Episode 3 | Life of the Mind with Joe Sroka

There are some conversations that you cannot plan, and this was one of them. I thought that my guest Joe Sroka would be interesting to chat with about finance (he is currently the Chief Investment Officer at NovaPoint Capital) and his career in/through finance. But Joe ended up giving me (a foreigner) a tour of the post-Soviet-Union world from the American perspective that I didn’t anticipate (#awesome). We talk about East German refugees (there’s some hope in there for the current refugee crises), the Bond villains in a world where there were no enemies (can you guess which one?) before getting to finance.

But there’s another side to this conversation that’s just as interesting on the nature of recessions, business cycles, board governance, investment management vs investment bankers, portfolio investing, and investing using AI/machine learning.

To ponder further, on information vs. noise in decision making: if you can’t support your decision making with data and it’s completely qualitative, it’s noise/speculative. (If you’re betting your money on a stock that has bad technicals, bad financials, but feel-good stories, you are investing on noise.)