Griffith: Public market investing requires operating with imperfect information and frequent mistakes
Reade Griffith · Reade Griffith – Managing Assets and Partnerships at Tetragon (Capital Allocators, EP.276) · Oct 17, 2022 · at 21:08
Reade Griffith, co-founder and CIO of Tetragon and Polygon Global Partners, explains why he specifically preferred hiring mid-career investors who had already experienced making mistakes.
0:00 / 0:39exact quote · 39.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“As a private market investor, you get, at least in your starting gun, you have near perfect information, all the data about the business, you get inside, you can do your surveys of what other competitors are doing, and really make a very educated decision at the time you make the investment. Public market investing, it's always investing with bits of information. People are telling you what they want to tell you, not necessarily what the truth is, and you have to glean for yourself. You're going to be wrong a lot, and you have to get used to that, and so if you haven't yet made mistakes, you're going to, and there's those mistakes that you learn the most from”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Reade Griffith
Griffith: High-frequency trading is retail flow arbitrage, not genuine liquidity
“I'm not a fan of high-frequency trading, so I see it as an arbitrage on retail flows. I know people argue that they're providing liquidity. I don't believe it. It's a high-sharp ratio strategy. I don't like things where I think people are making money on almos…”
Griffith: In 1995 Only Two to Four Corporate Hedge Funds Reached $1B
“And a big, big macro hedge fund at the time would have been three to five billion. And there were only two or three or four A billion dollar, what I call micro hedge funds, focusing on corporate actions, and Baker and I was one of them.”
Griffith: Post-2008 US bull market conditioned mid-career investors to maximize long risk
“I mean, since 2008, other than the last 12 months, the US market was just up and to the right. There are a lot of people who are in the middle of their careers who've only seen getting long risk benefit, and those who took the most risk made the most, and it's…”
Griffith: European markets may face much higher volatility over the next five years
“Now, the next five years in Europe may be much more volatile. If you don't have the toolkit, you're going to build the toolkit, but you're building it rather than employing it.”
Griffith: Macro drivers cannot be separated from corporate investing in Europe
“Europe, you have not been able to strip the macro from the micro because the macro has been driving the micro for much of the last two decades. In the U.S. It's been much less so.”
Griffith: European markets often misprice short-duration headline risks cheaply
“But what I've often seen is that there has been mispricing in Europe In what I perceive to be short duration risk, things that might happen in the next two or three months that could be very volatile, and you've been able to buy the equity market or currency o…”