Eddie Perkin - Battling Biases and Building Better Investment Teams

**Eddie Perkin** (0:00)
Our descendants would look back on the first half of the 21st century and say, I wish I were alive during that time.

**Michael Mauboussin** (0:08)
Welcome to a new edition of the Value Investing with Legends podcast. My name is Michael Mauboussin, and I'm an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and a faculty member at the Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing. My co-host, Tano Santos, the Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Asset Management and Finance at Columbia Business School and the faculty director at the Heilbrunn Center couldn't join us today, but we'll be back soon. In many ways, the investment industry has never been better. Lots of bright people, tons of data, extraordinary computing power, expert networks, and most recently, powerful tools from artificial intelligence.
But the scarce resource may not be people or information, but rather judgment under uncertainty, the ability to make good decisions with incomplete information, under pressure, and with real capital at risk. Our guest today has spent more than two decades leading global equity teams and thinking deeply about why smart people and well-intentioned teams fall prey to the same mistakes.
His recent work is not only about biases, but also about building teams and processes that challenge assumptions, welcome dissent, and learn from mistakes. We are delighted to welcome Eddie Perkin. Eddie was Chief Investment Officer at Eaton Vance and Goldman Sachs Asset Management and has 25 years of global asset management experience.
Until early 2023, he was Chief Investment Officer of the Equity Business at Eaton Vance, now part of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, where he led a team of 70 investment professionals with $75 billion in assets under management. Prior to Eaton Vance, Eddie served as Chief Investment Officer for the International and Emerging Markets Equity Division at Goldman Sachs Asset Management in London. He was also a Portfolio Manager for Numerous Strategies. Before moving to London in 2008, he was a Portfolio Manager and Analyst on GSAM's US Value Equity Team in New York.
His book, Running Against the Herd, Battling Biases to Make Better Investment Decisions, published in August 2026 by Columbia Business School Publishing, offers lessons from behavioral economics as well as managing investment organizations. Eddie earned his BA in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and his MBA proudly from Columbia Business School. Today, he serves as an independent director on the Invesco Mutual Fund Board and as executive in residence at Babson College, where he mentors students through the Babson College Fund. Welcome, Eddie. Thank you very much for joining us today. Lots of topics we're keen to talk about.

**Eddie Perkin** (2:50)
Thank you, Michael. It's great to be here.

**Michael Mauboussin** (2:51)
Let's start off with your path. Tell us a little bit about your background growing up and what first drew you to investing?

**Eddie Perkin** (2:58)
Well, I'll start at the very beginning. I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa to British parents. They were expats in South Africa at the time. As an infant, I moved back with them to the UK.
I grew up in Sheffield, which is in the north of England until the age of seven. Both my parents were entrepreneurial and so in the late 70s, the British economy was not in great shape. Everything was very stagnant, inflation was high, and so they thought they needed to make their mark in the US and they emigrated. Since it was the late 70s, the place to go was Houston, Texas. It was an oil boom. That was the city they chose and we settled for a couple of years in Houston, Texas. There were two things that happened at that time that I think were formative. One is, I can recall sitting in the back of the family station wagon, my father in the driver's seat and peppering him with questions about his business, but also about inflation and interest rates, which were strange topics for a child who was eight or nine years old.
The other thing that happened at that time is I opened my first bank account. I opened a passbook savings account at Bank of America with my life savings, which were a grand total of $50.
And I got a quarterly statement in the mail. I was earning about 4% interest annualized on that account. And so the first statement had earnings or interest of about 50 cents. 50 cents even to a kid wasn't a lot of money. But the concept that my money had earned money was very powerful and really resonated with me. And I also recognized the fact that that incremental 50 cents would now also be earning money on my behalf. So the concept of compound interest resonated very early. After a couple years in Texas, we moved to San Diego, settled down there. And as you mentioned, I went to UC Santa Barbara for economics. I was part of the investment club there.