The Judgment Call Podcast By cover art

The Judgment Call Podcast

By: The Judgment Call Podcast
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  • A podcast where we talk to risk takers, adventurers, travelers, entrepreneurs and simply mind bogglers.
    © The Judgment Call Podcast
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Episodes
  • Maciej Wojtal (Should you invest in Iranian equities?)

    Maciej Wojtal (Should you invest in Iranian equities?)
    Aug 27 2021
    00:00:20 How Maciej got started with Amtelon Capital and why he chose Iran as a primary investment target?00:05:33 Why is Iran like Russia (and Eastern Europe ) in the 1990s? Is there a catalyst for Iran making it back to be connected with the rest of the world?00:14:25 A short story of sanctions against Iran.00:26:06 How Iranians and the regime in Iran differ? Why is the regime so successful in controlling power?00:32:32 What are great businesses to invest in Iran?00:48:11 How Iran avoided the 'Dutch disease' of big commodity exporters.00:56:08 Is Iran starting to be a new part of an 'Axis power'? Will this hamper the participation of outside investors in the Iranian market? Maciej Wojtal is the founder and CIO of Amtelon Capital which is focused on investing in Iranian equities. Maciej has worked with Citigroup and JP Morgan before running his own fund. Big Thanks to our Sponsors! ExpressVPN – Claim back your Internet privacy for less than $10 a month! Mighty Travels Premium – incredible airfare and hotel deals – so everyone can afford to fly Business Class and book 5 Star Hotels! Sign up for free! Divvy – get business credit without a personal guarantee and 21st century spend management plus earn 7x rewards on restaurants & more. Get started for free! Brex – get a business account, a credit card, spend management & convertible rewards for every dollar you spend. Plus now earn $250 just for signing up (Terms & Conditions apply). Torsten Jacobi: Maciej, welcome to the Podcast. Thanks for coming on, really appreciate that. Maciej Wojtal: Yes, thank you for having me here. Torsten Jacobi: Hey, absolutely. You run something really interesting and you are the cofounder and the CIO of Amtalan Capital, which really focuses on investing primarily in equities in Iran, from what I understand. That sounds really cool, really unique. I have never heard about an investment fund out there that actually invests in Iran. How did that happen? How did you get started on why Iran? Why not something that's a little more politically correct, so to speak? Maciej Wojtal: Yes, well, it is super exciting. And when I speak to the local regulator in Iran, they tell us that we are their favorite foreign investor, foreign institutional investor, because we are the only one. There is really no other foreign institutional investor in Iran, so we are the only ones. So I decided to launch Amtalan Capital back in 2016, when JCPOA, the nuclear agreement, was implemented. And the reason why Iran and not something else was actually pretty simple. There was no other market. There's still there is still no other market at this moment in the world with lower evaluations, a higher growth potential, both like a long term structural growth potential, as well as near term growth that will be coming from the reopening of the country or reintegration of the country with the rest of the world. And to be honest, this is potentially the last opportunity of this size. So the type of opportunity, I mean, is a transformational opportunity. So country going from one situation, because it's not from one system to another, I don't expect any political, you know, revolution or transformation there. But the economic situation will change, will change from a, you know, decades of sanctions, where the economy was basically cut off from the rest of the world to the economy that is slowly opening up, catching up with the rest of emerging markets, with everything good that happened in the rest of the emerging markets over the last two decades. And on top of that, no one is there. So Americans cannot touch it. So all the big funds out there have to wait until the primary US sanctions are lifted. So suddenly you get, you get to go to a new market like this of this size and invest before the big US funds go there. It doesn't happen too often. And what I mean of this size, what I mean by this size is, you know, that's another unique thing is that you may have some frontier markets that you can get excited about because of demographics, you know, growth potential, whatever. But usually they have no capital markets. You can go and launch startups, build a factory, a bank, whatever. And here you already have pretty well developed capital markets, stock market with 600 companies. Right now it's around $250 billion market cap. Back in 2016, it was already $100 billion market cap. And right now several hundred million dollars turnover per day. And so, you know, big enough market to be attractive even for big investors. I mean, too big to ignore basically. And for us with a new fund, startup fund that wants to basically focus on this niche and do the initial fundraising and so on. Well, there was looked as an amazing setup with everything that we needed in place. So hence the decision. And, you know, the important thing is that I had no connections to Iran. So I actually had never met an Iranian in my life before my first visit to Tehran. So I had no ...
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Jared Dillian (From Lehman Brothers to 2021 – how did the financial industry change?)

    Jared Dillian (From Lehman Brothers to 2021 – how did the financial industry change?)
    Aug 27 2021
    00:00:23 How did Jared's path from Lehman Brothers to Internet personality develop?00:05:06 How did the finance industry develop during the last 20 years?00:08:18 Jared's experience on writing a novel (and how it compares to his other book)?00:11:29 What is Jared's view of the deflation/ inflation debate?00:17:03 Is productivity growth really as low as we assume? What role do stock buybacks play?00:22:01 Is individual risk taking the key to increase productivity growth?00:25:01 What are great areas of investment according to Jared?00:30:01 Will DeFi eradicate banks and most of the financial industry?00:34:01 Is the banking industry a good indicator for the health and competitiveness of an economy?00:38:36 How consistent should financial commentators be? Jared Dillian is the author of Street Freak: Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers, named one of the top business books of 2011 by Businessweek magazine. Jared runs The Daily Dirtnap, LLC, which provides daily market commentary and insight to a range of institutional clients. Big Thanks to our Sponsors! ExpressVPN – Claim back your Internet privacy for less than $10 a month! Mighty Travels Premium – incredible airfare and hotel deals – so everyone can afford to fly Business Class and book 5 Star Hotels! Sign up for free! Divvy – get business credit without a personal guarantee and 21st century spend management plus earn 7x rewards on restaurants & more. Get started for free! Brex – get a business account, a credit card, spend management & convertible rewards for every dollar you spend. Plus now earn $250 just for signing up (Terms & Conditions apply).   Torsten Jacobi : Jared, thanks a lot for coming unto the Judgment Call Podcast, I really appreciate that. Jared Dillian: Yeah. Torsten Jacobi : Hey, thanks for taking the time. And you know, you have a really interesting history, and it's something that's becoming a bit of a theme though, is you started in an investment bank, and you worked for Lehman Brothers, then you wrote a book, you became an author, and now you're an internet personality, you run your own internet business, your own content business. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about this transition, how this came upon, and how do you feel, was it the right choice looking back, or do you feel like, well, no, I want to go back to an investment bank? Jared Dillian : No, it was absolutely the right choice. It was funny because I was talking to my old boss at Lehman, this is the guy that I worked for 2001, 2002, and he told me a story of, you know, when I worked for him, we used to get the Garmin letter. I don't know if you know Dennis Garmin, but we used to get the Garmin letter at Lehman Brothers, and he had probably the biggest financial newsletter. It was a daily letter, and I used to get this stuff, and you know, I liked it. I didn't, you know, I didn't think his writing was the best, but I said, this is an amazing business. I was like, you can just get paid to write about finance, you know, I'd never heard of this before. So around 2003, you know, I had this idea in my head that I wanted to write a financial newsletter, so I had some ideas, and my initial idea was it would be sort of a retail newsletter. I would charge a very small amount of money, about $150 a year, and I would do personal finance stuff, and then I would do seminars and stuff like that. And I figured if I had 1,000 subscribers, I would make $150,000 a year, and that would be enough. And then what happened was, while I was at Lehman, I was put in charge of the ETF desk, and I was told to just grow the business, because the business was very small. They said grow the business, so my idea was to do that through writing. So I started writing market commentary and sending it out to people, and it was very popular, and it grew, and it grew, and it grew. So by the time the bankruptcy came around, I had several thousand people on my list, and I said, you know, I can easily monetize this, so the day the bankruptcy, I sent out a message. I said, I'm going to start a newsletter, and you know, hundreds of people said I'll sign up. So I quit Lehman Brothers, and I started the business, you know, I formed an LLC, and I got some office space, and about six weeks later, I started sending out content again, and I got a few hundred people to sign up, and that was the beginning of the newsletter. So that was in 2008, and about that time, I was also approached to write a book about my time at Lehman Brothers. There was a literary agent that found me and asked me to write a book about it, and initially I said no, but six months later, I came around and I said yes. So while the early days of writing the newsletter, I was writing this book, and that came out in 2011. So there's just been a bunch of stuff since then, I started writing from Alden Economics in 2014, I wrote another book in 2016, I'm an op ed columnist at Bloomberg, I've taught finance at the undergraduate...
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    45 mins
  • Stephen Clapham (How to spot a good investment – and a fraud!)

    Stephen Clapham (How to spot a good investment – and a fraud!)
    Aug 27 2021
    00:00:33 How Stephen got started in the world of finance and what motivated him to write his latest book.00:10:05 What is the basic premise of Stephen's analysis of financial statements (forensic accounting)?00:21:01 What is the fine line between fraud and creative accounting?00:27:22 What is Stephen's analysis of the Wirecard fraud?00:32:27 How well do the current accounting standards actually work for provide transparency into profits/ losses of banks?00:39:51 Where does all the printed money (from Central Banks) actually go? What is the best option to 'weather the current low growth environment'?00:51:10 How 'money printing' at this huge scale seems to be deflationary instead of inflationary? Stephen Clapham is a retired hedge fund partner who now trains stock analysts at some of the world's largest and most successful institutional investors. Stephen is also the author of The Smart Money Method: How to pick stocks like a hedge fund pro and hosts his own podcast. Big Thanks to our Sponsors! ExpressVPN – Claim back your Internet privacy for less than $10 a month! Mighty Travels Premium – incredible airfare and hotel deals – so everyone can afford to fly Business Class and book 5 Star Hotels! Sign up for free! Divvy – get business credit without a personal guarantee and 21st century spend management plus earn 7x rewards on restaurants & more. Get started for free! Brex – get a business account, a credit card, spend management & convertible rewards for every dollar you spend. Plus now earn $250 just for signing up (Terms & Conditions apply).     Stephen, thanks a lot for coming on the Judgment Call Podcast. I really appreciate it. Wow, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it. Hey, absolutely. I'm sorry about my improvised setup here today, but I hope you can still manage that. So you run a company called Behind the Balance Sheet and you also recently published a book that's called The Smart Money Method. And both I thought are really interesting and we want to dive a little deeper into both of the topics that you illuminate there. Maybe you can give us a very quick intro into how you got into the financial world in the first place and what inspired you to write the book and what's kind of the 30,000 feet view of what's in the book. Okay, so nothing inspired me to get into finance. It was purely accidental and serendipitous. I had accepted a job at a very senior level, one of the largest companies in the UK, where I was reporting to somebody that was reporting to the CFO, Finance Directorate. I was interviewed by the CFO for the job at a relatively young age and they gave me the job and they were delighted to have me and I accepted the role and they then called me up and they said, oh, we made a bit of a mistake because you're too young. You can't be this grade until next year and I said, well, what do you mean? And they said, well, you know, don't worry, only a little bit less money and there'll be a slightly fewer benefits and we'll make you up next year. And I said, well, I'm very sorry, but you know, as far as I'm concerned, we had a deal and I'm not allowing you to renege in that deal. If you have such a stupid philosophy that somebody has to be a certain age before they're qualified to do the job, then I suggest you go and look elsewhere because I'm not really interested in working for an organisation where merit doesn't overcome age. And I was recounting this tale and a friend of mine said, oh, well, that sounds a bit upsetting, but why don't you go into the city? And I said, well, don't be stupid. I don't know any of the cities for people with privileged backgrounds that won't suit me. And he said, well, no, I think you'll find that things are opening up and I said, well, how would I do that? Well, I don't know. How would I get? I don't even know where to start. And he said, well, I don't know either, but my secretary's husband, he works at a stockbroker and I bet you he'll see you and explain, you know, what sort of things you might be able to do. And I said, well, that'd be fantastic, so he called up his secretary at home and she said, oh, yeah, of course, he would be delighted to see Steve of Egan come in next Wednesday at 8.30. So next Wednesday at 8.30, I rock up to this stockbroking firm and this very nice chat Bob Carl spends half an hour telling me what it's like to be a research analyst. And I'm thinking, oh, man, that sounds like fun. And he says, well, why don't you come and work for us? And it was, you know, I hadn't gone there to get an interview, I'd gone there simply to learn and understand what the city was about. And I, you know, I went to work for him and it was a brilliant job. I really loved doing it, found it incredibly interesting, incredibly exciting. And I never really looked back. And so my career spanned the sell side where I was an analyst covering various sectors for many years, and I then was asked by one of my clients, a big hedge...
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    1 hr and 7 mins
Marketing Economics Physics
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