Wall Street

“So my initial launch report, I had more sells than buys, which was unheard of on Wall Street. And the reason we could do it is we didn't have any corporate finance arm. So they had an investment arm. They had no traditional underwriting arm.”

“The first is the easiest thing to sell is whatever has just been working. And the reason it's the easiest to sell is because it's the only thing the buyer wants is to be a part of whatever's working now.”

“There is no amount of regulation and I'm pro regulation, but there is no amount of it that's going to cure, you know, the fear and greed aspect to investing or that's going to stop someone from doing what they want to do, like in the end. And you can do, Three…”

“One, active management isn't going away. So I think there will always be a portion of the market that wants to outperform and is willing to pay for the option around outperformance. So I think that's going to still be here.”

“You have to understand you can't keep surging all the time, because eventually people are going to break, and when that opportunity to move comes, they're going to move, and it's going to happen just when you don't want them to move.”

“If there's any attempt to do so, and you've committed to four dollars and 25 cents of earnings per share, the moment something goes wrong, you're going to cut the vital spending that's forward-looking. And, you know, it's the old story about the urgent trumps …”

“All of the pitfalls of behavioral finance and the study about why people make predictable but irrational decisions when it comes to equities, so much has to do with equities in a relatively near term. And then over a relatively longer term, if you're right on …”

“I couldn't believe the way people were compensated. I couldn't believe the way people were promoted. It was literally an old boy system, and I went right after that, and helped create the first performance evaluation in the history of Wall Street.”

“You know, the further down the value chain you get in asset management, in my view, sort of, not asset management, financial services. You have asset allocators on the end. They're the nicest group. And then within that group, probably corporate funds are the …”

“Genuinely, the average IQ and EQ on Wall Street, and the general hunger and ambition and drive, all that, man, is literally top one percent. You go into the real world, into industry, into corporate, man, it's like night and day. So I was used to Wall Street c…”

“When you are an investor, especially a public market investor, you, and I hope I don't offend anybody on Wall Street, you actually think you're smarter than you actually are. Because you're analyzing all the numbers, and you're making these bets, and you're li…”

“In fact, the established firms moved from commission business to trading businesses, trading against their customers, really. The prop desks became established. And then subsequently, as volume exploded, as, in fact, commission business could work. The prop tr…”

“Most people spend 95% of their time crunching numbers, running DCF models, which by the way, has zero competitive advantage, because you have thousands upon thousands of people doing the same work.”

“To my Wall Street brethren, brothers and sisters that are listening to this podcast, I got bad news for you got about another 10 to 15 years to go, Before the cycle will swing back and you'll fall back into favor, but you're still going to be treated like pari…”

“Wall Street is the arterial structure of the capitalist system. It's literally the design of where capital can flow. You want to go into fracking, you come to Wall Street, you raise money. You want to build a new search engine, your name is Google, you come to…”

“Frankly, we can run money at one-tenth the cost of hiring somebody here on Wall Street to do the same thing”

“I'm not that bothered by this for a couple of reasons. One, it's like Many of these stories result in companies getting cheap financing and it's like, well, you have this derivatives market. Company didn't ask for it. It was just like grew up independently of …”

“We think the whole OCIO concept has been underappreciated by Wall Street, because the big firms who are getting into the space see it as a distribution arm. You know, it's a label. They want to Get more assets. Good. But we see it as actually this sea change …”

“I spend more money now than I did when I was on Wall Street. I'm negative income still.”

“You should not be selling over-the-counter products with leverage that take 10 days to settle like a leverage loan to retail and acting like, yeah, it's all going to be fine, but it's not.”

“One of the areas that African Americans always got pushed into was municipal finance. Why? Because they felt like government institutions would be a better place for them to go knocking and calling versus calling on corporate America.”

“Wall Street's a meritocracy. And I always say the numbers don't lie. And at the end of the year, you can add everything up. Well, if an African-American marketing professional or asset manager or portfolio manager had much less in the way of an opportunity set…”

“And so the game that's played on Wall Street that isn't so subtle is that if there is a client And the firm wants to do business with that client. They think that they need to select a woman if that client is a woman. Or they think they need to select an Afric…”

“Sponsors for educational opportunity, and great organization, probably responsible for 60 to 70% of the African American population on Wall Street at one point.”

“I think on our, the one trading floor that I worked on, there were approximately 600 professionals. My rough recollection was there were no more than counting me, I believe, five African Americans on the whole floor. And I think there were only to my best reco…”

“And I spent a lot of time thinking about, man, why are all these really smart people with tons of skin in the game making such obvious errors? And my conclusion was it's structural. It's not that these people don't see it. It's that incentives are everything. …”

“I saw a majority of the people, as I say, living out the Henry David Thoreau quote, which is the mass of people lead lives of quiet desperation. There were people there who absolutely loved what they did. They had Bloomberg terminals at home. They read Barron'…”

“If you go to Wall Street, And the 10 analysts tell you need to buy this stock. So, absolute unanimity. More than likely, you should not take their advice.”

“But I think the average net cash position across all of Wall Street right now is about two percent. So there's not exactly a lot of dry powder.”

“In the operating world, you're looking a lot less for rounded people and more for specific talents. And so what I would say is I want that intense bar that you had when I was trying to get a job at a hedge fund or at a bank, but in the operating world, I reall…”

“This isn't summer camp, like we're paying you, you're not paying us. So like figure out, and that's what I learned from him, figure out how to add value. And then along the way, we'll train you as opposed to it's our job to train you.”

“And what we've found again in more than 23 years of investing in health care is that the consensus estimates from Wall Street Are wrong about 90% of the time.”

“And, you know, to further expand Colin's point, a lot of African names used to be covered, and then got dropped because of the last four or five years, and generally Wall Street and Southside being under pressure and letting go of people.”

“I'll tell you how it happens because we have a lot of Wall Street firms who have a conflict of interest. They can wrap it into this new bottle and slap on another 40 base points of fees for it.”

“The nature of most Wall Street innovation is it's never stress tested for a rainy day, because that wouldn't be any fun. It's fun to sell a lot of bonds, sell a lot of stocks, sell a lot of partnerships, and rake in the investment banking fees, but when the ra…”

“The basic line that Peter Lynch hammers home is that there's a few disciplines you need to learn in terms of accounting and some basic knowledge about investing, but the real edge that you can have to beat Wall Street is if you have deep domain expertise in a …”

“And so my view as the foundation of the firm was research, and we needed to invert the pyramid where research is the foundation of financial investing and advising, then trading, and then if you can trade it and buy it, you can work on selling it.”

“Ivan Boski was probably the most revered and respected risk arbitrageur on Wall Street. He had accounts with every firm. In fact, he did very little trading with Drexel. He was probably the largest equity buyer of securities of stocks at the time for any firm …”

“I think also acknowledging that fear exists, which most of the time is completely unacceptable on Wall Street, has been Helpful to me, because it does exist, and anyone that tells you it doesn't is either a sociopath or is lying.”

“In my travels on Wall Street and in finance and sell side and buy side, people's assumptions about, oh, well, you just do this. Take those machines and put them over here. Take the equipment out of wherever, China, and just move it to the Philippines. It's lik…”

“There's a lot of things pitched often by the dealer side, Wall Street side, that we don't really believe in, and we will go in and talk to clients, and we've frequently done this. We put some Surgeon General's warnings on things. We're like, here's where that …”

“So corporate carve outs are always been our classic example, where on the other side was a big public conglomerate, new CEOs installed, wants to divest from a particular business unit that's underperforming. That's a great setup. They typically have a time clo…”

“In this market, it's been fun because we are viscerally exploiting or have been the specialist trap, where if you're an industry Wall Street specialist, you've looked at the same industry for 15 years, you're in an echo chamber talking about Peer analysts, man…”

“We think that Wall Street is getting a little short on places to stick the stumps. They're coming up in special situations funds. They're coming up in interval funds. They're coming up in places that people may not appreciate what happens when you're not getti…”