Strategas Research Partners CEO Talks Financial Services

Summary

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Bloomberg Talks – Episode Summary

Episode Title: Strategas Research Partners CEO Talks Financial Services
Date: March 17, 2026
Host: Tom Keene (with Paul)
Guest: Jason Trennor, CEO, Strategas Research Partners

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Episode Overview

In this insightful episode, Tom Keene and Paul sit down with Jason Trennor, CEO of Strategas Research Partners, to dive into the realities of Wall Street beyond the headlines. Trennor emphasizes the societal value of financial services, debates the risks and returns of private credit and alternative assets, examines the impact of AI and infrastructure spending, and reflects on personal lessons from his recent health challenges. The conversation is marked by frankness, wit, and deep industry knowledge.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Real Wall Street and Its Social Purpose

• [01:06] Jason Trennor discusses his motivation for writing "My Side of the Street," aiming to dispel myths about the financial industry by focusing on "the 6 million people in financial services" and emphasizing its important societal function:

  “I truly believe financial services serve a social purpose, an important social service purpose to raise capital, breathe life into dreams and raise capital for research and development..."

• He shares a personal perspective, noting he didn't come from a Wall Street background but developed a genuine passion for markets.

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2. Private Credit: Opacity, Risk, and Opportunity

• [02:12] Concerns over the growing trend towards private credit.

  “The problem with the private assets, of course, is the opacity... which also tends to be the attraction for a lot of pensions, endowments and foundations because it seems less volatile, although it's not.“

• Warns that history shows Wall Street’s creativity in extending credit to marginal players can end poorly.

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3. Geopolitical Risks & Infrastructure Spend

• [02:59] Current client conversations revolve around three themes:

  • Ongoing war and geopolitical tensions, especially the situation in Iran.
  • The persistence and risks of private credit.
  • The robustness of infrastructure spending in AI.

  “If this [the war/instability] lasts another couple of weeks, it’s going to be real problems... infrastructure spend, it’s really hard to fade that.”

• AI investments are still in early adoption, with only a small fraction of U.S. companies utilizing AI extensively ([04:30]).

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4. The Reality of AI Adoption

• Companies and investors now seek not just promises but real-world AI use cases and demonstrable ROI ([04:08]).

  “According to the Census Bureau, it’s only 5% of companies [using AI], on a labor-weighted basis, maybe 20%. So there’s a long way to go.” — Jason Trennor, [04:30]

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5. Shifting Value in Growth & Passive Investing

• [05:11] Discussion around the enduring appeal of growth stocks and ‘fear of missing out.’

• Trennor notes the outdated nature of traditional value investing tools:

  "Graham and Dodd was like... now it’s a book. Now it’s like a doorstop, you know, valuation basically since the GF is tragic." — Jason Trennor, [05:38]

• Despite a theoretical case for value, U.S. market innovation keeps drawing capital back.

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6. Alternatives, Liquidity, and the 60/40 Portfolio

• [06:43] The increasing allocation to alternatives (alts) by large funds.

  “People are conflating the idea of risk and volatility. The thing is the observed volatility of private assets is very low… but if you actually had to sell, the volatility would be very high... liquidity is always there until you need it, and then it’s an issue.” — Jason Trennor, [07:01]

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7. Market Sentiment & Generational Investing

• [07:47] The "silly season" of conspicuous consumption primarily affects the wealthy, but middle-class and younger investors are more serious and prudent.

  “Younger people have learned from us, and they’re more serious about it… much better than burying it in a savings account.” — Jason Trennor, [08:36]

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8. Personal Story: Facing Cancer & Life Lessons

• [08:49] Trennor shares his experience being diagnosed with multiple myeloma just before starting a government post:

  “The good news in multiple myeloma is it's… just chronic and it's treatable. But last nine months was... something else. Unlike anything I’ve ever experienced...” — Jason Trennor, [08:58]

• He encourages listeners to prioritize medical checkups:

  “...you've got to focus on your health because you can't do all the other things. You know, being a father, being a husband... It's important that you catch this stuff early.” — Jason Trennor, [09:58]

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9. Investment Strategy: Cautious Optimism

• [10:59] On client guidance and market outlook:

  “You have to manage expectations about returns moving forward... There’s not a lot of room. You have to really find idiosyncratic bets or you have to find things to really get big returns... you can’t rely on outsized returns from the public markets to sustain you.” — Jason Trennor, [11:21]

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10. Closing Reflections

• Lighthearted reflection on leadership change in the New York Archdiocese, sharing an anecdote about Cardinal Dolan:

  “He was eating a chocolate bar and he looked at me and he said, it's good for the kidneys. So this guy, you know, this guy's ready to give you a hard time. He's very funny.” — Jason Trennor, [12:19]

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Selected Notable Quotes

• "Liquidity is always there until you need it, and then it’s an issue." — Jason Trennor, [07:01]
• "The problem with private assets, of course, is the opacity..." — Jason Trennor, [02:12]
• "According to the Census Bureau, it’s only 5% of companies [using AI], on a labor-weighted basis maybe 20%." — Jason Trennor, [04:30]
• "Younger people have learned from us, and they’re more serious about it." — Jason Trennor, [08:36]
• "You have to manage expectations about returns moving forward... you can’t rely on outsized returns from the public markets to sustain you." — Jason Trennor, [11:21]
• "When you’re in a situation where you’re dealing with the treatments, you really are incapable of doing all the things that you love to do. So it’s important that you catch this stuff early." — Jason Trennor, [09:58]

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Important Timestamps

• [01:06] Trennor on the true purpose of financial services
• [02:12] Risks of private credit and asset opacity
• [02:59] Top client concerns: war, private credit, AI infrastructure
• [04:30] Real-world AI adoption statistics
• [05:38] Value growth, liquidity, and U.S. market dominance
• [07:01] Critique of alternative assets and liquidity risk
• [08:49] Personal health and cancer diagnosis story
• [11:21] Managing return expectations for investors
• [12:19] Reflections on leadership within the Catholic Church

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Overall Tone and Style

The episode is candid, thoughtful, and balanced between strategic financial analysis and personal storytelling. Trennor brings clarity to complex market dynamics while offering grounded advice for both investors and listeners on life’s unpredictability.

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Transcript

[IBM Representative]

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[Jason Trennor]

Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts, Radio news.

[Tom Keene]

So what you do, you know, if you're 19 year old kid, you know, I mean, you know it was, it was a difficult childhood. Jason Trenor with us right now and he summed up up in a book recently we're strategic working with Ed Hyman years ago and this is a book from like you know, ages back My side of the street. Why Wolves, Flash boys, quants and masters of the universe don't represent the real Wall Street. What is the real Wall Street?

[Jason Trennor]

Well, you know, the point of that book is that you have about 6 million people in the financial services in this country. And I truly believe financial services serve a social purpose, an important social service purpose to raise capital, breathe life into dreams and raise capital for research and development, all the rest of it. Unfortunately, the headlines tend to get hijacked by some of the bad behavior of Wall street. And I just wanted to give a very human, you know, approach to the way I grew up and I didn't grow up in any sort of, you know, Wall street family but I love the financial markets and I think they're important.

[Tom Keene]

You have led the way on this of almost a. So it's Robert Shiller, Yale leading on a social mandate of it. Once again Paul's led on this. Frankly we have the joy of private credit, private equity and some would say the agreed to make another 200 beeps on yield. Do you perceive it strategists that private credit is a challenge to our future?

[Jason Trennor]

I do. I mean, you know, and this is just based on experience. I think the problem with the private assets of course is the opacity which which also tends to be the attraction for a lot of pensions endowments and found because it seems less volatile, although it's not. But based on experience I would say that there's probably going to be more problems and that's only because Wall street is great at finding ways, very creative ways to extend credit to marginal players and it usually works out worse than people thought.

[Paul]

Jason, what's the conversation? You're having with your clients these days? We've got geopolitical risk front and center seemingly for a long time now. Now with what's going on in Iran, how do you put that in context of kind of just the conversation you're having with clients?

[Jason Trennor]

Yeah, no, it's. Good question. Three big things we're talking about with clients, obviously the war, private credit and the sustainability of the infrastructure spend on artificial intelligence. And the way, the way we're looking at it is as we discussed, we think private credit is going to stick around for a while. I don't think it's, we don't think it's systemic. We think the war is a big deal. The long, the longer it lasts, longer, you know, people forget we've had a 50% increase in the price of oil. And three, it's, it's only two weeks. You know, this lasts another couple of weeks, it's going to be real problems. Ironically, the infrastructure spend, it's really hard to fade that. I just have to say we look at the cash flows, you look at the fact that these companies are issuing debt.

[Paul]

Yep.

[Jason Trennor]

And we look at Jensen Wang's comments last night. I mean, it's pretty stunning. And he's, you know, he hasn't been, I'll try to clean this up. He hasn't been. He's been lying to us, let's put it that way. He's been promotional.

[Paul]

Some people will say, of course, maybe, but boy, he's been. Right.

[Jason Trennor]

Yeah, he's been, you know, it's again hard to fade what he said because he's largely been correct.

[Paul]

So, so I mean, I guess the, you know, before Iran erupted, I guess the trade was really the driver for these markets, really for the last two or three years. On the way up, I mean, you could spend enough on AI and now it's coming to the point where we want to see use cases, we want to see returns on investment. And that's where we've seen it spin to another direction. If you're a software company, you got a lot of explaining to do.

[Jason Trennor]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And we actually, in our piece this morning, we have a chart from the Census Department that's also based on the anthropic study. But you look at the companies that, and industries that are using AI, it's actually quite small. I mean, if you, according to the Census Bureau, it's only 5% of companies on a, on a labor weighted basis, it's maybe 20%. So there's a long way to go. Although I will say just as someone runs a business, you know, it's, it's expensive and it, it's not always easier or obvious what you need to do to incorporate into your business.

[Tom Keene]

An extended discussion with Jason Trent, Strategic Research with us today. Help me here with the meat and potatoes of retail, which is growth Stocks always work. Fear missing out. Step in by 7, 10, 12, 15 stocks. You know, years ago you put this up front and link it into Ed Hyman's economic call. Now you do it with your great team Strategic as you put up with Dan Clifton, which itself is a challenge. Recapitulate the value of growth right now.

[Jason Trennor]

Yeah, I mean the funny thing is Tom, you know, I started maybe 35 years ago. Graham and Dodd was like, it was important, you know, now it's a book. Now it's like a doorstop, you know, valuation basically since the GF is tragic.

[Tom Keene]

I don't, I agree literally have Graham and Dodd folks on my desk here. Alexis told me to clean my desk, but underneath it there's a gram and discuss.

[Jason Trennor]

It's kind of sad because. Well, it's kind of sad if you've been trained in this business because you almost throw out a lot of your training and you have to, you have to really focus on the liquidity in the markets and you have to focus on obviously growth, top line growth as opposed to necessarily bottom line growth. But I do think the, going into this year we were very much of the view that you wanted to be an equal weight S and P. You wanted to be more in value sectors and, and you want it to be more an international mainly because they are more value oriented than growth oriented. What you see though when you have dislocations is it's really hard to get away from the US because it's the only country in the world that really has this kind of innovation, sadly. But that's the way it is.

[Paul]

How about alternative investment alts as the kids like to call them? I mean the 6040 portfolio of equities in fixed income, it really increasingly, particularly with the biggest endowments and pension funds, increasingly increasing their allocations to alternatives. How do you think about that? Because a lot of folks are starting to question that now.

[Jason Trennor]

Yeah, I think they should question it. As we were talking about before, people are conflating the idea of risk and volatility. The thing is the observed volatility of private assets is very low and that's because they don't transact very often. But if you actually had to sell would the volatility would be very high and so again, the opacity is the, is the feature in many ways. But I think what a lot of endowments and foundations are finding, pensions too, is that liquidity has a significant price when the markets get in trouble. And if you have trouble meeting the actuarial assumptions, you have trouble meeting the spending requirements that you have. The liquidity has a significant price. So liquidity is always there until you need it, and then it's, then it's an issue.

[Tom Keene]

What's a Trenor exuberance meter look like right now? Are we in the silly season mean? Paul, help me here. How many square feet? I mean, Hamptons is up like 25% or something. You know, are we in the silly season?

[Jason Trennor]

I think for wealthy people, we're very much in the silly season. I think it's gotten kind of out of control and there's a lot of signs of conspicuous consumption. I don't want to make normative judgments, but it's not kind of my, my thing. But by the same token, I think for the average person, it's, it's nowhere near the silly season. And I do think mercifully, a lot of individual investors are investing in the market, which I think is, there's, there's more of a conception now that's an important thing for even middle class people, which wasn't the case, let's say for my parents.

[Paul]

I think younger people are investing more.

[Jason Trennor]

Absolutely.

[Tom Keene]

I think the younger people have learned from us and they're more serious about it.

[Paul]

Yeah.

[Jason Trennor]

Which is great. And you know, there's, there'll be some bruises along the way, of course, but, but it's much better than burying it in a savings account.

[Tom Keene]

Most people, when they get sick, they hide it. You wrote it up with Charlie Gasparino in the New York Post. How do you check into Sloan?

[Jason Trennor]

Well, it's, that's a long story, but the bottom line, I wasn't feeling well. I was about to, as, you know, about to enter the Treasury Department as Assistant Secretary of the treasury for financial markets. And I wanted to get checked out before I moved down to Washington and they discovered multiple myeloma. And so the, the, you know, there's not great news in that. The good news in multiple myeloma is it's not usually not fatal blood cancer. Right. It's just, it's just chronic and it's treatable. But last nine months was, was, was something else. I'll just say, I'll just say that. Unlike anything I've ever experienced, but.

[Tom Keene]

Right.

[Jason Trennor]

You know, you get through it.

[Tom Keene]

Speak to the people that don't, they ignore it. They ignore the pain in the elbow.

[Jason Trennor]

Yeah.

[Tom Keene]

You know, colon cancer, more serious cancer, frankly. What's the trigger? Where you say, I got to go to Sloan, I got to go to Weill Cornell.

[Jason Trennor]

You know, Tom, I don't know, because before this happened, I was going at about a thousand miles an hour. Okay. I was traveling 70, 80 days a year. I would go to the doctor maybe once a year, and I would ignore a lot of things and. Sounds familiar, you know, so you would just go kind of just in time and that type of thing. I really would stress to people that it sounds corny, but you've got to focus on your health because you can't do all the other things. You know, being a father, being a husband, you know, again, it sounds very corny, but when you're in a situation where you're dealing with the treatments, you really are incapable of doing all the things that you love to do. So it's important that you catch this stuff early.

[Tom Keene]

Are you back at Strategus or is Dan Clifton running the whole thing?

[Jason Trennor]

Oh, no. Are you kidding me? Now, Dan is, of course, one of the greats. Great. One of the great analysts. But I'm back every day, every morning, and so. And it's the best medicine for me.

[Tom Keene]

Fabulous.

[Paul]

Fantastic. So what's. What are you telling your clients these days? Just about investing going forward here, because it seems like there's more options than ever. There's ETFs, that's blown up in our lifetime. And to become such a huge asset class. What are you telling your clients here? Is it the diversification story? Is it the courage to be in the market is all of above.

[Jason Trennor]

Yeah. So I mean, our clients are institutional investors, so sometimes they must be fully invested. Other times they don't have a lot of leeway in terms of, let's say, cash. But I'm very much of the view that you have to. And I've been saying this for a while, but I think people have to manage their expectations about returns moving forward because you're starting at, say, use round numbers, 22 times earnings and about, what, a little less than 25 times earnings for the 10 year treasury yield. So there's not a lot of room. You have to really find idiosyncratic bets or you have to find things to really get big returns. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be invested. But it also means that as we were talking about before, you can't rely on outsized returns from the public markets to sustain you.

[Tom Keene]

One final question. A sea change on Fifth Avenue. Archbishop Ronald Hicks. Boy, does he have big shoes. Discuss that shift.

[Jason Trennor]

Yeah, well, it's. I'm a big fan. I'm a big fan of Cardinal Dolan and big, you know, big fan of Cardinal Hicks. Cardinal Dolan is a character. I was seated next to him at the Museum of American Finance's gala, and he was eating a chocolate bar and he looked at me and he said, it's good for the kidneys. So this guy, you know, this guy's ready to give you a hard time. He's very funny. And I'm so thrilled that he'll be sticking around in the city as chaplain for the New York Police Department. I think Hicks obviously will benefit from the fact, although some people question that he'll benefit from the fact that Cardinal Dolan is around. And in any event, we're blessed to have those two gentlemen leading the flock.

[Tom Keene]

Jason Trenor, thank you so much.

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[Dr. Guy Winch]

[e-mail] for many men, mental health challenges aren't recognized until they've already taken a toll. Work pressure, financial stress, changing relationships, and traditional expectations around masculinity can quietly wear men down, often without clear warning signs. In season three of the Visibility Gap, Dr. Guy Winch and his guests explore how these pressures show up, how them earlier, and how men can access meaningful support. Listen to the new season of the Visibility Gap, a podcast presented by Cigna Healthcare.