Rebecca Patterson & Liz Ann Sonders Talk 'Investment Wisdom for Our Friends and Loved Ones'

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Tom Keene (0:07)

In studio, Rebecca Patterson, Authorist with Liz Ann Sonders, and this is a triumph and indeed a celebration. Investment Wisdom for Our Friends and Loved Ones. Rebecca, I mean, you have the best blurb I've ever seen here. Chuck Schwab, founder co-chairman of Schwab Corporation, a wonderful collection of thoughts on investing, I think will keep Liz Ann around.

When you wrote the chapter up, what did you want to do about Investment Wisdom, Liz Ann?

Liz Ann Sonders (0:41)

Well, to some degree, Tom, I actually took advantage of something I had already written when I had just celebrated my 40th anniversary in this business. It was really about the wisdom I've learned along the way, including from Chuck himself and many other greats, as well as the books I have poured over over the years and the advice that I gleaned from those. So that's how I approached my chapter. Mine was the final chapter, so I've been telling friends and loved ones that they should read the book from back to front.

Tom Keene (1:18)

Back to front. Yes.

Paul Sweeney (1:20)

Rebecca, you and Jenny Harrington, how did this whole thing come about? Because we all value your opinion, Liz Ann's opinion. I'm looking through the who's contributed to this book. It's a who's who here of investment discussion. How did you kind of get this all together?

Rebecca Patterson (1:35)

Well, Jenny reached out to me about a year ago.

A woman that she had known for a long time, very smart, very successful, was in the finance world. Her husband sadly died, and she came to Jenny and said, I have to deal with the finances. I don't know where to start. And we quickly realized, we know lots of people like that, who are educated and smart, but personal finance is different than investment banking. You could grow up as a banker and still not know how to run your own money. So we start, exactly, we started thinking, all right, who else could give us a voice? Who else gets asked these questions by friends and family? Liz Ann, obviously, and we reached out, totaled, we have 25 authors. We didn't seek to make it a woman book, but it ended up being 25 female senior women in finance, which we thought was pretty darn cool.

And we just said, what do you say when someone asks? What is your insight? What is your wisdom that you share? And tie it to your life and your career. And Liz Ann's chapter, I love, and we put it last because we wanted to have a strong finish and because we loved the book recommendations and the advice from all her mentors over the years. And people always say, what are some books I should read? So Liz Ann's chapter had a bunch of great ones. And then when we asked all of our other authors for their favorite investment book, mine is actually not an investment book. It's An Uncertain Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which looks at history. And I always have believed that history helps you understand the present and future.

Paul Sweeney (3:09)

I'll read anything she writes, that's for sure. Liz Ann, what's kind of a theme that you kind of took from this book here?

You know, one of my themes is just something that Tom says, the courage to be in the markets. What are some of the themes that you've taken away?

Liz Ann Sonders (3:25)

I think that investing by its nature is an act of optimism. So I think there were a lot of optimistic threads through that book too. The confidence is something you build over time, but I think you have to approach it with optimism.

Tom Keene (3:41)

And we tried to impart that. Rebecca Patterson, Liz Ann Sonders were this, of course, with all their duties, their heritage on the street. The jewel of a book is investment wisdom for our friends and loved ones. I'm sorry, it reads like a damn PowerPoint at Bessemer Trust years ago. This isn't like a novel, folks. She's not looking for a screenplay in a summer movie. It's like readable with charts in big ugly letters like shut up and read this. It's a very hands-on book.

Liz Ann mentioned it here. The heart of the matter up front in the book, and I see this every day, and it's wildly sexist because women will admit it and men won't. There's that lack of confidence in investing. What's the first step, Rebecca Patterson, to developing a confidence you don't have?

Rebecca Patterson (4:32)

Investing is a language, just like any language, and I think one of the first steps should be, teach yourself a few vocabulary words. We try to avoid jargon in the book, at all costs actually, but there's a lot of jargon in our industry, and a lot of words that maybe they're not even jargon, but you're not sure you understand. So start developing a vocabulary, a few words a week, and educate yourself.