1 month ago
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Michael Lewis and Tom Lee held court at a podcast taping in New York City on Tuesday, talking to SoFi’s head of investment strategy, Liz Thomas, for her show, The Important Part. In a wide-ranging conversation that covered, among other things, Lee’s thoughts on flash-frozen food technology and Michael Lewis’s dinner with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the subject of Sam Bankman-Fried, the two towering figures in finance debated whether the current selloff in software stocks was turning into something more serious. They were grim, yet humorous.
The duo dissected a market defined by extreme volatility, in which software stocks are “down a ton” and artificial intelligence threatens to wipe out entire industries. But the most arresting moment came when Lewis, author of The Big Short, shared a morbid statistic about who actually makes money in these environments.
“Did you know Fidelity published a report about the best-performing retail accounts of Fidelity?” Lewis asked the audience. “And it was all customers who died.” (Lewis was referring to a famous 2014 study that found, in fact, the best-returning portfolios were left alone, whether owing to death or absent-mindedness.)
A few moments later, Lee cited research about how 40,000 stocks have either gone public or been spun off since 1974, of which 90% fel...
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