Episode
The Man Who Beat Goldman Sachs at Stock Picking — From a Trading Desk in Memphis
- Published
- Jul 23, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4887
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/economics-matters-with-laurence-kotlikoff-6614501/episodes/the-man-who-beat-goldman-sachs-at-stock-picking-from-a-trading-desk-in-memphis/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/economics-matters-with-laurence-kotlikoff-6614501/the-man-who-beat-goldman-sachs-at-stock-picking-from-a-trading-desk-in-memphis.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
What does it actually take to consistently beat the market when 90% of professional fund managers can't, and what is a Wall Street veteran seeing right now that has him warning ordinary investors to get off margin immediately? Steve Laffey has lived several lives in one. Raised in genuine poverty in Cranston, Rhode Island, he earned his way to Bowdoin College and Harvard Business School, landed on a trading desk at PaineWebber surrounded by guys with names ending in vowels, survived the crash of '87 up close, built Morgan Keegan into the most respected stock picking shop in the country according to the Wall Street Journal, returned to Cranston to become a two-term Republican mayor of a Democrat city, ran for president in the last election, and has spent the intervening years quietly running what he calls "the hedge fund I never started." In this episode, Professor Kotlikoff sits down with Laffey for a wide-ranging, story-driven conversation on how great investing actually works. The gut instincts, the discipline, the hard lessons, and the very specific warning signs he is watching right now in the current market. This is not theory. Every lesson in this episode comes with a story. What You'll Learn: [00:11:22] Lesson 1: "Eat like an elephant, poop like an ant" — ride your winners hard, but cut losers immediately and without emotion, no matter how right you think you are [00:13:08] Lesson 2: Never use margin — margin debt in the U.S. stock market has just hit an all-time high, and Laffey's single most urgent message is: get off margin now [00:29:36] Lesson 3: Crashes don't happen from all-time highs — they happen after a selloff has already begun and people panic, a pattern Laffey has watched repeat across four decades [00:43:36] Why Laffey doesn't o…