Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
Over the summer, I spent time with Abby Johnson, who is the chairman and CEO of Fidelity Investments and several other businesses lead at Fidelity to understand how a very large firm like theirs is navigating change in our industry. What follows is a condensed version of my various conversations with Abby and her team. We discussed the big buzzwords like blockchain and machine learning, but also thoughts on leadership, client centricity, and measures of success. I hope you enjoy this exploration. So I thought a really fun place to start would be early on in your career, specifically with your first experiences in the investing world, maybe even industries that you covered and describe those early experiences because I always like that as a framing for the bigger picture things that we'll talk about.
Abby
So when I first joined Fidelity after I got out of business school, I joined in 1988 as an equity analyst, and I was assigned industrial equipment as the industry to follow. And as you can imagine, the brand new analysts didn't get all the plum assignments. So my assignment was no exception, and I spent a lot of time traveling to the Midwest where most of the companies were located. And so my early experience in investing was really learning how to analyze and try to figure out how to make money in maturity declining industries. So as you can imagine, that industry today is quite a bit smaller than it was back in the late '80s. It was actually a really great way to learn how to invest because you had to really look a lot at valuations and whether the company had a long-term future because so much consolidation was going on because it wasn't a growing industry that you had to think about that as well.