Conversations with some of the most insightful people in finance and business.
Tune in for market beating views from top investment practitioners and commentators.
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Alec Butler manages a highly successful global low risk fund and has forthright views on stocks and markets. In this interview, we discuss inflation and markets and what this means for stock selection. Alec also explains his views on what makes for a successful investment team.
Guy Spier is a value investor best known for paying $250k to have lunch with Warren Buffett. That was clearly a brilliant investment as he explains in our discussion. And he talks about how Buffett helped him to grow as a person in ways he didn’t even want to grow.
Beth Lilly is a value investor with a specialism in small caps. She is highly successful, manages money for a billionaire family yet she drives a 12 year old car. She explains why.
William Green is the author of Richer Wiser Happier, an outlier in investing books as a best-seller. He is a craftsman and a perfectionist and having interviewed 40 of the world’s top investors for the book, has some fascinating perspectives on investing and on life.
Mario Gabelli is the founder of GAMCO, a billionaire, and still working in his 80s. His workload would be punishing for someone 30 years younger, but he is committed to an in-depth research process and likes to lead from the front.
Gavyn Davies is an economist, co-founder of 4 multi-billion asset managers, a former Government adviser to both Labour and Tory administrations and a former Chairman of the BBC.
Tian Yang is an economist and Chief Executive of boutique macro research firm Variant Perception.
Chris Bloomstran is a value investor, best known for his incredibly detailed analysis of the valuation of Berkshire Hathaway.
Dominique Mielle had an illustrious career as a distressed debt hedge fund manager and as a woman in a man’s world.
Vitaliy Katsenelson is an investor, writer and stock-picker. He eschews the usual equity index 60:40 portfolio and uses individual stocks.
Barry Ritholtz hosts one of the most popular business podcasts in the world. He rather modestly says he was one of the first. He has also built a $3bn wealth manager in just ten years.
In this interview, Carson explains the business of short selling; the difference between fundamental shorting and his business of shorting and exposing frauds; how he spots these fraudulent companies; where to find frauds; and why it takes Muddy Waters 3 months to launch a short campaign.
Sir Clive Woodward is a winner. He is best known for managing the England rugby team, taking them from world #6 to a world cup win. In this revealing interview, he explains that there is no difference between managing a sports team, a business or an investment team.
Richard Oldfield is a true value investor. Author of the delightful commonsense investing book, Simple but not easy, in this interview he recites several wonderful anecdotes from his long experience as a value investor. We even get a song (and Steve recites one of Richard’s investment poems). Richard has an innate belief in the cyclical nature of markets and the madness of crowds.
Chris Pavese, President and CIO of Broyhill Asset Management, is a seriously thoughtful investor. We talk about how investing straddles left and right brain thinking, about whether the advantage of being located outside the bustling environment of a New York or London will continue to confer the same benefit in the days of Zoom, and about the benefits and joy of reading widely.
Dan McCrum is the award winning FT journalist who exposed Wirecard as a fraud. Once a stockmarket darling valued at over €25bn, Wirecard crashed to worthless in June 2020, when its auditors could not confirm €1.9bn of cash. Dan pursued the story for six years and has now written a book about the saga.
Former Goldman, Sachs partner, Jim O’Neill (more properly, Baron O’Neill of Gatley), is best known as the man who coined the term BRICs. He correctly identified that this group of emerging markets would drive global growth and published a paper on it over 20 years ago.
In this interview we discuss the coming age of financial repression and why the capital cycle theory will be so important for investors in this new era. We also discuss the banks sector, the Asian crisis, value vs growth and the problem with ESG.
In this wide-ranging interview, recorded before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chris Wood, Global Head of Equity Strategy at investment bank Jefferies, talks about his route to success, why he is bullish on energy stocks, some of his fun trades (long Ryanair, short Zoom), why he doesn’t use Zoom, how the pandemic has altered his approach and why his multi-million air miles account won’t get built up quite so much going forward.
Dylan Grice is a former economist, prop desk trader, strategist and family office investor. Rob Crenian is the former UK CEO of Renaissance Technologies, the world’s most successful hedge fund. They teamed up to form Calderwood Capital whose reason d’etre is preservation of capital in what is likely to prove a much more difficult long term environment in the next decade or two than in the last.
Former hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry is best known as the man who made 30% in 2008, when others crashed, including many so-called hedge funds. He described his cockroach mandate as being a survivor no matter what. He closed the fund in 2017 after a period of lackustre but far from shocking performance and has become a property developer and landlord on St Bart’s.
In this podcast, MacDonald explains her really unusual route to finance, her approach to running successful portfolios, how to run a team of fund managers and analysts and how a woman copes in a man’s world.
In this interview, a rarity for Price, he talks about his snakes and ladders route to success, why doing the work is an integral part of his approach, and how putting clients first is the key to success in any business. Putting yourself in the client’s shoes not only ensures that you are delivering the right product, it also removes any possible temptation for ethical conflict.
In this fascinating interview, Pete Davies of Lansdowne Partners and Spencer Crawley of First Minute Capital discuss the UK venture scene, look at why academia is such a fertile source of innovation, discuss how venture networks operate and look at how today compares with the 1990s tech boom.
In this fascinating interview, he explains the 5 keys to a successful fund, how his 25 year partnership with Pete Davies produced one of the most successful hedge funds in the UK and how now managing venture capital is a different, yet similar, game.
Two investors who went to the same school, then to Oxbridge, and have been awarded the CBE (*). They are both titans in their fields but through very different routes. One has run his hedge fund firm for 27 years, has an astonishingly good track record, yet is so under the radar that few have heard of him. The other has started multiple companies, is a business celebrity and is recognised as one of the most successful people in UK.
When we started, we supported an important new charity: the Financial Times charity, Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign (FLIC).
Financial literacy has been proven to increase social mobility and improve financial behaviour for individuals and communities. It’s the charity’s aim to democratise financial education by providing free and engaging content to those who need it most: young people, women, and disenfranchised groups including minority ethnic communities and migrants.
This resonates with our mission at Behind the Balance Sheet to provide useful education to investors at a sensible cost. We believe that the lack of proper education on finance in schools (a problem in the US as well as the UK) is scandalous. It’s the poorest in society who suffer the most from finance scams.
It is simple to explain the power of compound interest and why you should never borrow on your credit cards – any child can grasp and remember that. It will save them money and grief later.
After two years, we decided that we could do more good by switching to a different charity and we are delighted to be supporting Duchenne UK. This is a personal issue for Steve, who some years ago was struck by the injustice of an uncurable disease affecting children and by the courage and fortitude of one of the mums at school whose son was affected.
Duchenne UK is a charity set up by Emily Reuben and Alex Johnson in 2012 following both of their sons being diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Duchenne is a progressive condition diagnosed in childhood that causes all the muscles in the body to gradually and irreversibly weaken. There is currently no cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, but there is hope.
Emily and Alex set up the charity to dramatically advance treatments and care for everyone affected by the disease. Duchenne UK is now at the forefront of this work in the UK.
Duchenne UK has tackled head on some of the big challenges in drug development in their search to accelerate the development of treatments. In 11 years, they have committed more than £18 million to vital work:
Emily and Alex’s work continues, and they still need support to continue their ground-breaking, life-changing work. There are a range of ways that you or your company can help Duchenne UK. There’s the Duchenne Dash, a 24 hour cycle from London to Paris that’s taking place in May next year. You could take part, you and your friends or colleagues could take part as a team, or your company could sponsor it. You could take part in another event, from a marathon to a sky dive. Or you could design your own event, by yourself or with your company. Maybe Duchenne UK could be your company’s ‘Charity of the Year’!
Please play your part in helping to change the lives of people children and adults with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
The podcast is sponsored by Stream by AlphaSense. Steve has started to use the product and is finding it really useful in his stock research.