Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk

**Jason Wenk** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:08)
This week on the podcast, yet another extra special guest, Jason Wenk is founder and CEO of Altruist, a new artificial intelligence-driven custodian challenging a lot of the legacy entities like Fidelity and Schwab that are stuck with all of their old hardware and software. I thought the conversation was fascinating and I think you will also, with no further ado, my interview of Jason Wenk.
Jason Wenk, welcome to Bloomberg.

**Jason Wenk** (0:50)
My pleasure, such a great intro.

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:52)
So I'm fascinated by the through line of your career. You are constantly focusing on creating lower cost tech enabled financial advice, but I'm going to put a pin in that and come back. I got to start with your background. You study computer science at Grand Valley State University.
What was the original career plan? Is it technology and computers or finance?

**Jason Wenk** (1:18)
Yeah. So I'd never taken a finance class. I'd never met anybody who had money. My family never owned any stocks or mutual funds. I didn't know what an IRA was or even a 401k for that matter.
But I grew up in the 80s and 90s, so I remember getting our first personal computer in the mid-90s.
Internet started to pick up a little bit of speed in the late 90s, and that was my dream was to go to Silicon Valley, work at a.com. You probably recall the market peaked out around 1999, and then a pretty major crash ensued. So very accidentally, did an internship at Morgan Stanley at 19 years old. I was a bit of an odd duck in that. I took a lot of college classes when I was in high school, so I was already doing internships in my first year of university. And yeah, I was presented an opportunity to move here to New York and to join Morgan Stanley, and that was really my crash course in finance.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:20)
And you were 19 or 20?

**Jason Wenk** (2:22)
19 as an intern and officially joined at age 20

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:25)
So what drew you to financial services instead of technology? Was it simply the dot-com implosion and there was no jobs to be had in technology?

**Jason Wenk** (2:34)
Yeah, I was still working in technology. So my role, the internship was like productivity software, but again, this happened before for Big Investment Bank.
And then I spent about two years building different types of technology, like within the Morgan Stanley ecosystem. By the time I joined, they were Morgan Stanley Dean Whitter. So they had this kind of big retail wealth business. They also had like prop trading and a number of other divisions too. So I didn't really get too involved into personal wealth until kind of the latter, maybe the last six months I was there. I was put on a project where we were doing a lot of work with Morningstar, which back then, they were still sending out CD-ROMs to branches around the country. So if you had a big branch, it'd be hard who had the CD-ROM. So we were just building networked versions of essentially the Morningstar database. But I remember around that time, I was doing some pre-built prompts inside of these research platforms. Again, the way my mind worked, there's more around math, physics, computer science. I looked at these prompts and I thought, these are terrible prompts. In other words, the prompt would be, let's build a screen so that financial advisors can easily build a portfolio, and the screen will be something like, find funds that have been around for five years with turnover under 100 percent, with the same manager for the five years or longer, that's in the top core tile of their peer group.
On the surface, you go, well, that seems like pretty reasonable and fair, but that is no prediction of the future result. That is a terrible predictor of future outcomes, but it was built as though it was a good predictor.

**Barry Ritholtz** (4:18)
Well, you have the data, past performances right there. We have to go something with it. I give Morningstar credit. They had an internal survey that more or less said, hey, don't worry about the stars.
The data shows if you just buy the least expensive fund, that's the one most likely to give you the highest level of performance. And to their credit, they published that. I want to say that was like 2011, 2012 Really fascinating. So you never really worked, rotated through the departments where you're smiling and dialing. Did you ever work as a broker?

**Jason Wenk** (4:51)
So I got licensed. I took the Series 7, Series 8, Series 24, Series 30, like all the classic licenses.