Victor Haghani is the author of a new book called The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Making Better Financial Decisions, which explores why family fortunes like the Vanderbilts' get destroyed in the hands of the heirs. Victor knows a lot about wild swings in wealth.
As a co-founding partner of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), Victor saw the hedge fund's value soar over the first years of its existence, then plummet spectacularly, losing 90% of its value in the first nine months of 1998. It was bailed out by a consortium of banks that injected $3.6 billion under the supervision of the Federal Reserve.
In this conversation and his book, Victor graciously shares candid insights from this harrowing experience, discusses the emotional roller coaster of his fund’s very public implosion, and reminds us of some facts many have forgotten: that the banks got their money back as did most of the original investors. Unfortunately, a few investors got washed out, as did the founders. Victor tells Paul how he balanced regret with the need to move forward.
Victor graduated from the London School of Economics and started his career in 1984 at Salomon Brothers, where he eventually became a managing director in the bond arbitrage group made famous by Michael Lewis in "Liar’s Poker." His participation in the failure of LTCM was a life-changing experience that led him to question and revise much of the way he thought about the economy, markets, and investing. Through a careful study of the academic literature on investing and many thought-provoking discussions with friends, colleagues, and investors of all backgrounds, Victor concluded that savers can and should do much better.
He founded Elm Wealth in 2011 to help investors, including his own family, manage their savings in a disciplined, research-based, cost-effective manner and to capture the long-term returns they ought to earn.
See more about "The Missing Billionaires" and Elm Wealth here.
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