August 6, 2025 • 39 mins
In this episode, we dive into the archive to take you back to 2022 when Anthony spoke to Will Hobbs, who at the time of recording was the acting Chief Investment Officer of Barclays Wealth Management.
Will talks about his untraditional route into markets, from training in Italy as a chef to landing his first role in finance, working through the dot-com and financial crisis, and then deconstructing his current role as Chief Investment Officer.
There are lots of tips on networking, leveraging personal experiences, and a detailed explanation of how his team oversees the investment philosophy at Barclays UK in Strategic Asset Allocation (SAA) and Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) decisions.
We also touch on how he found his real passion later on in his career which ultimately acted as the springboard to later success and discuss how he deals with the pressure of being responsible for key decisions within the division he operates in.
A must listen to episode for those looking to work in asset or wealth management but also for the wider community if you are looking for an open and genuine insight into working in the world of finance.
(00:00) Introduction
(02:10) From chef to CIO
(04:00) Travel, Turkey, and taking risks
(09:50) Early jobs and finding purpose
(13:57) Networking advice: just ask
(16:19) What a CIO really does
(20:12) Handling pressure and big calls
(25:01) Mental health in finance
(30:16) Bitcoin, blockchain, and investing
(34:53) How to start learning markets
(38:03) Final tips for beginners
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, and welcome back to the Market Maker Podcast.
As you can see, I'm flying solo this week.
Piers is away on vacation, but Ididn't want to leave you the
community without any content atall.
So what I've done is I've gone back and dived into the archives
to pull out a conversation I didthree years ago with a guy
called Will Hobbs, who was at that point the chief investment
(00:23):
officer of Barclays Wealth Management.
It's not only a great conversation that talks about
his story, the challenges that he had, how he overcame them,
and career advice, but it's one of the most succinct
explanations I've ever had in how exactly the wealth
management industry works. So I think you're really going
to love this one. All right, enjoy.
(00:45):
So hello and welcome to our latest Career Insight episode.
It's my great pleasure to be joined by Will Hobbs, who's the
Chief Investment Officer at Barclays Wealth Management.
In fact, probably when he startsspeaking, you might recognise
his voice if you follow the Barclays Word on the Street
podcast, which is always one of the most popular investing
podcasts in the UK. And it's definitely one I'd
(01:07):
recommend to everyone in our community to to subscribe and
follow because they're such Nuggets of information.
They'll be super useful interviewing and things like
that. In this episode, Will and I are
going to have a chat about his career, from school days getting
into finance, memories from early in his career to
deconstructing his current role as the CIO of Barclays Wealth
(01:28):
Management. But not only that, hopefully I
can extract some some pearls of wisdom to pass on to the
community who are kind of at that very starting point of
making really tough decisions about what they're going to do
for the rest of their rest of their life.
And it feels like such a burden of that decision.
Hopefully system of your experience will can, can break
that down. But I know when you and I have
(01:49):
chatted offline, you've had a bit of AI guess an untraditional
path right at the very beginningfor someone of your seniority is
where you sit right now in your position.
So perhaps we could kick it off and, and start way back to,
yeah, school days and, and and college and and.
What were your thoughts early onwhen you were starting out?
(02:11):
So well, Anthony, first of all, thank you for having me on the
show. Thank you for the kind, kind
words about we're on the street.It's it's yes, your support is
much appreciated. And and like I said, the team at
Barclays is, is very grateful for all of you.
Anyone who listens in terms of this, I mean, I would tend to
think that my career is an example more of the role of luck
(02:32):
and what not to do rather than any sort of particular paths to
follow. You know, it's certainly when I
was, when I was growing up, whenI really wanted to be was a
chef. I was always obsessed with food.
And I, I mean, I didn't really do any sort of GCS, ES or A
levels that would tend me towards finance.
I wasn't interested in stocks and shares as a youth at all.
(02:56):
I was obsessed with cricket and cooking primarily, I think.
Is that for your parents or werethey were they professionals?
Really, I mean, my old man was in the army and my mother was a
sort of garden designer. He's a garden designer.
And they dragged me around kind of, you know, garden centres,
stuff like that. So there was no real kind of,
(03:16):
you know, and, you know, there was a sort of a small whispering
that, you know, maybe I should go into the army and learn some
discipline. But I hate people shouting in
the morning. I respond really badly to it
generally. So.
So the army wasn't for me in theend.
So I was sort of, yeah. And I was sort of, I went
eventually having done or A levels.
(03:38):
I did English history, theology,sculpture and French literature
or French, which was French language and French literature.
And I didn't do very well in them.
I didn't work very hard for themeither, which was a sort of
excuse. And I ended up going to Oxford
(04:01):
Brooks quite briefly after travelling I, I sort of went
out. So I worked for a bit and I
saved up enough money to go out to Turkey and live in Turkey for
a while. And I lived with a Turkish
family in Ankara and learnt Turkish.
So I sent to a Turkish language called in Ankara and not
speaking a word and with the Turkish family, he didn't speak
any English. And as as I arrived, of all
(04:24):
things, just a slight deviation,there was a military coup.
And yeah, yeah. So I'd literally turned up my
first night in in Ankara in thisflat, and I saw these tanks
rolling down the streets. And I asked the guy who I was
living with and he had very broken English.
I'm much better than my Turkish,obviously.
And he said, oh, it's just the government trying to persuade.
It's just the army trying to persuade the government.
They are wrong. And I was like, I'm going to do
(04:45):
it, I guess. And so, yeah.
And I spent some time out there and I travelled, you know, I was
lucky enough to travel around the Middle East.
And I lived in Egypt for a bit. And I was sort of cleaned bogs
in a campsite in southern Turkeyfor all that while.
And, and all that while I was kind of trying to work out what
I was going to do when I got back.
And I ended up cramming into a French literature course at
(05:07):
Oxford Bridge, which I didn't really do much of.
I didn't turn up very much. So I wasn't sort of very
successful on that side of things.
And eventually I went out to Italy and did some cooking.
So I ended up as a Tommy chef ina very nice sort of hotel
restaurant in in a place called Bumbria, right next to Tuscany.
It was beautiful place, really amazing, you know, ripping off
(05:31):
tourists with huge ruffles, those kind of things, you know,
and yeah, and it was nice. And I sort of during that time,
I guess I sort of started to work out that AI wasn't quite
good enough to be, you know, professional chef.
It's such a competitive industry.
And the work was unbelievable. Literally, you know, you start
work at 7:00 in the morning, youfinish at 3:00 at night, you get
(05:53):
a couple of hours sleep, then you get back.
And I'd worked for three months and I think I'd got sort of £200
at the end of it. And I was kind of like, wow,
that's not, you know, that's notgoing to, that's not going to
pay the bills. And so I started writing letters
amongst of chief executives in the financial services industry
and one of them and many other places as well say he's going to
have some work experience and just try, try out.
(06:16):
And I guess that's that's where it was different to nowadays.
It was, you know, there was a way of entering some of these
places without kind of going through grad schemes and so on.
And one very nice chief executive called Steven Clark
said you can come and have two work, two weeks work experience
here. So it was Gerard.
I was, it was a stock analyst role.
I apprenticed there a little bit.
(06:37):
They kept me on for some reason.And yeah, I kind of got lucky.
So yeah, from there it's sort of, you know, it it it that's
where it kind of started, I guess.
So not a traditional route. Might be so, so go looking at
the travelling that you did, like most people go to Bondi
Beach or go to like Thailand or on the beach.
Whereas you've you've gone to let's say slightly different
(07:00):
geographic areas and like traditional gap years and things
like that. You've also then gone into an
environment. So you've gone into a different
cultural environment, then you've gone into quite an
intense working environment. Do you think they were?
Do you think you learnt attributes from those
experiences that were then deployed later in your career?
That's a good question. I mean, I'd so I mean, the main
(07:20):
thing I thought about, you know,the, the main thing I think I
learnt in Turkey, you know, which I'm sure all the listeners
will learn. You know, it took me longer, you
know, you, you H dot, but you know, it's, it's the benefit,
you know, speaking English and going, you know, being an
English speaker and going abroad, you sort of the
arrogance is you sort of assume everyone speaks English.
And most of the time you're kindof right.
You know, you're lucky enough and actually the difference in
(07:44):
Ireland is going to Turkey and speaking Turkish.
The way that people responded toyou was entirely different.
And also the understanding of cultural nuances that you've
managed to get just because of the difference of the language
and the way the language is constructed.
You know, Turkish in itself is a, is a history lesson because,
you know, Ataturk, you know, Westernized the alphabet and,
(08:05):
you know, when he tried to secularize the state and so on.
And so it was a, it was a good example really of sort of what
you gained from actually learning a language and, and
travelling around the Middle East was it was an irony.
You know, I mean, I spent some time in Jordan.
I went to, you know, it was, youknow, it was, it was quite a
troubled time in Jerusalem, but I spent some time there as well.
And so, you know, it was really,really broadened my horizons.
(08:28):
I guess it was a great thing. I mean, it was, it was, it was
amazing. And I, I, you know, I'm so glad
that I, I did it. Whether it's sort of, you know,
I think it was important. It's quite difficult to know how
though. I guess it just, you know, being
aware of the world outside and being aware of cultures and
having, you know, understanding about and, and I think also
these kind of things. One aspect I think that you
(08:50):
could sort of 0 in on to your point is that, you know, once
you, you know, you come from a very positive life in this
country and you start travellingabroad on your own and sort of,
you know, trying to sort of makeit without, you know, your
parents around or people to support you or people you know.
And you gain confidence from being able to make friends, you
know, Turkish friends, Egyptian friends, wherever else.
(09:12):
And you start to sort of it it. It changes your view on what you
can achieve I think. And then in that early part of
your career then as you were going through different roles
and getting promotions and responsibilities and things like
that, how much of it was technical know how and an
accumulation of knowledge as a or in combination or as opposed
(09:36):
to then your ability to just geton with other people, be in an
organization from a, let's say in terms of the internal
bureaucracy that goes on and things like that.
How much of A balance is that totry and in your early part of
your career? Well, so that, that's a really
good question, Anthea. I mean, I think, you know, I'm,
I'm well, so I'm, I'd reframe ita little bit because I mean,
(09:58):
when I when I first joined, quite a lot of my first part of
my career was really about survival.
You know, that was the blowback from 2000, then the blowback
from the great financial crisis,which really meant kind of, you
know, you just got to try and stay employed for quite a long,
you know, quite a lot of that time.
And so some of that was about trying to be good.
(10:20):
But actually also during that time, I hadn't really discovered
the passion for what I wanted todo.
Work was just work to a certain extent.
You know, I, I needed money to live, to eat, you know, so on
and to sort of, you know, to single friends and all those
kind of things. And so I and I, I sort of, you
know, I was doing equity analysis.
(10:40):
So I was covering consumers, consumer businesses around
Europe. It was interesting.
I got to meet amazing chief executives.
I didn't really quite appreciateit at the time, you know, the
people I was allowed into the room with.
I was a little bit conceited about that kind of stuff.
And I think now I look back and cringe a little bit.
But, you know, it was only really, you know, I think the
lesson, the one lesson that I could impart that was useful to
(11:03):
people, I think, is that at one stage during my quite far in,
you know, I met a guy or I was working for a guy who was the
chief practice, chief investmentofficer.
And he had said that rather thanlooking at the world bottom up,
I should try and think about theworld top down and start
(11:24):
thinking about the macro sort ofaspect.
And it to that extent he sent me, you know, to do a master's
degree at Butbeck doing development economics.
And it was at that point really discovered my interest.
I know that's so tragic, isn't it?
And my interest was economics. You know, I mean, honestly, my,
my, my 18 year old self would be, you know, horrified that
(11:46):
that was the answer. But it was it, you know,
development economics is kind of, you know, making poor
countries rich on how to the framework by which you could
think. Once you started thinking about
it, it's almost impossible to stop thinking about it, which is
again, another weird thing to say.
But that was what really changedmy career in a way, because I
suddenly found that I was reallyinterested and it made turning
(12:08):
up to work totally a totally different experience because
also outside of work, I wanted to read associated stuff.
But very broadly, I mean, you know, everything from, you know,
Guns, Germs and Steel to, you know, to, to all the all the
sort of weirder texts that you get in economics and sociology
and all those kind of things. But it made the experience and
(12:29):
from that, I think I think people saw that how much I was
enjoying it and how much I was learning it.
The technical side came because I was enjoying it more and I
wanted to do more study more masters, you know, so it's sort
of gathered, gathered, gathered momentum from there.
But I, I do think to your point though, that, you know, a lot of
it is, you know, especially in big companies, you know, a lot
(12:52):
of it is, is, is, is just being a good person as much as
possible. I mean, you know, there's a lot,
some people do it and you know, there are political players
within the business. And I tend to think that that's
you only so far and then gets you into trouble because you
know, what you need to do is build up networks, people who
you trust and they trust you andyou can act over time.
(13:16):
And over time you sort of the network.
The bigger your network, the more your ability to get stuff
done that you want to get done or that you collectively want to
get done. And that makes you more
effective, and therefore that makes you more effective as a
leadership. Yeah.
And then it's networking you just mentioned.
And that's one of the things that we strongly encourage to
all of the students we interact with.
(13:37):
But they almost look at people like you and you're you're kind
of so senior, you're up in the ivory tower.
And it's like we're just down here in the bog.
And it's like, how do we ever start to then communicate with
someone like yourself? What would be your advice in
that respect to reaching out to people within, let's say you're
external to Barclays, for example, but you wanted to talk
to someone there. What would be your kind of
(13:57):
approach? I always found out I'm, you
know, God, I'm, for a start, I'malways delighted to kind of, you
know, meet people anyway. And so, you know, if I've ever
got diary time, I'll always kindof make time.
And I found the same was true ofmuch more senior people than I
am now, you know, when I was kind of starting that if you
sort of reach out, they weren't always.
But, you know, a lot of them will turn around and say, yeah,
(14:20):
sure. You know, that's, you know,
let's have a coffee or something, you know, and it's
not too onerous. And I think, you know, just
sharing life experiences and whatever else and those kind of
things. I think people liked the feeling
of passing on tips. You know, I think it's not.
Yeah. I, I, I found that mostly I, I
was always surprised by the degree to which people did, you
(14:42):
know, say yes. So my advice to people on be,
you know, just give it a, give it a try.
I mean, you know, they can only say no, they won't be offended.
They certainly won't be offended.
They'll be flattered. I wouldn't.
I mean, a perfect, perfect example of this is, is me
reaching out to you in a way, because I mean, it must have
been a while ago and it's just kind of been, yeah, not a good,
(15:06):
I know you. Will.
Yeah, I. Know, I know.
I feel guilty. Honestly, yeah, yeah.
Like you and I didn't know each other before and we do now.
And so, yeah, it just takes thatleap of faith, I guess, to
especially for young people, I think to just have the
confidence to ask the question and be OK with the fact that you
might not hear back. I mean, that's.
Absolutely, absolutely. But nothing ventured, nothing
(15:27):
gained as the old saying. And I think, you know, I mean,
one thing that's been difficult in the last couple of years
trying to excuse myself as well at the same time, is that, you
know, I think Zoom meetings are quite difficult, aren't they?
You know, in a way, like face toface, there's no, it's very hard
to replace that. I think, you know, that's the
best form of communication whereyou can be in a room with
(15:49):
someone, go for a coffee, that kind of thing.
Now having said that, you know, what are the things that kind
of, you know, particularly old dogs like myself have learnt
during this crisis is that actually you can do more
meetings if you just, you know, do Zooms.
So there is a bit of a sort of atrade off there which is, you
know, you can potentially mentormore people because, you know,
(16:11):
it doesn't take much to do a 10 minutes beating with someone.
So I think that's just, you know, two things to bear in
mind. Yeah.
So, so tell me a little bit moreabout the role of a chief
investment officer because I think for as a as a student,
you, you know of that in terms of a title, you don't actually
know what the day-to-day entails.
So maybe you can walk us throughthat.
(16:32):
Well, it's different in different places, you know, so
the CIO sort of, you know, meansan awful lot of things to to a
lot of people. And you know, in a way, God, how
would I describe my role? So I mean, I think the easiest
way to look at it is within Barclays, you know, what we've
done for the mass affluent and wealthy customers.
(16:53):
So not the Ultron net worth. We have organized the investment
value chain into lots of distinct parts.
And what I mean by the investment value chain is what
it takes all the different activities and people it takes
in order to deliver a multi asset class diversified
portfolio fund that is the highest possible quality.
(17:14):
And if you think about it along those lines, you've got to first
of all, you've got to profile the clients and to see what kind
of what's our risk appetite, what's their appetite for
losses, so on. And then you've got to start
building your asset allocation. So you've got your strategic,
your long term asset allocation,your tax class allocation, then
you start going into the kind ofcolouring in aspects.
So things like manager selection, which funds to buy,
(17:36):
how to blend them, that kind of thing.
And then it's all sort of, you know, the other stuff, which is
kind of people, you know, various bits of police forces
aimed at stopping me being stupid and doing rash stuff, you
know, quite rightly and measuring and you know, all, all
all that kind of stuff. And so now all of the kind of
(17:57):
the bit that comes under me is the bit of constructing the
investment, you know, the multi asset class investment fund.
So kind of from the profiling all the way up to the
constructed fund, that's, you know, what I'm ultimately
accountable for. Now within that there's some
decisions that I'm on the hook for.
So within a strategic and tactical ass allocation in
(18:19):
particular, you know, those decisions come up to me for yes
or no, But mostly what you want in that situation, if you think
about it, you don't want key person risk, You don't want some
kind of, you know, me turning upone day and feeling in a
different mood to the next and making a different decision with
the same information. So you what you have is a very
organised research process, decision support tools, a sort
(18:41):
of kind of a, a very kind of strictly organized meetings,
which take into account kind of all sorts of behavioural biases
and, you know, so on that allow for a relatively consistent
decision making framework for ever sitting in my seat.
Then there's all the sort of various governance and represent
stuff that I do. So a lot of it is research, you
(19:03):
know, making sure that I'm on top of the world's economy and
markets so that when decisions do come to me, I'm able to, you
know, understand and assess and handicap the information
correctly. And that takes a lot of time, as
you know, you know, it's understanding the world at the
moment is complicated. And then there's a lot of the
(19:23):
kind of administrative, administrative stuff, which is
around, you know, how decisions are made, making sure that I'm
on top of all of the various bits of the investment
proposition where we're taking bets, how we're taking bets, the
framework by which those decisions are being made, the
people that are making them those kind of things.
And then there's a fun bit, which is things like, you know,
(19:45):
talking to you, you know, doing media, you know, that kind of
stuff and sort of trying to represent the team as best as
possible. So, you know, it's, it's, it's a
great job. I have to say, I love it.
I'm really tragic. It's a great fun job.
It's so different everyday. You know, there's times when
there's huge, huge, huge, almostunbearable pressure and that's,
you know, less fun. But most of the time it's great
(20:06):
and I've got great people you know around, so that makes it
really fun. So you just mentioned a really
important thing there that I think we we need to bring onto
the table, which is the pressurebecause you did say that for
certain things you're on the hook for.
And so it's kind of like, you know, a lot of lot of the
students we have are going through different trading
(20:28):
simulations and things like that, which is very just short
term is getting that kind of black and white result.
Whereas for you, it's on a different kind of level in terms
of the impact that that could have.
So what's your process for for managing from a psychological
perspective when you are on the hook for?
Significant decisions. Oh, hard.
Yeah. And it's really hard, isn't it?
(20:49):
Because it's really hard to replicate.
You know, it's a really interesting kind of behavioural
problem that we face. So I'll give you an example.
So, you know, and, you know thiswell, but when we went back, we
did a lot of risk profiling of our customers before 2007, 2008.
And we were like, you know, would you accept this kind of
loss? And they're like, yeah, that
sounds right. But when it's happening, you
(21:10):
know, even seasoned professionals like us, you're
watching the screen. You're thinking like whoa, you
know, I mean it is always like mind blowing, isn't it?
When you see the S&P like Dak Down or you see something crazy
happening, you it's. I remember the people queuing
outside Barclays, which is whereI bank tried to withdraw
(21:31):
Maximum. Absolutely.
And you know, and you see scenesyou haven't seen, you know,
ever. And you think, gosh, you know,
and, and the media is telling you this is the end of the world
this time round, you know, get ready, pack your bags, you know,
And so maintaining cool is very important because you know what
we know and and this is the slightly odd kind of position
(21:52):
we're in, in a way. And This is why to a certain
extent within the investment teams that I'm lucky enough to
represent, we kind of try and keep the people who are making
the TAT to class allocation decisions away from meeting
clients in many ways. Because you don't want them, You
want them to be dispassionate. They need to be to making, you
(22:12):
know, because the worst, you know, emotion is a terrible kind
of investing or, or, or you know, it's, it's a terrible
investing aid. You need to retain
dispassionate. You need to continue to look at
the facts as much as possible towhatever extent they can be
mustered. And I think, you know, part of
that. So one way we manage this, you
know, it's a long answer to a, to a relatively simple question.
(22:34):
But you know, if I look back to the most recent sort of, you
know, the pandemic 2020, you know, February, March 2021 thing
that really helped me and us there was we'd spent quite a lot
of time beforehand building decision support tools.
And one of those was a investor sentiment indicator which we
(22:54):
back tested, you know, very thoroughly so that we understood
what the thresholds were and what the hit rate was of going
in the opposite direction. So when investors were extremely
depressed, if we did the opposite, bought stocks at that
point, what would be the chancesthat we were right over, you
know, time periods somewhat and and we had a very good idea of
the shape of, you know, how those how those probabilities
(23:19):
played out. So when it came to it, you know,
when the investor sentiment indicator went off the chart,
you know, if that was one of thethings that helped you say,
right, OK, we need to do the opposite.
We need to add to risk. We luckily had sufficient dry
powder to be able to do so, which was luck to be honest.
You know, a lot of people went in over risks and were unlucky.
(23:39):
They had to de risk at the bottom just because of process,
whereas we'd actually de risked beforehand, not because we saw
the pandemic coming, just because we didn't see much.
And, you know, we didn't see much excess return and major
risky asset classes at that point in January.
And that allowed us to put quitea lot of high yields, you know,
(24:01):
stocks exposure right at the bottom.
And it was, it is difficult because always at that moment,
you know, everyone is strugglingto keep cool, you know, so your
risk teams are questioning, you know, whether you've gone off
your rocker and everyone's sort of telling you is this, you
know, ACIO is throwing, you know, bad money after good.
(24:22):
And you know, those kind of questions.
And what you've got to do, you know, what you're protected by
as the CIO and a decision maker is process.
You know, stick to process and make sure that before you go
into any crises stress tested, that you're very aware of its
parameters and its strengths. And you've got to have good
people around you as well. And I was very lucky on both of
(24:43):
those counts that enabled, you know, us to make the right
decisions for for clients. But yeah, I mean, I, you know,
it's very difficult to replicatewhat it's like in a really,
really messy market when you've got positions going the wrong
way. It's a it's a horrible feeling
have. You ever had that because
(25:04):
obviously mental health is a very big thing at the moment for
a lot of a lot of young people, particularly given the
challenges of the pandemic. I mean, how do you separate?
You've obviously got family and things like that.
Has it ever been at a point where that stress is kind of
impeded on personal life or has it always been quite clear for
you and it's it's segregation sort of?
(25:25):
No, no, I mean no, definitely. Yeah, definitely.
I mean, I've had yeah. I mean, yeah, in the last two
years, yeah. No, definitely.
I mean, I think one of the things that I learnt about
myself during this crisis is that I need to be around people
to a certain extent. You know, working from home
(25:47):
with, with just two small, quiteaggressive dogs for company has
not, you know, I said yeah, I did.
Did not do me do my mental health any good at all.
And I think, you know, we've learned all of us during this
crisis that kind of, you know, everyone has problems, don't
they? Everyone has stuff to deal with.
(26:08):
Everyone's got, you know, no matter what appears, whatever
facade they put on at work. And I think that facade a little
bit, you know, the facade that everything's fine.
I, I really, really like the fact that that the need to
maintain a facade, which was very much the case when I joined
the city that's kind of disappearing.
People can be much more open andhonest about the stuff that
(26:30):
they're suffering at home, the stuff that they're trying to,
you know, endure. And yeah, certainly, I mean, I,
yeah, I, I, I and lots of other people I know, you know,
suffered quite a lot from sort of, you know, various kind of
mental health issues. Did you have did you have much?
What's your process now of having interaction with the more
(26:53):
junior members of staff? Because I know usually through
circumstance of the, their living set ups and things like
that, they tend to be in the office a lot.
Whereas fortunately for say you and I, there's the, the luxury
of having a bit more space and things like that.
But what what's the the interaction that you see now
(27:13):
from top to kind of down in an organization?
So I mean the where it's interesting, I mean Barclay's
been quite cautious about sort of getting people back to work
in many ways because you know, you've got a huge range of
experiences, haven't you? You know, some people are very
nervous, you know, about coming back to workspaces more
generally. Some people have got used to
(27:34):
working from home and feel very comfortable.
But I feel particularly the younger, my colleagues have
suffered a good deal in this, not just from the situation you
described, which is sometimes their work environments are far
from, ideally they don't have a nice, you know, an office to
sort of back into and work you off the side of your bed and so
on. You know, I'd have been in that
position myself. The crisis had struck when I was
(27:57):
sort of 18/19/20, you know. But I think that, you know, you
know, part of the huge thing about offices and the reason why
with big companies or one of thereasons why big companies still
exist, in my opinion, is this idea of knowledge.
Philip, you know, in economics, you know, you talk about if you
get lots of people in the same space, it's very difficult to
(28:19):
kind of replicate digitally. But knowledge just fills over
usefully, not all of it. You know, there's chat about,
you know, Carrie Katona by the coffee machine too, which is me
mainly. But you know, it's, it's, it's a
kind of very difficult process to replicate.
And that's really important for young people.
A huge amount of what I learnt was just by being around senior
(28:42):
economists who'd done it all andhaving informal chats, which you
don't, you know, you can sort ofset up an informal chat.
It's really not quite the same is it?
I don't think it's not, it doesn't, it doesn't have that
sort of magic quantity. So we are trying to get people
back into the office as much as possible.
And certainly my team, you know,we are a team that need to be
(29:02):
back in the office, you know, two or three days a week to
cause knowledge spillover is really important in research,
you know, and you can't, you know, you can have research
meetings and we do, we have all sorts of, you know, you have
bull bear debates where you'd force people to go onto the
other side of the debate, which they currently sit on and things
like that. Those could be organised.
But otherwise I've noticed getting back into the office and
(29:24):
particularly with the younger team members, they really kind
of relish being able to sort of say, you know, share what
they're reading at the moment and send it on to you.
And I do too, you know, I reallylike that kind of more informal
process and it's just nice to see people, isn't it?
Go out for some lunch or have a drink or, you know, whatever,
you know, not in the office, obviously, but you know, that
(29:45):
that's, that's the, that's the benefit.
So the more that we can get backto some kind of normal, well, I
mean, I don't think we'll get back all the way, but I mean,
hybrid working is a very good way of doing things in my
opinion. But the more we can get back to
kind of 2-3 days a week versus one day, 1-2 days a week, which
we're at the moment, we'll all be very pleased.
And just going back to the kind of target audience that you have
(30:07):
in your role as the kind of the affluent individual or family
in, in that respect. So for the people listening on
our channel, they're kind of I guess they could be the future
affluent people given their demographic.
And so they are much of the moreof the generation of the digital
adoption, if you like, where they feel more comfortable with
(30:28):
digital assets and things of that nature.
So obviously at the moment like certainly for me coming at it, I
remember several years ago it was kind of when people started
talking about Bitcoin things like that.
It's kind of like some it's all nonsense because I was just very
narrow mindset of a traditional market Ishiner I guess.
But as you go further forward now and in your kind of base is
(30:52):
in decision making is about diversification.
How much do digital assets do you think starts to play into
that going forward in in the years ahead?
It's a fascinating question. I, I just don't know at the
moment, so I can't quite work out.
So I, I'm really interested, forinstance, in, you know, what
blockchain technology could do to the existence of the company.
(31:14):
You know, because if you just thinking sort of sideways, you
know, if, if you assume you go back to kind of old economic
theory, famous kind of Colson Williamson about the existence
of a Nobel Prize winning economist who decided or, or or
argued that the existence of a company is, is in part down to,
you know, transaction costs and sort of trust issues.
(31:35):
So because I struggle to sort ofsay, you know, get a stranger in
the other side of the world and trust them, what I do is I bring
him inside a company and therefore I can, you know,
internalize the transaction and share tacit knowledge and that
works that way. Now if I could institutionalized
or trust via blockchain, does that mean large companies are no
(31:57):
longer as important? So on and so on.
I struggle a bit more with some of the, some of the current sort
of very popular digital assets just because I'm not sure I
agree with some of the, the use cases.
So, you know, Bitcoin obviously is the one that everyone talks
about. But you know, there there's the
sort of the trade off problem, which is that if you're going to
(32:20):
be a currency, you've got to be boring.
If you're going to be a speculative asset, you don't
want to be boring at all. So I, I don't, you know, I, you
can't have a currency that changes dramatically in value on
your walk to the shops. So suddenly I can't buy a can of
milk, bottle of milk anymore andsuddenly a penny chew to take
(32:42):
home to my children, you know, that that that doesn't work.
So I'm sort of still, I'm watching with great interest.
But at the moment it may have some, they they may have some
diversification benefit. That's something that we are
looking at. But it's still too young a data
set to really kind of work out. So it'll settle a bit and I
think a lot of people are getting very interested in it.
I will continue. We will continue to watch at the
(33:04):
moment. But yeah, it's, it's interesting
though, because you know, to your point, what you're looking
for, you know, when we build theasset class toolkit, what you're
looking for is distinct exposures, you know, so you can
get equity duration, you can getthe credit risk.
Commodities offer something a bit different as well.
You know, the access to something called storage theory
that tends to be uncorrelated aswe're finding a little bit at
(33:25):
the moment. And, and, and anything you can
add further diversification willsmooth returns over the longer
term. And if you think what we're
trying to do, as you rightly talked out, is we're trying to,
you know, for the mass market for everyone possible, you know,
what we want to do is say, look,you know, we've got this one
stop shop multi asset class global fund, which is going to
(33:47):
bring you the frontier in institutional asset class, you
know, asset management returns. And you should just have it
chugging away in the background.You can buy Bitcoin, you can
have all sorts of stuff, technology, funds, so on and so
on in the background, but have this chugging away with your
savings over the long term and you'll probably be better off
and and have more, you know, more chance of hitting your
savings cost. So it's not I'm a buzzkill, you
(34:10):
know, I believe relatively in the sort of efficient markets
and so on. So the way we've organised our
team is to make sure that, you know, that we only pour kind of
expertise into excess returns where we think there is evidence
of excess return, you know, generations.
So we don't do style bets, you know, we do do single stock
bets, but through funds and we do TAA, but elsewhere we sort of
(34:33):
try and get the market return quite carefully.
So it's really just about makingsure you got all weather returns
plus some alpha chugging away with your savings and
backgrounds and everyone else can have, you know, fun with the
rest of it, I guess. So, so a lot of that terminology
there you were just mentioning. Was that too good?
Was that too bad? Where would a young person who's
(34:54):
quite, quite green to these times of terminology, where
would they go to find out this sort of thing?
Is there a place to go or? I don't know.
It's, it's sort of start the, the, the problem I always find
is where to start, you know, andI do think you know, but for me,
the first thing is to get an interest like what are you
actually interested in? Because I think, you know, I
(35:16):
could give you, you know, the anti ominous sort of, you know,
expected returns is the kind of Bible for this stuff, isn't it?
That's where you start. And I, he came round to our shop
the other day. He's a charming guy.
He's, he's absolutely lovely andhe's very accessible and talks
very accessibly. But I don't think expected
returns is a very good place to start necessarily because it's
big, imposing and it's not quitea lot of financial markets
(35:38):
jargon. I mean, I quite like my old boss
wrote a book and it's called Making Sense of Markets.
He's called Kevin Gardner. I sometimes think I give his
book the plug. I sometimes think that's quite a
good place to start because I think you've just got to try in
amongst it all to I, I don't agree with everything he says in
there, but I, I think it's a very good way of sort of just
(36:00):
getting an interest and startingto, you know, trying to work out
what you think. And that's the most important
thing is I think, you know, you've got to work out what you
think and what your angle is andyou bring your own.
You know, my example is of anything, you know, of, you
know, I've made a lot of terrible mistakes in my life and
all sorts of, you know, wrong turns and bad stuff and good
(36:23):
stuff. But I think there's sort of, you
know, the thing that I would sayis that all of that into your
first question, all of that pours into who you are and what
you can bring to markets if you're going to be in markets.
So, you know, if I look at who Itry to hire for the tactical
asset was actually I'm trying tohire different backgrounds who
(36:43):
bring different perspectives. But at the same time, I would
expect them all to have the samethreshold of evidence, you know,
so they've all got to believe toa certain extent and efficient
markets because I don't want to have that debate.
So what I mean that that should be kind of, you know, but what I
do want is different perspectives on the outlook for
inflation. What is, you know, how, you
(37:06):
know, different parts of the capital markets complex are
reacting to it. I want their different
interpretations on that so that we've got a so that we've got a
debate. And I think that comes from
having different university degrees, different experiences,
different specialisms. And I think you've just, you
know, the weigh in for me was not to start kind of right at
the top and sort of start reading the heavy stuff.
(37:28):
It was really just to discover an interest and then the
terminology becomes a bit easierto understand and also remember
because what I found when I started is that I learnt the
terminology over and over and over and over and over again.
I just kept on forgetting it. So I wasn't that interested sort
of, you know, in a funny way. And I think for it to stick,
(37:49):
you've got to find a hook for itto.
It's a bad analogy. It doesn't really work together,
but you know what I mean. You've got to find a you know,
if you want the coat to hang up,you want a hook to hang it on or
something. Like that, I mean, I've got 1
clear word of advice to anyone who, who's just getting started.
Listen to Will on the Barclays Word on a Street podcast.
(38:10):
That's a good bug for you there,Will, But that's a good place to
start. Because I think the thing that
you always do so, so well is howyou deconstruct and quite
eloquently explain what otherwise is quite complex
situations that are happening inthe world and their impact on
markets. And I think as a starting point,
you know, for me it's always been the global market side has
(38:31):
always been of much more interest than say classic
investment banking in in a sensebecause of the fact that
everyday is different. I'm sure that's something that
that you feel as and share as well will that everyday you're
learning and everyday it's wonder what happens next.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, in this
industry as well, I mean, one ofthe things that I've been blown
away by is that, you know, during your life working in a
(38:51):
big bank, particularly get access to amazing people.
I mean, people like, you know, if in normal life I went within
100 yards of them, I'd be arrested, wrestled to the floor.
And, you know, you suddenly get to talk to these people at sort
of semi equals and sort of ask them about what's going on in a
particular area. And so it's your, you know, your
access to genuine expertise and so on.
I mean it, it's, it's an amazing, what I can say to
(39:13):
everyone, you know, anyone who'slistening is it's an amazing
industry to work in and to have the ability to look at markets,
follow markets and try and understand what's going on in
the world. It's a real, I, I find it a real
privilege. I'm really interesting and ever
challenging. OK, well, look on, on that
point. We'll, we'll look to to wrap
things up. So Will, as I said the
beginning, it's been a great privilege and a pleasure to have
(39:36):
you on on the podcast. And yeah, hopefully you've all
found that insightful. I'm sure you don't mind Will if
people connect with you on LinkedIn and things like.
That yeah, no, please do. Please do.
OK. All right.
Well, thanks very much again andand take care.
Thanks.
Hello, and welcome back to the Market Maker Podcast.
As you can see, I'm flying solo this week.
Piers is away on vacation, but Ididn't want to leave you the
community without any content atall.
So what I've done is I've gone back and dived into the archives
to pull out a conversation I didthree years ago with a guy
called Will Hobbs, who was at that point the chief investment
(00:23):
officer of Barclays Wealth Management.
It's not only a great conversation that talks about
his story, the challenges that he had, how he overcame them,
and career advice, but it's one of the most succinct
explanations I've ever had in how exactly the wealth
management industry works. So I think you're really going
to love this one. All right, enjoy.
(00:45):
So hello and welcome to our latest Career Insight episode.
It's my great pleasure to be joined by Will Hobbs, who's the
Chief Investment Officer at Barclays Wealth Management.
In fact, probably when he startsspeaking, you might recognise
his voice if you follow the Barclays Word on the Street
podcast, which is always one of the most popular investing
podcasts in the UK. And it's definitely one I'd
(01:07):
recommend to everyone in our community to to subscribe and
follow because they're such Nuggets of information.
They'll be super useful interviewing and things like
that. In this episode, Will and I are
going to have a chat about his career, from school days getting
into finance, memories from early in his career to
deconstructing his current role as the CIO of Barclays Wealth
(01:28):
Management. But not only that, hopefully I
can extract some some pearls of wisdom to pass on to the
community who are kind of at that very starting point of
making really tough decisions about what they're going to do
for the rest of their rest of their life.
And it feels like such a burden of that decision.
Hopefully system of your experience will can, can break
that down. But I know when you and I have
(01:49):
chatted offline, you've had a bit of AI guess an untraditional
path right at the very beginningfor someone of your seniority is
where you sit right now in your position.
So perhaps we could kick it off and, and start way back to,
yeah, school days and, and and college and and.
What were your thoughts early onwhen you were starting out?
(02:11):
So well, Anthony, first of all, thank you for having me on the
show. Thank you for the kind, kind
words about we're on the street.It's it's yes, your support is
much appreciated. And and like I said, the team at
Barclays is, is very grateful for all of you.
Anyone who listens in terms of this, I mean, I would tend to
think that my career is an example more of the role of luck
(02:32):
and what not to do rather than any sort of particular paths to
follow. You know, it's certainly when I
was, when I was growing up, whenI really wanted to be was a
chef. I was always obsessed with food.
And I, I mean, I didn't really do any sort of GCS, ES or A
levels that would tend me towards finance.
I wasn't interested in stocks and shares as a youth at all.
(02:56):
I was obsessed with cricket and cooking primarily, I think.
Is that for your parents or werethey were they professionals?
Really, I mean, my old man was in the army and my mother was a
sort of garden designer. He's a garden designer.
And they dragged me around kind of, you know, garden centres,
stuff like that. So there was no real kind of,
(03:16):
you know, and, you know, there was a sort of a small whispering
that, you know, maybe I should go into the army and learn some
discipline. But I hate people shouting in
the morning. I respond really badly to it
generally. So.
So the army wasn't for me in theend.
So I was sort of, yeah. And I was sort of, I went
eventually having done or A levels.
(03:38):
I did English history, theology,sculpture and French literature
or French, which was French language and French literature.
And I didn't do very well in them.
I didn't work very hard for themeither, which was a sort of
excuse. And I ended up going to Oxford
(04:01):
Brooks quite briefly after travelling I, I sort of went
out. So I worked for a bit and I
saved up enough money to go out to Turkey and live in Turkey for
a while. And I lived with a Turkish
family in Ankara and learnt Turkish.
So I sent to a Turkish language called in Ankara and not
speaking a word and with the Turkish family, he didn't speak
any English. And as as I arrived, of all
(04:24):
things, just a slight deviation,there was a military coup.
And yeah, yeah. So I'd literally turned up my
first night in in Ankara in thisflat, and I saw these tanks
rolling down the streets. And I asked the guy who I was
living with and he had very broken English.
I'm much better than my Turkish,obviously.
And he said, oh, it's just the government trying to persuade.
It's just the army trying to persuade the government.
They are wrong. And I was like, I'm going to do
(04:45):
it, I guess. And so, yeah.
And I spent some time out there and I travelled, you know, I was
lucky enough to travel around the Middle East.
And I lived in Egypt for a bit. And I was sort of cleaned bogs
in a campsite in southern Turkeyfor all that while.
And, and all that while I was kind of trying to work out what
I was going to do when I got back.
And I ended up cramming into a French literature course at
(05:07):
Oxford Bridge, which I didn't really do much of.
I didn't turn up very much. So I wasn't sort of very
successful on that side of things.
And eventually I went out to Italy and did some cooking.
So I ended up as a Tommy chef ina very nice sort of hotel
restaurant in in a place called Bumbria, right next to Tuscany.
It was beautiful place, really amazing, you know, ripping off
(05:31):
tourists with huge ruffles, those kind of things, you know,
and yeah, and it was nice. And I sort of during that time,
I guess I sort of started to work out that AI wasn't quite
good enough to be, you know, professional chef.
It's such a competitive industry.
And the work was unbelievable. Literally, you know, you start
work at 7:00 in the morning, youfinish at 3:00 at night, you get
(05:53):
a couple of hours sleep, then you get back.
And I'd worked for three months and I think I'd got sort of £200
at the end of it. And I was kind of like, wow,
that's not, you know, that's notgoing to, that's not going to
pay the bills. And so I started writing letters
amongst of chief executives in the financial services industry
and one of them and many other places as well say he's going to
have some work experience and just try, try out.
(06:16):
And I guess that's that's where it was different to nowadays.
It was, you know, there was a way of entering some of these
places without kind of going through grad schemes and so on.
And one very nice chief executive called Steven Clark
said you can come and have two work, two weeks work experience
here. So it was Gerard.
I was, it was a stock analyst role.
I apprenticed there a little bit.
(06:37):
They kept me on for some reason.And yeah, I kind of got lucky.
So yeah, from there it's sort of, you know, it it it that's
where it kind of started, I guess.
So not a traditional route. Might be so, so go looking at
the travelling that you did, like most people go to Bondi
Beach or go to like Thailand or on the beach.
Whereas you've you've gone to let's say slightly different
(07:00):
geographic areas and like traditional gap years and things
like that. You've also then gone into an
environment. So you've gone into a different
cultural environment, then you've gone into quite an
intense working environment. Do you think they were?
Do you think you learnt attributes from those
experiences that were then deployed later in your career?
That's a good question. I mean, I'd so I mean, the main
(07:20):
thing I thought about, you know,the, the main thing I think I
learnt in Turkey, you know, which I'm sure all the listeners
will learn. You know, it took me longer, you
know, you, you H dot, but you know, it's, it's the benefit,
you know, speaking English and going, you know, being an
English speaker and going abroad, you sort of the
arrogance is you sort of assume everyone speaks English.
And most of the time you're kindof right.
You know, you're lucky enough and actually the difference in
(07:44):
Ireland is going to Turkey and speaking Turkish.
The way that people responded toyou was entirely different.
And also the understanding of cultural nuances that you've
managed to get just because of the difference of the language
and the way the language is constructed.
You know, Turkish in itself is a, is a history lesson because,
you know, Ataturk, you know, Westernized the alphabet and,
(08:05):
you know, when he tried to secularize the state and so on.
And so it was a, it was a good example really of sort of what
you gained from actually learning a language and, and
travelling around the Middle East was it was an irony.
You know, I mean, I spent some time in Jordan.
I went to, you know, it was, youknow, it was, it was quite a
troubled time in Jerusalem, but I spent some time there as well.
And so, you know, it was really,really broadened my horizons.
(08:28):
I guess it was a great thing. I mean, it was, it was, it was
amazing. And I, I, you know, I'm so glad
that I, I did it. Whether it's sort of, you know,
I think it was important. It's quite difficult to know how
though. I guess it just, you know, being
aware of the world outside and being aware of cultures and
having, you know, understanding about and, and I think also
these kind of things. One aspect I think that you
(08:50):
could sort of 0 in on to your point is that, you know, once
you, you know, you come from a very positive life in this
country and you start travellingabroad on your own and sort of,
you know, trying to sort of makeit without, you know, your
parents around or people to support you or people you know.
And you gain confidence from being able to make friends, you
know, Turkish friends, Egyptian friends, wherever else.
(09:12):
And you start to sort of it it. It changes your view on what you
can achieve I think. And then in that early part of
your career then as you were going through different roles
and getting promotions and responsibilities and things like
that, how much of it was technical know how and an
accumulation of knowledge as a or in combination or as opposed
(09:36):
to then your ability to just geton with other people, be in an
organization from a, let's say in terms of the internal
bureaucracy that goes on and things like that.
How much of A balance is that totry and in your early part of
your career? Well, so that, that's a really
good question, Anthea. I mean, I think, you know, I'm,
I'm well, so I'm, I'd reframe ita little bit because I mean,
(09:58):
when I when I first joined, quite a lot of my first part of
my career was really about survival.
You know, that was the blowback from 2000, then the blowback
from the great financial crisis,which really meant kind of, you
know, you just got to try and stay employed for quite a long,
you know, quite a lot of that time.
And so some of that was about trying to be good.
(10:20):
But actually also during that time, I hadn't really discovered
the passion for what I wanted todo.
Work was just work to a certain extent.
You know, I, I needed money to live, to eat, you know, so on
and to sort of, you know, to single friends and all those
kind of things. And so I and I, I sort of, you
know, I was doing equity analysis.
(10:40):
So I was covering consumers, consumer businesses around
Europe. It was interesting.
I got to meet amazing chief executives.
I didn't really quite appreciateit at the time, you know, the
people I was allowed into the room with.
I was a little bit conceited about that kind of stuff.
And I think now I look back and cringe a little bit.
But, you know, it was only really, you know, I think the
lesson, the one lesson that I could impart that was useful to
(11:03):
people, I think, is that at one stage during my quite far in,
you know, I met a guy or I was working for a guy who was the
chief practice, chief investmentofficer.
And he had said that rather thanlooking at the world bottom up,
I should try and think about theworld top down and start
(11:24):
thinking about the macro sort ofaspect.
And it to that extent he sent me, you know, to do a master's
degree at Butbeck doing development economics.
And it was at that point really discovered my interest.
I know that's so tragic, isn't it?
And my interest was economics. You know, I mean, honestly, my,
my, my 18 year old self would be, you know, horrified that
(11:46):
that was the answer. But it was it, you know,
development economics is kind of, you know, making poor
countries rich on how to the framework by which you could
think. Once you started thinking about
it, it's almost impossible to stop thinking about it, which is
again, another weird thing to say.
But that was what really changedmy career in a way, because I
suddenly found that I was reallyinterested and it made turning
(12:08):
up to work totally a totally different experience because
also outside of work, I wanted to read associated stuff.
But very broadly, I mean, you know, everything from, you know,
Guns, Germs and Steel to, you know, to, to all the all the
sort of weirder texts that you get in economics and sociology
and all those kind of things. But it made the experience and
(12:29):
from that, I think I think people saw that how much I was
enjoying it and how much I was learning it.
The technical side came because I was enjoying it more and I
wanted to do more study more masters, you know, so it's sort
of gathered, gathered, gathered momentum from there.
But I, I do think to your point though, that, you know, a lot of
it is, you know, especially in big companies, you know, a lot
(12:52):
of it is, is, is, is just being a good person as much as
possible. I mean, you know, there's a lot,
some people do it and you know, there are political players
within the business. And I tend to think that that's
you only so far and then gets you into trouble because you
know, what you need to do is build up networks, people who
you trust and they trust you andyou can act over time.
(13:16):
And over time you sort of the network.
The bigger your network, the more your ability to get stuff
done that you want to get done or that you collectively want to
get done. And that makes you more
effective, and therefore that makes you more effective as a
leadership. Yeah.
And then it's networking you just mentioned.
And that's one of the things that we strongly encourage to
all of the students we interact with.
(13:37):
But they almost look at people like you and you're you're kind
of so senior, you're up in the ivory tower.
And it's like we're just down here in the bog.
And it's like, how do we ever start to then communicate with
someone like yourself? What would be your advice in
that respect to reaching out to people within, let's say you're
external to Barclays, for example, but you wanted to talk
to someone there. What would be your kind of
(13:57):
approach? I always found out I'm, you
know, God, I'm, for a start, I'malways delighted to kind of, you
know, meet people anyway. And so, you know, if I've ever
got diary time, I'll always kindof make time.
And I found the same was true ofmuch more senior people than I
am now, you know, when I was kind of starting that if you
sort of reach out, they weren't always.
But, you know, a lot of them will turn around and say, yeah,
(14:20):
sure. You know, that's, you know,
let's have a coffee or something, you know, and it's
not too onerous. And I think, you know, just
sharing life experiences and whatever else and those kind of
things. I think people liked the feeling
of passing on tips. You know, I think it's not.
Yeah. I, I, I found that mostly I, I
was always surprised by the degree to which people did, you
(14:42):
know, say yes. So my advice to people on be,
you know, just give it a, give it a try.
I mean, you know, they can only say no, they won't be offended.
They certainly won't be offended.
They'll be flattered. I wouldn't.
I mean, a perfect, perfect example of this is, is me
reaching out to you in a way, because I mean, it must have
been a while ago and it's just kind of been, yeah, not a good,
(15:06):
I know you. Will.
Yeah, I. Know, I know.
I feel guilty. Honestly, yeah, yeah.
Like you and I didn't know each other before and we do now.
And so, yeah, it just takes thatleap of faith, I guess, to
especially for young people, I think to just have the
confidence to ask the question and be OK with the fact that you
might not hear back. I mean, that's.
Absolutely, absolutely. But nothing ventured, nothing
(15:27):
gained as the old saying. And I think, you know, I mean,
one thing that's been difficult in the last couple of years
trying to excuse myself as well at the same time, is that, you
know, I think Zoom meetings are quite difficult, aren't they?
You know, in a way, like face toface, there's no, it's very hard
to replace that. I think, you know, that's the
best form of communication whereyou can be in a room with
(15:49):
someone, go for a coffee, that kind of thing.
Now having said that, you know, what are the things that kind
of, you know, particularly old dogs like myself have learnt
during this crisis is that actually you can do more
meetings if you just, you know, do Zooms.
So there is a bit of a sort of atrade off there which is, you
know, you can potentially mentormore people because, you know,
(16:11):
it doesn't take much to do a 10 minutes beating with someone.
So I think that's just, you know, two things to bear in
mind. Yeah.
So, so tell me a little bit moreabout the role of a chief
investment officer because I think for as a as a student,
you, you know of that in terms of a title, you don't actually
know what the day-to-day entails.
So maybe you can walk us throughthat.
(16:32):
Well, it's different in different places, you know, so
the CIO sort of, you know, meansan awful lot of things to to a
lot of people. And you know, in a way, God, how
would I describe my role? So I mean, I think the easiest
way to look at it is within Barclays, you know, what we've
done for the mass affluent and wealthy customers.
(16:53):
So not the Ultron net worth. We have organized the investment
value chain into lots of distinct parts.
And what I mean by the investment value chain is what
it takes all the different activities and people it takes
in order to deliver a multi asset class diversified
portfolio fund that is the highest possible quality.
(17:14):
And if you think about it along those lines, you've got to first
of all, you've got to profile the clients and to see what kind
of what's our risk appetite, what's their appetite for
losses, so on. And then you've got to start
building your asset allocation. So you've got your strategic,
your long term asset allocation,your tax class allocation, then
you start going into the kind ofcolouring in aspects.
So things like manager selection, which funds to buy,
(17:36):
how to blend them, that kind of thing.
And then it's all sort of, you know, the other stuff, which is
kind of people, you know, various bits of police forces
aimed at stopping me being stupid and doing rash stuff, you
know, quite rightly and measuring and you know, all, all
all that kind of stuff. And so now all of the kind of
(17:57):
the bit that comes under me is the bit of constructing the
investment, you know, the multi asset class investment fund.
So kind of from the profiling all the way up to the
constructed fund, that's, you know, what I'm ultimately
accountable for. Now within that there's some
decisions that I'm on the hook for.
So within a strategic and tactical ass allocation in
(18:19):
particular, you know, those decisions come up to me for yes
or no, But mostly what you want in that situation, if you think
about it, you don't want key person risk, You don't want some
kind of, you know, me turning upone day and feeling in a
different mood to the next and making a different decision with
the same information. So you what you have is a very
organised research process, decision support tools, a sort
(18:41):
of kind of a, a very kind of strictly organized meetings,
which take into account kind of all sorts of behavioural biases
and, you know, so on that allow for a relatively consistent
decision making framework for ever sitting in my seat.
Then there's all the sort of various governance and represent
stuff that I do. So a lot of it is research, you
(19:03):
know, making sure that I'm on top of the world's economy and
markets so that when decisions do come to me, I'm able to, you
know, understand and assess and handicap the information
correctly. And that takes a lot of time, as
you know, you know, it's understanding the world at the
moment is complicated. And then there's a lot of the
(19:23):
kind of administrative, administrative stuff, which is
around, you know, how decisions are made, making sure that I'm
on top of all of the various bits of the investment
proposition where we're taking bets, how we're taking bets, the
framework by which those decisions are being made, the
people that are making them those kind of things.
And then there's a fun bit, which is things like, you know,
(19:45):
talking to you, you know, doing media, you know, that kind of
stuff and sort of trying to represent the team as best as
possible. So, you know, it's, it's, it's a
great job. I have to say, I love it.
I'm really tragic. It's a great fun job.
It's so different everyday. You know, there's times when
there's huge, huge, huge, almostunbearable pressure and that's,
you know, less fun. But most of the time it's great
(20:06):
and I've got great people you know around, so that makes it
really fun. So you just mentioned a really
important thing there that I think we we need to bring onto
the table, which is the pressurebecause you did say that for
certain things you're on the hook for.
And so it's kind of like, you know, a lot of lot of the
students we have are going through different trading
(20:28):
simulations and things like that, which is very just short
term is getting that kind of black and white result.
Whereas for you, it's on a different kind of level in terms
of the impact that that could have.
So what's your process for for managing from a psychological
perspective when you are on the hook for?
Significant decisions. Oh, hard.
Yeah. And it's really hard, isn't it?
(20:49):
Because it's really hard to replicate.
You know, it's a really interesting kind of behavioural
problem that we face. So I'll give you an example.
So, you know, and, you know thiswell, but when we went back, we
did a lot of risk profiling of our customers before 2007, 2008.
And we were like, you know, would you accept this kind of
loss? And they're like, yeah, that
sounds right. But when it's happening, you
(21:10):
know, even seasoned professionals like us, you're
watching the screen. You're thinking like whoa, you
know, I mean it is always like mind blowing, isn't it?
When you see the S&P like Dak Down or you see something crazy
happening, you it's. I remember the people queuing
outside Barclays, which is whereI bank tried to withdraw
(21:31):
Maximum. Absolutely.
And you know, and you see scenesyou haven't seen, you know,
ever. And you think, gosh, you know,
and, and the media is telling you this is the end of the world
this time round, you know, get ready, pack your bags, you know,
And so maintaining cool is very important because you know what
we know and and this is the slightly odd kind of position
(21:52):
we're in, in a way. And This is why to a certain
extent within the investment teams that I'm lucky enough to
represent, we kind of try and keep the people who are making
the TAT to class allocation decisions away from meeting
clients in many ways. Because you don't want them, You
want them to be dispassionate. They need to be to making, you
(22:12):
know, because the worst, you know, emotion is a terrible kind
of investing or, or, or you know, it's, it's a terrible
investing aid. You need to retain
dispassionate. You need to continue to look at
the facts as much as possible towhatever extent they can be
mustered. And I think, you know, part of
that. So one way we manage this, you
know, it's a long answer to a, to a relatively simple question.
(22:34):
But you know, if I look back to the most recent sort of, you
know, the pandemic 2020, you know, February, March 2021 thing
that really helped me and us there was we'd spent quite a lot
of time beforehand building decision support tools.
And one of those was a investor sentiment indicator which we
(22:54):
back tested, you know, very thoroughly so that we understood
what the thresholds were and what the hit rate was of going
in the opposite direction. So when investors were extremely
depressed, if we did the opposite, bought stocks at that
point, what would be the chancesthat we were right over, you
know, time periods somewhat and and we had a very good idea of
the shape of, you know, how those how those probabilities
(23:19):
played out. So when it came to it, you know,
when the investor sentiment indicator went off the chart,
you know, if that was one of thethings that helped you say,
right, OK, we need to do the opposite.
We need to add to risk. We luckily had sufficient dry
powder to be able to do so, which was luck to be honest.
You know, a lot of people went in over risks and were unlucky.
(23:39):
They had to de risk at the bottom just because of process,
whereas we'd actually de risked beforehand, not because we saw
the pandemic coming, just because we didn't see much.
And, you know, we didn't see much excess return and major
risky asset classes at that point in January.
And that allowed us to put quitea lot of high yields, you know,
(24:01):
stocks exposure right at the bottom.
And it was, it is difficult because always at that moment,
you know, everyone is strugglingto keep cool, you know, so your
risk teams are questioning, you know, whether you've gone off
your rocker and everyone's sort of telling you is this, you
know, ACIO is throwing, you know, bad money after good.
(24:22):
And you know, those kind of questions.
And what you've got to do, you know, what you're protected by
as the CIO and a decision maker is process.
You know, stick to process and make sure that before you go
into any crises stress tested, that you're very aware of its
parameters and its strengths. And you've got to have good
people around you as well. And I was very lucky on both of
(24:43):
those counts that enabled, you know, us to make the right
decisions for for clients. But yeah, I mean, I, you know,
it's very difficult to replicatewhat it's like in a really,
really messy market when you've got positions going the wrong
way. It's a it's a horrible feeling
have. You ever had that because
(25:04):
obviously mental health is a very big thing at the moment for
a lot of a lot of young people, particularly given the
challenges of the pandemic. I mean, how do you separate?
You've obviously got family and things like that.
Has it ever been at a point where that stress is kind of
impeded on personal life or has it always been quite clear for
you and it's it's segregation sort of?
(25:25):
No, no, I mean no, definitely. Yeah, definitely.
I mean, I've had yeah. I mean, yeah, in the last two
years, yeah. No, definitely.
I mean, I think one of the things that I learnt about
myself during this crisis is that I need to be around people
to a certain extent. You know, working from home
(25:47):
with, with just two small, quiteaggressive dogs for company has
not, you know, I said yeah, I did.
Did not do me do my mental health any good at all.
And I think, you know, we've learned all of us during this
crisis that kind of, you know, everyone has problems, don't
they? Everyone has stuff to deal with.
(26:08):
Everyone's got, you know, no matter what appears, whatever
facade they put on at work. And I think that facade a little
bit, you know, the facade that everything's fine.
I, I really, really like the fact that that the need to
maintain a facade, which was very much the case when I joined
the city that's kind of disappearing.
People can be much more open andhonest about the stuff that
(26:30):
they're suffering at home, the stuff that they're trying to,
you know, endure. And yeah, certainly, I mean, I,
yeah, I, I, I and lots of other people I know, you know,
suffered quite a lot from sort of, you know, various kind of
mental health issues. Did you have did you have much?
What's your process now of having interaction with the more
(26:53):
junior members of staff? Because I know usually through
circumstance of the, their living set ups and things like
that, they tend to be in the office a lot.
Whereas fortunately for say you and I, there's the, the luxury
of having a bit more space and things like that.
But what what's the the interaction that you see now
(27:13):
from top to kind of down in an organization?
So I mean the where it's interesting, I mean Barclay's
been quite cautious about sort of getting people back to work
in many ways because you know, you've got a huge range of
experiences, haven't you? You know, some people are very
nervous, you know, about coming back to workspaces more
generally. Some people have got used to
(27:34):
working from home and feel very comfortable.
But I feel particularly the younger, my colleagues have
suffered a good deal in this, not just from the situation you
described, which is sometimes their work environments are far
from, ideally they don't have a nice, you know, an office to
sort of back into and work you off the side of your bed and so
on. You know, I'd have been in that
position myself. The crisis had struck when I was
(27:57):
sort of 18/19/20, you know. But I think that, you know, you
know, part of the huge thing about offices and the reason why
with big companies or one of thereasons why big companies still
exist, in my opinion, is this idea of knowledge.
Philip, you know, in economics, you know, you talk about if you
get lots of people in the same space, it's very difficult to
(28:19):
kind of replicate digitally. But knowledge just fills over
usefully, not all of it. You know, there's chat about,
you know, Carrie Katona by the coffee machine too, which is me
mainly. But you know, it's, it's, it's a
kind of very difficult process to replicate.
And that's really important for young people.
A huge amount of what I learnt was just by being around senior
(28:42):
economists who'd done it all andhaving informal chats, which you
don't, you know, you can sort ofset up an informal chat.
It's really not quite the same is it?
I don't think it's not, it doesn't, it doesn't have that
sort of magic quantity. So we are trying to get people
back into the office as much as possible.
And certainly my team, you know,we are a team that need to be
(29:02):
back in the office, you know, two or three days a week to
cause knowledge spillover is really important in research,
you know, and you can't, you know, you can have research
meetings and we do, we have all sorts of, you know, you have
bull bear debates where you'd force people to go onto the
other side of the debate, which they currently sit on and things
like that. Those could be organised.
But otherwise I've noticed getting back into the office and
(29:24):
particularly with the younger team members, they really kind
of relish being able to sort of say, you know, share what
they're reading at the moment and send it on to you.
And I do too, you know, I reallylike that kind of more informal
process and it's just nice to see people, isn't it?
Go out for some lunch or have a drink or, you know, whatever,
you know, not in the office, obviously, but you know, that
(29:45):
that's, that's the, that's the benefit.
So the more that we can get backto some kind of normal, well, I
mean, I don't think we'll get back all the way, but I mean,
hybrid working is a very good way of doing things in my
opinion. But the more we can get back to
kind of 2-3 days a week versus one day, 1-2 days a week, which
we're at the moment, we'll all be very pleased.
And just going back to the kind of target audience that you have
(30:07):
in your role as the kind of the affluent individual or family
in, in that respect. So for the people listening on
our channel, they're kind of I guess they could be the future
affluent people given their demographic.
And so they are much of the moreof the generation of the digital
adoption, if you like, where they feel more comfortable with
(30:28):
digital assets and things of that nature.
So obviously at the moment like certainly for me coming at it, I
remember several years ago it was kind of when people started
talking about Bitcoin things like that.
It's kind of like some it's all nonsense because I was just very
narrow mindset of a traditional market Ishiner I guess.
But as you go further forward now and in your kind of base is
(30:52):
in decision making is about diversification.
How much do digital assets do you think starts to play into
that going forward in in the years ahead?
It's a fascinating question. I, I just don't know at the
moment, so I can't quite work out.
So I, I'm really interested, forinstance, in, you know, what
blockchain technology could do to the existence of the company.
(31:14):
You know, because if you just thinking sort of sideways, you
know, if, if you assume you go back to kind of old economic
theory, famous kind of Colson Williamson about the existence
of a Nobel Prize winning economist who decided or, or or
argued that the existence of a company is, is in part down to,
you know, transaction costs and sort of trust issues.
(31:35):
So because I struggle to sort ofsay, you know, get a stranger in
the other side of the world and trust them, what I do is I bring
him inside a company and therefore I can, you know,
internalize the transaction and share tacit knowledge and that
works that way. Now if I could institutionalized
or trust via blockchain, does that mean large companies are no
(31:57):
longer as important? So on and so on.
I struggle a bit more with some of the, some of the current sort
of very popular digital assets just because I'm not sure I
agree with some of the, the use cases.
So, you know, Bitcoin obviously is the one that everyone talks
about. But you know, there there's the
sort of the trade off problem, which is that if you're going to
(32:20):
be a currency, you've got to be boring.
If you're going to be a speculative asset, you don't
want to be boring at all. So I, I don't, you know, I, you
can't have a currency that changes dramatically in value on
your walk to the shops. So suddenly I can't buy a can of
milk, bottle of milk anymore andsuddenly a penny chew to take
(32:42):
home to my children, you know, that that that doesn't work.
So I'm sort of still, I'm watching with great interest.
But at the moment it may have some, they they may have some
diversification benefit. That's something that we are
looking at. But it's still too young a data
set to really kind of work out. So it'll settle a bit and I
think a lot of people are getting very interested in it.
I will continue. We will continue to watch at the
(33:04):
moment. But yeah, it's, it's interesting
though, because you know, to your point, what you're looking
for, you know, when we build theasset class toolkit, what you're
looking for is distinct exposures, you know, so you can
get equity duration, you can getthe credit risk.
Commodities offer something a bit different as well.
You know, the access to something called storage theory
that tends to be uncorrelated aswe're finding a little bit at
(33:25):
the moment. And, and, and anything you can
add further diversification willsmooth returns over the longer
term. And if you think what we're
trying to do, as you rightly talked out, is we're trying to,
you know, for the mass market for everyone possible, you know,
what we want to do is say, look,you know, we've got this one
stop shop multi asset class global fund, which is going to
(33:47):
bring you the frontier in institutional asset class, you
know, asset management returns. And you should just have it
chugging away in the background.You can buy Bitcoin, you can
have all sorts of stuff, technology, funds, so on and so
on in the background, but have this chugging away with your
savings over the long term and you'll probably be better off
and and have more, you know, more chance of hitting your
savings cost. So it's not I'm a buzzkill, you
(34:10):
know, I believe relatively in the sort of efficient markets
and so on. So the way we've organised our
team is to make sure that, you know, that we only pour kind of
expertise into excess returns where we think there is evidence
of excess return, you know, generations.
So we don't do style bets, you know, we do do single stock
bets, but through funds and we do TAA, but elsewhere we sort of
(34:33):
try and get the market return quite carefully.
So it's really just about makingsure you got all weather returns
plus some alpha chugging away with your savings and
backgrounds and everyone else can have, you know, fun with the
rest of it, I guess. So, so a lot of that terminology
there you were just mentioning. Was that too good?
Was that too bad? Where would a young person who's
(34:54):
quite, quite green to these times of terminology, where
would they go to find out this sort of thing?
Is there a place to go or? I don't know.
It's, it's sort of start the, the, the problem I always find
is where to start, you know, andI do think you know, but for me,
the first thing is to get an interest like what are you
actually interested in? Because I think, you know, I
(35:16):
could give you, you know, the anti ominous sort of, you know,
expected returns is the kind of Bible for this stuff, isn't it?
That's where you start. And I, he came round to our shop
the other day. He's a charming guy.
He's, he's absolutely lovely andhe's very accessible and talks
very accessibly. But I don't think expected
returns is a very good place to start necessarily because it's
big, imposing and it's not quitea lot of financial markets
(35:38):
jargon. I mean, I quite like my old boss
wrote a book and it's called Making Sense of Markets.
He's called Kevin Gardner. I sometimes think I give his
book the plug. I sometimes think that's quite a
good place to start because I think you've just got to try in
amongst it all to I, I don't agree with everything he says in
there, but I, I think it's a very good way of sort of just
(36:00):
getting an interest and startingto, you know, trying to work out
what you think. And that's the most important
thing is I think, you know, you've got to work out what you
think and what your angle is andyou bring your own.
You know, my example is of anything, you know, of, you
know, I've made a lot of terrible mistakes in my life and
all sorts of, you know, wrong turns and bad stuff and good
(36:23):
stuff. But I think there's sort of, you
know, the thing that I would sayis that all of that into your
first question, all of that pours into who you are and what
you can bring to markets if you're going to be in markets.
So, you know, if I look at who Itry to hire for the tactical
asset was actually I'm trying tohire different backgrounds who
(36:43):
bring different perspectives. But at the same time, I would
expect them all to have the samethreshold of evidence, you know,
so they've all got to believe toa certain extent and efficient
markets because I don't want to have that debate.
So what I mean that that should be kind of, you know, but what I
do want is different perspectives on the outlook for
inflation. What is, you know, how, you
(37:06):
know, different parts of the capital markets complex are
reacting to it. I want their different
interpretations on that so that we've got a so that we've got a
debate. And I think that comes from
having different university degrees, different experiences,
different specialisms. And I think you've just, you
know, the weigh in for me was not to start kind of right at
the top and sort of start reading the heavy stuff.
(37:28):
It was really just to discover an interest and then the
terminology becomes a bit easierto understand and also remember
because what I found when I started is that I learnt the
terminology over and over and over and over and over again.
I just kept on forgetting it. So I wasn't that interested sort
of, you know, in a funny way. And I think for it to stick,
(37:49):
you've got to find a hook for itto.
It's a bad analogy. It doesn't really work together,
but you know what I mean. You've got to find a you know,
if you want the coat to hang up,you want a hook to hang it on or
something. Like that, I mean, I've got 1
clear word of advice to anyone who, who's just getting started.
Listen to Will on the Barclays Word on a Street podcast.
(38:10):
That's a good bug for you there,Will, But that's a good place to
start. Because I think the thing that
you always do so, so well is howyou deconstruct and quite
eloquently explain what otherwise is quite complex
situations that are happening inthe world and their impact on
markets. And I think as a starting point,
you know, for me it's always been the global market side has
(38:31):
always been of much more interest than say classic
investment banking in in a sensebecause of the fact that
everyday is different. I'm sure that's something that
that you feel as and share as well will that everyday you're
learning and everyday it's wonder what happens next.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, in this
industry as well, I mean, one ofthe things that I've been blown
away by is that, you know, during your life working in a
(38:51):
big bank, particularly get access to amazing people.
I mean, people like, you know, if in normal life I went within
100 yards of them, I'd be arrested, wrestled to the floor.
And, you know, you suddenly get to talk to these people at sort
of semi equals and sort of ask them about what's going on in a
particular area. And so it's your, you know, your
access to genuine expertise and so on.
I mean it, it's, it's an amazing, what I can say to
(39:13):
everyone, you know, anyone who'slistening is it's an amazing
industry to work in and to have the ability to look at markets,
follow markets and try and understand what's going on in
the world. It's a real, I, I find it a real
privilege. I'm really interesting and ever
challenging. OK, well, look on, on that
point. We'll, we'll look to to wrap
things up. So Will, as I said the
beginning, it's been a great privilege and a pleasure to have
(39:36):
you on on the podcast. And yeah, hopefully you've all
found that insightful. I'm sure you don't mind Will if
people connect with you on LinkedIn and things like.
That yeah, no, please do. Please do.
OK. All right.
Well, thanks very much again andand take care.
Thanks.
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