By Jack M. Forehand — 

With so many great investing podcasts out there, it can be difficult to identify the best ones. Through our new Podcasts of the Week segment, I will try to help filter out the most interesting episodes and identify the podcasts I learned the most from each week. In addition, we will also take a look at a great podcast from the past via our From the Archives section.

Best Episodes This Week

David Tisch – Invest Like the Best – 9/19/2017

As an investment advisor, I get lots of exposure to public companies and methods to analyze them every day. But since more and more companies are staying private longer and more and more investors are getting involved in early stage investing, start up investing has become a big area of interest for me.

This podcast was a great introduction to start up incubators and how they work. Incubators can be incredibly difficult to get into and can be a grueling process for the companies admitted, but there are many success stories of companies that have emerged from the process and gone on to do very big things.

There is also some interesting discussion on the rising role New York is playing in the start-up scene, what it takes to build a successful product in the Internet age, and the biggest mistakes startup companies tend to make.

Matthew Rothman – Masters in Business – 9/21/2017

There is so much misunderstanding out there about what quant investing means. In reality, it can mean many different things, and this podcast is one of the best I have heard, along with a separate podcast Barry Ritholtz did with Cliff Asness, in terms of defining quant investing from the ground up.

I wasn’t familiar with Matthew Rothman before I listened to this, but I obviously should have been. He has been practicing quant investing for a very long time and has very interesting takes on some of the more interesting periods quant strategies have faced, including the 2008 bear market and the flash crash. The story of how he came to write one of the most widely read research notes in history during that period is a very interesting one. There is also a great discussion toward the end about what the future of quant might look like. I will certainly be following Matthew’s work going forward.

From the Archives

Josh Brown – Bespokecast – 4/23/2017

Ritholtz Wealth Management is one of the fastest growing registered investment advisory firms in the country. The approach they have taken to achieve that growth is far from conventional and is based around regular, genuine communication via their individual blogs and social media. I have listened to several podcasts with Josh Brown and have learned something from each one, but this one was the best from the perspective of getting into the most detail I have seen about how they have grown their business.

There was too much great content in this podcast to cover here, but there were a few points that resonated with me.

• How important shifting their focus to starting with the goals of the client vs. generic asset allocation was to their success.
• The value of public forums like blogs and twitter for client communication – The tendency of advisors is to focus solely on things like quarterly calls to communicate with clients, but the Ritholtz team has been able to use these public forums to communicate their views to clients regularly, and they have built a high level of trust with clients as a result.
• Dismissing the thoughts of clients is never a good idea – If a client has a question about a specific stock or a question about what the market is doing in the short-term, there is a tendency for advisors to dismiss these things and fall back on standard answers about how it all doesn’t matter in the context of their long-term investment strategy, but clients don’t want to hear that. They want advisors who can talk intelligently about what is going on in the market, even if those things don’t result in changes to their investment plan.

These are only a few of the many great lessons in this podcast. I would recommend both advisors and their clients listen to the full discussion, as there are many other interesting thoughts and insights.

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Photo: Copyright: bryljaev / 123RF Stock Photo

Jack Forehand is Co-Founder and President at Validea Capital. He is also a partner at Validea.com and co-authored “The Guru Investor: How to Beat the Market Using History’s Best Investment Strategies”. Jack holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation from the CFA Institute. Follow him on Twitter at @practicalquant.