HIGHLIGHTS: Mike Gitlin - CEO of Capital Group

Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi, everybody. I'm Nicolas Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. And today, I'm joined by Mike Gitlin, president and CEO of Capital Group, which is one of the world's largest investment managers with more than 3,000,000,000,000 in assets. Now more importantly, Capital Group has a unique approach to investing owned by its employees. And I kind of think that you are the gold standard in investing, Mike. So great to have you here. Well, thank you. We can end it there. No way. No way. Now, Capital Group, you've been around for nearly a hundred years. But for those of, the listeners who don't know, what do you do? So we manage money for people around the world, and those people may be served by a financial advisor. And they may be a part of a a large scale institution like a sovereign wealth fund, a defined benefit plan, a defined contribution plan. So it's both a wealth management business and an institutional business. But at the end of the day, all of that is managing money for people at the end of the day. What is it that make you guys unique? I'd say it's two things. Apart from a really great CEO, of course. Oh, jeez. We can end there. So I think two things make us unique. One is how we manage our business, and the other one is how we manage our money. So in terms of managing our business, we don't have to think about quarterly earnings in the public space. Mhmm. And we have shareholders internally who understand that we're investing in the business for the long term. So the S and P 500 can be down 20%, and we can still invest in that technology project that at another company might just get stopped. Mhmm. So we're able to invest through the cycle in our own business, which helps our clients because we're stable. We're not super reactive to the market conditions in that regard. And then how we manage our money, in 1958, we launched something called the capital system. It's just a different way to manage money than everybody else in the world. And and I can That's like your secret sauce. Right? It is. And I can speak about it. I wasn't alive yet. It is it was a brilliant concept, but it came out of a moment of challenge. At that time, our founder had had a heart attack, survived. When he came back to the office, said, we can't manage money with key person risk. It's just not good for the clients. And so the capital system was formed where the analysts themselves are investors. They're not credit raters or stock raters. They invest real client assets. And then you have multiple portfolio managers collaborate in a portfolio as opposed to …