068 - Perth Tolle: Free People, Strong Markets (VIDEO)
Hear why freedom weighting is a powerful way to invest internationally, rewarding countries with greater freedom for their citizens. Find out how Perth Tolle has quantified freedom for international investing with her ETF: Life + Liberty Indexes.
Guest: Perth Tolle is the founder of Life + Liberty Indexes, an index company that uses human and economic freedom metrics as the primary factor in its investment process. Prior to Life + Liberty Indexes, she was an advisor at Fidelity Investments in California and Texas.
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Find out why freedom weighting is a powerful way to invest, and how Perth Tolle has quantified freedom for the purposes of international investing with her ETF. This fund was created for investors want a broad emerging markets allocation but don't want to support the worst human rights offenders like China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, etc.
Countries are scored by think tanks including the CATO Institute on three measures:
Rights to Life
Rights to Liberty
Rights to Property
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Perth Tolle, founder of Life + Liberty Indexes, talks about the relationships between human rights and economic freedoms and a country’s market strength. And yes we discussed China.
Guest: Perth Tolle is the founder of Life + Liberty Indexes, an index company that uses human and economic freedom metrics as the primary factor in its investment process.
What effect do greater citizen liberty and economic freedom have on a country's stock market? We’re giving you the breakdown on how Life + Liberty calculates their index. Hear how freedom weighted investing can be a beacon of positivity during tough times.
Disclaimer: This is not a recommendation to buy or sell securities. This episode does not contain any financial recommendations or advice.
Topics and Timestamps
01:43: Life + Liberty Indexes and the mission with the FRDM Index
“We started this company so that people who have an interest in freedom and the benefits of freedom as a foundation for economic growth and societal growth over time can have a way to invest according to those values.” - Perth Tolle
02:30: Index investing: What is it?
03:15: How cultural backgrounds and governments can impact investing habits
05:00: Where does the data come from for the index, and how is it broken down? Think tanks who provide the scoring data include: Cato Institute, Fraser Institute, and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.
“I break down those metrics into three categories. The rights to life, the rights to liberty, and the rights to property.” - Perth Tolle
07:15: Incorporating economic freedom factors into strategy: “We’re for freedom.”
08:00: The dichotomy of freedoms: How do economic freedoms and human freedoms relate?
“People are the driving force behind an economy in any society. And so if your people are not free to innovate, be creative, and to not live in fear of censorship, arrest, disappearances, or worse, then you’re not going to have as much innovation as you potentially could.” - Perth Tolle
11:20: The Lion King and power dynamics
“You’re either marching towards freedom or away from it.” -Perth
14:00: How does Perth determine which countries are scalable enough to include in the FRDM index?
15:00: Shout out to our friends at Ritholtz Wealth Management, especially to Josh Brown (@reformedbroker) for putting Perth on Emily’s radar. The Ritholtz Mafia puts out some of the best content in finance, from books to blogs to podcasts to their top ranked Alexa Flash Briefing, Market Moment, which we launched.
Recommended reading from Perth’s stack: check out Michael Batnick’s book, Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments:
15:40: Building connections and advisory boards - the Fund Board, AKA the Fun Board
19:30: How earned media can help you grow your business. Networking, as always, can help you thrive in the beginning.
22:40: Shining the light on progress: Your investing decisions can be considered charitable in some cases.
23:45: Big stacks of books and recommendations to get you through quarantine.
Books and Podcasts Perth recommends:
Pod: any of Bill Browder’s his many appearances on the podcast Stay Tuned with Preet - e.g. The Death of Sergei Magnitsky (with Bill Browder)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy’s podcast Invest like the Best, episode: Investing During a Crisis with guest Dan Rasmussen of Verdad Capital
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061 - Dr. Daniel Crosby: Boating and Selfies Are Dangerous, Investing Is Not
Do you know the biggest misconception about investing? New York Times best selling author Dr. Daniel Crosby joined Emily Binder to talk about the psychology of money. Many investors are mistaken that success in the markets is about being analytically minded, but it’s actually more about self control.
So yes, C.R.E.A.M., but emotion rules cash. Daniel shares the three legs of effective investing and why education alone isn’t enough to save us from investing mistakes or weight gain. (Yes, the two are linked.)
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Daniel Crosby, Ph.D is author of The Behavior Investor and host of Standard Deviations
Guest: Dr. Daniel Crosby is an Atlanta based psychologist and behavioral finance expert who helps organizations understand the intersection of mind and markets. A New York Times bestselling author, his most recent book is The Behavioral Investor. Dr. Crosby is Chief Behavioral Officer at Brinker Capital.
Timestamps and topics:
02:00 Daniel’s background: trained in clinical psychology then searched for non-clinical applications of psychology, stumbled on behavioral finance: the intersection of the mind and the markets
02:50 What do people most misunderstand about investing and their money?
03:20 “My business is full of human behavior” -Daniel’s father, a financial advisor for forty years
4:00 Many people think that success in the markets is about being analytically minded… when in reality the most successful investors have one thing in common: being able to control their own emotions. See Buffett.
4:15 It’s quite easy to be okay or good at investing
04:40 Cognitive errors
05:00 Our brain is wired to keep us alive long enough to pass on our genes, not to achieve excellence
05:25 The ways our brains betray us and hurt our investing: Our ego (especially a problem for men: see Consider Firing Your Male Broker by Blair duQuesnay), emotion, conservatism, and attention (tendency to confuse what’s easy to recall vs. what is probable)
Taking selfies is riskier than investing.
06:20 Example of attention leading us astray: People are very afraid of sharks but not of taking selfies, even though the latter has a higher death rate. Attentional bias for the vivid.
07:13 People think investing is risky even though over any given fifteen year period in history you couldn’t have lost money while invested in the general stock market
07:30 Multi-asset class diversified investing is much safer than, for example, taking selfies or boating, but we don’t perceive it this way
Boating is riskier than investing.
08:20 We tend not to answer the complicated question but to substitute: so we ask, “is this enjoyable?” And investing isn’t fun, but boating is fun. So instead of answering “is this risky?” we answer the question “is this enjoyable?” And then boating seems safer than investing.
10:25 It’s more complicated than just having an advisor help you.
The three legs of good investment decision making:
Education: learn about stocks, bonds, accounts
Environment: your portfolio - well-diversified that won’t scare you to death
Encouragement: good advisors to slap the bad decision out of your hand before you make it
11:00 Self-control parallels to diet and exercise: know what to eat, don’t have junk in the pantry, have a trainer or workout buddy to get you in the gym (apply these analogies to investing)
11:20 We added nutrimental information and calorie labels to food but we are actually twice as obese now - behavior change takes much more than just education
12:00 We want to think that we’re rational but information/education is a weak predictor of behavior change (nutrition labels alone don’t change our behavior)
13:25 For the same reasons that we’re fat, we’re poor. It’s complicated information, and it’s just information alone, which is ineffective (see the three legs). There’s a cottage industry of selling complexity.
Our tweet storm - what do people misunderstand about investing?:
14:00 Are people more empowered to manage their money now with technology and more transparency? Are we on a better path to managing our money better now that we’ve gotten away from old school stock brokers dialing for dollars and manipulating our emotions?
15:00 There’s never been a better time to be an individual investor, yet things we think we want like transparency and liquidity can hurt us. E.g. the more you check your account, the more it induces action, panic, and mistakes.
You’ve probably heard of the famous Fidelity study which showed that investors who had forgotten their account passwords performed better than ones who logged in and traded actively.
16:00 Across 19 different countries, the more active people are with trading, the worse their portfolios tend to perform.
17:15 People need financial advisors, but not for the reason they think.
18:00 Emily mentioned this quote from Stephanie Bogan on Patrick Brewer’s podcast, The Model FA: “When people come into your office to talk about their money, they’re never really talking about their money."
19:00 Literally nothing has more excitatory power in the brain than money - not sex, not death, not anything else.
19:40 Daniel has a strong Twitter presence, is great at marketing himself, and at making his ideas accessible: what is his strategy?
20:35 Daniel’s long term plan: put positive messages into the world and study happiness
21:30 Daniel’s podcast recommendations:
Dateline NBC Podcast - listen on Spotify
Ologies Podcast - study of different sciences
The Pitch (“Shark Tank" for your ears”)
Standard Deviations (Daniel’s podcast) - Emily’s favorite episodes:
24:00 Daniel’s book recommendations:
He is writing a book on the meaning of life, so he is reading about this. Best one he read last year: Alchemy by Rory Sutherland (Ogilvy guy) - great book for anyone into marketing. Topic: behavioral economics and applying psychology to marketing.
Connect with Daniel Crosby:
Twitter: @danielcrosby
Interested in business, marketing, and technology? Subscribe free to our minipod, Voice Marketing with Emily Binder. Under 5 minutes twice a week on podcast apps and Alexa:
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036 - Monopolies: AT&T Yesterday, Facebook and Google Today - Robert Binder
Robert Binder is a Senior Engineer member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. He has 43 years of experiencing working in technology on everything from mainframe computers to embedded cyber physical systems, including work in institutions in financial markets in Chicago including the CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange).
We talked about how the drivers of economics and business are sending Facebook in the same direction AT&T was sent. Topics include:
Classical Economics
The Network Effect
The Monopolist's Demand Curve
When it came to AT&T's breakup in the 1980s, it was not just the new technology that mattered, it was the business opportunities created at that moment. Capital investment and risk taking and entrepreneurial activity that resulted happened at a very large scale.
Customers used to lease landline phones from AT&T.
Timestamps:
3:15 How Robert got involved with software in 1976
4:00 2 GTE software project the theory of the firm monopolist's demand curve
2.40 Robert's project with GTE Automatic Electric, which operated specialized telephone networks. At the time AT&T operated all the wires and owned all the phones. People leased their home phones from AT&T.
The deregulation in 1985 of ATT opened the door for cellular networks and led to what we have today; this is a hugely complex topic. But we discussed a few aspects.
6:00 The Theory of the Firm
6:15 In a competitive market, no individual company can control price; they price based on supply and demand
6:43 The Monopolist's Demand Curve
7:09 Martin Shkreli and high cost drug monopoly- ‘Pharma bro’ Martin Shkreli sentenced to 7 years in prison — says, ‘This is my fault’
9:20 AT&T was a monopoly but they made more money by charging less - not gouging customers even though they could
10:00 Facebook is the greatest deal in advertising but is quickly increasing in cost
11:02 The power of monopoly is a street that cuts both ways for Facebook (privacy issues, scrutiny)
11:20 Most users don't realize Facebook owns Instagram or that user data is the product - the model is much more complex than AT&T's monopoly
12:20 In the 1930s people realized that if the telephone system was to grow, they would need to employ an inordinate amount of humans to man the switches - not scalable
13:20 Was there skepticism about technology like the telephone like there has been for the PC, the smart phone, email, and now voice technology?
13:50 Long distance calls were expensive
14:15 New technology, when scalable and affordable, can be adopted readily and becomes quotidian
14:30 The Network Effect (the value of a network increases to a power of two with the number of connections) - exponential growth
