Michael Mauboussin — How Great Investors Make Decisions | The Tim Ferriss Podcast

Prior to joining Counterpoint Global, Michael was Director of Research at BlueMountain Capital, Head of Global Financial Strategies at Credit Suisse, and Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management. Michael originally joined Credit Suisse in 1992 as a packaged food industry analyst and was named Chief U.S. Investment Strategist in 1999.

Michael is the author of The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing, Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, and More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places. More Than You Know was named one of “The 100 Best Business Books of All Time” by 800-CEO-READ, one of the best business books by BusinessWeek (2006), and best economics book by Strategy+Business (2006). Michael is also co-author, with Alfred Rappaport, of Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns.

Michael has been an adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School since 1993 and is on the faculty of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing. He received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2009 and 2016 and the Graham & Dodd, Murray, Greenwald Prize for Value Investing in 2021.

Michael earned an A.B. from Georgetown University. He is chairman emeritus of the board of trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, a leading center for multidisciplinary research in complex systems theory.

Please enjoy!

Tim Ferriss is one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and an early-stage tech investor/advisor in Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ other companies. He is also the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. The Observer and other media have named him “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which has exceeded 900 million downloads and been selected for “Best of Apple Podcasts” three years running.

[00:00] Intro
[07:12] Latin roots.
[09:14] No business education? No problem!
[12:15] The best food industry analyst.
[15:36] Consilience.
[19:58] Complex adaptive systems.
[23:26] Diversity.
[26:23] The wisdom of crowds.
[32:42] The minimum effective dose of cognitive diversity.
[36:02] Designing experiments.
[43:49] Against the Gods and Complexity.
[49:56] Value investing and the Santa Fe Institute.
[53:57] A brief 21st-century asset class tour.
[57:47] Base rates and horses.
[1:06:16] Good vs. great investors.
[1:13:22] Expanding options when making decisions.
[1:18:56] Favorite failures.
[1:20:35] Counteracting overreliance on experts.
[1:24:34] Intuition.
[1:34:15] Time management tenets.
[1:40:59] Parental resources.
[1:43:42] Perspectives gained by learning about complex adaptive systems.
[1:46:12] Recommended reading.
[1:47:32] Michael’s billboard.
[1:50:33] Parting thoughts.

[ValueMaverick]

I Like How Tim Asks Questions. Insightful session 🤩

[ScalperSpecltr]

People like Michael has never invested and has never reached returns that would consider to be good. Why would you interview him? Listen, the whole interview and I can tell you that time was wasted. Michael writes a lot mumbo jumbo that has no relevance to 99% of the population. 99% of the listeners are small time wanna be investors. We don’t need these intricate systems. Simplicity trumps the complexity.