Seth Klarman: Masters in Business - Raw Transcript

Source: Bloomberg Podcasts - Masters in Business
Guest: Seth Klarman, Founder & CEO of Baupost Group
Interviewer: Barry Ritholtz
Duration: ~68 minutes

What can I tell you about this week’s banger? Seth Klarman, legendary value investor, uh, out of Boston at the Bal post Group. What a fascinating discussion about risk, about the current environment, about the Boston Red Sox. Uh, about just about anything that affects portfolios, um, distressed assets, stocks, bonds, real estate. I thought this was fascinating. And I know you will also. With no further ado, my conversation with Seth Klarman.

Seth Klarman, welcome to Bloomberg. It’s so great to be here. Thank you. Barry. Thank you so much. I’ve been looking forward to this for for ever. Um, before we get into your investment philosophy and the development of of ball post, I have to roll back a little bit to. To your early days. Economics from Cornell. An MBA from Harvard. What was the original career plan? So I was always drawn to investing. Um, even when I was a very young kid, I was interested in the baseball statistics. I became aware that there were these other columns of numbers in the newspaper. And, uh, I asked my neighbor what those were and started to understand and follow the stock market a little bit. So of course, I had no idea what I was doing, but I was paying attention from quite early age. I didn’t really ever develop a career plan, but I was drawn to the stock market. I think I I’m trying to puzzles Barry. I like doing word puzzles every day, like solving math puzzles. I subscribe still to something called, um, a math puzzle book published by Dell. And, um, stock market is a big puzzle. The financial markets are a big puzzle. How does it all work, and how does the performance of the companies get reflected in stock prices, and how can an investor outperform, um, everybody else. And so all of that is a piece of what what drew me in.

[Transcript continues with full conversation as recorded…]