On a mission to interview some of the most influential US investors…
Stockopedia heads to The States
Our interviews with successful investors have been very popular with the Stockopedia community over the past couple of years. From the messages I get from readers, the Q&As seem to offer a welcome human perspective on investing. Sometimes you just can’t beat reading about the journeys that these investors have been on. And while you may or may not like their strategies, it’s still enlightening to hear about why they think and act like they do.
This is great news for me because I like doing these interviews very much (and there’s at least some job security in it!). But is has always been undeniable — and Ed and I have talked about this many times — that some of the biggest and most interesting characters in investing are in the United States.
In fact, it isn’t just that America is home to some very inspiring investors. It’s that a lot of the thinking and discussion around investing in the US echoes so much with what we think and talk about here at Stockopedia.
Factor investing was predominantly born in America. Some of the most important observations in human behaviour were made in the States. And it was researchers there that began to tie these issues together and work out what successful long-term investing really requires.
In many ways, evidence-based, rules-based investing is still relatively new ground in the US. In a market super-focused on quarterly financials, talking heads on TV and more information than you could ever possibly consume, switching off from it all is still quite radical. But there are some very inspiring people leading that charge.
With this in mind, I’m travelling to the US this weekend on a two-week mission to interview some of them. It has taken months to organise. Some of these people I knew… others are very graciously (and bravely) talking to me without, I suspect, really having any idea who I am, or who we are!
It’s a trip that’s going to take me from New York to Los Angeles. Considering the distance, there’s still a sense of unpredictability about the schedule. I’m slightly winging it, and I’m still not entirely sure how it’s going to go (the job security might be taking a turn for the worse!).
Without trailing too much of this, all being well I’ll be doing interviews over the next week or so with people like James O’Shaughnessy of O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, Wes Gray of Alpha Architect, Barry Ritholtz of Ritholtz Wealth Management and Toby Carlisle of Carbon Beach Asset Management, plus several others.
In amongst that I’ll be attending EBI 2018, which is an investing event that is part of the Global Indexing & ETFs conference — and I’ll be doing more interviews there. It’s an impressive conference with some very interesting people on the speaker line-up.
One of the things I’ve learned over the past three months is that no matter how hard you try to pin down a schedule for something like this, you won’t really know it until the day before you leave. So if you have got any questions for the investors that I mentioned, or even suggestions for other interviews, feel free to let me know. Hopefully this trip will just be the start of speaking to some of America’s most influential investors.
The other thing I learned is that when planning a work trip to sunny California, no-one in the office listens when you complain about how much hard work it’s turning out to be!
All being well I’ll be blogging here as this trip unfolds.
Written by Ben Hobson, Strategies Editor at Stockopedia
Originally published at www.stockopedia.com.
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