Insight
Johnson: Markets Form Robust Consensus With Few Smart Participants
“The sad part about wisdom of the crowds is, we figured it out, is you don't need as many people as you think to get a wise crowd. You think you'd have to have all these really smart, sophisticated people. Ends up, you don't. The robust, we call it a robust con…”
Insight
Johnson: Engineers Make Terrible Investors When Ignoring Crowd Psychology
“Some of my former friends that are engineers make terrible investors. Not all engineers make, but my friends that were former engineers, because they kept thinking it's an engineering problem. I said, no, it's a, I mean, it is potentially an engineering proble…”
Opinion
Johnson: External red teams are too time-prohibitive for daily investment decisions
“And the problem with red teams, particularly in the investment businesses, since we're making decisions almost daily or certainly fairly frequently, having a red team coming in and prepping them is probably prohibitive in terms of time and energy.”
Insight
Paul Johnson: Investment research is useless unless pitched effectively to scale positions
“And now I'm a complete convert, which is that unless you can pitch this stock, get the portfolio manager, not only buy it, but then scale the position. It just doesn't matter. It's the proverbial tree in the woods.”
Insight
Johnson: Investor diversity and independence are fundamentally distinct market mechanisms
“Diversity and independence are completely different issues. Lack of diversity is when everyone's thinking the same way. Independence is slightly different, where people are diverse, but when they go to express their opinion, then they're collectively influence…”
Insight
Johnson: Non-diverse shareholder bases make stocks prone to violent moves
“Just because you lack diversity or independence doesn't mean they're wrong. And there's a subtlety there that's not insignificant. We're not saying that Amazon is mispriced. We're just saying the crowd's not very diverse. So if an event happens that challenges…”
Insight
Johnson: Index funds are price takers whose bear-market impact remains unknown
“Index funds by definition are price takers. And what we don't fully know is what happens if We ever have a bear market and index funds have to sell.”
Insight
Paul Johnson: Investment edge is strictly informational, analytical, or trading
“So an edge is either I know something the market doesn't know, that's that information, I have figured something out, what we say in the book, I see something the market doesn't see, or I have a trading advantage, which is either I'm willing to trade or I have…”
Insight
Johnson: Analysts must match a portfolio manager's schema to be heard
“So that first part of it is the scheme, and it ends up that the scheme is shockingly important, and it's important really as we continue to play with it is you're not going to get the portfolio manager to listen unless you match the stated schema.”
Insight
Johnson: The litmus test for creative teams is how they handle wrong ideas
“The litmus test for whether you have a creative organization is what do you do with people that are wrong? Because creativity is different. A lot of it's going to be wrong. Well, if you take people that are wrong, and I guess we, our analogy for the podcast is…”
Disclosure
Johnson: Stopped reading newspapers in favor of reading books
“So, as a rule, which shocks people, I stopped reading newspapers, and what I do is I use all that time to read books. I want to learn to think rather than read the news.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Johnson: A 27-person pre-mortem uncovered four path-critical risks I missed
“I ran a pre-mortem a year ago on a project we were going to launch. 27 people in the room. Wrote 27 things down on the first pass. Five of them were path critical. Of those five, I'd only thought of one.”
Opinion
Johnson: Michael Steinhardt's language on variant perception is convoluted
“We used Michael Steinhardt's variant perception as a very important cornerstone of thinking about how you get an edge in the market. And it was clear that his language is somewhat convoluted. The guy's brilliant, but his language is a little convoluted.”
