Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
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Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q Porter, you want to go back further than that?
A I was a Olympic rower, and I obviously had no income doing that. And so I got a job working for a firm called Commodities Corporation. Commodities Corporation was then bought by Goldman Sachs. And I did the two-year analyst program at Goldman, which was in Princeton, New Jersey, where I was rowing and living. After the 2000 Olympics, I knew I wanted to go to New York City and pounded pavement and knocked on a lot of doors and eventually got a job at a hedge fund called the Chilton Investment Corporation. I was the junior analyst there covering retail and consumer mostly. One of my bosses left and Richard basically came to me and said, well, Your family's background is in banking. Why don't you go work for Steve? And Steve Eisen was the financial services analyst there. Steve sat me down, had a good long talk. And he said, before you even start working for me, you have to spend five weeks reading, knowing about who I am, what I like, and the books I like. And so I did that for a little while and then worked for Steve and we left and then started Frontpoint with Vinny.
AI assessment note: “I was a Olympic rower, and I obviously had no income doing that.”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q When you were so deep in financials, how did you start thinking about the process of adding in other sectors to become a generalist?
A Most financial services funds or people that still do financial services funds, they do banks. And as long as I've been an investor and doing banks, I've hated banks, and there's been a lot of bad management teams, and so we historically, for 1520 years, had been short banks along other parts of financial services. From that angle, it wasn't all that hard, and what we did a lot of is looked at companies that financed all different types of businesses. So is leasing businesses, leasing ships, leasing cars, So from that angle, we touched a lot of industrials. And even back at Formpoint, we did a lot of industrials and cyclical stuff. Because financial services touches so many sectors, you had to really learn and be up on a lot of that stuff. And so it was a natural extension. I think it's fair to say Vincent and I are not good at is a growth investor. So we didn't want to force it and change something that we're not really good at. That's not my expertise. I can't buy a 35 times sales business and hope it goes to 50. That's just not who I am.
AI assessment note: “Because financial services touches so many sectors, you had to really learn”
Answered produced feed
D 3 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 3 3.55
Q In order to generate the returns you guys have the last couple of years on your own capital, you had to have a portfolio that looked a lot different from the ones you had in the past. What is the structure of that portfolio look like today?
A What we are is value investors. Even when we were doing financial service only, the average P.E. was five. I think now our average P.E. is three. And we love finding little gems in the middle of nowhere where people don't think it can go anywhere. And sometimes we like to keep it in the portfolio and sit on it, and you know that there's an inflection point coming. When that catalyst comes is hard. Klarman's book, Margin of Safety, which is one of my favorites. That really speaks to me in terms of the stock doesn't have much downside. Maybe it has 10, 15, 20% downside, but if things go right, it can be a, I think we had 12 bagger last year in some of these names. And go back to our credit experience, we always start with the balance sheet. What does the balance sheet look like? How much can we lose here? What happens if the income statement inflects, and it all becomes circular? Because the income statement inflects, the cash flows get better, the debt goes down, the cash goes up, then they start buying back stock, the share count goes down, and that's the iterative nature of the stuff that we're looking for. I'm, again, putting my own capital behind this. I sleep super well at night because I know that this is not much downside, and if something goes right, I think I can make a lot of money here. And being patient and not worrying about, I don't know, the market's up two percen…
AI assessment note: “What we are is value investors... I think now our average P.E. is three.”
Answered produced feed
D 3 · C 3 · P 3 · Cm 3 3.00
Q So what did it take to go from a college rower to make the Olympics?
A Like short selling, maybe it's the pain aspect of rowing that's so comfortable for me. What I'm good at is just perseverance, and hard work, and showing up, and that's what I've always done, and working in a team atmosphere, that's my North Star. That's what I learned and I trained so well on. You have ups and downs in this career, and after what I went through, nothing was really that hard. For me, I went to work, and I'm like, this stuff's easy. That's the background that I had, and I feel really blessed to have had the competitive nature that my friends and I were competing for the team. I mean, we bashed our heads in for years, and Mark had still bashed my head in, but that was just second nature to me.
AI assessment note: “What I'm good at is just perseverance, and hard work, and showing up”
