Interview with Pete Matthew from Meaningful Money about investing, and what to do if you can’t beat the market.
Meaningful Money Interview On How To Invest
Q1 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
Transcript
Let's kick off if we can. Just with a bit of a bio. You are who you are. And you know where you've come from and how you ended up doing what are you doing now.
OK well I'm old enough that my bio has gotten pretty raw. So I'm originally from Denmark but I haven't lived there since 1990.
So that gives you an idea. I live in the U.S. for 10 years. I did all my university and I've worked on Wall Street at an investment bank.
Then after university I went and joined a hedge fund in New York but very soon after I moved to London doing another hedge fund and in 2002 it set up my own. So did that for a while and so incredibly fortuitously in the early awaits I returned capital to external investors and essentially continued to demand money.
Since then I I still sit on the board of a number of questions. Well you know one of them but I've written a couple books. And so that's really my background in this field.
Yes there's some anger about the hedge fund thing later and you know the book specifically that Matt gave me and yes there was the other one called this one is Investing Demystified was one of the first to fool in and part of a third of a part of a certain but the first ones called Money Mavericks.
It's a book that describes my journey and as starting and running a hedge fund how that came about and all the defeats and victories and really trying to explain what that world was. And I always felt that boy listen I'm with another topic but I always felt that the hedge fund world was misunderstood and that most of the literature that it was about you know made us the world. Sheila people out of billions or about George Soros that made billions to begin at the expense of someone else all while flying private jets and driving Ferraris and I felt that that was not the lesson of honor but also that that world was not like that it was a tremendously interesting. And so I felt I could I had a pretty unique opportunity to write a book in the first person saying what was it like being me. And we did. We did very well. We started it and very humble beginnings. So which is funny because I later learned that that's the best of the book. People like the most is when we were doing this and we're being humbled on a daily basis that's much more fun than good.
So he says and said something about human psyche doesn't it that you know and you know hedge fund manager from a good family.
No one's ever going to feel sorry for me.
So tell me about investing diversified. What was that. What was the trigger for this. Why did you feel like you wanted or had to write it.
Yes. Well the very practical Strega was that first book ended up doing really well. And so my publisher came back. Financial Times came back and said you know we'd like you to write another book. And and I didn't want to be like this one guy. I didn't think that was but you know I didn't want to write another version of. And so the topic in the second book is actually something this throughout my adult life and very close to my end.
And I thought well just because I ran a hedge fund is on anyway way inconsistent with the message of the second.
And so it's actually originally I thought instead of going into investment banking I thought of getting aPh.D. and Tietjens so I was after my brother and I had a ton of debt and they are for money and so I sold my soul. But I you know I've always felt that the idea of investing and knowing whether you can beat the market or not and what you should do as a consequence of not being in the market is not only theoretically very interesting topping but it's actually one with extraordinarily far reaching practical implications. And I thought here I had you know the knowledge and I had the background and you know the first time I had a publisher let me write. So I thought that was pretty pretty cool. So pretty unique journey and no one directed me to you know what I should and shouldn't write. So excellent thing about Frank Raines to have to explain the publisher back in the day. I was different from some of the other call it index oriented books because it is this and I can talk to.
Yeah yeah I would like to talk to that day because you mentioned there that the approach to investing that you talk about in investing demystified.
