Ken Griffin
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
So that was the good fortune of 1987.
Look, I think that we really spend our time at Citadel playing offense, wherever value be created.
And then, of course, we take the time to think about how do we risk manage the portfolio that we're building.
But the story, the success story of America is a success story written by optimists.
And I think that in building a business or in building your career, it's really important that you bring optimism first and foremost each and every day to what you do in life.
So we're always looking for how do you create value.
And then having said that, survival is about having the realistic paranoia that the world will go through difficult times.
And how do you create the risk management to get through those difficult times?
But we come to work as optimists first, paranoid, pessimists, making sure we can survive difficult times second.
Look, I think there's a lot of virtues to the rise and death of the private markets in the United States.
You have a tremendous number of mid-sized companies or even large companies owned by private equity firms.
And you have very tight agency between the owner of the business and the management of the business.
That's been very instrumental in increasing American productivity.
I think that's the great strength of the private equity system that we have in the United States.
The downside in private markets, one of the downsides is you don't have good price discovery.
And price discovery is one of the ways that you, as a management team, have an appreciation for how the world values what you're doing.
and that investors are able to use as a metric or milestone in measuring their own skills as an investor.
One of my concerns with private credit, for example, the vast majority of companies will never default.
You invest your money today in a company's credit,
You won't know for five or seven years if you made a good investment, which means that a substantial portion of your career will have slipped through your fingers before you learn whether or not you made a good underwriting decision.