22 June 2026

155 new episodes (103 hours listening) published by the 38 podcasts on the list. 4 highlight clips below (14 mins total).

Investment 22 June 2026 · 4 clips

The Investor's Podcast Network

Emily Haisley

Episode

The Psychology of Investing w/ BlackRock’s Emily Haisley (RWH069)

Emily Haisley heads the behavioural finance team at BlackRock, which the episode puts at more than $14 trillion under management, and has been there just over a decade after starting on a behavioural finance team at Barclays. Her PhD in organisational behaviour is from Carnegie Mellon, supervised by George Loewenstein.

Hosted by

William Green

28 June 2026 · 1h 56m · 4 clips below

1 of 4 framework

BlackRock's real estate investment committee approved every deal it discussed for seven years and never once approved selling an asset at a loss.

Haisley puts sunk cost first among private-asset biases, because diligence money already spent makes walking away register as a loss. The fix moves the vote before the meeting: members rate the deal against the distribution of deals the committee has previously approved, and the chair reads the dissent before anybody in the room has spoken.

4m 03s · from 59:52
My observations
- A member who was travelling handed their proxy to someone already in the room, which removes an independent view and doubles a vote that was going to be cast anyway. Many committees still permit it without noticing what it does.
- Rating a deal against the distribution of past approvals does more work than a yes or no, because it forces a comparison the approver has to defend rather than a binary they can wave through.
- Haisley is describing her own employer's process, and the only evidence offered is that the process changed. Whether the committee's deals improved is not claimed here, and it is the question to put to anyone selling this design.
2 of 4 contrarian

Emily Haisley says the second appointment to an investment committee should not be the next best expert, because two people trained the same way make the same mistake.

Errors that correlate do not cancel, and error cancellation is the whole mechanism behind the wisdom of a group, so a clone contributes nothing the first appointment has not already contributed. She runs the same argument out to political persuasion, on the ground that a view of what is right and wrong feeds straight into what a person forecasts.

3m 02s · from 1:09:49
My observations
- She adds geography and political persuasion to the usual list, and argues the second mechanically rather than on fairness: a shared political prior becomes a shared forecasting prior, and nobody on the committee is placed to catch the resulting error.
- Groups gravitate to what they already agree on because agreement feels good, and she cites literature where disagreement produces objectively better decisions that the group feels less confident about. Holding that gap between confidence and accuracy is the chair's job.
- Assembling a committee for decorrelated errors costs speed and comfort, and nothing here puts a figure on how much accuracy that buys, so the trade sits with whoever is doing the appointing.
- governance
- institutional-investors
3 of 4 explainer

BlackRock links portfolio managers' ring-measured stress data to the risk they are taking, after research found that a week of elevated cortisol pushes people towards risk aversion.

One group in the study was given cortisol and one a placebo over about a week, and the treated group turned risk-averse. What concerns her is not stress arriving from markets but stress arriving from home or the office, which moves position sizing for reasons with no bearing on the opportunity, and her instruction to managers in a drawdown is to rest as hard as they work.

3m 38s · from 1:17:09
My observations
- Participation is voluntary and confidential, and the data sits outside compensation and promotion by design, which is the only reason anyone hands it over. A firm that cannot make that separation credible cannot run the programme at all.
- Simply showing a manager that a drawdown is still raising their stress often returns them to baseline, on her account, and she reports managers saying they had assumed they were past being affected.
- Her causal chain is asserted rather than shown: a laboratory cortisol study plus a correlation in her own population is not evidence that the programme changes returns. The version a board can use is duller, that decisions taken in a drawdown are taken by people under load, and a meeting calendar can allow for it.
- risk-management
- institutional-investors
4 of 4 framework

BlackRock built a simulation that loads an investment team's live positions and feeds them headlines, some economically meaningful and some noise, to see what they trade.

Each decision generates the next headline, so a team plays its own path through a drawdown instead of reading someone else's case study. What they usually come away with is a sharper statement of what their volatility strategy actually is, and the discovery that a leader who listens last in normal conditions has to run the room differently when the clock is running.

3m 42s · from 1:25:43
My observations
- Teams laugh their way through a drawdown in the game that would be miserable in the portfolio, which she treats as the useful part: the same problem becomes solvable once the money is not real.
- A leader who deliberately speaks last to avoid anchoring the room has to drop that under time pressure and start directing, going to the expert and then to the counter-argument. Most people will not make that switch cleanly without having practised it, and it is as true of a board chair in a crisis meeting as of a portfolio manager.
- Playing is not holding. The teams know the money is not real, so a manager who rides out a simulated drawdown has not shown they would ride out one that costs them.

22 June 2026

Investment 22 June 2026 · 4 clips

BlackRock's real estate investment committee approved every deal it discussed for seven years and never once approved selling an asset at a loss.

Emily Haisley says the second appointment to an investment committee should not be the next best expert, because two people trained the same way make the same mistake.

BlackRock links portfolio managers' ring-measured stress data to the risk they are taking, after research found that a week of elevated cortisol pushes people towards risk aversion.

BlackRock built a simulation that loads an investment team's live positions and feeds them headlines, some economically meaningful and some noise, to see what they trade.