Everything Paul Sonkin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Sonkin: Highly creative people show much higher rates of neurodivergence and mood disorders
“The people that are the most creative, if you look at, again, this 90 years of literature, they tend to, many times above the population They have mood disorders, depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, Asperger's, OCD.”
Sonkin: Top long-term outperforming investors have less specialization than allocators expect
“The other problem that we kind of see with allocators is that they're looking, well, and you can opine on this more than I can, is that they're looking for specialization, and if you look at the people that have really outperformed over long periods of time, t…”
Sonkin: Quant crisis of August 2007 was driven by model uniformity
“We talk about the quant crisis of August of oh seven as a perfect example when you don't have diversity in the shareholder base. And that was what really caused it, is that you had so many quants that were using the same models, so there wasn't a lot of divers…”
Sonkin: U.S. Exchange Listings Halved From 8,000 in 1996 to 4,000
“So the companies in 1996, there were 8000 companies on organized U.S. Exchanges, which doesn't include the pink sheets and the OTC bulletin board. And that is 4000 companies now, even though on our levels of GDP, it should be 10,000.”
Sonkin: Scaling an investment position requires transferring idea ownership from analyst to PM
“In order to get the portfolio manager to actually scale the position, there has to be a transfer of ownership from the analyst to the portfolio manager, and the problem that you have is that there's a lot of subconscious emotions going on in the portfolio mana…”
Sonkin: Optimal analyst-PM relationships require both doing 90% work, claiming 48% credit
“In order to have an optimally functioning relationship between the analyst and the portfolio manager, each of them have to do 90% of the work and take 48% of the credit.”
Sonkin: PMs Won't Buy Stocks Unless Pitches Clearly Articulate the Edge
“Where most people screw it up is they don't fully articulate why the stock is mispriced, and a portfolio manager subconsciously, unless they feel as though they fully understand that, They're not going to buy the stock, and if you think about it, if you can ex…”
Sonkin: Generating investment alpha is fundamentally an act of creativity
“The definition of creativity, the formal definition in cognitive science, is something which is novel and that has value. So if you think about a variant perspective that is a view that is different from the consensus, which is something novel, and then you ha…”
Sonkin: Has not read a finance book in years, prefers journal papers
“Like, I'd say that I probably read like a few hundred journal papers a year, and there aren't, like, there aren't very many good finance books that come, come out. So, I haven't read a finance book in years.”
Sonkin: Convincing yourself and pitching others require different skill sets
“So what we've always thought is that first you have to convince yourself on an idea, and then you have to convince someone else, and those require two very different Skills.”
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