YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Hancock

lines on the record: 47
first: 2024-02-01
most recent: 2024-02-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That appreciation of quality businesses and the value to pay for them. I come, my mindset is a little bit more contrarian, and I think from an investing perspective, that manifests itself much more in a value orientation or value meaning low multiple underperforming stock, cigar butt of philosophy. And I think realizing the value of time and compounding, it's just worth paying up for a higher quality business.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think all the great investors talk about reading and how much of their time they spend reading and just learning. And I think that is one of the things I like about the investment industry is you just spend so much of your time just learning about how businesses work, how the world works. You're kind of an observer. You're kind of a miserable critic rather than actual creator of value, but an analyzer of others work.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment finance is actually a very broad area. So the first advice is kind of narrow that down and the West would narrow it down is to get exposure to lots of different things. And I think the best way to enable yourself to get exposure is don't focus so much on finance investing. Just figure out about learning. Learn all sorts of things. Learn math, learn history. You can always learn a trade after that. Don't think, oh, I'm interested in finance, so I'm just going to spend all my time listening to investment podcasts. No sense. I'm going to read 10Ks.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is the holiday time. I just came back from a long plane flight and I read this really fun detective book that my wife gave me for Christmas. But then I was reading a biography of Samuel Sewell, who's one of the judges at the Salem Witch Trials actually, saw a colonial era figure. It's an interesting book to learn about that era. My favorite book of all time is not even close, is a children's book called The Land of Green Ginger, which is written by the screenwriter of the original Wizard of Oz movies. It is a satirical, clever take on the kind of the postscript, the Aladdin myth from the Arabian Knights. I recommend all of your listeners if they can find it, which is easy. Read that book.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My colleagues now wouldn't believe it, but I used to be probably over accommodating, and maybe I've learned that lesson a bit overleared.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in my case, a lot of the mentors come through kind of my academic career and teachers and professors going back in my high school math teacher, Mr. Hyde. He was someone who taught the computer programming course. He's the one who sort of encouraged me to take college courses when I was in high school. He also taught me bridge, which is, I don't really play that much anymore, but it is a great game and lets you think of that things in a great way. My PhD advisor at Harvard, Les Valiant. I'd also pick out, I mentioned Chris Darnell at GMO, Rob Sousse was the name of my first manager there. He was a very wise man. If I think about... One of the things I've gained from these people too, particularly the professional ones, it's kind of when to be willing to say no to stuff too.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a 12 year old daughter and she runs the family with an iron fist and she likes us all watch TV together. So I've been watching a lot of Survivor episodes, although unfortunate, I actually like those. She's moving on to something else now that I like less well. I won't call it out. In terms of, I listen to a lot of podcasts too. That's where I get a little more sort of, I'm sort of embarrassed to say, but professionally takes a little bit of the place of reading. I love econ talk, which is sort of theoretical. Economics debate podcast. For fun, I love Judge John Hodgman. There's all kinds of things out there. It's a great world.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm a humble portfolio manager who works from the bottom up. So I'm not really thinking about super bubbles very much. Honestly, I'm thinking about are these stocks that we're investing in good quality business price to deliver a good return and good. I mean, sort of double digit type return over the next five-ish years. So if it turns out this is a super bubble and I think Jeremy's technical definition of that is a very, very big bubble, then quality stocks are going to go down. I've been wrong to invest in them. The silver lining is at least we'll have done better than pretty much anything else out there. Quality go down.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that important. I think the thought experiment for us is if this is something that feels cyclical that isn't going to affect where the world's going to be five years from now, then we're only going to pay attention to it to the extent that if something happens, we react to it. Like it can create a dislocation, right? People might overreact to an interest rate move, in our opinion, but we're not going to try to forecast it or pick stocks based on that. You did mention geopolitics in that list, geopolitics. In my mind, a little bit different. And the reason that's a little bit different is I'm not sure that's going to be solved five years from now, right? That could get worse or the trends that we're on are different from where we've been in the last 20 or 30 years. So that is, I'd say, of those things, the one where we scratch our head a little bit more. Not that I'm going to claim we have the answers there, but it is front of mine for us.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd apologize for confusing terminology on our part because when we say deep value, I think people often think just the lowest price to book stocks out there. In the GMO terminology, that's deep value on a measure of what we'd call intrinsic value that blends a hefty version of quality into that. So that will include some stocks we hold in the quality. I think the metas of the world, companies like that.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And frankly, I think that is where most of the action is. It's that the non-value stocks are trading at much higher multiples than they normally have. And when we say deep value, it's almost like two people talk about indexes, they divide the world 50-50. There's no magic to that. And I think right now Just in a market cap sense, market concentration, there are a lot more growth stocks. So to find the true value stocks and making air quotes, you kind of have to go a little bit deeper into the percentiles of market cap than you would typically.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a quote that's coming up from our asked allocation team about how they think about positioning equity portfolios to be maybe nuanced about that. What we're talking about is the valuation of that relative to the overall market. So it's kind of two sides of the same coin. It's not so much that cheap stocks are really, really cheap. It's that the spread of valuation ratios is very wide. So the”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, not practical constraints. Of course, there is a constraint for everything, but we'd be talking about tens of billions of dollars where capacity would be.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some more ripe than others, but I think there's a lot of opportunity out there. Maybe another way of asking that crisis is why did we start with this one? I think there are a couple obvious reasons. One, it is our largest strategy, but another, it is US equities, which are kind of the simplest, most liquid asset class. They fit well for the transparency of an ETF structure. It's easiest to do the market making around them. So it was a very obvious place for us to start.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asset class or the time a new asset or sub asset class like quality investing, that's how a lot of what we do get started. It's why we kind of have a complicated lineup for a firm, our size. But that does impose a certain, I think, intellectual consistency on how we think about the world.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focusing on quality characteristics as well as valuation and sort of quality at a reasonable price, sort of big picture, is an idea that cuts pretty much across all of GMO strategies and the different asset classes in which we invest. Of course, it means different things if you're running a merger arb strategy, a short horizon than long-term buy and hold investing like, quote, we do. But that's there. Another thing to think about that sort of unites GMO as a firm is that a lot of our clients come sort of through the door, if you will, in our multi-asset class solutions. We call ass allocation at GMO. So a lot of the strategies that we've developed over the years at GMO, including originally the quality strategy, derive from us, Jeremy and team, Ben Incher and others, seeing a top-down opportunity in the market, us forming a strategy, if that's a convention.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Philosophy, team, and everything One simplification we've made for the ETF is it we only invest in US companies. So the quality. Global and its opportunity set has had up to 20% in non US domiciled multinationals think like the Nestle's of the world, that kind of company. To be a more straightforward SP 500 U.S. only equity strategy.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A segment of the market we want to shy away from other than just the operational complexity of having lots of small clients. And there, the ETF market has matured to a point where we don't really face that complexity. And so we're glad to be able to be a lot more accessible. The only thing I'd say about ETFs, and they've been on our radar screen for a while, of course, but. Originally they were for no particular reason, but kind of associated with passive or more commoditized quantitative factor strategies. And it's really over the last few years an active strategy in an ETF. People would pay any attention.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're exactly right. GMO has been an institutional manager. We started in the endowments and foundation space and have gone from then. But as you also said, institutional includes increasingly family. Wealthy individuals who pay taxes. And so just structure ETF is such a better I mentioned GMO has always been an advocate of pooled investing. Solution and allows more portfolio managers. The genesis of having an ETF for us was less about entering the retail market or accessing different clients and more about better services. Taxpay Of respect for individual investors. I think they get a bum rap among institutional managers. Individual investors can be very sophisticated, discerning thought.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great thing. If you think GLP ones are fantastic, if you think there's innovation going on all around the world and you want to participate in it, we think high quality companies are a great way to do that.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the fear part is kind of what we've been talking about. Like, if you're worried about market downturns, quality is a good sleep at night investment. I laugh about it every time we think about writing an annual letter or something like that. Someone wants to write. In these uncertain times that we're now in today is like, when has that not ever been the case, right? So people are always worried. And so quality is always good for that constituency. The only thing I'd say is when those worries come to pass, if you hold quality stocks that you really believe in, you're less likely to sell at the wrong moment. So there's that psychological advantage to them that goes beyond just statistical analysis of return periods over time. And the greed is the quality is not just a defensive portfolio. If the market's going down, you hold cash, right? You don't hold high quality stocks. So the greed part is that high quality companies do participate in the upmarket. And so if you think AI is a...”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's maybe a mistake I've made in my career has been too rooted in looking at what did well over the last few quarters. If a stock did really well thinking, oh, it must be expensive, whereas the reality of it, markets are efficient enough that the vast majority of outperformance is driven by truly improved fundamental results. So we have to be with that level of humility, I think the other thing to think about is that if you're a long-term investor getting the valuation exactly right matters less. Finessecing the entry-exit point is less important if you're going to hold for five plus years, which is kind of what our ambition is to do with our stocks. But in extremis, which is the Microsoft 2000 example, and maybe some other AI related stocks today, it really does matter. The long time where you have to hold to make up that valuation whole is so long that you...”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of companies, but we've been leaning against the wind to buy the growth stocks at the end of 2022, the value stocks more recently. Rebalancing has had a lot of value.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, when we think about the opportunity set for us of high quality company companies, there are, as you say, really different kinds of companies within that. Quality is neither growth nor value. You can find both within it. And so when we talk about quality growth or think tech stocks, core quality, think defensive, Coke, consumer staples, value think some of the more cyclical names. We like the fact that there are high quality companies in all these areas, and generally we find them attractive, and we like the fact that, as you point out, they tend to work at different parts of the market cycle. And so, yes, it is deliberate that we have exposure across these. Not that, you know, if it's 1999, we're probably not going to have much quality growth. So it's not a fixed allocation. But it does give us diversification. And because we're familiar with stocks across this spectrum, it also gives us the ability to rebalance. And that's one of the things that we've been quite successful with over the last few years. It's not just that we hold both these kinds of stuff.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, in isolation, quality on average gives you downside protection, certainly did in 2007-8, for example. But then it didn't when the tech bubble burst. It didn't last year in 2022. Then the reason for that is a lot of the quality stocks were really expensive. So the trade-off, compromise or combination of value and quality is what we think gives you that best downside protection, but without having to give up too much on the upside too.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that's a point that Jeremy Grantham kind of observed very long time ago and is emphasizing for a long time, and actually Ben Anker is the head of our AST allocation group, just wrote a very interesting piece on that too. This idea that at the big picture level, stocks versus bonds, things kind of behave what you'd expect. You get more return, but there's more risk associated with it. But if you look within asset classes, that hasn't been true, just empirically. Like, why is it perplexing, right, that high quality companies which have been safer, right? They do better in recessions and such, you've not had to pay for that with lower return. And that was really the core of Jeremy's observation about quality stocks and why it's not just that quality is the silver bullet that just beats the market all the time. I'm sure we necessarily believe that's true, but it does improve your portfolio with lower risk without having to give up returns.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least that, I think, at this point. We held through the and actually added in the Balma era. So that would be our taking the view that, at least in this case, turned out to be right. That is something companies can fix. If the core assets there, the core network effects of everybody using their products, they're being so entrenched in IT systems departments around the world, that was still there. The easiest thing almost to fix is...”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And speaking of the.com and play like Microsoft via a case study where we, in previous strategies, we held Microsoft for a very long time. That's where the valuation could help us in the dot-com. So Microsoft now is on 30 times earnings. It was over 50 in 2000. And I don't think it was a much better company than it's a pretty good company now. So there's great company. You have to at some point be willing not to hold the stock. And yes, actually, Microsoft, by this point, is outperformed since the peak of the cycle, but it took a long, long time for that to happen.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we also hold Microsoft and Apple. Apple's actually an interesting case study because we use as an example of our investment at our investment conference 15 years ago about what a high quality company isn't. And then Steve Jobs turned the round and the iPhone and so forth with, of course, the rest is history. The point is we were very wrong about them and we were late to the party. The party had such a long party that it's okay to be late to it. You see, we still had a really good time with that company, which I think is a little bit of a lesson for quality investing. You don't have to be the first one in the door there. These themes run for a long time. And if you're going to admit you're wrong and change your stripes, you can still make money.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Names you mentioned are quality companies, we believe. We don't hold all of them. The prices vary. If you think about Meta and Alphabet, those are kind of the value stocks in the bin, right? Well, they got you laugh over the back over there.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's been pretty much the definition going back to the 80s and 90s. I told you kind of the fundamental definition. There's also quantitative metrics that we look at. Those have evolved, but always within that cluster of high returns on investment, stability across the economic cycle are consistent and strong balance sheets. What has changed over that period too is what kinds of companies best meet that threshold. So if you go back to the 80s and 90s, we're talking about the Cokes and Procter and Gambles and Johnson Johnson. And big consumer in healthcare. And now those are still there, but a lot more of the big tech companies, the Fang companies, more growth companies, frankly.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we think about quality first off, the ability to deliver high returns on investment going forward. And then what enables that? You have to have some asset ability, capability that competitors can't equally duplicate. I mean, traditionally it could have been like a physical asset or brand. Of course, these days in an IT world, it's much more about network effects of platform companies and such. But you have to have that special sauce that's not reproducible. It has to be doing something that's relevant. Like you want to avoid the trap of companies that do one thing well and that thing's not growing, so they just try to do other stuff. And then management quality does also come into play. I do keep a strong balance sheet. Are you prudent? Do you invest when you should return capital when you shouldn't? So those assets, the relevance and then capital discipline are the key components for us.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Managers, so the quality, but at a reasonable price, or you could interpret that as not just chasing the companies everybody knows are high quality, but finding a few maybe more neglected names, that quality to reasonable price is a little bit of a different style than I see most people practicing out there.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you think about value investors, value investors traditionally are people who kind of know the price of everything and the value of nothing, right? They're much too focused on ratios around trailing fundamentals and not on the plus side, future growth opportunities on the negative side, maybe competitive threat. So bringing the quality idea into that, thinking about what companies have a long trajectory to grow and to grow at high return on capital. That's the key thing also, differentiating between growth that's just sort of throwing money at the wall and seeing a little bit come back to you versus very efficient growth. That's the key to quality investing. I could maybe flip that around a little bit since I think particularly post 2008, 2009, the quality style of investing has become a lot more popular. People certainly send people talk a lot about. The difference between our approach and a lot of quality managers is that they're really quality growth.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an improvement of value or refinement on the definition of value. And people use these terms loosely, of course, and these all fall under the rubric of fundamental investing and buying companies that are great over the long term at great prices. But the idea that companies that can compound at high rates of return deserve premium multiples and you should be willing to pay for them is the root of it.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I say he's a big picture guy, I don't necessarily mean just that he's investing us to make macro calls. I mean more that he steps back from the fray a bit and thinks about the big ideas and what really matters. And that whole idea around quality investing, that's kind of Jeremy from the 1980s, early 80s, and Sing Bang say, hey, you know, I cut my teeth, as he and Dick Mayo did on traditional deep value investing, but we're missing something here with these higher quality companies. Should we think about that? How can we invest about that? How can we improve our process? So that sort of philosophical outside and around the box thinking is kind of what really led to us having a quality-oriented strategy today.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be my guess. Yeah, I think he probably will outlast me in the industry. He is one of the smartest people I've ever met and one of the most driven people I've ever met. He has a, I think, and hope along a professional lifespan ahead of him. I would say he is a little bit less focused on what you might call the day-to-day of investing at GMO, and he does a lot of stuff outside. He's very involved with the Grantham Foundation, his charitable organization, both on their mission, but also on the investing side of managing their portfolio.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's always been, in my experience, at least, has always been much more of a gadfly. He makes you think about things. He makes suggestions. He pushes you to come to your own conclusion. He leads you to water. But he's not a hands on the portfolio person.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one thing to start with there is the name G, M and O, and it's three people, and people know Jeremy Grantham, I think, very well, but that Dick Mayo and Ike Van Otterlou are the other two. And that's relevant to your question, because from the very early days before I was there, they kind of operated separate investment teams. Dick Mayo was a traditional, I'd say, portfolio strong portfolio manager focused on U.S. stocks. Ike was similar international stocks, and Jeremy was kind of the go everywhere, top-down big ideas guy. And a bit of that culture, Dick and Ike are both retired now, but a lot of that culture of different investment teams that do things a little bit differently is very much part of GMO. There is not one central view to the firm. Jeremy is a very strong, powerful persona and very deep thinker. Jeremy's never really been a portfolio manager.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's about 500 people today. The book are in Boston, which is where I sit, but we have investment offices in San Francisco, in London, in Singapore, in Sydney, Australia. So it's a global firm. One of the things when I started at GMO, it was really just investment people almost and all the sort of compliance, client service, legal kind of everything was done sort of on the side by investment people. And gradually we hired, we professionalized over time.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been a great place to work, obviously. I thought so. I think GMO felt very familiar to me when I joined as a smaller firm, I think maybe 60 people at the time. It's very much of an intellectual debate, academic kind of vibe. It felt very comfortable to me. And the firm's grown. I've kind of grown with it. I think one of the things that's kept me engaged is I've actually done different things. So kind of as you were alluding to, as you'd think, my background is very much on the quantitative side. Now I do fundamental side research, portfolio management.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that leads to the others with finance, which wasn't certainly an opportunistic element to that. Like what kind of industry hires people that values fancy academic degrees that don't have necessary a lot of developed specific skills and finance, I say management consulting is any of the other thing that at least at that time was the other career trajectory, just my personality more of a math-oriented introvert finance was the natural fit. For GMO particularly, I got really lucky. When I was in graduate school, so I was at Harvard, Harvard has a smaller computer science department. We do a lot down the river at MIT, and I went to a research group there. I was headed by Ron Rest, who's perhaps known to some as the R behind RSA cryptography. But he also worked in machine learning in this area. And he ran this research group of scruffy grad students and postdocs that I would go to. But there's this one guy who came from downtown who wore...”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's two parts to that. One is just sort of why not the academic track and then why the finance part. So why not the academic track was in academia I was doing very theoretical stuff that was May be intellectually interesting but understood by increasingly few people in the world. So I just sort of wanted to be something that was a little more relevant. And I thought maybe the research lab would provide that and for various reasons it still didn't feel like that. So I was basically looking for something that was relevant. I want to be loved like everyone, right? So I want to do something that I can talk to people about and they don't.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I worked the area in which I studied in graduate school and then worked at Siemens, which, as you say, is a research lab, think like Bell Labs, IBM Watson, that kind of think tank environment. I worked on machine learning, which is a subfield of, of course, artificial intelligence. Yeah, that was the 90s. So, artificial intelligence is a, it's an area that's been around for a long time. I think the term was coined in the 1950s. But I was doing it, or at least I should say working on a small part of it back in the 90s. In graduate school is at a fairly theoretical way at Siemens, who was with more applications in mind.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For profit traditional company ever. I'm the first, so I'm kind of the black sheep. So that's where I started from. In fact, the fact that I actually went into computer science rather than the more liberal arts discipline was a little bit non-traditional, let's say. And I think that was kind of an early wise decision that I give myself credit for is back in high school. I was really interested in history and stuff, but I didn't really want to be a historian. So it's like, what do I actually like to do as opposed to think was interesting? And that's where at the time computer programming was becoming a thing. I really loved it. That led me down that track. And really, while I had a software engineering job, I was always sort of pointing toward a research career. And then at some point after my PhD school studies, we could get into that if you like. But I kind of decided to switch and finance was kind of what was available for me at that point.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, it wasn't doing invest in quality stocks in the early days, that's for sure. I actually come from a very academic family. My father was a university professor. My mother worked as an editor. Her father had been a university professor. We have doctors in the family. I actually don't know that anyone in my family actually had a job at a private.”
2024-02-01 · Masters in Business · Tom Hancock on Quality Stocks and Launching ETFs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source