10: My chat with a Great Dane – Bo Knudsen - CEO of C Worldwide Asset Management

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In this Money Maze Podcast edition, we travel north east from the UK, beyond Norwich, and further than Hamburg, to a country of less than 6mm people, a country which has the oldest national flag, dating from 1219, and is consistently reported as having the world’s happiest people. Home to Lego and with some of the nicest people in the world, it’s Denmark of course.

The guest on this podcast is a veritable Viking of the investment management industry, Bo Almar Knudsen, CEO of C Worldwide, formerly known as Carnegie.

Bo starts by describing a little of it how it feels to be Danish, and of the respect and trust Danes have for their institutions. He speaks of their intrigue with travel beyond their borders which has been demonstrated with Danes travelling and settling around the world over the centuries, and in some ways mirrored in the global portfolio C Worldwide has managed for 30 years.

Bo describes his decision to study in San Francisco as well as Denmark, then starting out at Danske Bank before beginning his own journey at Carnegie Asset Management in 1995. Today, his firm manage nearly $20 billion, and have achieved world class investment returns in their core equity portfolio which has made 60x an investor’s initial investment, outperforming the world equity index by 10 times!

Bo details their investment approach, the very long term perspective they adopt, and speaks about the challenge of building a culture that encourages open dialogue and recognition of mistakes, but also of avoiding complacency and being patient.

He makes an unusual point that the investment industry is one of the great time-wasters, whilst at the same time the challenge is to gain “lasting knowledge” and not be distracted by daily noise.

Finally, as one of Denmark’s top veteran tennis players, he shares life lessons he has learnt from studying Roger Federer, why his favourite book is Sapiens by Harari, and his favourite band unexpectedly, is Depeche Mode. So - back to the 80s!