 Okay, hi John and welcome to the first episode of this three part mini series, and I thought perhaps given this is episode one, you could just give us a brief history of time and walk us back to really your, your high school days before then we start to delve into some of the major topics I want to talk about really two things, the reality versus the perception of working in finance because I know the two can be somewhat a large difference in reality and then your best and worst experiences of working in finance because I think it's going to be a really good way for the listeners to get to know you as individual while we embark down this three part journey, but also I'm sure there'll be some invaluable advice as well for all the community so perhaps a little bit about you and your background first John. Thank you, Anthony, and thank you everyone who's tuning in for the for the podcast I always like talking to students people who are at that formative period in their life when they're thinking about what they should study and what career they should go towards because I think it's important to realize that a lot of the past that you end up on or very different from the ones you might envision when you're in school and and that was certainly my case, I grew up in Louisiana in a town of 5000 people, we had a bank, but it was not an investment bank. A bank was a place where you took a load of cash to keep it safe in your savings account, it was a place where you took a bunch of spare coins and traded them in for actual bills, you know, I knew nothing at all about banking as we know it in the city of London or Wall Street. Until I was probably about 25. That meant I went through my entire undergraduate program which was an economics, I went through my first job, which was in public policy consulting I went through the first year of my first master's degree in the states without any contact with the banking world and without really knowing anyone who had ever worked in banking so then I went on to a 25 year career at Jacob Morgan doing research, running research for foreign exchange for commodities for interest rates and the process of strategy so the kind of stuff that was going through my head when I was the age of people on this podcast was vastly different from what I ended up doing you know with most of my life when I was in high school, I think because I grew up in Louisiana, you know the idea of being a professional where a doctor or lawyer, those are kind of the role models and that was kind of the direction I was heading in. And for, I guess a good part of my undergraduate career, even though I was studying economics. The idea was that that was something that was just going to position me eventually to go to law school and then from law school I was probably going to work in some field of public policy in Washington DC where I went to undergrad at Georgetown I thought about the US Trade Representative or the State Department or the World Bank or the IMAP, these are the kind of things that were in kind of like my conception of a great job and a great life. And it wasn't until I went to graduate school the first time I went to the public policy school at Princeton and I was studying economics within that track that the Mexican peso crisis broke out in 1994. The first time I realized that there was this nexus between economics and public policy and financial markets and I thought, you know, I still want to go to DC and have a job working for the US trade rep or the White House and State Department or whatever. But I wouldn't mind spending a couple of years learning about, you know, finance properly, especially as it interacts and is kind of shaped by by by economic policy decisions and policy mistakes. I got a job or several jobs on Wall Street, I got one with a money manager UBS asset management, and I was a global fixed income strategist there for about a year and a half covering all the bond markets outside the US emerging markets and developing markets. It was a great job but I was kind of the only one there doing that and everyone else in the shop was covering domestic US fixed income markets so when I got a call from a former professor of mine at Princeton to join what was then known as Chase Investment Bank, a currency strategist I thought this is great, you know, this is the middle of the Asian crisis, I'm going to join currency research, I'll work with someone who used to be my mentor and my professor at Princeton, so I'm going. And from there, Chase ended up buying JP Morgan I ended up at JP Morgan I relocated to London I had a variety of kind of senior jobs running research for various businesses. And that was essentially the fullness of my self side career, I mean the process of transitioning to the, to the buy side now, after stopping at LSE and doing a degree in philosophy but that's kind of the backstory and the takeaway there is, you know, a lot of things are going to happen in your life and over your career. Nothing is exactly kind of predetermined by what you're studying right now, you're going to take everything incrementally one year or every couple years at a time. It's so so interesting because talking to people like yourselves who've gone through the career up to this point experienced. There's not many of them actually who had this really predetermined idea from youth. And I've just followed it all the way through. It's nearly always that there's been some opportunity, some life situation, something which has meant that they've, they've ended up taking a slightly different route in that sense. The term for the other people use it which is kind of an uncharitable term is, is luck, meaning things will just happen to you that are way beyond your control. And the degree to which you know you're able to capitalize that as a big determinant whether or not you realize, you know, success or failure or kind of something in between. There's a lot of things that you just can't control for so you probably shouldn't beat yourself up too much that you haven't gotten on X or Y track by now yet, you know that that opportunity just hasn't presented itself you can only kind of control the things that are within your remit what you study how hard you work how much you apply yourself in a certain situation but the opportunities, you know, unfortunately can be quite random. But I'm lucky because I've caught you where you're not at JP Morgan at the moment, even though you're there for now in 25 years so reason why I say that is because I think one of the hardest things for students to get access to for one is a kind of direct line which which is why I love the podcast format is quite intimate direct line to really hear from you. So I could sue the senior person but then also now that there's not so much constraint on you in terms of what you can and can't say to get a bit of an insight really as to what is life actually like working at a major financial institution so this idea then of the reality versus the perception. Like what when I just say that phrase like what's your take and where do you want to start with that because I know it's a big question. So when you say perception I think how do people perform their perceptions they form their perceptions, perhaps through contact with a handful of individuals they might encounter and if they don't encounter people who work in the city or Wall Street they might encounter perceptions based on things they see on television like the show industry or movies like Wolf Wall Street. And I guess what I want to explain to people is what I think the common perceptions are a finance side of finance versus the reality and I'll break it down into kind of two subcomponents one is what is the content of a job in finance the reality versus the perception. And what's the culture of a finance job the reality versus the perception and how much of that is and justified how much of it is positive and not justified and kind of where is kind of the truth value and, and all of that and start first with kind of like the content of a job and finance. I'm going to speak from the perspective of someone who's only ever worked in markets so I did research, as I said for 25 years I still do research and research is one of kind of the three pillars of a markets business a investment bank has sales it has trading, and it has research. The markets business is one part of an investment bank, the other part of the investment bank is the capital raising side through debt and equity markets and the lending side, and and everything I'm describing on the investment bank side, the banking and the markets is known as the sell side, its counterparty is the buy side which is the investment management side encompassing hedge funds asset managers and an asset owners. And I think it's about, you know, my research experience but I think it's roughly representative of what goes on in markets, and I know a lot of your audiences is sort of aiming to be traders. And I think it's also reasonably representative of life on the buy side, which is the compliment to the markets business in an investment banking. The content of those jobs is, I believe the perception is that these are jobs that are intellectually demanding and incredibly stimulating. I think people think of the content of the work as being incredibly dynamic, meaning the kinds of challenges faced today are not necessarily the challenges that you'll face tomorrow, even though it's all quite stimulating. I think the work is probably highly technical very specialized and very quantitative and if we kind of stick with those features. I think there those are pretty much bang on, meaning I think the perception of the work as being stimulating and and demanding in a good way kind of intellectually was exactly my experience, because I covered markets and I was an analyst. And I had to make the call on what currencies, raids commodities, you know, equities would do in response to how the economy was going to behave and what macroeconomic shocks would hit and what monetary and fiscal policy events would occur. And because each of those things I describe are quite unpredictable and unstable in themselves. The challenge every day was unique in a slightly different way. You know, it wasn't that day two was different from day 180 degrees but there was also always some slight evolution of the macroeconomic environment that I would have to respond to as an analyst. And so if I have to think, you know how many times was I bored in 24 years of doing investment research, I would say I could count them on less than two hands. I mean, not many times, and those times when I was born, line up pretty nicely with lows in volatility in markets. I was raised in a crisis environment in terms of my market experience I started during the Asian crisis. I like crises like financial crises I like recessions as an as an analyst. So low ball periods were kind of boring for me. Thankfully, those didn't come, you know, very often. But, you know, that's, that's why I would always characterize that experience as being incredibly challenging and stimulating. In terms of the technical side of things. I know we're going to have a discussion in part three about people coming into finance and non traditional backgrounds and I'm not going to lie to you, like if you're not somewhat comfortable with numbers if you don't like doing some kinds of calculations, you should kind of question why you're looking at finance in the first place. It doesn't mean you can't have a degree in philosophy or literature or psychology or something else and do very well in finance but you have to kind of wonder, you know, if you really like that other stuff so much. Do you like that plus numbers, you're fine. Do you like that stuff and hate numbers, maybe you're not fine. I think one of the good and bad features of finance is that people are given roles that are quite narrowly circumscribed, you know you're a salesperson covering this or selling this product you're a trader who has this book you're an analyst who covers the sector. And that's what you're supposed to do day in day out and to the extent that you do it 12 hours a day five days a week for five years 10 years you get better and better at it and you're compensated for that expertise, but that can be quite narrow. I think is thankfully changing. I think because markets are more interconnected banks tend to look for people with a lot of these kind of crossover skills. I think there are certain parts of finance that are becoming quite dominant right now that are inherently kind of cross domain, you think about data scientists are very much in demand. Those are basically statisticians who are also computer scientists think about climate investing those are people who are kind of climate scientists but also economists so that that bit of it's changing. And the reality perception difference, I think is a little more problematic on the cultural side, because if you ask people what their perception of the culture of the finance environment is, I think they're going to use words that are generally not flattering, like aggressive competitive homogenous meaning not diverse, and probably unethical, and you know if I talk about two of those issues diversity and ethics. These are ones that I think often are a turn off in terms of the perception, and how young people kind of feel like they will be welcome or comfortable in a finance environment so to be honest about it. I think if you took a snapshot of the finance industry, and you didn't sort of control for whether we were looking at the buy side of the cell side, or whether we've been looking at the analyst associate population, or the MD population. You'd say, there's nothing about that demographic in aggregate, which is representative of the country, whether your country is America or your country is the UK. You're a little more granular, and you kind of recognize it's been a little more of a, like a moral evolution and people's thinking about barriers to entry into finance and how the finance industry should welcome kind of a broader church, you know, for its own quality of the workforce. If you took a snapshot of the animals associate population now, definitely a big investment banks, and I think at a number of cells, by side firms that have formal recruitment programs, you would probably see that they're 5050 men and women. You would probably see that the racial composition is also pretty representative of the underlying population of the country. So, you know, if you if you judge finance and aggregate, you probably say, not very diverse. If you look at where it's come, and particularly what it's doing around analysts associate populations you'd see it say that's great. I think it's still very problematic for a lot of young people. And I believe that's partly because the ethical failings in finance are recurring. I think when the history is written on Silicon Valley Bank, there'll be a lot of malfeasance which is unearthed and publicized. And you don't even have to write the history of Credit Suisse. I mean, the whole sad tale of Credit Suisse for the past 10 years has been, you know, constructing this kind of monument to management malfeasance every year they paid a fine for the past decade and the the value of those fines exceeded the market capital company at one point a month ago it's just the kind of thing that makes you wonder if there's been any like learnings since Lehman and Bear Stearns. And this is a point where I would, you know, really push back on the perception that finance is somehow inherently unethical, I think, because I'm older, and because I have friends who have worked in other domains, I can tell you this and pretty unsavory stuff that goes on in fields like academia, which people think of as being, you know, an example of virtue or an example of upstanding sort of individuals. There's an awful lot of malfeasance in law. It exists in medicine, it exists in technology, it exists in media. So I would be, in fact, I will never say that there are more kind of bad actors in finance than other sectors I think they're bad actors in lots of places what I will say is that the consequence of unethical behavior is much higher in finance that it is another sectors because banks, many of them are systemically important. So someone that does the bad thing creates potentially more harm, more externalities for the rest of society than if that same bad person ran amok at running a toy shop or a cement factory or, you know, the department at a certain university. So it's right to kind of hold finance people, I think, to higher standards than, you know, the sectors because, you know, there's a greater consequence to wrongdoing, but I think it's incorrect to say that finance, you know, inherently attracts more of bad actors than we see in other sectors. Yeah, no, I think it's a really timely piece to talk about that, because given exactly as you just said this latest banking episode that we've just gone through. For a lot of young people, I guess it's the first one that they've seen, right. What they've been more interacting with financial press and use and consuming of that information so I think it's going to be good for them to see that because if you didn't know any different, like you said, and you're looking at certain financial institutions you might have some questions but I think it's a very valid point thinking more broadly and in other sectors, not too dissimilar in that way but perhaps then to link into the next part then talking about your best and worst experience. So I'm quite interested to know about the worst you definitely weren't bored then we've determined that it's intellectually stimulating and I can totally sympathize with that as well given that I worked in kind of macro on a desk covering real time stuff so that for sure but perhaps then personally what what were some of the things that really stick there as a memory out of your lengthy career of being a memorable positive and one maybe that was a negative but a learning lesson all the same. So terms of positives, like I said like I came from kind of nothing in terms of my background I was never supposed to be in banking I was never supposed to be an MD like none of the stuff was ever kind of on in the scope of possibilities for me so everything was kind of good and everything was gravy whether it was the compensation the professional opportunities I had the promotions the or whatever it was it was it was all so much more than I ever would have wanted. So for me like the experience that was more meaningful to me and I only recognize this when I moved on from cell side research and I kind of wrote a final note to clients kind of summarizing my experiences in my learnings. The most valued was the simple fact that I learned so much all the time. And, and this is because you know I'm, I've got kind of an academic disposition in some ways with some commercial meetings obviously but, but the point is, I like figuring things out. And so the idea of getting paid to figure things out and talk to people about the things I figured out was a really really great experience and it's and it's why I'm still committed to finance even after 25 years at one place and even after doing a philosophy you'll feel like if you're hardwired to like to solve problems and problems that are really at the intersection of economics and politics like markets is still the place to be, and you just have to choose whether you want that market experience to be on the or the buy side, but conversely, you know kind of linking that to worst experiences because I am an analyst and because the role of an analyst is quite public role, meaning you write things it goes out to 10s of thousands of clients you get on TV and you talk about it and go to conferences and talk about it. It's really important to be correct and be correct for the right reasons, because when you're incorrect, you feel like an idiot, and you feel useless and there's a paper trail of it and there's a video record of it. And that for me was incredibly hard. And there were, you know, moments where I failed miserably publicly in terms of market calls so when the emu crisis first broke out the sovereign debt crisis in the your area. In December of 2009, I very publicly said, look, I think this is overblown and I think this will be resolved relatively quickly in a few months and then it went on to last for like two and a half years. And that was a very, you know, public failure. And what I learned from that is a few things. And one is, you know, in finance, I think you're probably going to fail a lot more than in other domains precisely because of the content of the role. I mean you're trying to wrestle with something inherently unstable which is the economy and policy and exogenous shocks, and how all that translates into markets and if you think you're going to get that right. At the same time, you're dead wrong. If you think you're going to get it right 75% of the time, you're dead wrong. I'd say if you're getting it right 60% of the time. That's really good, but that means 40% of the time you're going to feel like an idiot. And if you're a researcher you're going to feel like an idiot publicly 40% of the time. And, and so that's important to kind of understand, you know, the hurdle rate is really high to succeed. But what I learned from that failure is that, you know, when you are getting it wrong, you need to be introspective enough and self aware enough to self diagnose and to figure out like what did you miss. Did you, was your framework inappropriate was your framework incomplete did you look at, you know, data that wasn't so relevant should you have focused on this instead. And what I learned is that, you know, I really needed to always understand where leverage was in an economy. Is it in household sector corporate sector banking sector government sector. Is it in the investor base and if it's in the investor base or part of the investor base was and that was a really important learning that it took to, you know, every subsequent business cycle and financial crisis like I made sure I knew like all the bodies were buried so that when the shock hit, I could figure that that was going to be the hotspot and, and I haven't always anticipated correctly. All the shocks but when they hit, I was pretty comfortable saying, look, this is going to be the problem and that's not going to be the problem. So, you know, the takeaway there is, you're going to fail, you're going to fail a lot more than a lot of other things you can do in your life. But you got to teach yourself, you know, how to be better, because you might not have someone tapping you on the shoulder and saying this is what we did wrong. If you're lucky you have that mentor or that manager to point the way, but a lot of times you just kind of figure this out on your own. And is that something I say is something I've heard from many other people is about that importance of a role model like a mentor that can help you navigate these peaks and troughs generally of a career in that sense is that someone did you have that someone that you said at the beginning you had that Princeton professor who called you over to chase. Is that a relationship that said exists I'm sure it does. It is in fact she wrote, you know, my recommendation 25 years later to go to LSE and do my second master's degree so that's a relationship that I still have. So I would distinguish between kind of formal mentors and informal mentors. A formal mentor I think is someone who is designated for you by someone else or someone you choose. And it's recognized that you will have, you know, some degree of contact with them at with some regularity and and banks and many financial institutions have these formal programs, you know, specifically to kind of nurture talent and to retain good people and that's all great if you have one of those people. And that's not the only way to sort of get feedback from your work and to get guidance on your career. You can, you can have role models, which I guess role model is the better parent rather than mentor because you can identify people whose behaviors and work styles whose particular methods are very useful to you as a as a salesperson as a trader as a researcher, in terms of modeling and kind of developing your own craft and your own expertise so they don't have to know who you are, you can introduce themselves yourself to them but if they are visible, you can hopefully identify like what what traits they have what sort of ways of working or what frameworks they use analytically are useful and transferable to you and you can try to mimic those and so I had, I guess, semi formal mentors meaning my my managers were always people who I felt very comfortable asking for guidance from even though, you know they were called manager they weren't called mentor. And there were other people who, you know, aren't aware of it but they always kind of set the standard for me analytically and I sort of learned from them just by reading their stuff and and listening to them and you know those relationships are completely anonymous to them but they were very useful to Yeah, my final question kind of just going linking back to the beginning is about this reality and perception. You talked quite a lot about where you've come from the type of town and environment. What are those people like you must still have friends from home from high school maybe. What do they think of you now and what's their perception of you and how have you managed that because I know. Sometimes if you're going through this this kind of social mobility process, almost, and you get to interact with lots of different people members of society, like has that been something you've been conscious of when you particularly because you're heading home right next week for This, the reason I laugh is because, like, I'm from Louisiana you can't stand on ceremony you can't have errors in a place like that so you know you're, especially when some of these things just don't register as, as experiences or professions in another places isn't what people do. And so, if you, if I say I'm an investment strategist, you know that that that isn't something that people can kind of connect with so it's not kind of the basis for my interaction with people back home for the most part because that that's just the world of, like, the South, and, and I think that's an important lesson like the, the, the finance world is is a particular ecosystem, and the more time you spend in finance working, the more time you will spend with finance people socially, and you know, a sliver of society and that's a particular sliver of society, where there's a big gap, in terms of relational quality with lots of other parts of society and parts of the country and that's the case whether you live in the UK or the, or the US so you need to. You know, this is difficult you to retain, you know, as a sense of self awareness that you're incredibly lucky to have gotten this opportunity that that of course you should work hard and monetize it to the full extent, you know, you deserve it. But that ecosystem is incredibly detached from from other parts of society, it will lead to all kinds of distance, you know, even within your friendship circle and your family, other kind of domains that are important to you. And so you really don't want to think of yourself, outside of those circles as being nearly as important as you feel within that circle, like that's a very kind of pernicious and I think kind of toxic mindset to have. Yeah, well that really leads us nicely into the next episode, which will air which to give people a bit of a flavor we're going to talk about setting goals and managing expectations for success and then company quality versus job quality and work life versus personal life. And then we'll also go on to have an episode we talk a little bit about you mentioned non traditional backgrounds and about how they could have their interaction with finance and various different roles. And the value of those newer credentials talking a lot more about quantitative finance and things of that nature and then common attributes of successful analysts and associates and you know you talked about kind of analysts associates and then the the MDs. I'll be really interested to understand then with your looking back in hindsight what have been some of the memorable things or qualities characteristics that you've seen so they're all things will will dive into but remember to follow and subscribe put on notifications to make sure you don't miss the next episodes with john two more still to come but john pleasure and thank you very much for joining me today. Thank you for the invitation.