Ted Merz: 32 Years at Bloomberg & the Future of Financial Media

Imagine working 32 years at Bloomberg.

Now picture shaping how millions of professionals consume financial news.

Now imagine:

↳ Working closely with Mike Bloomberg.
↳ Leading AI-driven initiatives before AI was even a buzzword.
↳ Pioneering the integration of Twitter into the Bloomberg Terminal.

That’s Ted Merz, CFA.

In this episode of The Blunt Dollar podcast, we dive into his journey.

From faxes and newspapers to real-time market intelligence, algorithmic trading, and the future of financial media.

What was Bloomberg’s secret to staying unchallenged for decades?

How did Mike Bloomberg really lead his teams?

(Hint: It involves a LOT of sticky notes!)

Why is finance media being disrupted by expert influencers and AI?

Ted’s stories from the trenches of financial journalism and tech innovation are fascinating. 💖 

Some of them will blow your mind.

Check out the episode and tell me:

Have you ever used Bloomberg Terminal?

What was your first impression? 😅 

Where do you get more market insights: social media or traditional news?

Oh, and if you haven't already... subscribe to The Blunt Dollar for more raw and honest finance conversations.

New episodes drop every other week! Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.

And last, but not least, don't forget to follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ignacio-ramirez-moreno-cfa/

Enjoy the episode!

Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. Listeners should consult a qualified financial professional before making any financial decisions.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Whenever people ask me what do you need to do your
job as a fixed income advisor, Isay Bloomberg is like my right
hand.
How has Bloomberg, over theyears, managed to maintain this
dominance?

Speaker 2 (00:11):
First of all, Mike Bloomberg is a genius and he's
got an incredible sense for theproduct you open Bloomberg the
first time, like everyone tellsyou about Bloomberg and you're
like what is this?

Speaker 1 (00:21):
The UI is like shocking.
It's very utilitarian.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
You'd strip all that out because you wanted to load
the page fast, because peoplewanted the pure information?

Speaker 1 (00:28):
What's the future of media and?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
finance.
We are at a completely new erawhere I can go out and write
online and get 100,000 views andget my story out there.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
I mean, this is like unprecedented being a
charterholder has helped you inyour career.
In all honesty, because it's alot of work, I think the CFA has
evolved into a marker foranyone in finance.
What is one lesson that you'velearned along all these years
from working in the industrythat you wish you had learned
earlier?
It's a big question.

(00:59):
I mean, I think that that thisis the Blunt Dollar with Ignacio

(01:19):
Ramirez.
Hello everyone, and welcome tothis new episode of the Blunt
Dollar.
I'm thrilled to have Ted Merzjoining us today.
Ted has spent 32 years atBloomberg, so he's a true legend
in the world of financial newsand innovation.
He spent nearly a decade asBloomberg's global head of news
product, where he ledinitiatives that shaped how

(01:41):
millions of professionalsconsume financial information
every day.
Before that, he spent 16 yearsin senior roles at Bloomberg
News, including as New Yorkbureau's chief and managing
director for the Americas.
Ted's work during this time hasbeen pivotal.
He oversaw coverage duringmajor events like 99, and he
helped expand Bloomberg'soperations across Latin America.

(02:05):
Major events like 99 and hehelped expand Bloomberg's
operations across Latin America.
And what I think makes Ted'scareer especially fascinating is
how he bridged the gap betweenjournalism and technology.
He was instrumental inintegrating Twitter into the
Bloomberg terminal and led 10teams that worked on AI-driven
tools like automated newssentiment and data analytics.
And since leaving Bloomberg in2022, he founded Principles

(02:25):
Media, a ghostwriting agency forexecutives, and now he advises
startups and financial firms oncontent strategy, fintech,
innovation and even a little bitof angel investing.
On top of that, ted ispassionate about mentorship and
loves working with peopleinterested in journalism,
content and fintech.

(02:46):
Ted, welcome to the show.
I'm so excited to dive intoyour incredible journey.
It's great to be here.
Thank you for having me.
That's quite a longintroduction.
Sorry about that, but you havea very interesting background so
I wanted to make sureeverything was in there.
So, of course, today we'regoing to be spending a lot of

(03:06):
time talking about Bloomberg.
I can't think of anyone else inmy network that has spent over
three decades working in thecompany, so I guess that
everyone listening to this showis pretty familiar with what
Bloomberg is.
But before we dig in, maybecould you say in a couple of
words what is Bloomberg.
It's a good question.
Maybe could you say in a coupleof words what is Bloomberg.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
It's a good question because people know the name.
A lot of people know the namebecause Mike Bloomberg ran and
was the mayor of New York Cityfor 12 years.
But Bloomberg is basically theinformation highway for
financial professionals.
It is a system that all thecentral banks, major brokerages,
trading houses use to evaluatesecurities and to make purchases

(03:50):
.
Mike Bloomberg founded it inthe early 1980s and it started
essentially as like an onlinecalculator specifically for
bonds.
So if you go back in history,what's interesting is that a
bond trader, if I were tradingbonds, I were a buyer and you
were a seller.
I would call you and you wouldtake out a big book and look up

(04:11):
the descriptions of the bondsand then you take out a manual
calculator and try to plug inthe numbers.
So Bloomberg put that allonline.
So it made it much easier tofind securities, to know what
you were trading, to type inprices and get yields and then
also, very crucially, to trackthe performance over time.
So it stored the prices and youcould graph them over time, and

(04:35):
so that was kind of thebeginning and from there it went
into equities, commodities,fixed income, all kinds of other
securities.
It's really become theindispensable tool for any
financial professional.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, I think we cannot emphasize this enough,
but whenever people ask me whatdo you need to do your job as a
fixed income advisor, I sayBloomberg is like my right hand
and Excel those are the twothings.
You give me those two and I'mhappy I can do my job.
But yeah, it's clearly definedhow the whole financial industry

(05:06):
operates today and we're goingto dig deeper into that later on
.
But before that I wanted to askyou about Mike Bloomberg,
because I guess very few peoplehave had the opportunity to work
as closely as you did to himfor so many years.
So can you share maybe amemorable story that you had
with him?

Speaker 2 (05:27):
I think what's interesting about Mike and so I
wouldn't say I worked closelywith him all the time what I'd
say is that what's interestingabout Mike Bloomberg is that he
was a securities trader but hewas an engineer by training, by
education, and so he's alwaysthinking about the product, he's
always using the product, he'salways trying to make it better.

(05:48):
That's kind of his technicalstyle.
And then his managerial stylewas that when he would open the
Bloomberg every day and start touse it, he might find problems
and things he didn't think hedidn't understand or didn't
think worked, things he didn'tthink he didn't understand or
didn't think worked.
And so I was in charge of thenews applications on the
professional system for a numberof years, and this was after he

(06:11):
was mayor.
But when he came back and heused something, if it was a news
application, he might messageme or call me and that's very
interesting kind of managementleadership story because he
would jump a number of.
You know, I was not like adirect report or anything like
that.
I had a number of layers but hetended to go right to the person
who might be able to answer thequestion and he could work with

(06:32):
.
So he might send you a messageand say I'm looking at the
screen and I don't understandwhy it is the way it is.
Can you come over and show thisto me?
And I think that's probablyvery unusual for executives and
CEOs.
I think it's unusual.
People tend to follow the chainof command and Mike would kind
of skip over those layers andjust call directly either the

(06:53):
salesperson or the productperson who might be able to
answer the question he had andthen work with him on a solution
.
So I think that's kind of verynotable about just the way he
manages.
I can remember lots of storieswhere he would type something in
.
It gave him a different resultthan he thought he would do the
caller message.
You'd go over to his desk, hewould show you what he's working

(07:13):
on and there'd be a quickconversation and you'd say is
this the way this should work?
And if you said no, no, itdoesn't make any sense, he'd say
okay.
He'd say okay.
He'd say I want you to fix that.
But the way he went about it wasinteresting.
He would take out a yellowsticky and he would write down
on the sticky and say okay, tedMerz, to fix this thing, and

(07:37):
he'd put it on his desk and he'dsay call me when it's fixed.
Which is incredible, because Ithink what it shows is one his
involvement directly in theproduct.
It shows the way he'scommunicating with a sort of
frontline manager, and then alsothere's a level of
accountability.
He's like come back to me whenit's fixed and tell me it got

(07:58):
done.
And when you put all thosethings together, it's quite an
effective way to manage thosethings together.
It's quite an effective way tomanage, you know.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
So I think that's one of the things that struck me
about about very hands-on, veryapproachable, then that I think
that's yeah, that's definitelyvery interesting.
I also very much like managersthat are like that, and I guess
he consumed a lot of stickinessduring those years.
So I mean, after working threedecades in Bloomberg, you saw
the evolution of tech, media andmarkets and how they got more

(08:31):
and more intertwined with eachother.
So what are your lessons fromthose years at Bloomberg, seeing
those three forces collide andmerge with each other, and what
do you think the future willhold when it comes to those
three verticals?

Speaker 2 (08:46):
It's a really good question.
Sometimes it's worth justtaking a second and remembering
how much has changed in the last30 years.
I mean I started at Bloomberg.
There was not really theinternet.
We didn't have the internet.
Bloomberg was a closed systemthat ran on an intranet directly
to customers.

(09:07):
They had cables directly tocustomers, so we were not
working on the internet andinformation was not widely
available in the same way.
And one of the stories I like totell is my first job at
Bloomberg was to summarizenewspapers and articles in

(09:27):
newspapers and the way.
This is 1990, so maybe not thatlong ago, but it's incredible
the way we went about it.
Newspapers at that day wouldcome in and get distributed to a
newsstand where at seveno'clock the newsstand would open
and you could go buy them.
So what we decided and wefigured out how to do was to go
to a wholesaler and buy thenewspapers at 4 in the morning

(09:51):
and we would take those copiesof the New York Times and the
Wall Street Journal and we'dlook for major stories that they
had broken and we would writeshort summaries that we
published on Bloomberg.
And so this was essentiallyputting on the wire for traders
in London and Europe andelsewhere, stories that were

(10:12):
going to be breaking news butwhich had not appeared anywhere
yet.
Obviously we're not on theinternet because that didn't
exist.
You could not get them at thenewsstand, and so people could
trade off this, and I think oneof the things to think about
with financial markets is thishas always been the case.
This has been the case forhundreds of years where people
tried to get an informationaladvantage.
If you go back to the CrimeanWar, they used pigeons to

(10:35):
deliver battlefield news toLondon to trade off of, and over

(11:11):
the next number of years theinformation just got that
accessible to customers so thatpeople can trade off of that.
But it's still the samefundamental principles are kind
of driving the business now, sowe can talk a little bit about
where we go now, where we're nownext, but it's I think it's now
an evolution from what I calltraditional media, traditional

(11:33):
data, to alternative data andnew content that's produced by
individuals or other people whoare not in the traditional media
.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
Yeah, I think we're going to touch upon that a bit
later on, but first of all onequestion if you were at four in
the morning picking up thosenewspapers, where did you sleep?
I mean, where did you go to bed?

Speaker 2 (11:53):
at.
Yeah, I'd go to bed at eighto'clock, 8 pm.
Yeah, it was a sad, sad life,but I'd go to bed at 8 pm, get
up and we'd start working atfour.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
That was very interesting and exciting, but I
really want to come back toBloomberg as the tool it is
today.
I'm guessing that a lot of thelisteners are working in
probably startups or financialapps or fintechs that do some of
the things that Bloomberg doestoday maybe a fraction of it and

(12:26):
every now and then we hearabout this company that is going
to replace Bloomberg the newBloomberg, but cheaper and
faster and so on and I guess myquestion for you is how has
Bloomberg, over the years,managed to maintain this
dominance and how did Bloombergremain unchallenged despite all

(12:48):
these predictions of downfallsand all these new fintechs
coming out?

Speaker 2 (12:52):
It's a big question.
So, first of all, mikeBloomberg is a genius and he's
got an incredible sense for theproduct.
He has also built a culture ofvery hardworking, very customer
focused, very incrementalimprovement.
So I mean, why Bloomberg hassucceeded, I think has a lot to
do with just the culture oforientating people around a very

(13:15):
clear mission of serving, ofsaying what information do
financial professionals need andwhat do we have to do to get
there, and just coming at it dayby day.
And what do we have to do toget there and just coming at it
day by day.
So I think it's like Bloombergis like any great company you
know Google, microsoft, otherswhere people have a pretty clear
mission of what they need tosolve and they're working at it.
So I don't think that's.

(13:35):
I think that the part wherepeople think Bloomberg can be
replaced, the part they don'tunderstand, is how it's such an
essential element in theecosystem of finance and there's
some things about the financialmarkets that make it quite
unlike other industries.
And I think people particularlythink about it from a tech
point of view and they say whycan't we just create better tech

(13:56):
and displace Bloomberg?
And I think there's a series ofthings there.
Number one they underestimatethat finance is a very regulated
business.
So, for example, all theBloomberg data is kept for
compliance measures and storedin case there's any issue with
regulators.
So there's a whole series ofthings that are behind the

(14:17):
scenes that you don't even knowabout that application, but
that's a key service that thecompany provides.
Once a company, a client, buysBloomberg, the switching cost is
very high to try to, becauseit's essentially doing all your
compliance as well as your frontend kind of applications and so
forth.
So that's an aspect I thinkthat's hard to understand.

(14:39):
The other is that Bloombergunderstands its customers very
well and they are geared forspeed and reliability.
You look at most consumer techcan do incredible things, but it
can also go down for hours.
Bloomberg has no outages.
It's like that's impossible forthem to main business if they
have an outage.
So very reliable.

(14:59):
And then it's geared for speed.
I mean and a lot of peopledon't really focus on this
unless you're a professional butwhen you call up a website, it
can take three seconds to paint.
In Bloomberg, it paints in lessthan 30 milliseconds, so
everything's very fast, veryreliable, and so these are.
When you're trading billions ofdollars of securities.
Those are the things you aremostly looking for, as opposed

(15:23):
to some kind of bell and whistlethat is like a fancy page or
like a great design.
You're looking for speed andreliability, so they provide
that and then I think you knowthey've just done a great job
over time.
Going into new markets andstarting with bonds, they go
deep in bonds, then they, whenit's equities, then commodities,
then fixing and FX, and so justthey kind of aggregate all this

(15:47):
information, make sure it'svery reliable and clear, and so
forth.
So I think those are some ofthe reasons why people don't
understand why it would bedisplaced.
It's not like a search engine.
You know, a search engine ishow you might get attached to
Google, but you could use Bing.
That would be possible and itwouldn't be that different.
I mean, this is totallydifferent.

(16:07):
You're embedded in thecustomer's daily workflow and
business in a much, much deeperway.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
Yeah, 100% Like as a fixed income advisor.
If I had to emphasize twothings about Bloomberg, one is
that the market is on Bloomberg.
I mean it sounds stupid, butthere's this feature which is
the chats and the whole market.
All my counterparties, all mysales reps, everyone is in there
sharing information, access,prices and so on.

(16:37):
And everyone is there, you know.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
So you need to be there in order to get that
information.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
It sounds a bit stupid, but it's actually a big
deal for us.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
I think the message function is a good thing for
people who don't know what we'retalking about.
It's essentially acommunications.
It's like a chat feature or anemail or a chat feature built
into the platform.
Like a chat yeah, internal chat.
What's important to note aboutthat, though, is a couple of
good things.
First of all, I know theengineer who originally built
and designed that, and a goodstory is that he took it.

(17:14):
He built it as an internal toolto communicate with other
engineers in the company, andthis is in the early 90s, like
92, 93.
And then he thought this wouldbe great for customers.
Customers could use this kindof an email service a
point-to-point person forcustomers.
Customers could use this kindof an email service a
point-to-point person.
At that point, they were usingbulletin boards, where there'd
be 100 people in the room andpeople would post just randomly.
You couldn't follow aconversation.

(17:34):
So he took it to Mike Bloombergand suggested they build this,
and Mike was skeptical.
He was like well, he's like Idon't see how people would use
that, and the engineer pressedand said no, this is going to be
really good.
And so Mike said okay, if youreally believe in it, let's
build it.
So I think one of the thingsthat Suri tells me is that you
know, there's not like a magicproduct plan and what Bloomberg

(17:55):
is good at is iterating and Mikeis open-minded.
He didn't initially see thatvalue immediately, but it became
clear very quickly with theusage.
So he's open to products likethat.
But then, to your point, thatmessage system became kind of a
gated community.
So if you are in finance, youcould look up anyone else in
finance and you could connectwith them directly and there was

(18:21):
no intermediator, you weren'tcalling an operator and you know
, back to that day you didn'thave their email.
I mean, email didn't exist, butyou didn't have their phone
number.
And yet I could connect withyou, I could find you in this
directory and I could connectwith you directly and I could
sell you securities.
There's no guarantee of ananswer right.

Speaker 1 (18:42):
There's no guarantee of an answer I can definitely
send a message to Mohamed.
Hey Mohamed, how's it going?
And maybe he answers you knowhe might answer.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
But then I think the thing over time, it became a
situation where, because theproduct is expensive and
everyone's a professional, Ifyou're inside this gated
community, there's a level oftrust and if you were outside it
was going to be it becameharder to connect with people
and to communicate with people.
So the email and chat functionswere are really really huge in

(19:11):
terms of cementing the productas a community, and that would
be a reason why you'd want tohave it for sure, because you
can look up people, you cancommunicate with them.
It was invaluable.

Speaker 1 (19:20):
The other feature that you alluded to that I'm a
hundred percent a fan of is thespeed, because when you open
Bloomberg the first time, likeeveryone tells you about
Bloomberg, and you're like whatis this?
It looks like a Mario Brosversion of the game from the
1980s.
Like all pixelated.
Like the UI is like shocking,it's so basic.
You're like what is this?
You're like, what is this?

(19:41):
Yeah, then when you start usingit you realize you know they
did it.
Actually, it's very intentional, I guess the design so that you
really focus on the informationand not the look and feel.
And also, I guess that has theadvantage of making the tool
super fast, no-transcript, likeyou can be talking about US

(20:31):
treasuries and blah, blah, blah.
Oh, and, by the way, the marketis pricing this amount of rate
cuts at the moment.
Oh, by the way, and the spreadsare over here and you're just
jumping from one function toanother without any latency and
that's just fantastic, it'sreally, really powerful.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
You must be a good salesman in that way to use it
that way, because I think thatis right, where you're looking
up information while you'retalking.
But two good stories about that, though.
The color scheme on Bloombergis iconic.
It's amber on black, butremember, they built this in
1983 and the two choices at thatpoint for computers were green

(21:12):
on black or amber on black.
They didn't have the sort ofblack writing on white screens
that is common today, so theywent with what they had and then
, over time, people got used tothe imagery and it became
defining.
And one of the things I thinkpeople realized was that from a
with what they had, and then,over time, people got used to
the imagery and it becamedefining.
And one of the things I thinkpeople realize is that from a so
I guess they they went withthat design, uh, because they

(21:34):
had to and that's what wasavailable at the time.
It was expedient, but they keptit because it became iconic and
when you would walk down atrading floor you could see a
Bloomberg terminal from a mileaway because of the collar
scheme.
It was very unusual, butironically, over time, the other
providers in the market havebasically adopted that same kind

(21:56):
of amber on black imagery andit's become the standard for
financial markets.
So black, dark mode has becomestandard in finance in a way
that it's not a consumer.
And when Mike came back frombeing mayor in like 2014, we
took a look at and we evaluatedwhether we should switch the
color scheme to uh, you know,black letters on on white, like

(22:21):
we basically were considering aredesign, a total redesign, and
we went out to customers andasked them.
They said there was a kind of asplit split decision and mike
said we should just stick withwhat we have.
You know, people know what itlooks like, but it's interesting
, we even consider changing it Ithink that that you, that the
color scheme is iconic, but Ithink the speed is the issue you

(22:42):
talked about, and so in thedesign for applications, when
you design something there, youthink about how fast that will
load on the screen and where aconsumer app would put up lots
of pictures and things thatentice you to make you want to
go to the page.
Those things take time to load,they take milliseconds or
seconds, and so at Bloomberg itwas very utilitarian.

(23:04):
You'd strip all that outbecause you wanted to load the
page fast, because people wantedthe pure information.
So I think this is driven inpart by certainly by the
customer, but it's by listeningto the customer too.
What does the customer want?
They want performance, but it'sby listening to the customer
too.
What does the customer want?
They want performance, theywant speed more than they want
something very well-designed orattractive or so forth.

Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yeah, 100%.
I mean speed is the key here.
So one of the reasons also whyeveryone in the industry is so
keen or such a big fan of theterminal is because the
accessibility to data, and Iwanted to ask you about that how
has data accessibility over thelast 30 years evolved,

(23:47):
especially now in the time whereGen AI is basically reshaping
the whole landscape?
Hey there, quick favor to askIf you enjoy the blunt dollar,
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The easiest way to support theshow is by tapping that
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(24:10):
conversations, freshperspectives and the kind of
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Thanks so much for being hereand let's keep these great
finance conversations going.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
So I think about data and I'll tell you a story as an
example.
I think broadly, we always havethe same arc of how data is
acquired and processed and itreoccurs in markets over and
over again.
When I started at Bloomberg,the first reporting job I had
was covering emerging marketsand at the time it was a very
nascent market.

(24:44):
So this is like 1992, 91, 92.
And people traded thesecurities by voice trade over
the phone or by broker screen,but there were no feeds and so I
had no access to prices.
I would call people to writeabout the market and I would say
well, what happened today?
And I couldn't see anything.

(25:06):
So it was different than theequities.
Imagine everybody today goes onYahoo Finance and they can sort
of see prices and they canchart things.
Imagine you have no ability todo that.
So what I did was I called achemical bank and I asked them
if they would fax me a list ofthe prices every day, which they
did, and so they faxed them tome and I typed them into like a

(25:26):
Word document and I publishedthat and I think it's
interesting when you think aboutthat.
So, bringing price transferenceinto anything, any market, the
first thing you do is you justget the prices and you publish
them.
I mean, it might start out as aonce a day kind of flat flat
screen and then we take thoseprices and we put them into a

(25:47):
time series so you can chart it.
Even if it's only once a day,you can chart it over time.
And that's kind of thebeginning of this movement
towards okay, how do you have adirect feed and you enter in a
number of bids and offers anddifferent prices and you combine
them into a compiled one priceand then that becomes a
real-time screen where you canlook up the price and you can

(26:08):
see a chart.
Now we have that in like lotsof even in alternative
collectibles and things likethat.
You can look up the prices oftrading cards and Rosarities and
various things.
But it's always like that.
I think people decide they wantto trade an asset.
First they have to get theprices, then they have to input
them, Then over time they'relike oh, this is popular, so
we're going to create a fee.
But when we first started, noneof that was there, and so I

(26:32):
think it was really interesting.
Also, when you think about itfrom a news media story coverage
, I can remember, reporters atBloomberg started to write
stories about the stock marketand said what happened, Right,
and that had been going on forobviously decades.
Newspaper reporters wouldalways say the stock market's up
or down, until Bloomberg builtthis application that was

(26:57):
accessible to the reporters aswell as customers, that
calculated the weights of whatwas driving the index.
You really, you didn't reallyknow.
So you might say this you knowthe Dow Jones Industrial Average
went up or the S&P went up,because you knew what the number
was for the index, but youdidn't know what the component
weights were that drove thatnumber.

(27:18):
If you see what I'm saying,like the breakdown.
So Bloomberg built anapplication and then the
reporters knew that it wasreally driven by Intel or it was
really driven by IBM, and sothe stories became much more
nuanced and that's now a verycommon feature, but back in the
day that wasn't available at all.
Know?
So I think you know.
I think prices you get prices.

(27:39):
You, you start to chart themand then they become also more,
more available for analytics andother you know other deeper
inquiries, by the way you weretalking about the facts.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
I think a lot of of of listeners wouldn't know what
a fax is.
Can you explain them?
I, I was I think one of thelatest generations that saw one
of those at home.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
I think you have to tell people what a fax is, but
it's a fact.
You know.
That's crazy.

Speaker 1 (28:05):
It's like a scanner linked to the phone, but all
days.
So you would put a piece ofpaper at home and on the other
side, at someone's home, themachine would start beeping and
you would press the button.
It would make a terrible noiseand the paper would start coming
out on the other side.
But yeah, that doesn't existanymore.
Right Like, I don't see any ofthose anymore.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
Faxes.
Well, faxes existed in adigital format.
I guess you could say, butobviously it's just email.
Now it's you know.
I mean, that's how we, that'show we got, that's how companies
released information back inthe day.
Too right, they would fax youtheir results.

Speaker 1 (28:43):
Oh my God.
Yeah, I love these storiesbecause it really shows how the
industry has evolved.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
And it's not that long ago.
But they would have a piece ofpaper they typed up that said
here's what our results are.
They'd have your fax number,they'd put it in.
And so if on the bloomberg endin the newsroom, you'd sit there
and the machine would wouldwhirl and make now noises and
then a piece of paper wouldslide out and you'd pick it up
and it'd be like okay, there'sibm earnings, you know, or

(29:11):
whatever, whatever theannouncement, and then someone
would get on it, you know sorryfor talking about, about, uh,
about stories of how things werein the past.

Speaker 1 (29:23):
There is this, this story that you and I talked
about in the past that I love,which is the y2k period yeah, it
was basically when, you know wewe went into year 2000.
People thought that systemswould collapse and that it would
be the end of the world.
You were Bloomberg's New Yorkbureau chief at the time and I'd
love to hear, like how did youlive through those moments?

(29:47):
Because I guess it was veryparticular, very stressful, yeah
, and what do you think thatevent represents in terms of
global interconnectivity andtechnological transformation?

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Yeah, I think my thoughts on that for people who
don't remember what Y2K was.
When the new millennial, whenthe new year struck in the year
2000, a lot of computers wereconfigured where they only had
two digits for the year, like 99for 1999 or 98 or 1998.
And people thought the computersystems would fail and it would

(30:23):
be a catastrophe and all thesethings would happen.
So it's amazing in hindsightbut so many people did so much
work to try to make sure thatdidn't happen and because of the
fear it was going to happen,myself and another person I
worked with, brian Rooney,stayed in the office in New York
and Bloomberg had people in alloffices all over the world to

(30:44):
sort of monitor to make sure itwent okay.
And obviously it went off fine.
And so the main result was Imissed my New Year's the biggest
New Year's of you know, likedecades.
But I think what we realizedafterwards one of the things in
my thought was that we realizedthat the world was much more
globally interconnected than wehad realized.

(31:06):
We thought things were verysiloed In the 90s.
You would build a product oryou'd have an application and it
was like here, and so we wereprobably like almost 10 years
into the internet then and werealized just how interconnected
everything was.
That's what Y2K caught me and,I think, the world in a certain
way.
Our perception ofinterconnectivity and globalness

(31:28):
changed at that point where wereally understood both.
Not just technology systems butalso markets were much more
intertwined.
I think that's definitely oneof the things I look at from
before and after that period.
You know that everything wasinterconnected.
Information was.
When you think about that, I canremember back in the 90s,

(31:50):
people talked about equities andfixed income and commodities as
being relatively uncorrelated.
You know they had differentmarkets and you would put assets
in different places fordiversification and so forth.
In the years subsequent, andparticularly when we got to the
global financial crisis in 2008,one of the things we saw was it

(32:11):
was very clear that everythingwas connected.
As an example, in the market Ioriginally covered in emerging
markets, people thought youcould buy emerging markets as a
diversification and yield play,but it turned out that when the
global, when the US market wentdown, people had to sell
something.
They'd sell emerging markets.
So everything in a crisis kindof everything becomes correlated

(32:32):
very fast and that's continuedto be the case in the last 20
years.
I mean every major downturn,everything suddenly correlated.
We saw that even with cryptorecently, right?
So I think to me that was thelesson of Y2K.
For me it was just howeverything is connected and tied
together on the same boat.

Speaker 1 (32:59):
I guess I'm part of the generation I started working
full-time in 2012.
That started in an industrythat was already completely
interconnected, but it must havebeen very interesting to see,
during the end of the 90s,beginning of the 2000s, that
transition take place and peoplerealizing that we are all on
the same boat and we all facethe same problems across the
globe.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
Yeah, no it's.
I can't even imagine thesituation you're in in terms of
coming in in 2012, becauseyou've basically only seen a
bull market, you've only seenlow interest rates until very
recently, and you know anincredibly strong equity market.
So I don't know how you thinkabout that, but that's got to be
very different.

Speaker 1 (33:40):
Well, we could do a whole podcast episode about that
, especially when it comes tofixed income, because interest
rates, yeah, indeed, went downfrom the 80s all the way to 2020
, more or less.
We had like a bull market forfour decades and I was just
getting into the market at theend of it, and since then it's
been a little bit more chop less.
We had like a bull market forfour decades and I was just
getting into the market at theend of it, and since then it's
been a little bit more choppy.

(34:01):
But, yeah, there is indeed likea whole generation of young, I
would say, finance professionalsthat haven't seen the
volatility bounce that you guyssaw in the past.
Maybe leaving aside, of course,a few episodes in recent years,
such as COVID, but yeah, it's adifferent world.

(34:24):
Maybe we can have a wholedifferent episode on that.
Yeah, talking about the 90s, Ialso wanted to ask you because I
know that back at the time, youwere manually processing
emerging market debt prices forBloomberg processing emerging
market debt prices for Bloomberg.
Obviously, debt is very closeto my heart, because when I
started working as a fixedincome advisor, I started

(34:44):
specializing in debt.
So it's a topic that I really,really like and I guess that I
mean if now sometimes gettinginfo is hard, back at the time
in the 90s, getting high qualitydata or even any data at all on
E&D must have been quite achallenge, which highlights many
, many things, but mostly notonly how hard it is to collect

(35:07):
this data, but how important itis to have precise and quality
financial reporting.
So what thoughts can you sharefrom the States of Affairs?
today from where we were back atthe time.

Speaker 2 (35:22):
I think the big idea is we've gone from scarcity to
abundance.
The scarcity.
When we started, when Bloombergstarted covering Argentina, for
example, there was a guy, rickJarvie, who we put in an office
in Buenos Aires.
And we located the officeacross the street from the stock
exchange.

(35:43):
And the reason we did that wasbecause at the end of each day
the exchange folks would comeout with pieces of paper with
news on it and he had to runacross the street and take the
piece of paper news and run backacross the street and then type
in headlines and type outstories.
So it's almost the equivalent,when you talk about high

(36:04):
frequency trading, of locatingthe trade close to the exchange,
the processing close to theexchange.
But that was the world we livedin.
We lived in a world where theperson had to be very close to
the exchange he had to walk overand manually get the
information and to be very closeto the exchange.
He had to walk over andmanually get the information and
then send it out to the world.
And we thought that wasincredibly global because it was

(36:24):
going out to the whole world,whereas before it would have
been local.
But the impact of that systemwas that there's very little
information.
We didn't have much informationabout companies, a lot of the
companies at that point inemerging markets.
We didn't have much informationabout companies, a lot of the
companies at that point inemerging markets.
Their descriptions andfundamentals were not online.

(36:44):
So you would have, like I canremember, when I first started
covering Mexico, I had ahandbook, this thing, the Mexico
Company Handbook, and it wouldhave all the financials for the
companies year on year andthat's where you would get your
sort of like revenue figures andthings like that.
So, fast forward to today, andobviously because of the
internet, digital, all thatinformation is now online.

(37:06):
And on top of the news which we, you know, the Bloombergs and
Reuters of the world, there arenow lots of other people
publishing information, like youknow, just some of the random
people, some of them financialprofessionals, but so the volume
of information has gone up.
And just to give you a flavorof that, when I started the

(37:27):
product role at Bloomberg inlike 2005, in about, let's say,
2005, bloomberg was carryingmaybe 5,000 stories a day from
Bloomberg and then, you know,half a dozen years later, they
were covering two stories andthose other stories were coming
from content on the internet,scraped content, content deals

(37:49):
and so forth.
So I think in the last 20 yearsthe information challenge has
gone from one being of totalscarcity, like you can't get
anything, to overabundance,where you have so much that you
need processes and systems towinnow it down and find what
you're looking for.
And and this, this plays outlike in so many ways I mean in

(38:13):
ways like um again in the 90s,just to give you an example, it
was very hard to get executiveCEOs on the phone.
Oftentimes CEOs did not doconference calls, they didn't do
the earnings calls, so therewas just a scarce I would say
kind of a scarcity ofinformation in that arena.
Now every CEO is on everyconference call.
You have all sorts of otherpeople publishing sub-stocks and

(38:34):
blogs and things, and so theproblem now is that there's so
many insightful things out thereI can't find them all, I don't
have time to read them all, andwe haven't really built the
systems, let's say, to aggregate, sort and derive insight from
all that information that's outthere.
So I think the key thing from atechnology point of view that's
going on right now is buildingsystems that allow people to

(38:57):
better sort that data, andBloomberg's doing that.
But there's also this is wherea lot of startups come into play
now where a lot of startupsaround that ecosystem are
providing value by addingadditional components and layers
.
Where you can understand, youcan get insights that were
embedded in data that youcouldn't get otherwise.

(39:19):
So I think we're actuallygetting in a really exciting
time period, but it's a periodof the problem is no longer
getting information, it'sprocessing it and understanding
it and knowing what you need forsure.

Speaker 1 (39:31):
Yeah, I fully agree with that.
We've discussed in otherepisodes about the fact that we
come from a world whereinformation was barely
accessible to a world wherethere's too much of it and the
challenge is how to digest it.
But, in terms of production, Ithink we're entering into a
world of niches where, yeah,everyone can be a reporter,

(39:51):
everyone has something to say,and I feel that, if you know
where to look at, there's tonsof very interesting and
insightful pieces of informationout there that are not
necessarily being produced bythe main media outlets but that
help a lot when it comes toinvesting, and takes a little
bit of time to sort that out,but there is value, obviously.

(40:12):
I mean, the main example thatcomes to mind is social media.
That comes to mind is socialmedia.
So I wanted maybe to ask youabout that how you know, with
the rise of creators on Twitterand all the sub-stacks and even
LinkedIn, how does the rise ofexpert corporate influencers be
in the finance industry?

(40:32):
Or even, like any industry, Iwould argue, how is that
reshaping the role of media?

Speaker 2 (40:38):
Wow, there's a lot of questions embedded in there.
So, first of all, if you lookover the last two decades and I
think, for the foreseeablefuture, what we call the media
let's say the media calls itself, which would be a Bloomberg,
new York Times, reuters, abc andso forth New York Times,

(41:02):
reuters, abc and so forth theestablished media has been
shrinking for reasons everybodyknows and talks about, with
advertising and so forth.
It's been shrinking in size.
It has fewer reporters that arecovering fewer things.
It's also been shrinking inaccessibility because, to the
degree they have survived liketake the New York Times as an
example they have gone behind apaywall and they're now charging
.
So the period where theyreached vast numbers of people

(41:25):
on the internet because thestories were free and
advertising driven is over andyou now have to pay to see them
so that they're incrediblyinfluential.
They do great work, but theirreach has really gotten smaller.
So, if you're looking at thisfrom the financial markets point
of view or from your point ofview, like you're saying, where
do I get quality information totrade off of?

(41:46):
And so the mainstream media hasgotten smaller and it provides
less information and less access.
The gap has been filled bythese all sorts of
user-generated content as wellas niche publications.
Think of it like we now live ina newsletter world where there's
a lot of specialty newslettersthat publish niche the long tail

(42:07):
of information they publish onTwitter, and those people are

(42:29):
really interesting to me and Ithink this is a fundamental
shift, because a lot of thepeople who are now publishing
about finance and about marketsare not traditional journalists.
You know, you think yourtraditional journalist is
somebody who's a very goodcommunicator.
They write about all kinds ofthings and they have reasonable
knowledge about an industrybecause they've been writing
about it.
But the new people writing area completely different breed,
because these people typicallyare true experts, true domain
experts, very deep.
You'll have a CFO writing aboutfinance and it just so happens

(42:53):
that among all the CFOs, thisguy is a really good
communicator too, but the levelof expertise that that person
has versus a journalist cannotbe compared.
So we're actually coming intothis new world that's very
interesting where some of thebest information is no longer
coming from the media and it'scoming from these other
publications, you know, whichyou might call an influencer,

(43:16):
although I think what's going tohappen in business and and in
particular in finance, is theinfluencers are not going to be
these kind of like generaliststhe way you would have in like
consumer or like Hollywood orconsumer products, but they're
going to be like true experts,and that's really fascinating to
me.
So, like you know, in thisexample you have lots of

(43:38):
influencers in the consumerspace in cosmetics, but they're
not experts in cosmetics,they're just really.
They use them a lot.
They're good, you know, they'regood consumers, but you have
somebody like Josh Brown whoblogs, and Josh Brown runs a
firm called Ritholtz WealthManagement and he's like he
knows everything about themarkets and then he's writing
and he writes really well too.

(43:59):
So that kind of explosion ofcontent is very interesting to
me because I think they're goingto.
I mean just people are kind ofgravitating to that for a lot of
reasons.
I mean there's just moreexpertise and there's more of it
, and so I think that's going tobe interesting and I think that
when you look on Twitter now or, to a lesser degree, linkedin,
the people writing in FinTechand finance, some of them are

(44:21):
incredible and you have todiscover them, you have to find
them and follow them, and it'slaborious and it's not like
super set up well, but thepayoff is pretty great.
So I think we're just at thebeginning of actually a golden
era of a lot more content.
People talk about the declineof the media, but I actually
think we're at this golden eraof content where there's going
to be a lot more produced andthat's going to be very, very

(44:42):
interesting.

Speaker 1 (44:43):
I'm curious to see also how the traditional media
outlets react.
I mean, we mentioned it at thebeginning of the podcast, but
you helped out in the efforts tointegrate Twitter within
Bloomberg, don't you Didn't you?
Yeah, I did, yeah, I did.
What was the logic behind that?
Like Bloomberg said, okay, weacknowledge that there's a lot

(45:04):
of value coming from there andwe want to facilitate our users
that flow of information so thatthey stay within our ecosystem.
Hey there, quick ad break.
Do you work in the financeindustry and have a genuinely
interesting story to share?
I'm always on the hunt forgreat guests who bring raw,
unfiltered insights to the table, or maybe you know someone with

(45:24):
a story worth telling.
Please put us in touch.
You can reach out to medirectly via LinkedIn.
I'd love to hear from you andnow.
I'd love to hear from you.
And now back to the show.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
So that's.
It's really interesting the wayyou've turned that.
It's not like that.
It wasn't like that.
It was customer-driven.
A lot of good innovation iscustomer-driven rather than
strategy-driven.
You know you can look back on itand explain it that way, but in
fact what happened was therewas a major hedge fund in Europe
, in London, and they had aproblem because in roughly 2010,

(46:01):
their traders were usingTwitter on their phones.
They knew Twitter was a sourceof information and they'd hold
up their phone and look forinsights, looked for insights
and the firm felt that there wasa risk that they could be
tweeting, and so they were like.
They called the SEND and theysaid okay, you're our biggest

(46:22):
vendor and supplier ofinformation.
Can you help us solve thisproblem?
What we're looking for is howdo we get the insights from
Twitter to trade on them withouthaving the risk of people
posting online?
So what we did was we went toTwitter and eventually we bought
a feed, we bought access to thefirehose, we assigned a lot of
engineers to parse it and sortof tag it in a way that it could
appear on the Bloomberg systemand people would have access to

(46:45):
a read-only version of Twitteron Bloomberg.
And I think that was a supersuccessful project, but really
it was driven by the fact thattraders knew that there was
insight and information in this,and so they just wanted it.
And I think it also points tosomething else, which is, most
people in the financial marketsare agnostic about where that

(47:05):
information comes from and whatit looks like.
They want quality information.
That's market moving, and so ithas taken the media a while to

(47:32):
get their head around this, butat the time and the reliability
and so forth but they weren't ashung up on the fact that it was
a media company or not a mediacompany.
They're just like this isquality information.

Speaker 1 (47:47):
It's been consistently right.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
So we want access to this Interesting Okay, and I
think that you're going to see,you know, just going to keep
seeing more of that.
I'm not sure.
I think you know the media andthe financial media do great
work.
They do great work.
I think all the growth iscoming outside that, all the
growth is coming from contentoutside that area and I'm not
sure they really understand howto compete Like an example would

(48:09):
be.
A big example actually is theexplosion of podcasts are very
interesting.
I'm sure you watch somefinancial podcast.
10 or 15 years ago those wouldhave all been done by media
companies.
You'd have a BBC podcast or aBloomberg podcast or New York
Times, and you do have thoseoutside media companies.

(48:32):
The growth has come with a sortof Joe Rogan or Patrick
Shaughnessy, o'shaughnessy andStephen Bartlett.
You know these independentpeople who do long form, very in
depth, and so even in thatarena the financial media is not
done particularly well, youknow.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
Yeah, I mean, we are at the beginning of a new era,
if you will.
I mean, this is a prime exampleof it.
I mean, a few years ago Icouldn't even have thought or
dreamed about doing my ownpodcast, and here I am.
I'm not talking directly aboutmarkets, it's a finance podcast,
but not with a different angle,I guess.
But, yeah, like this creatorbeing, there's content sorry
being created left and right bypeople that have knowledge and

(49:13):
things to say, and I think it'sa very welcome addition to the
way we're consuming informationnowadays.
I'm all in for it, so I'mexcited to see how that trend
evolves over the coming years.
I guess, like a lot of thosethings happen very gradually.
You mentioned how Bloomberg,how Mike, was an incrementalist,
how he wants to progress.

(49:36):
1% every day was his motto insome way, and you've seen
Bloomberg expand over the years,over your three decades
firsthand.
I wonder if you could give ussome color on how it was to
navigate the regulatory hurdleswhen it came to expanding to new
markets such as Japan, or evengetting closer to politics and

(50:01):
Washington, which was also quitebig for you, if I understand.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
Yeah, there's a couple of stories that stand out
there, and I think they're bothstories about media and
information, but also technologyand maybe just the way the
culture has shifted.
I mean, I'll start by tellingthe Washington story.
When Bloomberg started, theidea is we were going to write
financial news, and so the firstyear they started with 15

(50:27):
people in New York City and wecovered markets basically, and
then what became clear is weneeded to cover companies.
So the second year we hiredcompany people and we realized
also that policy like theinformation out of Washington
also drove a fair amount ofmarket activity and the news out

(50:47):
of Washington was bothpolitical, but it was also very
concretely economical, like theLabor Department reports and the
Commerce Department and soforth, and so it was quickly,
you know, determined we neededpeople there to write about
those topics.
So what happened was that whenwe tried to expand in Washington
, we were told that you had tohave credentials to either be a

(51:11):
reporter at the White House or areporter at the Labor
Department or CommerceDepartment.
You had to be verified as areporter and initially that
decision was made by thiscommittee of journalists.
So the government had appointeda journalist group to make the
decision of who else is ajournalist and that those people

(51:32):
would let them in.
And initially at the time wasand this is hard to believe now
but Bloomberg didn't publish anewspaper, it was only online.
So the initial determinationwas Bloomberg did not qualify as
a news organization becausethey didn't actually publish
anything.
And now that seems insane, butthat was a battle.

(51:53):
That seems insane, but that wasa battle.
It was a battle.
And then my former boss, mattWinkler, who's the
editor-in-chief at the time ofBloomberg, went to bat and said
no, we're going to.
We are a legit newsorganization, we have to cover
this and we need to be in here.
But it took a little bit oftime and persuading.
And Bloomberg went through asimilar but even more difficult

(52:17):
battle in Japan.
Japan at the time had a verystrong group of journalists and
media companies and they sort ofhad a pecking order of who got
the information first and wherethey got it and so forth, and
what access you got to it.
And if you weren't part of theclub and it was literally called
the Keisha Club if you weren'tpart of the club, then you

(52:39):
didn't get access to theinformation you needed to do
your job.
So there was this whole panelof how we were going to get into
the both, be accepted in theclubs and get access to the
information on an equal basis.
And I think you know at somedegrees this is kind of a
broader story.
But, like, access toinformation has been
democratized in a lot of waysand access has been open.

(53:00):
And I think these were earlyexamples in the early 90s where
it was still very much industrydriven and industry focused and
you just weren't let in if youwere new or an outsider.
So I think it's kind offascinating to think about how
that's, how much that's changedWow.

Speaker 1 (53:16):
Yeah, I love those, I love those insights and yeah,
it's crazy to, as you, as youwere saying, how much things
have changed and, and, moreimportantly, how things are
likely to change.
So, maybe we can we can nowtalk about the future.
And going back now to this newstep in your career yeah, you've
transitioned from Bloomberg torunning two companies, one

(53:38):
focused on storytelling and theother on AI.
What's the future of media andfinance with everything
happening on the AI space, andwhich role does storytelling
have in all of that?

Speaker 2 (53:50):
Wow, I mean, I think it's bigger than ever.
I mean, I think so.
My career, I think, has been anevolution of the way
information, in particularfinancial information, is
created and displayed andaccessed.
And after I left Bloomberg, Istarted a company called
Principles Media which doesghostwriting for executives.
But the theme, the big ideathere is that people have

(54:13):
realized that, with the accessto the internet and the
distribution that platforms likeLinkedIn, twitter, others
provide, that you can write yourown story and you can reach the
stakeholders or investors oremployees that you want to reach
.
And what we saw until reallyquite recently 15 years ago,

(54:33):
even 10 years ago was thatlargely you still relied on the
gatekeeper, the gatekeepermainly being the journalist and
the institution like the NewYork Times, where you had to get
your story there, to getvisible.
And so we're at a completelynew era where I can go out and
write online and get 100,000views and get my story out there

(54:54):
.
I mean, this is likeunprecedented and you still have
relatively few people doing it.
Okay, and I think the reasonfor that is somewhat
generational People who are, youknow, over 50, grew up in a
different era where they weren'tas digitally focused.
The whole ethos was not to goout and write about what you've
done.
It was more to sort of focus onthe team and the company and so

(55:16):
forth.
But the seminal event for me inthis arena was I guess now it's
is it two years ago?
One year ago, when Sam Altmanwas fired from OpenAI.
He was fired by the board andwhen you're fired, normally
you're cut off from allcommunications.
You have no access to the PRteam.
You're kind of done.
But like 45 minutes after hewas fired, sam Allman tweeted

(55:41):
and said hey, basically I'vebeen fired and I'm going to have
more to say about this.
So he had built up this enormousfollowing by publishing content
for two decades and he wasthere for independent.
He was able to communicate withthe marketplace and with people

(56:03):
independent of theinstitutional power structure,
and I think when you saw that,you had to tell you the lesson
was very, very clear thatanybody who doesn't have that
capability is at a disadvantage.
They're at a disadvantage justas an individual in our modern
society, but they're also at adisadvantage in promoting their
company.
So you fast forward to thisyear and the big event that

(56:27):
happened for me was the way MarkZuckerberg started using social
media.
So Mark Zuckerberg kind ofironically, since he controls
Instagram had never really donemuch with reels or videos or so
forth, and this past year he gotvery, very active and in fact I
think the major productannouncements, the major shifts
in policy were all announcedwith him talking directly into

(56:51):
an iPhone and publishing that,and that's the way the rest of
us communicate.
So I think that CEO-ledcommunication whether it's video
or writing or tweeting orposting on LinkedIn is going to
be a very big thing andrelatively few people do it now.
But it is an unquestionableadvantage to have a large number

(57:14):
of followers and to be able todo that well, to communicate
well.
So that's what my agency does.
It helps people tell theirstories and you can now tell
them independent of the media,and I think that's the kind of
revolution people haven't quiteabsorbed, the implication of
which is you don't, because ourwhole lives we've always thought
if I have a story, how do I getthe newspaper to write it?

(57:35):
And now we're realizing that ifyou just tell a really good
story and you have thedistribution, you can still do
that without the gatekeeper.
The other company I have iscalled Price and Closure and
that's kind of the other end ofthe barbell.
If my agency is high quality,low volume handwritten stories,

(57:57):
the other company is high volumemachine written content and
it's for totally differentpurpose and it's really pretty
fascinating.
It's something which has onlybeen possible since the advent
of generative AI and AI ingeneral, which allows you to
take information and turn itinto a narrative, and the big

(58:19):
insight we had here was thatwhen you run chat, the big
insight is that there's a lot ofinsight locked inside numbers
and that kind of data that wecan use AI to write narrative
stories about, and then thatbecomes more accessible to
people.
Like an example of that wouldbe if I handed you an Excel of a

(58:39):
lot of numbers and it was anarea you were not familiar with,
it was some kind of biotechtesting, you know, and it's just
an Excel of all these numbersyou wouldn't know what to do.
You'd have to basically hire aspecialist in that data to
interpret the data and produce areport on it.
But we realized, with the rightprompts and the right domain

(59:01):
expertise, we can write anarrative report based on that
data that just gets pushed toyou every day, every week, every
month and it's accessible.
Then the accessibility is in thecontext in which text allows us
to deliver around the numbersand anyone in your company could
read it then, and so it's goingto highlight anomalies and

(59:24):
changes and things you should belooking at.
And so that's a human use.
And then a machine use is wecan write that story and we can
store it in a database andcreate opportunities for small
language models where you canquery that database and get it
in a database and createopportunities for small language
models where you can query thatdatabase and get insights in a
way that you cannot query thenumbers, because LLMs basically
work off text, not off data.

(59:46):
So that's kind of two ends ofthe spectrum and I mean I
couldn't be more excited aboutboth of those because they're
really like I think there's alot of runway and it's super
interesting.

Speaker 1 (59:55):
Two ends of the spectrum, but with a common
theme, which is storytelling andfun fact.
One of my year-end resolutionsfor 2025 was to get better at
storytelling, because I feel itis the one thing, as you were
alluding to that a lot of peopleare not getting right, but that
is incredibly powerful.

(01:00:16):
So I have two last questionsfor you.
Now we're going to step alittle bit back, because a lot
of our audience is our younglisteners probably think about
starting their careers infinance or holding junior roles
at the moment, so I have twoquestions that are going to be
specifically useful for them.
One is you are a charter holder, and I was wondering if you

(01:00:41):
could share with us whetherbeing a charter holder has
helped you in your career in allhonesty, because it's a lot of
work, and whether it's worth theeffort or not.
That's such a funny question.

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
I mean I think the CFA has evolved into a marker
for anyone in finance.
It's kind of like you have tohave it If you're going to be an
analyst, a portfolio manager inthe modern world.
You pass that, then you're like, okay, it's like a
demonstration of a certainamount of mental horsepower, you

(01:01:23):
know.
I mean, obviously the market'schanged so much.
I don't think it's ademonstration of like what you
really know, because I mean, Itook it 20 years ago and that
test is going to be vastlydifferent than it is today and I
, you know, I couldn't just walkin and pass the test today
without an immense amount ofpreparation.
So I think it's more ademonstration of your commitment
, your effort and the fact thatyou can like learn and do this

(01:01:47):
stuff Honestly.
I think for financial peopleit's basically, yeah, you have
to have it.
You know I was not.
I mean, remember I worked atBloomberg, I was in the media, I
didn't have to have it.
I was one of the few people Ifelt in the room that day who
was not working at a bank orbrokerage house.
I did it for a totallydifferent reason.
I did it because, as I talkedto people in the marketplaces.

(01:02:09):
I wanted to better understandwhat they were thinking and
telling me, and I mean honestly.
Just one basic reason was peoplewould always tell me what the
stock is going to trade out ayear out or two years out.
And they said well, the modelshows it's going to trade it
this price a year out.
And I was like I had no ideahow they got to that number.

(01:02:31):
It was like wizardry, it waslike magic and I mean I think
one of the things you learn whenyou do the CFA if you haven't
done financial analysis is thatit's not magic, it's just like a
series of inputs and a seriesof decisions and that helped me
understand better the people Iwas interviewing and talking to.
It definitely changed the way Ilook at the whole industry.

(01:02:52):
For me it was very helpful.
I'd do it again.
But I think most people, if youwant to be in finance, you
don't really have a choice.

Speaker 1 (01:02:58):
You're going to have to do it.
I guess it depends on the role,but for sure it shows that you
are determined, that you havegrit and mental toughness and by
all means it's a great way tolearn about financial markets.
Not for everyone, given thetime commitment, but whenever
anyone asks me I always saylisten, if you want to

(01:03:18):
understand how financial marketswork and you're willing to put
the work, I think it'sdefinitely worth it.
One last question for you, abit more philosophical, but I
like to ask this to my guests.
Obviously very long andsuccessful career in finance.
Ted, I wanted to ask you whatis one lesson that you've
learned along all these yearsfrom working in the industry

(01:03:40):
that you wish you had learnedearlier?

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
Well, I think the biggest lesson and I'm not sure
this is unique to finance thiscould be just overall kind of
general career advice, but itmight more apply to finance and
that's about networking andmeeting people and getting out
there.
And I'll tell you, I thinkfinance is somewhat unique in

(01:04:05):
that people tend to move arounda lot within the work.
A few years at this bank and afew years at this bank and a few
years at this bank that fewyears at this bank, you know
that doesn't necessarily happento the same degree in other
industries because you don'thave as many players.
I mean, maybe it happens alittle bit in tech.
So your ability to connect withpeople and to just know people

(01:04:26):
is really, really important, Ithink, and it's not going to
just happen to you.
So I have found, subsequent tomy leaving Bloomberg, if I look
back, I mean I spent a lot ofyears knowing a lot of people at
Bloomberg.
I was very internally focusedon the connections at the
company and so if there's onelesson I'd say to people and one
thing I learned was that wassomewhat of a mistake

(01:04:49):
over-prioritized internalnetworking to, and I would have
prioritized more external, likedo I know people at the other
publications.
Do I know people, how manypeople do I know on the street
and so forth, and how much timehave I spent on that?
And that's been a bigger focusof mine since I've left is just
connecting with people, meetingpeople.
You're not only is it yournetwork if you want to look for

(01:05:13):
a job or you want to, you know,but it's also your awareness.
Your situational awareness ismuch higher because you're aware
of what other people are doingin other industries.
And I think that people there'san easy tendency to get stuck
into the company you work at orthe job you have and you're not
really aware of what's going onhave and you're not really aware

(01:05:37):
of what's going on.
So I think I guess I'd say,lastly, is that the advantage
you have now with social mediato be able to do that is much
greater than it was.
It was much harder before.
So with social media you canconnect with a lot of people.
You can see what people aredoing.
People generally are prettyopen.
So I would go for that.
That's something I woulddefinitely have changed about my
career.
I would have known more people,I would have been more

(01:05:58):
connected and more aware of thelandscape.

Speaker 1 (01:06:02):
And people are generally very nice and open.
When you reach out, I mean lookat us having this conversation.
When I first reached out to you, I mean we had no friends in
common, just a common interestfor markets and finance.
And here we are doing anepisode together.

Speaker 2 (01:06:17):
There you go.
It's an exact example of that,for sure, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:21):
Ted, it's been absolutely amazing to have you
on the show.
Thank you so much for sharingall those stories.
I'm 100% sure a lot of ourlisteners are going to love them
.
I mean especially those thatgot in the industry in the last
couple of decades.
I would say we didn't have allthat granularity, all that color
, and I don't know about them,but for me for sure, I'm a

(01:06:41):
sucker for all of these stories.
I love them and thank you somuch for sharing them.
Best of luck for the next stagein your career and I hope you
know, in the next 30 years ofyour career you manage to bring
those businesses to similarheights to what you managed to
do at Bloomberg.
Thank you for having me.
I really enjoyed it.
The Blunt Dollar is written,produced, hosted and edited by

(01:07:04):
me, ignacio Ramirez.
Everything you hear concept,script, sound design and
production comes straight frommy desk and occasionally my
kitchen table comes straightfrom my desk and occasionally my
kitchen table.
Thank you so much for listeningand join me in the next episode
of the Blunt Dollar for moreraw, honest finance
conversations.