Transcript
A (0:00)
I'm Curtis Peirce. For those that don't know me, I'm David's co founder and business partner. You're one of the most prolific interviewers of the world's top institutional investors. Today we're putting you in the hot seat to explore some of the most important lessons that you've learned over 300 interviews over the last two plus years. You recently made the comment to me that Alpha is not what people think it is. How do people traditionally think about Alpha and what do they get wrong?
B (0:24)
Experienced CIOs implicitly grasp this, but Alpha is in the hard and the boring. I recently had dinner with the chairman of Jeffries, who founded a firm called Leucadia. His name's Joseph Steinberg and he won't even jump on camera. He's, he doesn't believe in doing press. He's very much focused on his business. We spent three hours together. I asked him to like, like what determines what he's interested in. He said it has to be hard or boring and ideally both. Alpha, as portrayed in movies like the Big short or on TV or in YouTube shorts or TikToks, is this like stroke of genius. You're in the shower and you get this genius idea, let's short the mortgage crisis. Nothing could be further from the truth. Alpha is about doing the things that people don't want to do. There's this well known entrepreneurial meme which is if you want to get rich, you start a garbage disposal business. The same lessons apply to investing. It's focusing on the things that people don't want to do and focusing in the areas that people don't want to focus on.
A (1:36)
Would it be accurate to say, based on that description, that Alpha is more about avoiding these trades, these stroke of genius ideas, and more about finding the consistent compounding areas or factors that lead to true outperformance consistently over time.
B (1:56)
I interviewed Bill Brown, episode 253, who actually did the big short trade. He wasn't the main investor, but at the Stern family office they did a sizable trade. They knew all the parties, the guy who's portrayed and Big Shore from Deutsche bank and all these characters. And even that, even the most famous, most sexy trade of all time wasn't the stroke of genius. It was a lot of work. It was talking to a lot of people, talking to all the different banks, figuring out the unknown unknowns, like what are we missing in the trade? Building conviction. And then it was a lot of execution and trading and recalibrating. So even the most extreme Example of alpha being the stroke of genius was not actually a stroke of genius. That being said, 99% of investments are not the big short. 99.999%. If you take a 50,000 square foot view, Alpha is much more about portfolio construction than these structural genius trades. In fact, there's a famous pension Fund study that 90% of returns at pension funds could be predicted by their portfolio construction, not by their manager selection. So figuring out how to construct your portfolio, which sounds extremely boring and not sexy, is actually where alpha is more so than picking the trade or picking the manager that's just going to outperform.
