| August 10, 2003, Sunday MAGAZINE DESK
Well, I don't know if I agree with your assessment. Maybe what you mean is we've gone from the top of a bull market to the beginning of a bear market in bonds. Let me put it this way: the best investment performance is when you're outperforming the market and the market is doing well. That's when you deliver not only relative money to your clients but absolute money. You feel superduper, you feel good. Now we're doing better than the market, which is good, but clients are beginning to lose money. That doesn't feel as good. The worst is where your clients are losing absolute money and relative money. In other words, you're underperforming the market. That would send me into absolute depression.
Is it hard to break the news to investors that their bonds aren't performing as well as they were a few months ago? Do you feel guilty that you persuaded them to invest? No. That's a function of the market. I don't feel bad. I don't feel guilty. I simply wish that it could be otherwise. It's not the perfect world, but it's not Armageddon. Is your own money invested in bonds? Yeah, and a little too heavily this spring, especially for having known that the salad days were over and the bear market was upon us. I was in an investment committee one day, and I looked at everybody, and I said, ''Everybody put a smile on your face, because I've lost more money than all of you put together.'' You've said that the markets are like a blackjack table. You have a history with blackjack, right? When I was 22, I went to Vegas to see what I could do, and I had $200, and my parents told me I would be home in a day and a half. Of course this was my independence, my breaking away. So I played blackjack for 16 hours a day, seven days a week. No one was there that I knew, so I was friendless, and that was all I had to do, seven days a week. Stayed in the Indian motel -- I guess that is not politically correct, but that is what it is called. And it was $6 a day. It had 95 cents worth of free nickels at a local casino. So I financed my way through business school. No car. I would just walk from casino to casino. What's an ordinary day like now? Six a.m., when the market opens, all the guys are there on the floor, all day. Yoga or meditation -- I go from 9 to 10:30. An exercise bike 30 minutes and then 30 minutes of yoga. Then from 12 to 2 the investment committee, which is attractive because of the free lunch! We'll talk about what happened during the day, what we want to do now, what we think about longer-term things. From 2 to 4 there are other stupid meetings, different things that every office has. And then 4 to 4:30, hit balls at the range and go home about 5:30. Sounds pretty regimented. You know, I don't know whether that is positive or negative. It works for me, but there is a certain part of me that would like to be free-flowing, that would like to be at-the-moment, that would basically like to jump up on this table, that would like to break out of that. Well, actually, when I am face to face with someone, I think I can emote. I don't want to be an automaton. I want to be a person. I recognize that having longevity in this job requires a certain discipline. I am trying to mix that in. What did you think of the Pentagon's plan to create a way to trade on the possibilities of terrorism? Ludicrous. That's carrying the casinolike atmosphere of the financial markets into a whole different arena. To my way of thinking, it pits capitalism against common sense and national security. It was a trial balloon, and thank goodness it was popped. But you're a believer in markets. Aren't markets a good place to read what's going on in the culture, where the bets tell you what might happen? Well, I suppose so. But I don't know what kind of sophistication people would have before placing their bets. The true knowledge about terror in terms of the color of the warning level, orange or whatever -- that is the knowledge of Washington and defense insiders, and they're not betting on the markets. Or hopefully they're not like Pete Rose and betting on the market from the inside. So what information would it convey to anybody? It would be a marketplace of idiots, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Emily White
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