YouSaid · the spoken record

William Bernstein

lines on the record: 114
first: 2019-04-18
most recent: 2019-04-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Stocks aren't the least bit risky. In fact, you should get down on your knees and pray for volatility and low returns. All right. But once you're approaching your geezerhood, stocks are three mile island toxic. You should be very approach them with a great degree of caution. So I wished I had known when I was 30 years old that I could put 100% of my savings into stocks and not worry at all about them.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's this parlor game that academics like to play about how risky your stocks. And we've all heard the rationales of how they get risky or more or less risky with time and how that argument goes back and forth. But what I've learned that I wish I knew back then is that it's a stupid question to ask without also adding for a given investor of a given age. So if you are a 20-year-old saver who has a lot of human capital and no investment capital.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would encourage anybody who wants to go into medicine. It's a very rewarding profession and it's a much more difficult profession than when I was in it because of all the bureaucracy insurance and what have you. And not only that, but back in the day, you could work for yourself. Now you'll almost certainly be working for the NBA from hell.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Medicine is a much surer way of making a living than writing is, that's for sure. I tend to look at writing as something you do to amuse yourself in your dodage. It's fun. But if you've got kids to raise and colleges to pay for, I wouldn't be a writer. I would choose a much more solid profession. Live modestly. And then you can kick back and follow your bless and write if you feel like.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the Wonky Finance way of saying it is that it's not a stationary parameter, meaning that if you just look at how it works out of sample, it works very poorly out of sample. In sample it works. But if you do, for example, what Staunton Martian Dimson did, which is to look at it at, say, the dividend yield in multiple countries, and then you just stop the analysis each and every year, you look back and you devise a set of rules depending that are based on looking back at a given point. And then you look how it does forward. It does very poorly going forward in almost all countries. The one thing that does work is timing within countries, but that's a different subject.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of whack? No, but the market fell by 88%. Sure. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by about 88%. So it was the same order of magnitude of fall. The reason why I think it's unlikely we're unlikely to see anything like that happen to the US market and why it's more believable in Japan is simply because in 1999 we only had a PE of like, well, as trailing PE, I think of 40 and a CAP of 30, or maybe it was the other way around, a cape of 40 and a trailing PE of 30. Whereas now we're at a trailing PE of somewhere around 20 and a trailing cape of somewhere around what 30, I believe.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even worse. Yeah, very, very, very, very close to that. And that's what people always talk about, my gosh, can the US stock market experience what happened to the Japanese stock market post-1989? And the answer is it did, of course, in 1929-32.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the NICK peaked very close to 40,000, and I think that at its nadeer, it was somewhere around 5,000. I don't know what it is now, but it's somewhere in the mid-teens right now, I think.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. And it's a book basically that covers finance, of course, the three great bubbles of the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as a lot of religious manias. And so that's what this book is. It combines three things, is financial maniacs, religious manias, and then the neuropsychology, and particularly the evolutionary psychology that glues all of them together.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next book will be a modern remake, if you will, of Charles Mackay's famous extraordinary popular delusions in the madness of crowds, or actually memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions in the madness of crowds. That's got to be.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I love that. And of course, the things that I really enjoy doing are the research, the process of putting a book together. It is just great fun uncovering these stories that almost no one knows about.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I'm afraid very ordinary wife. I'm your basic septogenarian who enjoys his children and his grandchildren and traveling while I still can. I enjoy living in Portland, Oregon more than I can imagine. I live in a place where I can walk downtown and be there in 15 minutes or I can walk 20 minutes uphill and be in a sequoia grove and have first class croissants and baguettes right out my front door.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the whole point is I had just as much fun writing both of them. I'm just as proud of both of them. And what it taught me is that you can spend three or four years writing a book and it can disappear almost without a trace. And that doesn't mean that the exercise wasn't worthwhile because hopefully you're writing books for other reasons.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, the last two nonfiction books that have been published and sold were one was a splendid exchange which succeeded beyond my wildest expectations in terms of reviews, sales, the speaking gigs it continues to get me. It was just wildly successful. And then the book that came after that, Masters of the Word, which we talked briefly about, was an absolute flop. I doubt it's sold 5,000 copies. Really?”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, astonishing. Yeah. And it's also very useful when you're thinking about financial fraud and financial malfeas. If you understand Auschwitz, it's very easy to understand what happened in Enron.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, any people can do it. One of the most shocking things, most things will stick in your memory from the Reese book is that British officials in the Channel Islands, which were taken over by the Germans, gladly handed over Jews to the Nazis.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were just convinced by everybody that the Jews were vermin. What do you do to vermin? And what I tell everybody that I meet these days is that it's a very short throw from vermin to rapists and murderers.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About what lousy forecasters we are, what mistakes we make. And his section on the nexus between the media and pundits is required reading sure. For everybody, there is a book called The Moral Animal by Mainwright of Robert Wright, which gets to the heart of the origins of religion and morality and of human behavior. It's a book basically about evolutionary psychology. It's like Tetlock, it's a very dense book. And then finally, there's a book which is, well, it's both easier and more painful to read, which is a book by a British documentarian called Lawrence Reese called Auschwitz A New History, and it is about the camp personnel who worked at Auschwitz and how they did what they did, why they did it, and it basically explains to you Aaron's famous banality of evil. The Germans were not exceptional. They were not an exceptional evil.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then there are the three great books that I recommend to everybody. Number one is expert political judgment by Phil Tetler.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's nonfiction, of course. And how often have both you and I had the experience of reading an article somewhere, New York or Atlantic, wherever, and you say, God, this is really good. I wonder who wrote this because you didn't really pay attention, who wrote it. And you go back and you slap your forehead. And of course, it was Michael Lewis.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, fiction wise, I don't read that much fiction, but there are two people who are popular writing, I should say, that I read compulsively, and one of them is Jean Le Care, and the other is Michael Lewis”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I got to know Jack Bogle a little bit personally, not very well. And then the other two I, well, and then Gene Foma, I don't really know at all, and I've become friends with John Recenthaler at all. He's enormously helpful. It was enormously helpful to me.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, she's that good. And then as far as finance goes and finance writing, there was a person I've already spoken about, Frank Armstrong, who encouraged me. Another person was Scott Burns, who was a writer for the Dallas Morning News, who was still writes and still also manages money, who told me very forthrightly that I had what it took to be a financial writer, that I was good with numbers and I could write pleasing prose. And he said that I should pursue that. And then two other people who helped me greatly along the way were John Raythenthaler, who's chief of research at Morningstar, and Jonathan Clemens of the Wall Street Journal who very early on took an interest in me. And then there are the people who, you know, I had only a very glancing knowledge of or almost no knowledge of at all, but who's writing affected me. And of course, that's the holy trinity.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's my early work and my middle work and my late work. I will not send anything to a publisher without having her look at it.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's really difficult to point out who at some point I decided I love neurology and I guess there were some junior and chief residents who I glombed onto when I was in the medical school and I enjoyed the way they approached patients and I enjoyed the craft of neurology and I can think of a couple of names that no one will recognize but they were basically my, you know, when you're a medical student, a junior and a senior resident in a subspecialty field as a god. And so those are the people you tend to imprint upon. And then there was several different groups of people. The one person who's certainly a mentor to me was my wife, who was an English major and she knew how to write and she taught. Me, how to write. Did she ever?”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, that goes way back, as you say, it's millions and millions of years ago. We seek status because it enables us to make babies better, particularly if you're male, and particularly if you're a male bull elephant seal, for example. But, you know, human beings have that same basic mechanism operating. That is why we seek status. It's just a way of forwarding our DNA.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The kayak make the blow gun hunt bison, and then you imitate what that person does. So we are the species that imitates. We are the ape who imitates. And once you understand that, a lot of economic activity, and particularly behavior and finance, becomes a lot more understandable.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It the easiest way to think about that is to think about the history of our species in the Western Hemisphere over the past, depends upon what archaeological record you believe between 15 and 50,000 years. And over a period of a very few thousands of years, maybe three or five thousand years, humans spread from the high subarctic in Alaska and the Yukon all the way down to the southern tip of South America, which has a not very dissimilar climate. And on the way, they had to learn how to make kayaks. They had to learn how to make poison darts, blow guns, they had to learn how to hunt bison on the Great Plains. And you can't learn how to do any of those things on your own. If each individual person had to learn how to do all of those things on their own, they'd have very quickly become lunch for a predator. And so you find the one person who learns how to build...”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right way to describe it. You're talking about a lot of the work that gets done with functional imaging, particularly MRIs, ethnically functional MRI. And I think it's overdone. It's become way too fashionable, as important as the Kahnemanversky work is. I think it has its relevance to finance, although it's great, is not as great as an area that I think is relatively ignored. And that's evolutionary psychology. We behave in certain very irrational ways, and it's nice to be able to identify the ways in which we're irrational, which is what Kahneman and Tversky are justifiably famous for. But if you just read Kahneman and Tversky, you don't understand what is in back of that behavior. To give you a small example, the fundamental characteristic that we have that we've already mentioned is that humans imitate or in finance we say that humans heard. Why do humans heard? Well, if you think about...”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was a tough one, but what I came up with is that only the people who know me the very best understand how easily bored I am. I'm the kind of person who likes being on the steep part of the learning curve. So most people, most people in medicine find neurology fascinating, and I did too for about 10 relatively short years. And then I got bored with it. And it's the same thing with all the other things I've done with my life is, you know, I've written a history about world economic growth. I've studied finance. I've written about world trade, now I'm writing about human irrationality. I just enjoy reading new things. For me, what I like, what I like to say is that writing is just a way of organizing my reading properly in an interesting manner. And it's a fun way of...”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you can't find a Fiat 850 spider now almost for love or money. You can, but they don't cost very much. They're very hard to find because none of them ever lasted that long.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And you also have another question about what's one of the biggest mistakes you've made and when did you learn from them? And it was both an enormous joy. And ever since then, I've owned Japanese cars.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a nineteen seventy two blue baby blue fiat eight fifty spider purchased at the factory in Milan for $1,855. And it needed to be tuned every 3,000 miles. It was both...”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. The investment you want is the one with zero investment, excuse me, zero entertainment return, which leaves more room for the investment return. Right.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if I can get all wonky on you, you know, you asked about the return on art. And the reason why the return on art is so low is because it has an entertainment segment part of the return as well. And this is work that Bill Baumel and YU very famously did. Bill Baumel, B-A-U-M-O-L. Yeah. In which he looked, you know, he actually has a return series of art going back centuries and found that on average it's got a lower return than stocks and bonds because part of its return is an entertainment return. So if you want entertainment from investing, you are going to pay for it. You're going to get a low...”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I mean, if you really ask me, I'll tell you what I really think. But yeah, I mean, I mean, that's true. The way I like to put it is that CNBC at base wants to make you poor and stupid.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, it's just the entertainment aspect of investing. It's the CNBC market environment. The idea that where the market's going next year or what company is producing the best product or what country has the hottest economy, it's what Jane Bryant Quinn called financial pornography.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can hunt it down and it basically makes you feel bad if you email me. It's one that's for press only. And that basically scares away 99% of people who want to”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those five series or those five books I sort of fold into what I call my investing for adults series, which is for investing adults, people who basically understand market efficiency and who understand the relationship between risk and return and know that there is no returns ferry and no stock picking ferry and no market timing.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which was published four or five years ago. So that's probably a book that superseded the intelligent asset allocator. It's basically meant for the same math geeky kind of audience.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a book for millennials. And it's been hundreds of thousands of downloads. Really? That's great. Because it's free. And it was an Ellamosinary project named Millennials who didn't have assets. And then I have three short booklets, Deep Risk in the Ages of the Investor and Skating Where the Puck was. And I sort of combined that and a bunch of other things into a newer version of Intelligent Asset Allocator called Rational Expectations.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've produced four ebooks, actually five ebooks. One of them I give away for free, that's if you can. And it's actually probably the most widely distributed of my books. If you can.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know, you're talking about how doctors are such awful investors. I mean, doctors are certainly not the only occupational category that's susceptible to that. I mean, entertainers and sports figures in particular regularly lose their shirts on restaurants.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it's the same thing to a more subtle degree, but a more important degree probably with mutual funds. There are mutual funds that have done very well and have good long-term records, have beaten the market. But for every one of them, there are probably 20 or 30 that got euthanized by the fund family because they did so poorly. And you don't even see those in the record unless you have the right database.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The engine you're not going to make the flight back. It's the same thing in finance. You see the people who did well. The thing that sticks in your mind is the guy who bought Amazon or Microsoft on the IPO. But what you don't see are the other 99% of IPO investors who had their heads handed to them.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back shout out. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, and just for the readers who haven't heard this, when they analyzed the bombers that came back from World War II and they looked at the patterns of the shrapnel bullet holes, shun holes. Yeah, they found that there were areas that didn't ever seem to get hit. And of course, the reason why they never get hit when you got hit in a fuel tank, you didn't come back. Or the energy.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tend to be fairly sympathetic to the fire group, but it's a suspicious group of people. A lot of these people were people who were making six-figure incomes in the tech industry and then got to retire at age 33 or 35”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And save it for 70 years and invested for 70 years, you're going to have a fabulous amount of money. But myself, I'd rather be 20 years old with a few euros in my pocket on the boulevards of Paris than be 90 years old with millions of dollars. Thank you.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's called the magic of compounding. If you save and you have a decent rate of return, even a modest rate of return over hundreds of years, then you'll have a fabulous amount of money. But of course, you can't do that because you're going to want to spend some of the money, let alone let it ride for three or four generations. Now, Ben Franklin did that. In what way? Well, Ben Franklin set up an investment portfolio, and I have to admit, I'm not aware of the details of it, but it was a portfolio that was designed to last some very long period of time and benefit his charitable causes. And it actually did earn a decent rate of return over a period of more than the century and wound up being worth a lot of money. What I like to say about that is that, yes, if you put $100 into stocks,”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's an oldie, but a goodie. You know, if you or I actually know how to reliably beat the market, you're not going to tell anybody about it. You're not even going to tell your own mother about it. You are going to leverage yourself to the hilt. You're not going to take anybody else's money that's not viewed, that you haven't borrowed yourself. And then when you're done, you'll go to the beach. You're sure is not You're sure as heck not going to publish a newsletter and sell it for $200 a year.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source