawn towards macro because they really understood how a top-down system could work. But micro was really hard for them to grasp because most of these were people who had never had the opportunity to make a free decision in their life. It was always constrained. And so for that reason, they really didn't have an easy time figuring out what the market mechanism really was and how it was supposed to be. The whole idea of the invisible hand and the supply and demand equilibrium was very counterintuitive.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forbidden fruit is pretty attractive everywhere. And especially, I think that was especially true at that particular time because remember there was a whole generation of Chinese who had been effectively pulled out of school during the Cultural Revolution, sent to the countryside, and they were just beginning to get to figure out ways to get back into the cities and into universities when I was there. They were so avid to learn. And they also had such a sophisticated understanding of politics. I've never met people in my life who had that same three-dimensional awareness of all of the things that could lead to political outcomes, and they were way more thoughtful about that than I was. I think when you live through that kind of turmoil, that's an ability you have to develop. So that was a very interesting thing for me to see. And then they had all these questions about economics that were...”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before the beginning of classes, where they would be informed solemnly that as part of China's open-door policy, there was going to be this class on Western economics or capitalist economics, but they should all remember that the right economics was Marxist-Leninist economics. And they were just being given this exposure for study purposes, which is probably the best advertisement that I could have ever had.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was amazing. So I think I learned so much more than I was ever able to teach as a teacher on a couple dimensions. First of all, just about what was going on in China. It was a very fascinating time because literally the Cultural Revolution had just begun to wind down, although it was in its last throes when I was there. I was there as part of the so-called open door policy that Deng Xiaoping had launched. Part of that was exposing people in government agencies like the finance ministry, which needed to train all these functionaries to keep the machinery of the financial system running because the whole thing was state-owned at that point, including the universities. And they wanted to expose people to Western economics. But of course, they did that gingerly. So one of the things that I learned when I was there was in every single one of my classes, there was someone called a banjang, a class leader, who was a party member who would actually convene a meeting of my students.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Convinced that I was going to spend my career as an academic probably with time at the World Bank and the IMF and that whole approach. When I got an offer from the Chinese finance ministry actually to be a teacher in China teaching so-called Western economics because at the time there probably was a very short list of people who were Western economists trained but Mandarin fluent. So I kind of realized that that was probably the sort of opportunity that if you didn't do it you would spend the rest of your life regretting.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, which this sort of gets to, I think what you'll see is a recurring theme, which is that I've tended to be a contrarian at the time, if you were interested in Asia, Japan was a thing to study. Because remember, Japan was number one. But for whatever reason, I got really fascinated by China and Chinese because it was an area of the world I really didn't know and it seemed very intriguing. And then I decided to really focus on at the graduate level, on economics, because I thought that was the lens that was most useful to really assess China's future through as opposed to China's past. And I was really quite”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So I did my undergraduate work at Princeton mostly on Chinese and Chinese intellectual history. So luckily I had an amazing set of teachers there and really became fascinated in that part of the world. But realized that I didn't really just...”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My guest on today's show is Seth Masters. Seth recently retired from Alliance Bernstein, where he spent 26 years across six different careers. He started as an analyst, portfolio manager, and CIO in the emerging market equity area and value stocks. Over the last decade and a half has served in separate roles as CIO of the private wealth business, CIO of asset allocation, CIO of the defined contribution strategies, and CIO of blend strategies. Seth is a true polymath. He's articulate, thoughtful, and wise on a wide range of topics. Our conversation starts with a fascinating discussion of China thirty years ago and today, and then goes into covering contrarian career paths, the critical flaw of benchmark-based investing, structural issues with investment committees, potential causes of the next crisis.”
2018-01-29 · Capital Allocators · Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source