Mining the Great Philosophers
Trish Regan is one of America’s most recognized financial journalists and digital media hosts. An award-winning reporter, author, television personality, and speaker, Trish is a leading economic and political thought leader who helps viewers to better understand the most critical issues facing the economy and American business today. With extraordinary access to newsmakers and industry sources, as well as a knack for anticipating opportunities and risks in investing, Trish leverages her knowledge of how the mainstream media works to enable subscribers to best understand the information moving markets.
Trish is the Co-Founder and Executive Editor of 76research. She is also the founder, owner, and host of the daily livestreamed Trish Regan Show with more than 16 million views per month. Prior to founding 76research with longtime friend Rob Hordon, Trish anchored some of the most highly rated financial programs at America’s most noted financial networks including CNBC, Bloomberg, and most recently, Fox Business News.
Throughout her career, Trish has interviewed numerous heads of state, including multiple U.S. Presidents, foreign leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs and other institutional, charitable, and government leaders.
Trish credits her start in journalism to her fifth grade position as school correspondent for her local New Hampshire newspaper. But, while Trish showed an early interest in reporting and writing, it wasn’t until years later that she chose to make journalism her career. In fact, she originally intended to pursue a career in finance and worked as an analyst in emerging debt markets at Goldman Sachs while a student at Columbia University. Fluent in Spanish, Trish focused primarily on Latin American sovereign debt markets including Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil, but when Bloomberg Television offered her an opportunity to work as a correspondent, she made the jump into financial media.
Beginning at Bloomberg in 2000, Trish was on the front lines as the dot-com bubble burst. She covered its aftermath from Silicon Valley and San Francisco as a correspondent at MarketWatch before moving back to New York to work as a correspondent for CBS News. In 2006, Trish returned to her financial roots as an anchor on CNBC’s top-rated daily markets program The Call where she reported on the 2008 financial crisis in real time. While an anchor at CNBC, Trish also reported business news for NBC's Nightly News and The Today Show. In addition, she produced and hosted the two most highly rated documentaries in CNBC's history – Marijuana Inc and Marijuana USA, which investigated a massive and fast-developing underground industry. Trish predicted that industry would soon become mainstream in her book Joint Ventures: Inside America's Almost Legal Marijuana Industry, published by Wiley & Co. in 2010.
In 2011, Trish went back to Bloomberg Television to anchor the network's afternoon market close coverage as host of Street Smart with Trish Regan. While at Bloomberg, Trish was the network's main political anchor for all political television coverage of the 2012 election, including both the Republican and Democrat conventions and the election itself. From 2013 through 2016, Trish also worked as a front-page economic columnist for USA Today, writing on the biggest trends in business, markets and the economy.
In 2015, Trish left Bloomberg Television to join Fox News and Fox Business as the anchor of her new program The Intelligence Report with Trish Regan during FBN’s market hours. She would later move to an evening program and become the only woman in cable TV at that time to host a primetime show. Trish Regan Primetime grew 8pm ratings to a level never before seen at Fox Business.
While at Fox, Trish Regan also anchored two Republican Presidential debates – making history as part of the first all-woman team, with colleague Sandra Smith, to anchor a Presidential debate. She also appeared as an economic and markets contributor to all Fox News programming and was also a guest anchor on Cavuto, Fox and Friends, The Five, and primetime programming. In addition, Trish anchored all primetime coverage of the 2016 Democrat and Republican conventions for Fox Business and was a co-host alongside Neil Cavuto, Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Stuart Varney for the network's main political events. Trish left Fox in 2020 and began work on the creation of her own digital media enterprise which debuted in August 2020. Her focus now is her own program and 76research, although she still appears regularly on other platforms both in cable news and in digital media.
Trish graduated with honors from Phillips Exeter Academy before going on to study opera at New England Conservatory and graduate cum laude with a degree in history from Columbia University. While at Exeter, Trish was the first-place winner of the Harvard Musical Association’s Competition for Excellence in Music, becoming the first singer to win the top prize since the organization was founded in 1837. She later studied opera and German at The American Institute for Musical Studies in Graz, Austria. Her operatic singing skills enabled her to represent her home state as Miss New Hampshire in The Miss America Pageant, where she won the talent competition and the first B. Wayne Award for the contestant with the most promise in the performing arts.
Trish's journalism awards have included multiple Emmy nominations for her documentary and investigative reporting. Trish was also recognized with a George Polk nomination for her long-form reporting covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with a team from CNBC. While at MarketWatch in San Francisco, Trish was named SF’s Society for Professional Journalists most promising broadcast journalist.
Trish Regan was born and raised in New Hampshire. She now makes her home outside New York City with her husband and three young children.
A successful fund manager and stock picker, Rob Hordon has extensive experience investing across asset classes, sectors, geographies and strategies. With consistent emphasis on ways to preserve and grow assets and manage risk, Rob has offered guidance to thousands of financial advisors and wealth management professionals in the United States and abroad over the course of a multi-decade Wall Street career.
Rob’s professional investment career began in the late 1990s as an associate in the Equity Research department of Credit Suisse First Boston, where he covered wireless telecommunications stocks at the dawn of the mobile phone era. As a recent college graduate, Rob had a front row seat at one of the epicenters of the tech bubble. He witnessed for the first time the stock market’s potential to deliver immense value creation through innovation but also its characteristic tendency towards excess.
Rob went on to obtain his MBA from Columbia Business School, where he focused on security analysis and through his course work learned from some of the top investment practitioners in the country. Upon graduation from Columbia, he took an analyst role in the Risk Arbitrage department of a firm then called Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder Advisers, which would later be renamed First Eagle Investment Management.
For approximately seven years, Rob worked as a member of a small team that ran a hedge fund strategy focused on identifying mispriced long-short opportunities among companies involved in merger and acquisition activity. Just prior to the 2008 financial crisis, he transitioned over to First Eagle’s Global Value team under the auspices of the legendary international investor Jean-Marie Eveillard.
As an analyst on the team, Rob was responsible for initiating and covering several billion dollars of public equity investments across a wide range of industry sectors and countries. This move also reunited him with renowned Columbia Business School economist and author Bruce Greenwald, who had recently joined as Director of Research. As colleagues and mentors, Bruce and Jean-Marie would become the two most formative influences on Rob's investment career.
In 2011, Rob proposed and worked with the team to develop a new multi-asset investment strategy built around the same long-term value-oriented investment philosophy pioneered by Jean-Marie. As co-portfolio manager of the First Eagle Global Income Builder Fund, Rob was directly responsible for over a billion dollars of assets under management with a particular focus on dividend-paying stocks and credit instruments. Rob and his partner later re-created and managed this strategy at a London-based boutique investment firm, J O Hambro Capital Management, beginning in 2017.
In 2023, Rob teamed up with his longtime friend Trish Regan to form 76research, where he is Co-Founder and Chief Investment Strategist. This entrepreneurial venture merges his passion for investing, research and writing with his desire to help others benefit from the long-term wealth creation potential of the stock market.
The son of an economics professor and elementary school teacher, Rob is a proud husband and father of three whose interests include history, philosophy, sailing and world travel. He was born in New York City and grew up in northern New Jersey, where he attended local public schools.
Rob Hordon is a Chartered Financial Analyst. In addition to his MBA from Columbia Business School, he received his Bachelor’s degree in Politics from Princeton University and was awarded a Certificate in Political Theory. His senior thesis, entitled Justice without Truth: Contingency in American Moral Thought, explores how the philosophical tradition of American Pragmatism offers a roadmap out of the moral and political abyss of postmodern relativism.
Mining the Great Philosophers
Enter Your Email to Access this Content
John Locke is widely seen as the most important intellectual influence on our founders. The United States of America in many ways represents the fulfillment of his philosophical vision. Our nation was formed in large part to establish a system that would enable us to preserve and accumulate wealth so that we may lead better, fuller, healthier and happier lives.
The great and chief end, therefore, of men's uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property. - John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1690
By “property,” Locke was referring to our “lives, liberties and estates” and not just narrowly to the things we own. But he includes the things we own within the same general concept as our life and liberty because all three are interdependent.
Money is not the meaning of life, far from it. But we cannot survive, we cannot be free, and we cannot pursue our dreams if our “estates” are not protected and nurtured.
In Locke’s era, one’s estate typically consisted of land and farm animals, along with any commercial skills that allowed a citizen to be a productive contributor to the economy. Today, it’s our financial assets.
At 76research, we truly believe investing should be viewed as one of the most important endeavors of our lives. Because how well we perform as investors will determine, in many ways, how free, how secure, how healthy and how fulfilled our lives and the lives of our loved ones will ultimately be.
The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, 1790
Unfortunately, this conscientious attitude towards investing is not universally shared. And with the recent emergence of “meme stocks,” crypto and other tools of speculation, we seem to be moving in the wrong direction.
Investing should not be done as a frivolous form of entertainment. It should not be how you get your day-to-day kicks. Nor should it be seen as some kind of opportunity for artistic self-expression or projection of your psychological state or personal beliefs.
Investing should be done purposefully and rationally, with your long-term goals always front of mind.
Being an “intelligent investor,” as Benjamin Graham (the founding father of security analysis and Warren Buffett’s mentor) described it, is easier said than done. Money, gain, loss, success, failure—these are all emotional triggers. It is likely, if not inevitable, that you will to some extent get sucked into the roller coaster. This is why gambling is so addictive.
The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists. - Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor, 1949
The most successful investors in the world all talk about conquering their emotions and sticking to principles, reason and fact. This is a common theme among the many exceptional investors with whom we have worked or whom we have studied.
The worst investors succumb to emotion. They allow their understanding of reality to be shaped by their fears or their hopes. They get nervous when their own thoughts conflict with those of the people around them. They sell into panics. They buy into hype. Often, they do nothing, like a deer in the headlights. Sometimes, they do too much, compelled by an irrational impulse to react.
You have power over your mind-not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, AD 171-175
While investing should be deliberate and serious, this does not mean it has to be boring. To the contrary, it’s a fascinating vocation. While many professionals cannot wait to retire, it’s common to see even the most successful investors, like Mr. Buffett and his late sidekick Charlie Munger, keep at it so long as they are physically able.
Investing is fundamentally about understanding how the world works and anticipating where it is heading. Practically every discipline is brought to bear—the physical sciences, math, psychology, history. It also requires imagination and an ability to contemplate how a huge number of variables, from the macroeconomy down to the regulatory environment to the specific individuals running companies, will interact and determine business outcomes.
Investing successfully is fundamentally about earning higher rates of return. Einstein allegedly called compound interest the “eighth wonder of the world.” Seemingly small differences in portfolio returns can lead to drastically different results. A portfolio that delivers a 5% return annually over 20 years will grow by 160%; a 10% return will lead to growth of 563%.
But investing successfully is also about risk management and not just chasing upside. A portfolio that declines in value by 50% would require 15 years to recover at a 5% annual rate of return. To make matters worse, if you assume just 3% average inflation over that same time frame, the same portfolio would actually end up worth 30% less in real terms.
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things. - Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851
At 76research, we follow a pragmatic, research-based approach to investing that balances risk and reward. We are grounded in rigorous analysis but open-minded and stylistically flexible. We are looking for opportunities across the landscape of growth, value and income and businesses large and small. We are focused on figuring out the things that really matter, instead of getting lost in minutiae and information overload. We are constantly questioning what other investors are missing, overestimating or underappreciating.
Like America’s founders, we take inspiration from the great truth-seekers of human history and the values they embody: open-mindedness, curiosity, self-awareness and humility.
…[W]e are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it. - Thomas Jefferson, 1820
About 76research
Established in 2023 by financial journalist and media entrepreneur Trish Regan and veteran fund manager Rob Hordon, 76research is an independent digital content platform focused on delivering relevant, unconflicted and value-added research to the investing public. The company's subscription-based services include a biweekly newsletter called the 76report, thematic model portfolios and multi-media streaming content. For more information, go to www.76research.com.