Chad Slater – Worldly

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Timestamps:

• 0:45: Intro to Chad
• 2:00 – Chad’s early life… in PNG?!
• 3:30 – Chad was working in the family supermarket at 11
• 4:40 – Chad goes to boarding school in Queensland
• 6:20 – High school runner-up Dux. He wants to be a pilot but ends up studying finance.
• 9:00 – Pairing up with other Aussie investing heavyweights from a young age
• 10:00 – Chad takes a role at Treasury then fails to get into BT (the first time), works for Peter Costello
• 12:30 – Chad gets rejected for the second time at BT… but persistence and doggedness gets him an interview
• 15:30 – Chad keeps his job then moves to Boston on secondment
• 18:00 – Chad moves to Argentina on sabbatical and take time off “until you can understand why you’re not the idiot, you’re the idiot”
• 19:00 – Offers to join some of the best hedge funds in the world (NYC, Paris & London)
• 20:30 – Managing $100m in your 30’s and lessons from the GFC (including, stop losses to increase cash balances)
• 23:40 – 1 simple process can trump the most convoluted process in the investing world (how do you know when you’re early or wrong?)
• 24:40 – A cooling off period after the stop loss and when to re-enter (Epsilon theory, always go to a funeral). What did you learn and why would you go back?
• 26:30 – Why start Morphic?
• 29:45 – Circles of competence and Chad’s early promises to his staff
• 32:00 – Advice: Don’t short
• 35:00 – Having an edge in investing and why Chad believes all investors need to understand the economy and individual ideas
• 37:00 – How and why Chad invests ethically
• 40:00 – Why diverse boards make better decisions
• 42:00 – Would Woolworths pass the ethical test? Black and grey listed stocks. Chad’s percentage of revenue test (putting it in the grey area)
• 43:00 – AMP and ‘active ownership’
• 46:00 – Using quant screens and models to refine the universe, using value and momentum.
• 50:00 – An example of a successful short sale on the ASX — Morphic’s rival Platinum Asset Management. “The burden of proof is on me to figure out what is and what isn’t a lie.”
• 53:00 – “Is Value Investing Dead?” and knowing who you are as an investor
• 58:00 – Avoid junk, be prepared for long winters, and be agile. There’s cheap then there’s bad.
• 59:50 – Instead of seeking brilliance just try to avoid doing something dumb
• 1:00:20 – Does Morphic own FAANG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google/Alphabet)
• 1:01:00 – Where does Chad see opportunity (and risk) towards the end of 2018? “Japan is the forgotten cousin of the world”
• 1:05:00 – “you can have a mud-map of where you want to go but the world very rarely lets you go exactly where you want to go”
• 1:07:00 – Find out more about Morphic
• 1:09:00 – Investing with fund managers who don’t invest in their own funds
• 1:12:00 – The most important advice he would give himself. “Markets climb a wall of worry”. Write down simple rules in advance. Ask yourself: What do you want out of markets?

Further Reading:

• Competitive Advantages
• Multidisciplinary Learning – Farnam St Blog
• The Superinvestors of Grahame-and-Doddsville (PDF) – Columbia
• Circle of Competence
• Charlie Munger on Envy and psychology: The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (video)
• Epsilon Theory – Always Go To the Funeral
• Morphic:
  • Why is Shorting an Asset for Investors?
  • Is Value Investing Dead?
• Superforecasting book
• AMP investors must take some of the blame: ethical hedge fund

Learn more about Chad: 

• Morphic website

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