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.
