Sebastian Mallaby: Understanding Legendary Hedge Fund Investors

Nov 19, 2021

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ADVICE

Prepare Unreasonably To Earn Access

Do unreasonable preparation before approaching hard-to-reach sources to earn trust.
Demonstrate deep homework so subjects know you won't waste their time and will be taken seriously.

ADVICE

Force Specific Case-Study Questions

Ask for a reconstruction of a specific trade rather than general reflections to get valuable insight.
Prepare detailed timelines and facts to trigger precise memories during interviews.

INSIGHT

Look Everywhere — Expect Dry Wells

Valuable sources can appear in unexpected places, so search everywhere including archival basements and old deputies.
Research will drill many dry wells but occasionally uncover gushers that reshape your story.

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I’m very excited to share my conversation with Sebastian Mallaby, the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of several books including More Money Than Good, The Man Who Knew: The Life & Times of Alan Greenspan, as well as an upcoming book about the history of venture capital (The Power Law). I’m a big fan of More Money Than God and tweeted about the gems in its footnotes. This conversation was an absolute treat and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

Disclaimer: this podcast is for entertainment purposes only. It does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities mentioned or discussed. Seek your financial, tax, legal, accounting, or other advisor’s advice before making any investment decisions. Do you own work. I am are not your fiduciary or advisor.

Conversation highlights:

2:00: Sebastian’s journey to the book and topic (hedge funds, also Alan Greenspan)

5:15: How to gain access and build trust.

“The key was to do an unreasonable amount of preparation work.”

“You win people's respect by doing a ton of homework. It shows that you're serious and you're not wasting people's time by asking the obvious questions.”

7:44: How to decide what questions to ask?

“What you really want to know from them is specifically what their thought process was around a particular important or interesting trade. How did they make the call? How did they develop conviction? How did they hold onto the position during the inevitable hiccups and adversity? So it's that reconstruction of the case study.”

11:00: Where to look for information? “The answer is you've got to look everywhere.”

12:20: Finding memos in which Greenspan “described the creation of the Federal Reserve as one of the historic disasters in U.S. history.”

15:00: George Soros who joked "I can only remember the future."

Learning the division of labor in the Soros team and the Thai Bhat trade.

20:00: “The culture within an investment company matters almost as much as the analysis that the company does of the market or of the trade.”

21:00: The Korean bank trade.

27:00: Different cultures and investment styles, contrasting Soros, Druckenmiller and Robertson.

31:30: Culture at Tiger and the Tiger cubs.

34:00: Julian Robertson outgrowing his original strategy and the loss of “supercharged incentives.”

39:30: Can investors evolve and adapt?

42:00: Mindset and personality.

47:45: Understanding Paul Tudor Jones.

“Genius does not always understand itself.” Vic Braden

49:00: Jones tried to replicate his system with a quant.

52:00: The Lehman Brothers 2008 trade.

56:50: Jones’s process and his ‘market scripts.’

“Sometimes causation in human actions works in a weird way.”

59:45: Reflecting on the industry and book from today’s perspective, a decade later.

1:03: Rise of quantitative trading.

1:08: Sebastian's upcoming book, The Power Law.

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