YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephen Cohen

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64
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2025-12-12
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2025-12-12
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Honestly, it was talking to the people in i It was having kind of been introduced to them and having been approached to go and talk to them. I learnt a lot from just sitting down and understanding this. I'd sat in banks. We traded ETFs. They were, to be honest, a very, very small component of what we did. It was only really when I spoke to the people that iShares and a BlackRock and understood the history of how iShares had grown and where it was then. That sense of mission, that sense of kind of the purpose of giving more access to investing to people and creating more transparency.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “That could exist, and again, you always have to. Quite hard. You always have to cast a barry. You always have to cast your mind back to what it was then versus your perspective of where you are today. It was still fairly plain vanilla in terms of what the...”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “This business, particularly how do we expand ice years, this ETF business. And back in 2011, European ETFs was still a very nascent industry. You know, now it's like a $2.5 trillion industry. European iShares is over a trillion dollars. Back then, it was very much still the very early days. And you could see what was happening in the States. And so when I was speaking to BlackRock, you could see this really interesting opportunity to kind of take all of what I'd done before in terms of the market's kind of background and the breadth of experience and then apply it to this thing that was still pretty new. And the kind of mission was how do you educate people about what an ETF is? How do you help people start to think about how to use an ETF in a portfolio? And by the way, also, what are the ETFs that don't exist yet?”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So I had an opportunity, you know, having had a lot of great experiences in 2011, BlackRock was probably 18 months into the integration of the iShares business or the indexing business and really focused on how do we expand”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, because I think if you look back to the history, and again, this Sector, you have private lending, direct lending, things like that. So again, it's good, I think one of the things I've learned over my career and had the opportunity to work in different markets is you start to see the way these economies operate is different. And therefore, the impact on the markets and therefore investors is very, very different.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “The reaction of the market to that was this is going to have no impact. The reaction now to fiscal spending is actually this is great. This is kind of part of the economy, the country kind of being back on its feet. You're now talking about inflation being potentially an issue in Japan, whereas there it was all about deflation. So it's quite amazing how it has turned around. And you're seeing that in the bond market and just the yields.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “It feels incredibly different. I think for Japan, it's completely different. If you go back to, as you say, the late 90s, early 2000s, the banking crisis that was part of the bubble. The collapse had still not been solved. And it was only really in the early to mid 2000s that they finally kind of got their arms around the banking system. And one thing you read about history, and unless you can get the banking system operating properly and lending, you really struggle to get an economy going. The second thing that's really interesting, I think, is so different is back then you would every six months every year there would be a government-led fiscal impulse, right? And they used to call it the building the roads to nowhere, right? You know, paving the entire country, just got to kind of spend and spend and spend.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “But I think you know again, it was what was interesting about it is you learn about kind of an economy and therefore a stock market that is in such a different place as it was then to look at the US market or the European markets at the time”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Only took three and a half decades. And I managed to do the middle bit, which was not necessarily the most exciting bit, I've got to be honest.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “That kind of letting involved in Japan kind of lent me to doing convertible bonds originally at ING and then with a group of us at Nomura. That's where I spent a lot more time on the Japanese markets. And I think it's all part of how you. I think back to those days, Japan was very different to what it is kind of now. The market, definitely. The market at the time was about 9,000, 9,000 to 10,000, given where we're all.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So I originally started him fixed income and then went into convertible bonds. And a lot of what I spent my time doing was kind of more market strategist type of role. So talking to clients about what was going on in the markets, what was going on in the bond markets, developing trade ideas for clients. And then that's also how I got involved in spending quite a lot of time on the Japanese markets, which I found incredibly interesting and really got to understand the Japanese culture and the way the country operated.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And he said, so I got talking about him, and I mentioned his interest. And he said, well, why don't you do a day's work experience with me? We'll go to a bank. So we went to one of the banks. I can't remember which one it was. And I walked onto this trading floor. And, you know Someone who had no experience or never experienced this before, it was amazing. There was people shouting, there were screens and flashing numbers and stuff like that. And I thought, you know what, this looks pretty cool. This buzz, the kind of combination of an opportunity to work in something that took economics and markets and the world and then this kind of feeling of a buzzy environment, that was the thing. And so I applied to a number of banks at a university, got an opportunity to go to UBS.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Dealable. The phone systems that you use on the trading floors, you know, with all the hoot and holler and all that kind of stuff.”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I'm not sure I had a plan. I studied economics at school and then at university and I was always very interested in this kind of concept of the markets. I didn't have any background, no family background in markets or investing. But I always found reading up about markets interesting. And what kind of got me in was a slight fluke. We were talking about flukes before the show. One of my neighbors. Was a telecoms engineer, and he used to go round to all the banks installing the dealer boards. And he wondered, and I was talking to him, and he one day”

    2025-12-12 · Masters in Business · Building New Financial Products with BlackRock's Stephen Cohen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source