How to Think and Speak Like a Macro Strategist: Finance Career Skills Explained

Thinking about a career in finance and want to build confidence in your market views? In this episode, Anthony Cheung is joined by Mike Bell, a former J.P. Morgan macro strategist, to break down how to think clearly about the economy, communicate under pressure, and make your ideas land.

Mike explains how to navigate the business cycle, what really matters when forming a macro view, and how to present with clarity - whether it's to clients, in interviews, or on live TV. If you want to sharpen your market thinking and sound confident doing it, this episode is packed with practical insights you can use right away.

(00:00) Intro to Mike Bell

(03:06) Politics Meets Economics

(07:41) Business Cycle Basics

(13:05) Inflation and Recession

(17:39) Tech Shocks & AI

(22:36) Models vs. Discretion

(31:15) Learning Public Speaking

(35:28) Preparing for Pressure

(51:25) Posting on LinkedIn

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Hello, and welcome back to the Market Maker podcast.
I'm really excited to be joined by Mike Bell, an independent
macro strategist who spent the last decade at JP Morgan.
And in this conversation, Mike is going to break down how to
build a macro view to explain markets with confidence.
And some tips and tricks are on how to perform under pressure.

(00:21):
So whether you're a student or early in your finance career,
this conversation is going to bepacked with tips on thinking
clearly, speaking simply, and making your content land with
impact. So, Mike, how are you?
You good thanks. Please be here.
Good stuff. And so I know when we've spoken
before, you gave me a little bitabout your, your background and

(00:42):
I know that you, you didn't comefrom a traditional economics
background, but spent a career pretty much doing it.
So I just wanted to get a an understanding of how you first
got into into a macro and what attracted you to that in
particular? Yeah.
I mean, I think that's interesting because I actually
think it's helped me not having studied economics purely at eco

(01:04):
at university. So I studied a social science
degree, multidisciplinary university, and in our first
year we had to study psychology,sociology, social anthropology,
as well as sort of political andeconomic theory with some
international relations. And you know, it's part of that.

(01:28):
In the psychology course, we looked at how people do strange
things when they're in crowds. We studied the Tulip mania and
stock market bubbles. We also looked at, for example,
at how people comply with ordersthat are given by people in
uniform or perceived to be so-called experts.

(01:51):
All of which was just fascinating at the time, but
nowadays I find very useful whenI think about the way markets
work. But mainly I was, you know, I
specialized in my second and third year in the politics and
international relations side of that.
And as part of that I read a lotof, you know, political

(02:13):
philosophy, but also linked to that, a lot of the sort of
economic theory. So it was much higher level than
the equations that you would study if you did a pure
economics degree. And, and it was looking at, you
know, reading Marks and Keynes and Adam Smith and all these
kind of people. And I guess what really got me

(02:33):
hooked on macros that I've always, I've always wanted to
know how the world worked, to really understand how the world
works on the issues which reallymatter to people.
And, you know, I'd seen the recessions where people lose
their jobs can have a real life impact on people.

(02:54):
And the more I studied, for example, revolutions when I was
studying politics and learned how the economic conditions were
often a key part of that, it made me understand that you
couldn't really understand how the world works in a way that
was really important for normal people if you didn't understand

(03:15):
both politics and the economics.And that made me sort of want to
branch out and focus. I mean, I spent a lot of time
looking at the politics, felt like I had a pretty good grasp
about that all works, and then wanted to focus on the
economics. And once I got into it, I just
found it fascinating. But I actually learned a lot of
that in my first job. So in terms of then just

(03:41):
thinking about the economics that you need to learn from the
equation side like so for you I'm assuming that there is a
baseline of that stuff that you do need.
So did you get that in that course that you studied or did
you have to just upstart yourself and teach yourself or
was it on boarded when you got your first job that?

(04:02):
I largely kind of, I mean, therewere obviously experienced
people who I was working with who were able to help me learn
it. But no, I really learned it on
my first job and you know, part of that job I was doing
investing and there was a team of four of us and our job was to
decide whether we should have more in stocks than in bonds or

(04:23):
whether we should be investing in European stocks instead of
the US, etcetera, etcetera. So we're ultimately getting paid
on being right. So straight out of university,
my job that was going to determine how much I earn was
based on essentially can you predict the future.
And I thought, well, that's obviously not easy to do.

(04:46):
And so I set about thinking, well, how can you do that?
How can you predict the future of what's going to happen with
economies? It quickly became clear that one
of the most important things to work out is can you predict
recessions, for example, becausestocks tend to do very badly and
recessions, bonds tend to do better.
And so how would you do that? And if you look at a lot of the

(05:11):
economic theory in the equation that you might study at
university if you did an economics degree, they actually
do a remarkably poor job of predicting that stuff.
So my approach was to look back and think, well, I guess one
thing I thought was firstly, if all the economic theory that you

(05:33):
learn at university worked, thenevery economics professor would
be a billionaire, right? And I know, so clearly there's
something there that's not working.
And then how can you actually work that out?
And part of it that kind of struck me was if you're trying
to predict the future, what hopehave you got of predicting the

(05:54):
future if you can't explain the past?
So I looked back and as much history as I could find all the
economic data. And one of the benefits of
learning on the job is that you don't have access to a lot of
the data that's not as easy to find publicly available sources
and just looked at the interaction between different

(06:17):
things. So you know, when interest rates
go up, what happens to these different sectors in the
economy, what happens to housingbuilding permits, etcetera.
What leads what, what goes 1st and what has been the historical
interaction between inflation and wages and unemployment, for

(06:38):
example. And so rather than starting with
the theory, just saying, well, what actually happened and has
that repeated throughout history, and can you use that to
build a model of how the economyreally works rather than how
you'd like it to work in theory?Because in kind of part of the

(07:01):
reason I hadn't wanted to study economics at university was that
someone, perhaps unfairly, had kind of flippantly summarized by
saying, you know, one strain of economics is trying to fit the
world into equations by assumingthat everyone is perfectly
rational and it's in a rational way.

(07:22):
And that seemed to me perfectly obvious that that wasn't true,
and that it would be a better approach to focus on what
actually happens and how things actually were, rather than
saying, well, how would it be nice if things were so that we
could fit it into a simple equation?
So, so kind of thinking of the audience listening to this, they

(07:45):
often get told you should have aview on markets, like a macro
view. It's quite a standard, I guess
global markets kind of question that you would expect one of
these these interns or grads to be to be doing.
So I think students get told that go off and have a view,
read, consume some financial media, have a view, But what is,

(08:08):
you know, some of them, your experience, I think it'd be
super useful for how do you build a kind of a robust but
kind of concise macro view? Like where do you start and what
are the kind of the cornerstonesof building a view?
You know, spirit question. So I mean, I think I would start
with understanding the short business circle, which is

(08:31):
actually relatively simple and I'm going to oversimplify it.
But broadly speaking, the way I think the short term business
worker cycle works is that let'sstart forsake of argument at a
point where you've just had a recession.
And so you're in recession, unemployment has risen and is

(08:51):
now relatively high by historic standards.
And when unemployment is high, workers have less bargaining
power. I'd say you go to your boss and
you ask for a pay rise. There's loads of other people
out there who lost their jobs recently during the recession
who would like your job. So that conversation doesn't go
the way you wanted it to go. Pay growth is slower.

(09:15):
Fewer people are willing to leave because they don't want to
take that risk of starting at a new company when they might be
laying people off. And so generally speaking, you
know, you get high unemployment leads to low wage growth.
And then when wage growth is low, generally speaking, and
that means that inflation is low, so prices are going up at a

(09:37):
slower pace. And if inflation is low and the
economy is weak and struggling, then central banks tend to react
by cutting interest rates. And so when interest rates get
car and often you also get some kind of fiscal stimulus.
In other words, either tax costsor spending from governments.

(10:00):
And those are kind of the two key levers, right?
You've got monetary policy and fiscal policy, and those are
what can shift the course of theway the economies go.
So you get some fiscal stimulus,perhaps the government cut taxes
and perhaps they spend some money, which all stimulates

(10:22):
spending, essentially puts more money into people's pockets.
Interest rates come down, which means that their mortgage
payments decline, which again means they've got more money to
spend. And so that starts to put more
money into people's pockets, which means that the people who
still have jobs start spending. And then this is I think is the

(10:45):
thing that traditional economicsmisses, right?
It's all about momentum and feedback loops.
So one, people start spending because interest rates are
being, car taxes are being car spending has been boosted, some
combination of those three things.
Then they're spending more and let's take the shops or
restaurants. And so then the people working

(11:08):
in those restaurants are gettingmore tips which they can then go
and spend in the shops and the restaurants are busier.
So maybe they need to hire more staff and the shops need to hire
more staff. And so then those people who
didn't have a job because they were unemployed now have a job.
And if you go from not having a job to having a job, you go out

(11:30):
and spend nearly all of that money that you suddenly have
that you haven't had, and probably even more so than you
normally would because you've gone through a period of having
to spend less than you would have liked to.
And so that cut in interest rates and fiscal stimulus kick
starts a positive feedback loop whereby spending increases,

(11:55):
which leads to more hiring, which leads to more spending,
which leads to more hiring. And round and round you go,
right. So most of the time the
unemployment rate is coming downin a relatively straight line,
sometimes at different gradients.
But broadly speaking, if you look at history, and this is one

(12:15):
of the first things I did when Isort of started off in the
industry many years ago, I started in finance in 2008, just
had a, it was just before the financial crisis.
The financial crisis hit, unemployment was very, very
high. It cut interest rates.
There was some fiscal stimulus, printed money, and then the
unemployment rate started to come down, but from a very high

(12:38):
level. And I was thinking it was also
what happens from here. And so I looked at history and
so, well, basically what happensis that once unemployment starts
coming down, it keeps coming down until it gets to a low
level. So we're probably now at a point
where things are going to get better once interest rates have
been cut and money had been printed and they're going to
keep getting better. For some time, stocks were

(13:00):
cheap, so now it's a good time to be buying stuff, as indeed it
turned out to be. So then, OK, you can skip most
of the cycle. Most of the Skype is that
positive feedback lead unemployment is falling as
unemployment. So why, where does it all go
wrong? It's the kind of endpoint, how
do you get back into the recession?

(13:22):
And the way I think about that is that what happens is that
unemployment eventually gets to a level where workers have
bargaining power again. And how long that takes is
dependent on how high unemployment was in the 1st
place. So after the financial crisis,
unemployment rose to very high levels.
And so it took, you know, the best part of 10 years, but

(13:45):
unemployment to get back to the level where workers really had
bargaining power, right. So you might study at university
that the concept of a kind of Phillips curve.
But in fact, the way I think about it is less about, oh, the
fall from 10% unemployment to 9%unemployment should lead to wage
growth and higher inflation, butit doesn't.

(14:07):
But the fall from 5% unemployment to 4% unemployment
can have a real impact because all of a sudden lots of people
are leaving their jobs for better paid jobs elsewhere.
Companies feel like they need topay the remaining staff more to
keep them from leaving. And so historically, again, I
just looked at the pattern, whathappens when unemployment gets

(14:30):
to low levels? Is that wage growth Pixar?
And so once wage growth Pixar, you would think, right?
Most people, if I speak to, and sometimes taxi drivers, when
they find out I'm an economist, ask me about it and they would
say normally the average person thinks, well, wage growth's a
good thing, right? And it kind of is.

(14:50):
But the period where you need toworry most about the economy is
when unemployment is low and wage growth is picking up.
And the reason for that, Simply put, is that when wage growth
picks up, it tends to then feed through into higher prices.
And when prices pick up, centralbanks then start to put interest
rates up. And eventually that increase in

(15:14):
interest rates starts to slow the economy down.
And so sales growth comes down, but the wage growth doesn't come
down until unemployment starts to go up.
So what happens is spending declines because interest rates
have gone up, but wages are still growing strongly and that
squeezes company profits, right?And then I'm simplifying that

(15:39):
can also be tax increases, etcetera, etcetera.
But as it squeezes company profits, you get what's called a
paradox of thrift, right? And so you go to business store
and big Business School. But I imagine what they teach
you based on the way I observe the world is that if costs, you
know, if you're coming under pressure, profits are coming

(15:59):
under pressure, cut costs, whichsounds perfectly sensible if one
company does it. But if every company has the
same bright idea at the same time, then it causes a recession
because every company's cost, every pound or dollar they spend
is another company's income or another person's income.

(16:20):
And so as they cut costs, it just tips the economy into a
weaker situation till eventuallythey start cutting job.
And then that positive momentum I described of falling
unemployment leading to more spending, leading to more hiring
starts to tip into reverse. But all of a sudden people start

(16:42):
to lose jobs and they spend a lot less.
But most importantly, everyone else does, too.
You hear from your neighbor thatthey lost their job or you hear
on the news that unemployment's rising.
And so everyone thinks, I actually, you know, I won't do
that lavish thing I was planningon doing.
I just spend a bit less. I'll go take away rather than

(17:02):
eat out at a fancy restaurant, whatever it may be.
And that just tips the feedback loop.
So people spend less and then more people lose their jobs,
which means there's less spending and then even more
people lose their jobs until they cut interest rates again
and the whole cycle starts again.
So you're in this kind of, I think that's the most important

(17:23):
thing to understand, understanding that short term
business cycle. And I'm aware I've talked a lot,
but on top of that, you've got an overlay the long term debt
cycle, which we can talk about if you want, but I'll pause for
a moment. Yeah.
Just just thinking about the thebusiness cycle and then also

(17:44):
your emphasis on looking at history to understand the
future. How does things like the the
introduction of AI influence those factors?
Is there anything in the past because we've gone through
meaningful technological change in human history, but so can we

(18:06):
identify behavioural similarities that could be
useful even though the technology is completely
different? Yeah, I think that's a
fascinating point, right? And so if you look back, let's
say you go back to the Industrial Revolution, and,
yeah, back then everyone was worried.
They were sort of knitting or clothes, and they were worried

(18:31):
that the machines that came in were going to put lots of
workers who were in the textile industry out of work and that
you were going to have mass unemployment.
And to an extent, that did happen, right?
And you got protests against that.
And, but obviously, Fast forwardto today and you don't have mass

(18:53):
unemployment because of machinesthat now can make clothing.
People ended up doing different things.
In fact, it allowed people to focus on other stuff and
actually helped grow the economy.
So and, you know, look at all sorts of different technologies
throughout history where people have worried that it was going

(19:15):
to take everyone's job. And perhaps initially there was
a period where jobs were lost, but then eventually demand grew
and people weren't left without jobs.
Now, I don't know for sure. Could it be that AI is such a
game changer that actually it's different this time and that it

(19:38):
does displace workers in a way that is more problematic and
doesn't just create new roles that, you know, that's probably
the biggest question for our time.
But I do think, you know, one shouldn't forget the this is not
the first big new technology. You can go back and you look at

(20:01):
the railways and you'd look at. So there was a massive railway
bubble in the 19th century. Obviously it was a huge
technology that changed the world, but with it came a big
bubble. In 1929 you had a massive
bubble. In stocks related relating to
radios, again, huge technology. Think of how that changed the

(20:25):
world. Nowadays we think of it as just
pretty basic and it's crazy to think that there was a massive
bubble in radio stocks and then theother.com bubble in 2000.
And you know, many other examples throughout history
where, you know, in 2000 it was all about the Internet and how
that was going to revolutionize the world.

(20:46):
And of course it did and has. But if you bought Amazon stock
in 2000, if you'd held it to today, you'd be very happy.
But you know, lost an awful lot of money between 2000 and sort
of 2003. So I think there's a lot to be
learned from history about a howAI can change the world, but how

(21:10):
it doesn't necessarily lead to mass unemployment.
And I would link to that the fact that actually the big
change that we're not spending enough time thinking about is
demographic really for the last,you know, certainly last few 100
years, populations have grown. And certainly in some parts of

(21:34):
the world, we're actually going to go into a period quite soon
where populations start to shrink and particularly the
working age populations start toshrink.
So absent AI, the problem we would have is that we wouldn't
actually have enough workers. So one needs to balance all
these concerns around how AI is going to take jobs with the fact

(21:54):
that actually we're going to need AI to take a lot of jobs
because they're going to be fewer workers because people are
having fewer children and have been for some time.
But also, I think you need to look at it and think if every
other major technological breakthrough in history has led
to an equity market bubble, is this time going to be different?

(22:17):
And I don't think it is. I think there will be an AI
bubble. And just the question for me is
how far through that are we right now?
Yeah, the $1,000,000 question, literally.
So having a look at this, so just to extend on this line of
question before we move on, is that the marketplace in terms of

(22:37):
how participants interact is becoming increasingly
quantitative, not just because of AI, machine learning, lots of
other techniques that are being adopted, particularly in buy
side hedge funds sort of space where they've got capital to
deploy and R&D in these things. I just wondered then like one of
the things where we've talked before is about how they can

(23:00):
often fall short during specifically big macro shifts.
And so I just wondered your takeon the balance between kind of
model driven insights and then discretionary inputs if you
like? I think you need both.
I think that's huge value from models, but any model is only as

(23:23):
good as what you put into it. I'd say you think back.
I mean, I maybe shouldn't give specific examples, but there was
a famous example in the late 90swith the LTCM Edge font and he
had some of the smartest people in the world working on that.

(23:45):
But if you only look at data that goes back a relatively
short period of time, you can besurprised when things happen
that have actually happened manytimes before throughout history,
but just haven't happened in theperiod which you're feeding
through into your models. So you can have a model that has

(24:07):
perfectly predicted how everything in markets is moving
and is going to move based on data over the last five years or
even over the last 10 years. But if that then misses a shift
that's taken place over a longertime frame, then it's vulnerable
to that shift. So, you know, I won't go to the

(24:31):
whole history of it, but that's broadly what happened when that
blew up in the late 90s. And again, if you look at a lot
of the models that went into theproblems around the financial
crisis, they were looking at housing data and they didn't go
back far enough. So their models all baked in
that basically house prices onlygo up.

(24:52):
And you don't need to look back that far or indeed think very
hard to realize that that's obviously not the case.
But if your model says that house prices always go up
because they broadly had for a decade or so prior to that, then
when things change, you're goingto get caught very painfully

(25:14):
offside. So and then the other thing, I
mean, I remember clearly mainly because it was Valentine's Day
back in 2022 going on Bloomberg and the anchor asked me, so
we've just had reports that Putin is putting tanks on the

(25:35):
border near Ukraine. What do you think about that
now? Can a quant model build that in
in theory could, right? You can run searches of news
stories and you can program it to say that historically, when
you have wars involving major energy producers, that often

(25:55):
leads to energy price shocks, which then transmit into
weakness for the economy, which is, you know, broadly what I
said on that Bloomberg slide said that, yeah, we look back
through history. You look at the Iranian
revolution, you look at the Yom Kippur War, wars in the Gulf,
Middle East states, energy producers, when there are wars

(26:17):
involving energy producers and it leads to an energy price
shock. It's often been bad news for
increasing inflation, but also bad news for the economy and
often causing recessions and badfor stocks and causing kind of
stagflation type scenario. Could you build a model that had
that in it? You could, but a lot of them

(26:39):
didn't. Whereas, you know, it was kind
of, I thought perfectly obvious that if you're putting tanks on
the border, it's because there'sa high, at least a high risk
that you're going to invade and that's going to cause a spike in
energy prices. And with that problems for bonds
and stocks. How many Quad models had that in
it? Not that many I would guess.

(27:03):
Yeah, I, I an analogy that I often use when talking to
students on this point is I think of a when I was young, I
used to love playing together and painting those little model
planes. You just get those sets that
like hobby crafts or the places.And it used to be the the jump
jet Harrier was the technology of the day back back when I was

(27:24):
a kid. And then you look at The Jets
that are being made now, the latest versions.
And I saw this really cool documentary of this pilot who
has this visor and it has augmented reality in his visor
that allows him to look at strategic information coming
from the plane. And it's feeding in.
And the plane is so much more sophisticated.

(27:45):
But in the end, the end decisions that are made between
targeting something or a manoeuvre or the location that
they're flying is still down to the pilot in the end.
It's just that they've got more information to make more timely,
more insightful decisions. I thought it was a, a nice way
of kind of wrapping up the it's still a human who has to have

(28:06):
that, that little discretionary experience decision, but they're
better equipped. So the likelihood that the
outcome can be, can be tipped, Ithought.
I think that, you know, I wouldn't rule out that it's
impossible that with AI and big data and all the advances being

(28:27):
made, like could we're long pastthe point where computers can
beat humans or chess, right? Could we get to the point where
AI and feeding into kind of quant models can beat any human?
Predicting the future in the markets, that's certainly

(28:49):
possible. All I'm flagging is to the there
are some things that are obvious, well not obvious to
everyone, but that are more easily visible by humans that
you need to make sure in your model.
I just think of COVID as an example.

(29:11):
You could have built a quant model.
The how many quant models had looked back to 1918, the last
time we had a major play? Probably not.
And so was that in their models.Maybe, maybe some did and great,
well done. But like a lot of those would

(29:32):
have broken when something like that happened.
And whereas with hindsight, it'seasy to say, but also, you know,
you could have seen, oh, there'sthese cases of this thing that
are causing trouble. And originally they're in China
and now it's in Italy. Maybe that's going to go
everywhere. And if you'd had time to factor

(29:56):
that in and if you'd had the history of knowing that most of
the time these aren't a great problem.
But actually they've been several times throughout
history, you know, Black Death and Spanish flu where actually
pandemics have caused major, major problems for the economy
and disruption where you might have thought, well, at the very

(30:17):
least we shouldn't be maths longrisk at this point.
Yeah, that's interesting. You.
There's two things that you you said when we talk about this.
And one I totally think is relevant is that if you go back
to 1918, you go back further, it's just the unstructured
nature of the data because it's just what the intention was not

(30:39):
to populate models back then. And so although that is
obviously a big part of the industry is to structure those,
those historical patterns, having actual quality of that is
like that's your diamond in the rough sort of scenario, I think
for a lot of these quant houses.And then the other thing you
said right at the top of the conversation was there's a big

(30:59):
problem with markets is that, you know, humans are irrational.
And I guess even trying to predict human irrationality, I
guess is the, the infinite challenge that that the machines
will always, always have. But look, I wanted to move, move
on and talk a bit about, you mentioned there, you're on TV
speaking on that particular topic.

(31:20):
And so I wanted to shift the conversation because a lot of
the students that I talk to, I think are intellectually super
capable. And in fact, I see the resume
and I go, it's all there. Like from academic achievement,
I can see it, but then I meet them or they deliver a group
presentation or something of that nature, or they just need

(31:41):
to kind of be visible amongst a group of people.
They just seem seemingly a lot lack a degree of confidence,
particularly in that public setting.
And you know, you've, you've done a lot of this.
So I've got a few questions around this.
I think it'd be super useful. For one, I think it is pretty
much most people's natural default to not enjoy speaking in

(32:03):
public. You've told me that you do enjoy
it and I just wondered has it always been that way and or do
you think people can learn that skill?
First of all, you're. Not 100% alone, I mean, no one's
born knowing anything really being able to do anything.

(32:23):
So suddenly I learned it. It's just that some people learn
it earlier than us and you can also learn it very late in life.
But I've seen she's some very senior people.
I won't say they are, but I've seen some very senior people who
when I first got to know them, were not great presenters.

(32:46):
And then as part of their very senior roles, they had to
present and had training on it, often from an amateur and became
excellent at it. So you can learn even if you're
ACEO. I learned early because I did a

(33:06):
lot of drama at school and then at university, and I was shy and
nervous when I first started doing that.
But then over time I became moreused to doing it and started to
enjoy it and started to get sortof main roles in just school

(33:29):
plays. And then, you know, you got used
to and comfortable being on stage.
And there you have the kind of comfort of knowing what you're
going to say because you're kindof read, you're just saying
lines that you've learned. I was fortunate to have a good
memory. So that was kind of easy for me
to memorize the words. And, and so I then got used to

(33:54):
that and learned it so that by the time I started my first job
and was being asked, oh, will you get, will you get up and
present to people who are a lot older than me about the economy
and how we think things are going to play out?
I was very comfortable at least with the presenting side of that

(34:18):
because I'd done plays where it had been just me and one other
person on stage for and out. And so getting up and talking to
a few people wasn't a challenge.But yeah, you can 100% learning.
But like anything, it's a skill that needs practicing, and the
sooner you start, the better you're going to get there's.

(34:41):
There's obviously different scenarios when speaking funded
people can come to the forefront.
There's, you mentioned being on TV, so CNBC, Bloomberg, these
sorts of things. There could be investor days if
you're talking about the CEO earnings calls, Regular
presenting is probably the most common when you're just doing it
internally or to clients privately.

(35:03):
But then I know they can also bemajor career influencing
situations where it's on the line.
As far as you're concerned, it'sreally this is it.
It's going to define the next years, if you like, if I really
get this, this right. So I just wondered, how do you
prepare? Is it a?
Is it a single way of preparing for all three, or is there

(35:24):
differences in how you would go about it?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's really
interesting and I've got quite alot of experience with doing all
of those different types of things.
So all the way from live TV on Bloomberg, as you say, well, you
don't know what questions you'regoing to get asked and you've
got bright lights on you and it's being be beamed out as many

(35:46):
people as watching and fundamentally as well-being
recorded. So that then like the CEO of the
firm you watch you work for might watch it back.
So that kind of, that's one skill.
And I can talk a little bit about how I would prep for that
kind of thing through to the majority of the presentations

(36:07):
I've done in my life have been, I know what I'm going to talk
about. And I'm doing that presentation
basically 45 minutes on what's the outlook to the global
economy and what does it mean for markets.
And I'm going to present that toyou, however many people over
the next month. And broadly speaking, and the

(36:30):
content is going to remain the same.
I'll update it a little bit as the data evolves, but the broad
story is going to be the same. And I'm going to use broadly the
same 20 charts to talk through it.
And then there's similar presentations, but normally

(36:50):
shorter, but not necessarily shorter, where, as you say, it
really is going to make a difference.
And realistically, like, I can probably think of 2IN my career
that I would put in that category.
One was when I got approached totake the job that I had at JP

(37:11):
Morgan. And JP Morgan's obviously a big
firm. It's an impressive place to
work. And I kind of felt like I was
going to get one shot at this. And the kind of final round of
the interview process was to go in and present to all these
super senior people on the art for the economy.

(37:34):
When they said, we don't want you to just talk about the
economy. We're also interested in how you
tell that story, right? It's about the the narrative.
And so that was a presentation which I knew was going to
potentially have a meaningful impact on how the rest of my

(37:54):
life played out. I don't like over play.
It's not like it was life or death, but it was going to have
a big impact on my career and how the next sort of decade or
so went for me. And so for that, I essentially
wrote a script like you would ifyou were writing a play.

(38:15):
And then I learned it, and then I refersed it, and then I
videoed myself doing it about five times.
And so I got to the point where I knew exactly what I wanted to
say. He could say all that without
thinking, could vary the speed and delivery of it.

(38:35):
You know, it helped, as I say, that I'd spent many years doing
that for university and school play.
So I already knew how to do thatlearn, learned that presentation
and I crafted into it stories. I mean, I had a story about a
fairground ride in Vegas, for example.

(38:57):
I won't bore you with it, but and then delivered it on the day
as if, oh, I'm just kind of thisis just what came into my head.
Well, of course it wasn't right.I'd practiced it five times and
videoed it. I'd gone.
Ashley. No, I don't want to deliver it
quite like that. I want to slow this bit down and

(39:17):
then say this for emphasis. I'd say those.
And then I, you know, my boss, once I joined JP Morgan, after a
while she moved on and there wasa period where briefly I was
kind of like the main person in London on my team and got the
opportunity to do one of the kind of big mainstage
presentations, which historically my boss would have

(39:41):
done. So that was, again, that was a
big opportunity to show to the whole business that I can do
this. And so same thing for that,
right? I crafted a script with lots of
stories and analogies that wouldillustrate the economic points
in a way that was relatable. I told a story about a wedding
and how that related to the lifecycle of an economy, for

(40:03):
example. And then I learned it and I
videoed it. And again, I was basically doing
a play. And people still, that was in
2017, I think late 2016, still some people who were in that
room come up to me and say, I remember that presentation and
what, what stage at the wedding are we at now?

(40:24):
So when you can. So that's how I would do like a
potentially career defining presentation.
But the truth is, you can't mostof the time.
Yeah. Just just just to say there that
that I think that's really a good message then, because I
think a lot of young people, let's say if you're a grad and
it was my first week at JP Morgan and I see you do that

(40:48):
probably in my head, it's very easy.
It's probably the easiest place for me to go mentally is to go.
I'll never be as good as Mike and I, you know, to coin that
famous 90s phrase, I want to be like Mike.
But the the idea being that in actuality, this is what I always
try to stress to all the the kind of the students I work

(41:10):
with. So when you see a really good
public speaker, and certainly when it's a set event like that,
you've just described that process.
It's so methodical, so thorough,really deep process.
What you're seeing is the end result of a lot of work.
And I think sometimes there are young people because of this,
this nature. Maybe it's a byproduct of social

(41:32):
media and seeing all the finished articles, but there's a
whole like journey to get to that point of being able to
execute at that level. So I hope the people listening
kind of understand that, you know, if someone you see is
speaking, great, that's probablybecause it's been a lot of, you
know, graft to get to that point.
And of course there is like natural skills that you develop

(41:54):
over time, but for those big ones.
But yeah. But tell me some about some of
these other scenarios then. So like like the TV one, for
example, like you said, different type of scenario in
terms of the the recording thingI thought was quite interesting.
Your boss might watch. I didn't really think of that.
But yeah, you're absolutely right.
You're, you're representing a business, right?

(42:15):
You're you're the face at that moment in time of the whole
entire organization or division.So yeah, how how would you go
about that? How's it different in that in
that scenario? Let me just talk first about the
like the middle state, right, which is the presentation, which
is probably like the bread and butter of what most people will
do, which is a presentation thatthey've had some time to prepare

(42:37):
for. They've got a slide deck and
then they're going to present itprobably more than once to
groups of people. And because that's the kind of
in between stage from what I just described, a kind of career
defining presentation where you script it, learn every word of
it, practice with the video yourself.

(42:57):
You know, you can't realistically do that for I was
I think 8 presentations a week on average.
And you can't do that for every single one.
And then I'll talk a little bit about like when you don't know
at all what's coming because youhave to be able to do each stage
to do that final bit. And so the, the middle stage,

(43:22):
what are the, the best presentations?
If you don't have time to scriptit like a plague, there's a
structure to them, right? So you, you know broadly where
you want to go. You want to have, you've got
your slides. And by the way, don't put words
on slides. You have a chart or a picture
that tells a story. And so you show your chart.

(43:47):
Maybe it's unemployment versus wage growth, as I was describing
at the beginning. And then you're going to explain
to people what the message you want them to get from that is
and tell it with an analogy. And so rather than just saying
when unemployment comes down, wage growth goes up, you can
say, you know, I remember in 2009 during a recession, going

(44:10):
to my boss and asking for a pay rise and then basically laughing
at me and saying, you know, we'dlove to, but it's not the
economic reality at the moment. I mean, that story is not even
true, but it's a story that helps bring to life.
You know, the dynamic and the bargaining pound are there.

(44:31):
So then you've got your slides, which are kind of your hooks,
but you know, I'm going to show each of these 15 slides and I
know the kind of key message I want to make on each of these
slides. Then if you were quite practiced

(44:53):
at it, I often find, and I oftenwas basically just getting up
and saying, right, well, so I know broadly where I'm going
with this story. I know the key messages, I need
to laugh, and then I'm just going to talk about you
obviously know what you're talking about, right?
So it's much harder to give a presentation on topic where
you're not an expert, but you know, realistically work.

(45:15):
You're not going to get asked topresent things that you don't
know about. So if you know what you're
talking about, you just get up and then talk as you go.
So you're kind of making it up on the spot, but you're not
completely making it up, right? There's a structure to it.
You know, you're going to hit this point, you're going to hit
this point, but the bits in between can change a little bit.

(45:36):
And actually, it's that interaction between structure
and improvisation that makes those presentations good because
you're not just worrying about. And for a lot of people, if
you're having got the experience, it's hard if you're
thinking, oh, I must remember every word, every scripted word

(45:56):
you can get. Oh, I've forgotten that bit.
You know, I particularly don't have a great memory for
memorizing this kind of stuff asyou don't worry about exactly
what you're saying. And I said, maybe for many
people, if you don't have a great memory, maybe this is even
the way you should do that career defining speech because
you what you don't want to be doing is worrying.

(46:18):
What's the next bit? I forgot, Oh, I didn't quite
deliver that or worst of all, saying, Oh, I missed that.
There doesn't matter, right? Just what matters is a
compelling narrative. And if you were making it up on
the spot, then you the other thing is you've got to be quite
a good actor to deliver a scriptin a way that doesn't sound like

(46:39):
it's a script. So if you haven't got a lot of
acting experience, the best way to do that is to not be reading
from a script, or at least reading in your mind from a
script. And some of the worst
presentations I've ever seen arepeople reading notes, because
when you read, you don't intonate the way you do when you
talk. And so, you know, that's one way

(47:01):
I would think about it is that have your structure.
And so I, I link this a lot to music, right?
So I used to play jazz trumpet, but I started off playing
classical drum there. And in jazz you improvise.

(47:22):
But to what extent is that fullymade-up that you can practice
improvisation? So classical music is obviously
written down and you practice the technique and you learn it
and then you play and it can sound beauty.
And then there are forms of jazzmeans where you've basically got

(47:46):
chords and you're, without getting too much technical
detail around it, what makes good improvisation sound nice is
when you're playing the right notes over the right chords.
And so that's your structure you've got your slides are kind
of like the chords. You know what the piano is going

(48:07):
to be playing and now there isn't a specific right note
because actually there's lots ofdifferent notes that you can
play over certain chords, but there are wrong notes.
There are notes which will sounddissonant against certain
chords. So that's kind of like the semi

(48:27):
structured bit which I describedwith the kind of bread and
butter normal presentation that you do.
Having a structure, knowing where you're going, the kind of
ad libbing the details. And when you're presenting a lot
like I used to, now it also justkeeps you interested, right?
Because you're not saying the same script, script, you're just

(48:48):
telling the story, but tell in adifferent way.
And you work out which jokes land better and then you edit
them. You get the timing right as you
do the presentation more than once.
And then you've got something like doing Bloomberg or whatever
TV where you don't know what questions are coming at you, but
still you want to have some structure to it, right?

(49:08):
It's not completely unpredictable what you're going
to get asked. And so if you go on TV on the
day that the Bank of England aremeeting to decide what's going
to happen to interest rates, they're probably going to ask
you what you think about the UK economy and the outlook for
interest rates. So prepare a bit about what you

(49:30):
think the answer to that is going to be.
And then where would that conversation naturally go?
Well, it would naturally go to talking about what's going to
happen with the Fed and what's going to happen with the ECB.
And so you can then at least have some idea where that
conversation might go. And the difficulty we're doing
live. And it's the same way that's, I
mean, live on TV is the most extreme version of it, but it's

(49:55):
the equivalent of the Q&A bit ofa presentation that you might do
in front of colleagues or clients.
You can practice this presentation and then at the end
you've got to go, right. So any questions, and now you
don't know what's coming at you and you're still on stage.
And that's the same thing. Like what kind of questions
might you get asked? And then there's an element of

(50:16):
learning to think, yeah, so that's filler material.
You can say, look, that's a really great question while you
think in your mind about what you're going to answer.
Or frankly, I remember being on TV and I'm asking me something
about Turkish interest rates because something just happened
and I've been on holidays Turkeya lot, but I didn't know a great

(50:38):
deal about the Turkish economy. And so I kind of came up with a
way of kind of politely not answering the question.
I simply and. Say it.
You've become a politician at that point.
OK, cool. Well, look.
Well, the other part of this that I thought you could add
great value to our community is that you are particularly active

(51:03):
and always have been on LinkedInin, in sharing some of these
insights. But you know, one thing that I
think LinkedIn forces you to do is to be pretty, pretty precise
with the message that you're trying to land in the way it's
crafted. I just wanted to, to know a
little bit more about your, yourmethod to doing that.

(51:24):
How, how do you decide? First of all, what you want to
post when you you have macro, you might have some geographic
kind of responsibility, but evenwithin that, let's say UK,
there's many parts of it that you could probably could dive
into. Do you just go back to those
pillars that you mentioned and talk about wages, employment?
Or is it a trending theme that you think something's changed or

(51:48):
a lot of people are talking about something?
I want to share an insight on that and catch a wave of
interest. Yeah, how, how do you go about
choosing the subject matter do? You hear anything?
A lot of what I post is based onbasically what's going on in the
economy, broadly speaking. So I want my followers on

(52:11):
LinkedIn to have a good idea of how I view the economic outlook
across the major economies and its implications for markets.
So to try and almost serialize in the way that, you know,
Dickens used to, and nowadays we're used to with Netflix, a
what you could sit down and write a book, but doing it on

(52:33):
LinkedIn is writing short kind of thing, a bit like episodes as
to how that bigger story is playing now and then.
You know, part of it has come from my experience.
We're doing press stuff where you understand what journalists

(52:54):
are interested in, right? And they're interested in the
breaking news. What, what is news, what
qualifies as news, right? And the news is basically what's
happening today, What's the new bit of data that came out?
And so you, there's a, you can see there's an economic calendar

(53:16):
of data releases. You know, what's coming out on
what days it's coming out or whether it's earnings reports
for companies. And so you can either write a
preview, I think that the Bank of England are going to do X
because of this, or you can write a reaction, oh, the Bank
of England did this or consumer confidence fell or rose.

(53:41):
That's interesting because this was the labor market data.
But when you delve into it in more depth, this is what it
actually shows. So kind of reacting to the data
as it comes out is the way I tryto do that.
And then there are some days where frankly, there's not very
much that happens of interest. And on those days I'd try and

(54:01):
post about more long term thingswhich have been on my mind,
which are relevant for the broader story.
So it might be demographics or climate change and some of these
and how are they going to shape the big picture.
And so, yeah, that's how I kind of think about it.
And part of that, though, as well is about like the speed of

(54:24):
response. So when you work at a large
firm, what you'll find often is that for understandable reasons,
there's often a desire to write something and then have it
checked by two or three people and then have it made to look

(54:45):
beautiful. And by the time all of that has
happened at some places, you know, it's two days later.
So the Bank of England often meet on a Thursday.
It's not uncommon to see somewhere publish something on a
Monday. By then it is old news.

(55:06):
I imagine a newspaper writing about the Bank of England report
on the Monday when it happened on the Thursday would never
happen. And yet you get large corporates
doing exactly that. So I always try and make sure
that I'm posting something either before it happens or the
day it happens, while it's stillnewsworthy.

(55:29):
And so just advice then to people just testing the water,
like I imagine there's a well, Iknow talking for having talked
to them, it's almost like this is their online resume and
persona, their professional brand, and it's those first few
that they'll agonize over. So what kind of words of

(55:51):
encouragement or structure do you think you could give to
those people just to get the ball rolling?
Do you think I. Think it's difficult, right?
If you're first starting out, like let's say you've just
started a job somewhere, should you be posting lots on LinkedIn?
I'd argue maybe not because likeI've been doing this since 2008,

(56:18):
not the LinkedIn stuff, but I'vebeen analyzing the economy.
And then I was in a role where kind of my part of my job was to
represent views on the economy to our clients and people.
And so I guess what I'd say is like, make sure that you feel

(56:41):
like you know what you're talking about and that you've
got something to add. Don't just post for the sake of
it, right? I will try and do analysis where
I'm showing something which I think either goes a little bit
deeper than just the headline data point or maybe looks back

(57:02):
through history and shows well, how is what's happening now
relevant to the past and therefore how that might relate
to the future. But if you've got something
where you genuinely think, yeah,this is valuable, this is
something that people might be interested in, firstly, you've
got to get permission from the company worker to do that.

(57:24):
I was in a position where I was encouraged to do that.
You don't just want to start posting this is, you know, my
view on the world if that isn't in line with what your chief
economist thinks or whoever. And so you've got to make sure
that it's OK for you to be doingthat.
And then you're right. It is your like LinkedIn is your

(57:46):
CV, it's your public face to theworld.
So make sure that what you're posting is what you want the
world to know about you and thatit is smart and it's interesting
and, and that it's OK with the people who are employing.

(58:11):
Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't want to
put people off. I'm just saying like, I don't
think everyone should just rush out post every day, but if
you're in a position where that's encouraged and a good
thing, then post on the topics where you can add value and try
and tell stories, right? People love stories.
Anyone can say this data point went down, so why is it

(58:34):
relevant? Tell a good story around there.
Tell me something I didn't already know.
I mean, tell me something that wasn't in the press.
Now this is the other mistake that I see a lot of firms do.
They say the Bank of England cutinterest rates by naughty .25%.
Yeah, we know, like I can see that on BBC.

(58:55):
So what is the So what, Why did they do that?
What are they going to do at thenext meeting?
What are they going to do over the next year?
What is wrong about the way thatthe market is thinking about
that? If you are hiring for a A-Team,
let's say you you ran a desk, you're hiring for a team, and

(59:18):
you saw a student in study doingthis, which is definitely
possible in terms of access to see what's, you know, the
calendar of events and all the things that you said about the
planning. How would you perceive that
individual then at that age compared to a rest of a cohort
if they were actively doing that?

(59:39):
I mean, I've got to be honest with you, be it would be
dependent on the quality of whatthey were posting, right?
So if someone was posting stuff which I thought wasn't, didn't
make a lot of sense, it wasn't very good, that would damage
their profile. But if they were posting
something which I thought, wow, that's really insightful and I
hadn't thought about that, and that makes me want to go and do

(01:00:01):
some more research on that topic, then I'd hire them.
And so that's the challenge if you're young and starting out is
that can you can you post thingswhich are really valuable and

(01:00:23):
going to make someone who you want them to hire, you're even
going to impress them. You may well be able to, but
just don't feel like I've got a post every day, particularly if
you're young postings, if it's like this is actually real value
at this is something where I'm doing my PhD on this and it's

(01:00:44):
made me realize that the market's got it wrong X or, you
know, less extreme than that. I'm studying economic.
It could even be a question. I sometimes it could be I'm
studying economics at the momentand we've just learned that the
economy works this way, but thatI, that doesn't seem right to me

(01:01:05):
because of what I'm seeing happen in the world at the
moment. What does everyone on LinkedIn
think about this? You can ask, ask me.
I might reply saying I think theeconomic theory is wrong.
Well, I might say, Oh yeah, you just aren't thinking about that
in the right way. Or I might say, I don't know.
I'm going to look into that. You know what I mean?

(01:01:25):
So you can comment, you can ask questions, you can post if
you've got value to add. No, I think something you said
there, I think it's really interesting and it's the, I
guess the perception is that youalmost need to break ground with
every post in terms of like somereally insightful thing.

(01:01:48):
But like you said with the question aspect, I, you know, my
job on for 10 years early in my career related to markets was
essentially I'm an aggregation human aggregation tool.
So. And that in itself can provide
huge value because not everyone sees everything and so there's
lots of different ways to get tobreak.

(01:02:09):
Ground like sometimes, like, I mean, you're going to look at my
LinkedIn profile and see some ofthe posts I do.
Sometimes all I'm doing is saying take payroll data as the
most watched piece of financial data in the world.
Although I think it's coming outtoday because of the government
shutdown, but you know, normallyit's the most watched piece of

(01:02:29):
data in the world posting on LinkedIn, Non farm payrolls rose
by whatever they rose by. Why bother, right?
You're not the first person who's going to post to that.
It doesn't add any value. But sometimes all I do is say,
well, let's look into that in a little bit more depth.
So let's strip out the government and health care

(01:02:52):
workers who aren't really dependent on the strength of the
economy. And let's look at what happened
to employment growth in the cyclical sectors.
It's not a massive value app, nor is it a huge amount of work,
but it can tell a slightly different story.
And sometimes overall payroll growth is positive.

(01:03:12):
The cyclical payroll growth was negative.
That's a big story. And then what does that mean?
What does that mean for the app?It's just one example.
Cool. Well, look, I think we'll, we'll
wrap up the conversation there. Yeah, really, really enjoyed
that, particularly the how you were describing the the jazz

(01:03:34):
analogy. I really like that because the
other thing as well is I'm just thinking sometimes just when you
know something, the audience throws you something and then
you have to just roll with it ina certain way or different
audience types and you have to tweak the the sound a little
bit, so to speak, sticking on theme.
But yeah, no, that was that was super cool one.
Thing I would say on the whole jazz analogy for particularly

(01:03:57):
for the like younger people who might be listening is most of
the best jazz musicians in history were pretty good
classical players first. OK.
So if you look at like Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis, and they
were good classical players, he didn't take part, right?

(01:04:21):
Look at someone like Picasso. He could do like draw me a
picture that actually looks likeit does in real life.
He could do that. Winta Marsalis is a phenomenal
classical trumpet player. So learn to do that first before
you try improvising. You know, don't let your first

(01:04:42):
thing be live on Bloomberg. You're not going to go very
well. But if you if you learn that,
then you can learn, right? Well, so I know how to do it in
the structured way. Now I can experiment with
improvisation. What if I change the way, the

(01:05:03):
perspective that I draw this from in the way Picasso did?
Or what if I what if I actually experiment with playing the
wrong note on purpose, like MarsDavis did right these kind of
things. But the key point is, as you
said, like don't look at someonewho's later on in their career
and just think, oh, either don'tthink, hey, I can't do that, but

(01:05:29):
also don't think I'm just going to skip straight to that.
Master the kind of classical piano or the presentation where
you really practice it and learnand all the rest of it.
And then with with time and and fundamentally like being the
expert in the room, you know, make sure that when you get up

(01:05:50):
and talk to people, you're confident that if they ask you a
question, you're going to know more than they do about the
answer, because that's part of where the confidence comes from
is knowing that you know what you're talk talking about.
I said, if someone if you're in a room and you're an economist,
you're often speaking to non economists.
Someone asks you a question, well, you can feel com

(01:06:12):
comfortable, might not know the definitive answer, but I
probably at least have an informed opinion on this topic.
And if you know what you're talking about and you've done
the structure and the prep for it, then later on down the line
doing the more improvised side in the Q&A or whether you're

(01:06:33):
doing it live on TV, that that comes with time.
Great. Well, Mike?
A real pleasure to have you on. I certainly learned a a few
things this conversation, so everyone else did too.
So thank you, Mike, and take care.
That's all I know.