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The Wall Street Skinny
142. A Conversation with the Co-CIO of Bridgewater | Karen Karniol-Tambour
00:32:56
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- [00:00]
Kristen
Guys, we are so excited to finally announce the launch of our long awaited talent accelerator, our exclusive live virtual training series. This is our chance to bring you our signature training to any company that wants their incoming talent trained by us, Kristen and Jen.
- [00:15]
Jen
We are running three live sessions over the next two months. First up, our Excel and Financial modeling bootcamp on May 8th through 9th, designed to get your new hires up the curve on Excel, accounting and integrated modeling fast. Then in June, we're running two intern focused sessions. Our Investment Banking and Private equity accelerator from June 2nd to June 5th and our fixed income sales and trading accelerator from June 9th to 11th.
- [00:42]
Kristen
These are perfect for firms who want their interns to hit the ground running this summer and actually understand what's happening on the desk.
- [00:49]
Jen
And for individuals, we've got you covered too. Our self paced investment banking and private equity fundamentals course is live and available now. These courses are nothing like the boring online classes you're used to. They're video driven, visual and totally bingeable, just like our Instagram content. And yes, fixed income, sales, trading and investing self study is still coming later this year.
- [01:12]
Kristen
Check out the link in our show notes to register your firm and start learning today.
- [01:25]
Jen
Finance can be boring. But it doesn't have to be. We should know. After decades working and teaching at the world's most prestigious investment banks, private equity firms and hedge funds, we are the Wall Street Skinny. Two lifelong best friends here to explain everything about how the world of finance works and make it feel like a gossip session with your besties. We break down deals, talk about the news in the markets and bring on experts that we can ask all the dumb questions of so you can go be smarter in real life. Hi friends. Welcome back to the Wall Street Skinny. I'm Jen.
- [01:59]
Kristen
I'm Kristen.
- [02:00]
Jen
And we are so excited today to be sharing an interview that we recorded live at Global Alts with one of my longtime friends from Princeton, Karen Carnell Tambor. So when we first started this podcast, I feel like we've said that we're finally like getting the people that we wanted from like the get go with our podcast. I feel like we had to prove ourselves for a couple of years that we were going to stick around for people to to take us seriously. But Karen was so supportive when we first started our podcast and helped connect us with some of our early guests and we were like, okay, but we want you to be a guest. And because Karen is hands down, I would argue, one of the most powerful and influential and smartest and funniest and most hardworking women on Wall street, let alone like in the entire world. We're so excited to finally get her on here. Karen is the co CIO chief investment officer of Bridgewater, which is the world's largest hedge fund. Karen has been named, I think, on Baron's list of most influential women in the world. Like she's always at the top. I know forbes under like 40, under 40 as kind of a running joke. But like she was on that list. She's every single list of people who matter in investing. She's on it. So we're going to talk to Karen here in a bit. And some of the themes from our conversation were around concentration risk. So we filmed this conversation the day after the Deep Seek news broke about, hey listen, it might be possible to do some of this AI for a much cheaper startup cost. And that really shook up the markets. And Karen actually has a phenomenal newsletter called Connecting the Dots. Bridgewater has long been known for making publications available to their investor base. Connecting the Dots is a publication that Karen just launched for the Bridge broader audience. So everyone from Yumi, we don't have to be institutional investors, although it's great for institutional investors as well. I subscribed to this the second she launched it. This is not an ad like I truly am a fan. And so one of the things that Karen's going to talk about here is like she doesn't take any information for granted. It's like, okay, well there was this data release. Well, why, how do we know? What are we looking at? I think you get a little bit of that insight into how they are running their own research and experiments, exploring everything and not just taking what the pervasive mentality is even in hard data for granted. And so one of the things that she talked about in today's edition of their newsletter was concentration in the S&P 500. Just some stats from her newsletter that I think are great to have in your mind to frame the conversation about concentration risk. So currently one third of The S&P 500 is in the Magnificent Seven. That is insane, right? And another 12% is in the rest of the technology sector. So nearly half of the index is now driven by tech. I mean, that's wild, right? So when you think about what's going to happen to risk assets as a whole, when you get some kind of news that's really surprising about something like Deep Seek, it's not really that surprising then that you get a wild reaction in the markets. And that is part of why I think she some of the other investors we talked to at Global Alts, obviously they're talking their own book, right? Because these are actively managed funds. But why there is such a strong case, I think, for active versus passive management coming into a more volatile environment. And I will also say in my mind everything's so correlated now, but she actually talked about how things are less correlated than ever. So this is something on the technical side that we're going to talk about in this interview and it's a short one, it's a sweet one. But Karen is just one of the most dynamic and exciting women, period, full stop in finance. She's a great friend and one of the best speakers we've ever had on.
- [05:42]
Kristen
Well, I mean it's funny, I've heard about her for over two years from you and so for me it was actually really cool because I had not met her before. And I will say when you meet people who are so impressive, I get very surprised when they're very human and down to earth and warm. I think that that was such a cool part of meeting her is just her personality is so just like effervescent and she clearly loves what she does and it's contagious in a way that I think is really inspiring. So I was really excited to have this conversation. And you know, she also represents. Obviously you went to Princeton, she went to Princeton. It's not like you're a financy school. So she had the non finance background. And I think that we always have these conversations with people on Instagram like, well, we'll put out information and I mean you obviously were an English major, I was an engineer. And people always are like, well how, you know, why would you go into finance? And blah blah, blah. And I do think that the fact that she's been so successful and so many people who are not actual finance majors are so successful, so much of what it is is like people. And Avery Sheffield said this too, like it's just wanting to understand how the world works and wanting to just connect things. And I mean it is interesting how like whether it's human psychology or honestly like even mathematical whatever, science can somehow explain like how markets move. And I mean it's really cool kind of when you tie all this together. And I think it sort of speaks to just the need for well rounded people. And so anyway, I love having conversations with people who really love what they're doing. And you also like didn't have the traditional background and became such a badass in the industry.
- [07:15]
Jen
So we released a reel recently that got A comment from someone. Why would a math major or a PhD from MIT ever go into finance?
- [07:25]
Kristen
Right?
- [07:26]
Jen
Like, why would they lower themselves? Why would. Would they stoop to those debts? And you had a witty retort which was like, have you ever heard of rentech? As in, like, there are massive opportunities to apply those skills within the finance world, potentially to massive profit. But I don't think. It's just that. I think there is.
- [07:45]
Kristen
And really quickly, Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you, but also the fact that fricking Deep Seek came out of a quantitative hedge fund, by the way. So, like, I just want to make that connection. So it's literally the. The.
- [07:56]
Jen
But even if your goal isn't AI tech, finance, whatever, even if your goal is something that you consider more lofty, like, oh, what about curing diseases? What about that? Amazing. I think what sometimes gets lost in all of the specificity that we apply to the world of finance is what you just spoke about. The curiosity and the eagerness to understand how the world works. If you just understand physics, but you don't understand finance, you actually won't understand how a rocket gets up in the air, because it's not just momentum and thrust and all those things. There needs to be money to build that rocket.
- [08:34]
Karen Carnell Tambor
Right?
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Jen
And if you don't understand where and how that money comes, this is also my pitch for Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I really think this is a great intersection to, like, get you on the podcast, but, like, you know what I'm saying? So understanding how things work in a vacuum, you want to go cure cancer, you need to understand where the funding comes for clinical trials, how the pharmaceutical industry works, like, how all these different players interact and where the money comes from. Because we can, like, pretend that we live in a world where there's no money and that having just pure intellectual curiosity for the sake of intellectual curiosity sake should be the goal. But what if you could do both? What if you could be intellectually curious about how the world works and be part of the mechanism that turns the world to make all these other things possible?
- [09:11]
Kristen
Yeah, well. And actually, I don't really want to get, like, too political here, but, like, it's funny because I. My cousin was over, by the way. Go Birds. Like, forget Eagles won the Super Bowl. But my cousin, who is from Philadelphia, also, he was over. And he's also Princeton, Maryland, PhD, so smart. And he was talking about how, I guess because of some of the funding cuts, per Doge, it's actually really affecting the research that is being done at Universities, to your point, like, you do need the money to then go into like, the research and then it can get used by private practice and then. Which. So. Oh, anyway, I don't even know why, like, that came up, but it just, it was like, it is so important. The research is. Is critical, but without money, it doesn't get done. You gotta have the funding, which.
- [09:51]
Jen
Right. The world costs money to run, like, and we can, you know. So I think that Karen represents this beautiful intersection of, like, pure intellectual curiosity. You can see it on her face. If you guys watch the YouTube version of this podcast, you can literally see how she's like, leaping out of her chair with excitement to answer each question and talk about it. And I think that that's like such a beautiful thing to have. Another thing that we are going to touch on here for all of you who are always curious to understand what it's like being a woman and being a mother in a seat like this. Karen shares a really great story. I'm not going to spoil it for you, but she actually was speaking with us, having just gotten off a plane from Davos and was leaving Miami to be home to tuck her kids in in Connecticut that evening. So learning about how she approaches Juggles and ultimately has been a force for change and part of a changing dynamic in the industry when it comes to motherhood. And being a woman at the. Does not get any more senior than this level in the industry. I loved her perspective on it. I thought it was. It was really, really cool to hear that from her.
- [11:03]
Kristen
Well, I'm excited. Should we bring her on or do you want to?
- [11:05]
Jen
Let's. So we actually lost the first 30 seconds of our intro where I was like raving about how amazing Karen is. Hopefully I have listed all of her accomplishments at the beginning of this episode. I cannot say it enough. Karen is an amazing human. She has kids of her own. She is the chief investment officer at Bridgewater. Just one of the most inspirational people in the industry. And we're so lucky that we get to air this footage.
- [11:32]
Kristen
Awesome.
- [11:33]
Jen
One of the smartest, funniest, and most energetic people I have ever known. So it is such an honor to have you here, Karen. Karen, can you just give us a little bit of your background, which I kind of know, but I don't know all of the steps that you took to get to where you are in your career. So kind of how you got interested in finance and then how you rose through the ranks to become who you are today.
- [11:54]
Karen Carnell Tambor
Well, first, thank you guys for having me. You Guys are awesome. I got to Princeton. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was not at all coming in thinking I was going down a finance path, but. But in the classic way of people who don't know what they want to do with their lives and are learning about the world. I looked at what on campus recruiting was all about, and I don't think I could have told you what a stock or a bond was for most of the time that I was in college. But it seemed like if you were interested in the world, you did what you wanted to do. You did consulting. So I did an internship in consulting, and I was lukewarm about it. I thought it was okay. I feel okay saying that because the firm I did it at has gone out of business. The sense. But at the time, pre financial crisis, that seemed like a good, solid career. I just wasn't really enthusiastic about taking that offer. It felt like you spent a lot of time sort of trying to make the client feel smart and feel like they came up with the idea. And then I ran into Bridgewater and on campus recruiting, it immediately spoke to me as well. Here are these people that seems like they're asking these questions about, like, what's going to happen in the world for their own understanding. Like, they're actually trying to figure this out for their own understanding. And the thing that definitely got me was when they told me that in your first year of Bridgewater, this is still true, you spend, like, half your time taking a class where they just teach you about finance and economy.
- [13:12]
Jen
Really?
- [13:13]
Karen Carnell Tambor
Yeah. Half your time. And I was like, they're going to pay me. They're going to pay me, like, more money than I've ever seen. To sit and. For them to teach me.
- [13:22]
Kristen
Yeah.
- [13:23]
Karen Carnell Tambor
To how this works. So I didn't assume I would do it for very long. I just thought, this is going to be an adventure. I'm going to give it a try. We're going to see what that's like. I actually think that philosophy helped a lot because at the time when we were graduating, a lot of people went into investment banking. There weren't a lot of jobs. There we go. There weren't a lot of jobs that were actually at a hedge fund. Someone.
- [13:40]
Jen
Actually. No one went to the buy side.
- [13:42]
Karen Carnell Tambor
No one went to the buy side. And so a lot of people who started Bridgewater with me, it was like their lifelong dream and everything they had worked for, they were so excited to be there. But that created a certain amount of stress, if that makes sense of you don't want to be like sounding like an idiot and asking a question if you don't know the answer to it because you're trying to be like, you know, I'm finally here and I skipped the two years investment making. I'm already at hedge fund. I had dad. Kind of sounds smart. Whereas I was like, I don't even know if I want to do this for my career. So I felt, I think, more comfortable than most people in my class. Sitting in this class and just sort of saying, like, why does that make sense? Sense that there's one very memorable one I remember where I was a new hire and I was basically like, I don't understand why some of these allocators hire us. It seems like we're not the right thing for them. We shouldn't even be in that business. And so I think that people just didn't feel comfortable saying that. And so the fact that I came in without all these expectations let me be kind of comfortable just asking the questions. And it's something I always tell new hires, which is like, when you've been somewhere for longer now, you really do sound like an idiot asking a question. Like, now it really is like, how did you get through a year and not learn that? Yeah, you got to put it out there and ask the questions early on if you want to kind of keep up with what's happening. But so I joined it. I just really fell in love with the firm in the industry. It just seemed to me like I couldn't believe that that's the thing I was getting paid to do. Even after that class, which is, at the end of the day, being an investor. It's about looking out in the world and basically saying, what do I think is going to happen? Can I predict and understand these dynamics better than other people? Because if everyone else knows it, it's already in the price. And I was like, wait, this is a job where you basically get to think about whatever is most interesting in the world to you. This is crazy. And so when I kind of reached that inflection point of couple years out of school, people are thinking what to do next. I was sort of like, why wouldn't I make this a career? This is really cool. I should stay. So that's just history.
- [15:29]
Kristen
It's unreal quick. Yeah, I'm so cute curious too. Just because you were talking about how it used to be that like, no, nobody hired to the buy side out of undergrad and now there's a little bit more of that. But I'm curious Are you seeing like industries competition or. It's like Bridgewater kind of has the reputation. So like from a talent development standpoint and recruiting standpoint, is it still people are clamoring to get those seats.
- [15:49]
Karen Carnell Tambor
Well, we definitely did a lot to set that trend. And so we had hired not just out of undergrad, but a lot of non trouble traditional backgrounds. So a lot of people that didn't study finance, that's not what they did. And we know many competitors, not to be named, that were just so weirded out that we did this, that they like hired people to say, can you just look at their whole intern class and figure out like, how did they figure out an English major to hire? Like, what are they doing? How did they figure this out? We've had competitors literally be like, let's just give an offer automatically to anybody who spent a summer at Bridgewater because we don't know what they're doing. Like, we don't exactly understand what's, like.
- [16:24]
Jen
What'S going on there. Yeah.
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Karen Carnell Tambor
Just trying to bring all these people. So competition has definitely become greater. I'd also say that, you know, you kind of go through up and down.
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Kristen
Right.
- [16:31]
Karen Carnell Tambor
So you have these years where people are like, working in tech is the coolest thing to do. Cares about finance. Yeah. Where suddenly everybody wants to go to tech. So you have a little bit ups and downs. There was definitely a period where people were like, hedge funds are dangerous. Hedge funds blow up. And so there's been ups and downs, but our brand has always been been like, let's find people who are interested in the world, who want to work hard, want to ask hard questions, want to understand how things work. We don't really care as much about specific background.
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Kristen
So smart.
- [16:58]
Karen Carnell Tambor
We have tried to sort of just keep that brand, get interesting people, try, diversify backgrounds.
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Jen
Okay, so let's talk markets for like three seconds here. What are you most excited about asset class wise, coming into 2025? We just had one of the biggest days of volatility yesterday that we've seen in a while. And one of the things we've been talking about thematically with some of the other investors here has been, well, hedge funds. When, when I first started in the industry, hedge funds were the sexiest thing in the world. Right. And to me, I've always been like excited about the public markets wanting to apply a critical lens like you. And it's been for the past couple of years this balance between passive and active management. And the last two years, when the market is just got up in a Straight line, everybody's a hero just lying on the beach. Now, when we have actual volatility, where we have maybe some mispricing, what are you thinking about as an active manager? What's most interesting? What's most exciting to you going forward in that landscape?
- [17:54]
Karen Carnell Tambor
So I'm excited about yesterday's market action because it gives that wake up call that, wait a minute, this is what being concentrated is like, right? Like if you find yourself in a situation where you think I'm just buying the market cap, so I must be really diversified. And then you realize, wait, something that is very important in AI but cannot be important to everything and everything all at once, which is really affecting not just AI, but like literally which firms will benefit or not from AI and which chips. Yeah, that's driving my whole return. Yeah, that's what being concentrated is like. And so I think we're in the spot where like you're saying just buying passive has been so good, a lot of people have just totally given up. Like, why would I do anything except for. And I'm telling you, I get calls from chief investment officers that are like, listen, I know off the record that these changes are not a good idea for my portfolio, but I don't want to deal with it governance wise of getting all these questions. If something's right 70% of the time, but 30% of the time, people are going to be like, you're an idiot, you should have just been passive. Maybe I should just be passive, but it can't be sustainable if everyone goes past it. You just are going to get mispricing.
- [19:01]
Kristen
Yes.
- [19:01]
Karen Carnell Tambor
And so I'm excited about shifting into a world where it's clear that you need to be more discerning. You need to actually find the opportunities. And look, the equity market correlation between stocks in the equity market is at lows. Like there are huge differences. Is that companies. And so the ability to find opportunities between companies is really there. It's only indices these that feel really correlated a lot of sense of the ability to say, let me hold more resilient stocks. So like one of the things we've shown is that if you basically take your alpha, whatever that is, whatever views you have on stocks and you try to do two things with it. You try to either say, let me beat the benchmark or let me just build the best stock allocation. If you beat the benchmark, you can be the benchmark very reliably, but you'll make 3% above the benchmark every day. You're still inheriting more or less what the benchmark is, is and is going to do.
- [19:48]
Jen
Yeah.
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Karen Carnell Tambor
If you just say build me the best thing. Yeah. You're going to have huge tracking area, going to be different than the market. But overall you can be consistently way better because you don't have to inherit what the market is. And so I think that's going to shift money back to say we need expertise and talent. That's not just going to inherit whatever the market is. We have that, that's free. You can get that for free, no problem. But am I really going to just have that? I should probably also be doing other things.
- [20:12]
Jen
Yeah, I love that.
- [20:13]
Kristen
And I'm curious because you were saying that there's like a lower correlation like and Jen, I thought you were like wait a second. Really?
- [20:18]
Jen
Well, I was thinking about it, how relative value becomes a greater skill for a macro investor in an environment like that, which you typically don't think about. But sorry, back to you.
- [20:26]
Karen Carnell Tambor
Yeah. You also have macro factors are more important to stock picking than they used to be. Yeah. So if like old school stock picking was like I'm listening to every earnings call and I understand exactly their competitive strategy, that's not going away. It's still important. But when you actually step back and see stocks do well and poorly, a lot of times actually very big macro factors like these are the kinds of companies that do well when something broad is happening, when there's liquidity, when certain.
- [20:49]
Jen
Trends rate, environment, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [20:52]
Kristen
I mean, I guess like there's the conversation about the massive amounts of spending in AI and now with the. It's deep. Oh my God. I was about to say deep deep because you were joking.
- [21:03]
Jen
That Bloomberg topic.
- [21:05]
Kristen
Oh my God. With deep seek coming out and showing that you can have similar performance with, you know, much less cost. And now all the magnificent seven. What's going to happen with all the spend and all these data centers and blah blah, blah. Is there any particular other sector that's like not tech driven or maybe that is, but that's utilizing infrastructure in a different way that you're like think is interesting.
- [21:25]
Karen Carnell Tambor
Well, I make two points. One is that I think that there is so much demand to keep investing in AI that while this deep sea thing makes companies say wait a minute, how are we going to make back the money for everything we invested? I don't think in a stop investing. I think they're a spot where it's existential. They're like, if we don't keep up with our competitors, we're going to go out of business.
- [21:44]
Kristen
Yeah.
- [21:44]
Karen Carnell Tambor
And there's a lot of things to spend money on. A lot of what's being spent on is actually the infrastructure to do what's called inference, meaning there's training the model and then there's once the models up there using it every day to get results. And you also need to get that. So actually the person who lost the most money yesterday, the company lost most money was in video. Because it really made you say, I'm not sure I need their specific chips to do all this. They are really specialist in much more, the training. And when you look at inference, you're like, well, there are other startups like that are kind of coming up there. And so I think that you're still going to get this big. If you kind of take AI broadly. I think right now it is much more of an inflationary inflation influence on the economy than deflationary. Because really there's just so much money being spent and it's being spent at any cost. They're saying, I don't care how much it costs, I'll spend more money, more money to get ahead of all this technology. Whereas at some point is going to turn deflationary. At some point it'll be like, wait, we're taking costs out of the system? And that comes back to your question about different sectors, which is, yeah, other sectors, they're going to go through like a, sometimes we said like Barnes and Noble moment. Like, like, wait a minute. Yeah, somebody that's not like me, me at all. Amazon can do what I do for way better. It's going to happen. We're not quite at that inflection point. I think that it really depends both how AI develops, whether or not it can just take people out of their jobs, like be its own agent and how fast businesses kind of get their act together. It takes, you look at past technologies. It took a long time for businesses to actually integrate. Even technologies that after the fact are obvious. Yeah, took a long time.
- [23:12]
Jen
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Okay, so since we're short on time, switching gears just slightly, we are three moms here. We have a gazillion children between the three of us. It is something that we get asked about all the time. What is it like being a mom rising through the ranks of this industry? How has motherhood shaped your career and how much do you feel like you are changing the industry to fit you, a young mom in this world versus the industry changing around you and facilitating your growth?
- [23:45]
Kristen
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- [24:41]
Karen Carnell Tambor
You know, it's a great question. I'd say that when I look at, like all the people went to school with us, the hardest thing is being a mom in an industry where you have no control over anything. So, for example, like, if you're in a situation where you're a lawyer and being a lawyer just means being uncomfortable, call at all hours. And it just means doing 100 hours of work a week, it's very hard to say, you know, how do I control my time versus being an investor? By definition, a lot more about, like, you're studying how the world's working, you're choosing how to invest, the markets are open, so you do have to be on. But there's a lot more control of sort of how and what you do things. The second piece is, I don't think I realize the degree to which seeing someone senior as a mom had impact below me. It was not something I was really holding. But I'll tell one story because it has stuck with me so much, which is that the first adventure for me meeting I did, I basically had an almost newborn and at some point I was like, breastfeeding during the meeting. I had like a cover and I was breastfeeding and someone took a picture of it. So it was like me and the other executives and it was like one of the pictures that had kind of been out there. And then when I was officially named chief investment officer, somebody went into our company Slack and made it. So when you typed in chief investment officer, the, like, emoji you got was a picture of me breastfeeding. Because they were like, I just thought it was so cool that that could be your image of what the chief investment officer is so it's my first time really being like, huh, this is actually impactful to others and thinking of kind of what's out there and possible. And then the one other thing I'll say about being a mom, which I'm sure you both can relate to, is that being a mom is really helpful and being a dad too and like focusing you on what's important in life, it's very helpful in your career in a way I didn't appreciate because it makes you sort of say, what do I love to do that I really want to be doing that I love getting out of bed doing. If I really hate what I'm doing, I'm going to be like, I have better things to do, I have better draws of my time. And so I found myself a much easier time saying, wait, wait, wait, this part of my job, why do I still do that? There's so many people who could do that better than me.
- [26:34]
Jen
We say that every day about like 99% of what we do because we're.
- [26:37]
Karen Carnell Tambor
So incompetent at the test different times.
- [26:39]
Kristen
It'S like our thing. And I 100% agree with you. I think that that's one reason why I actually think in some cases you see women leave the workforce because they're like, this thing sucks and I have like my baby that I love so much. Why am I wasting my time with this other thing? But then the people that are in the industries where they love it and they're like, it lights them up.
- [26:56]
Karen Carnell Tambor
I feel like I basically, instead of taking my whole maternity leave, what I did was I basically took a shorter one and then worked part time longer. I sort of made it a longer period part time because it felt like me. To me, I was excited about, you know, doing certain things in the markets or certain things I couldn't wait to do. I wasn't ready to work all those hours, but I was excited to go back into it. So look, I mean everybody knows this, but picking a thing you love to do is the most important thing. Because you go to college, there's so many smart people around, you're never going to be just doing well because you're the smartest person. There are other smart people. You have to actually really like what you're doing. It's so true. There's always going to be someone smarters willing to work harder if you don't love what you're doing, just never. You have to actually find a thing that speaks to you.
- [27:36]
Jen
Yeah, okay. I mean, Karen, I've known this about you Forever. But your passion and your excitement. You've used the word excited about, like, 52 times in this conversation. What is it that gets you out of bed every morning and gets you so excited? And who were the mentors that you look to and that you still do look to that inspire you and have been the good guide for you to develop that passion?
- [27:59]
Karen Carnell Tambor
I think what gets me out of bed is like, the world is honestly so interesting. The world is honestly so interesting. There's so much happening that it's just natural to have curiosity about. Like, today I was going back and forth with my team about how are we going to study whether or not US Productivity will actually go up. It's like the foundation of all the economy is like, how much can we do? When we put in our time, how much can we make? That's such a theoretical question, but it's actually changing, right? If Trump is going to deregulate, if it's going to be a I. If we're going to have protectionism, so we can't have these other countries, it is going to change. So I think, honestly, curiosity, and I think a lot of the mentors I really looked up to and I would list, you know, chief among them, the chief investment officers of Bridgewater. When I came there, right, Prince, Ray, Dalio, Greg Jensen, I saw the way that they were just genuinely curious and always learning. Like, this story that I always tell about Ray is that I remember thinking about Ray. I don't understand how Ray gets out of bed in the morning and gets to work, because how does he not, like, get to his car and start asking questions like, how do I know that an internal combustion engine will really get me there? How does an internal combustion engine work? It just gets stuck in the car. Because it just seems like that's like a work is. He's just like, let me really deeply understand how this works. And that can feel, like, almost impractical. Like, how can you always stuff and be like, but why? But how? But it's incredibly useful as an investor. I learned a lot from that. You know, Bob Prince was such an important mentor to me throughout my time. I mean, really, like, took me on to his team early on and was sort of like, saw did the best thing I think mentors can do, which is he said to me, he saw things in me before I knew myself I could do it, before I felt capable and ready. He was like, I see this in you. The biggest thing I saw in him was no matter how many years older than me he was, he was Always learning new things. He was always opening his mind saying, I got to keep learning new things. Yeah, the markets are changing, the world is changing. I want to keep evolving and learning. I think that's the most inspiring thing.
- [29:48]
Kristen
You talked about how at Bridgewater there is that again, amazing training. But then once you actually get on the job and obviously the world is changing all the time and there's so much to learn and so much to understand and so many different products and like trends. What are the things that you use to keep up to date on the markets and continue, continue learning? As you were talking about, like, what are the things that are your go to sources for learning?
- [30:10]
Karen Carnell Tambor
You know, I really encourage people to have some degree of a peer group in whatever firm they're at on Slack or on whatever, sharing things, exchanging ideas. So you're not the only one that's kind of trying to make sense of the world. But you have a little bit of a peer group and most valuable is if you feel comfortable going back and forth with them and like saying, it doesn't make sense to me. I don't know about this. And you're kind of comfortable having that exchange. People learn a ton that way. They learn a ton from peers. And it's really valuable in a firm to have a peer group that's kind of learning about things together. I mean, I'd say today I'm chief investment officer, but tons of my learning is me being on our internal slack, hearing from our own team, seeing them wrestle with things, seeing the questions they come up with. It's a huge part of it.
- [30:51]
Kristen
And I know you also are starting a newsletter or just launched a newsletter.
- [30:55]
Jen
I read your newsletter. I literally got this morning. I was like, karen just came from Davos. She's here at Global Alts and she's tucking her kids into bed. I don't even know where you live. New York City.
- [31:04]
Karen Carnell Tambor
Connecticut.
- [31:05]
Jen
Connecticut.
- [31:05]
Karen Carnell Tambor
I didn't write it this morning. I didn't write it.
- [31:08]
Jen
Damn newsletter out. You should see me moving heaven and earth to get our like two paragraph newsletter out every Thursday morning. I mean, it is nothing short miracle, but I read that thing and it's so fucking good.
- [31:18]
Karen Carnell Tambor
Oh, thank you.
- [31:19]
Jen
Excellent.
- [31:20]
Karen Carnell Tambor
Well, the thing I felt was that we have run a newsletter called the Bridgewater daily observations for 40 years. Yeah, that's really widely read by institutional investors and policymakers and that's a very stern crowd. Right. But we definitely spend a lot of time with that crowd. And it's been really exciting to me over the years to see, especially Policymakers like you from Treasury Department or central banks calling and saying, I'm seeing this. This is affecting my views on things, of course investors. And so my thought was we don't have to. To give the volume of all of that publicly, but why don't we figure out there's a subset there that we do want to communicate more publicly. Like it doesn't have to be that. You know, the average newsletter length there probably if you put into Pages is like 10 plus pages. We have to put out 10 plus pages a day.
- [32:02]
Kristen
Right.
- [32:02]
Karen Carnell Tambor
But why don't we pick some key things that we feel like could be a good conversation. So would love. You will sign up. Would love feedback because we're early on with like the normal audiences. We've written for. We've written for. For decades. And this is newer. So exciting. Hear you're reading it. Yeah. And most importantly, to hear from people what topics they would want to hear about because there is so much research we do that's not being shared that we want to figure out what is it that we should be sharing that would actually be helpful.
- [32:24]
Jen
Okay, last question because I know you need to go, sorry, your team is probably going to strangle us. If you could give one word of advice to kind of the young Karen in college, maybe in business school who's thinking about getting into the industry. What people piece of advice would that be?
- [32:41]
Karen Carnell Tambor
You know, don't worry too much about like getting into exactly what you think the hot industry is like. You're saying hedge funds at some points were considered like the coolest thing ever and other times have been like totally like not interesting. Not the cool industry to get into. These things are going to come and go and so you don't have to go after the job. It's considered like the coolest job. I've been around long enough that we've seen it. The ups and downs.
- [33:03]
Kristen
Right.
- [33:03]
Karen Carnell Tambor
Over 20 years of what are the cool things to go into. Yeah, it's much more important that it speak to you. You think you'll want to get up every morning and do it and that you think the people around it will make space for you to grow. The worst situation is to be in an industry because you think it's hot in a situation where you know in your heart of hearts that there's no opportunity. Right. Like it's going to be. You're going to be kind of stuck in a role and have to leave five times in order to come back to have a good enough role. Find a place where you think there's development for you and where it speaks to you. And don't worry that much whether it's the hottest thing in that moment. You are going to make part of the future, right? You're going to make part of the destiny of that place by joining. So join a place where you feel like you could be part of that destiny. I love that.
- [33:44]
Jen
Oh, I love that. Karen, this is amazing. I'm so glad we got to do.
- [33:48]
Karen Carnell Tambor
This same year again.
- [33:50]
Kristen
I have heard so much about you from Jeff all the time, and it's so cool to meet you in person.
- [33:55]
Karen Carnell Tambor
Thank you.
- [33:55]
Kristen
So wonderful.
- [33:56]
Karen Carnell Tambor
Thank you so much for being so much for so much.