How the Bond King Built His Market Empire – Mary Childs

Real Talk: The Charles Mizrahi Show

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In 1966, he went to Las Vegas with $200 in his pocket. A short time later, he made thousands of dollars counting cards.

Bill Gross was soon looking for a way to use his skills to make money — big money. He turned American finance into his casino and became known as the “Bond King.”

Gross went on to found PIMCO, a leader in fixed-income management that has $2 trillion under management.

Author Mary Childs covers it all in her book, The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All.

And she shared with me how he did it and why the U.S. Treasury has Gross on speed dial.

Topics Discussed:

• An Introduction to Mary Childs (00:00:00)
• Bill Gross: Counting Cards in Vegas (00:05:26)
• The Bond Market Opportunity No One Else Saw (00:10:41)
• The Power of Regulating Your Emotions in Investing (00:16:56)
• Losing it All (00:33:10)
• Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously and Be Humble (00:41:44)

Guest Bio:

Mary Childs is a co-host and correspondent for NPR's Planet Money podcast. Before joining the team in 2019, she was a senior reporter at Barron's magazine, where she covered the alternatives industry, the bond market and capitalism. Before that, she worked at the Financial Times and Bloomberg News. She's written about the pioneering of new asset classes like time, billionaires' proposals to solve inequality and diversity and discrimination in the finance industry. Before all that, she was also a Watson Fellow, spending a year traveling the world painting portraits. She graduated from Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, with a degree in business journalism and an honors thesis comparing the use and significance of media sting operations in the U.S. and India.

Resources Mentioned:

• The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All