Minyanville.com helped
make it possible for me to be conversant about finance. I remember discovering
the site about two weeks into my first internship on Wall Street; I had been
tasked with monitoring a status screen and told to continually read the news to
help my own understanding. When I first started reading the news on traditional
channels like the New
York Times business section and Reuters
financial news, I felt like I was drowning.
I found Minyanville by chance, and found Todd Harrison's
writing there to be immensely helpful to my understanding. At first it was just
his writing, but as I started
exploring the site I found a collection of writers ("Professors" in
Minyanspeak) who have devoted themselves to the craft of finance and are
willing to share their experiences.
Imagine me, eighteen years old, essentially dropping in and
listening to a collection of the "cool kids" in the finance world talk about their craft with one another and an audience of thousands. I was given the opportunity to both sit down with and chat over the phone with Todd (Toddo) recently, and he shared with me some musings about how Minyanville fits in with the world and how the world fits in with the financial media.
Minyanville is a finance website built in a new way: with
education at its core. Toddo characterizes his experience landing on the
derivatives desk at Morgan
Stanley rather simply: "I got a Black-Scholes
model and a Wall Street
Journal and they said, you know, 'here you go'." That experience, to him
was "the genesis of understanding that there was a void in the marketplace."
Minyanville has been actively trying to fill that void. One
can tell from the way that writers are referred to as "professors" that
education is a high priority. There is a wide range of content on the
non-degree granting University
of Minyanville website aimed at college students looking to expand their
awareness.
The content is not organized in a quiz-and-lecture format,
which allows students to access the material in a very nonconventional way.
This is consistent with an ongoing theme in Minyanville; as Harrison puts it:
"The industrial revolution part deux, it's really the need for pretty much
every sector in the marketplace, whether it's finance, whether it's media,
whether its education, whether it's philanthropy...to reinvent their model."
It's not hard to see how trying to integrate the UMV content
into a classroom might lead a professor to examine his model to better serve
his students. UMV serves as a great way to "bring reality into the classroom",
while simultaneously making sure that students understand that they are reading
the opinions of fallible humans rather than the "truth" or the infallible
advice of market gods.
The Minyanville approach of providing opinion rather than
advice comes clear after I ask Toddo if anyone actually understands the
financial machination. He responds "To understand where we are we must
appreciate how we got here. So I think that looking at the probability spectrum
of what could occur and communicating the risks and rewards to all of the
scenarios within a probability spectrum and offering an opinion in the context that
it's just that (an opinion) is the greatest value add in the market place, as
opposed to telling people what to do."
Indeed many have long been critical of those who offer
advice to random audiences rather than opinions. In person, it's clear that
Harrison believes there's very little merit in offering advice over the
internet, since there is absolutely no way he could know the risk profile of
his readership. Further to the point of offering advice without information he
offers "I think that's endemic of the mindset that got us into trouble in the
first place."
Harrison offers that people should re-examine who they look
to for their punditry, arguing that "Many of the pundits that people are
looking to for questions on when we're going to get out of this are the same
people who didn't see I coming in the first place." This jives very well with a
thought passed on by a friend in the asset management industry who offered
that oftentimes, once people are validated as pundits in the media mainstream
that it's very difficult to get rid of them. Indeed pundits who offered up
investment recommendations that failed miserably one month are often back the
next recommending new investments with little accountability for their past
failings.
On the subject of criticizing unaccountable pundits, there's
not much more I can offer. There's already a
closet industry built around criticizing CNBC. A point Toddo raises which I
think is very thoughtful is that "There is a fair amount of culpability that
extends throughout the societal spectrum. (It ranges) from the consumers who
overextended on their credit to the financial institutions that engineered the
markets to the policymakers who were complicit by acceptance to the CEO of the
United States of America." He adds "Nobody was asking questions when the
screens were green."
Harrison is hesitant to point out that he and many other
Minyans were asking questions when the screens were green. It's been a good
thing for me to have these guys as teachers, and to have their thoughts
percolating in my brain as I attempt to make sense of the world. I truly hope
that Minyanville is representative of a trend in financial journalism, and that
more seasoned pros will begin coming out of the woodwork to add valuable
perspective and commentary to a confusing world.
