Enterprising Investor

Enterprising Investor is CFA Institute's flagship podcast, and its subject is the practice of investment management rather than the theatre around it. The structure is consistent across episodes. A host introduces a guest with genuine specifics — the book they wrote, the tool they built, the research they published — then poses a working problem and lets the guest construct the answer at length. Mike Wahlberg fronts many of the conversations. Kathy Scott, editor of the Enterprising Investor blog, hosts others, often with contributors who are writing series for the blog. The Research and Policy Center hosts its own multi-part conversations, including a two-part exchange with Roger Urwin on the total portfolio approach. The material is unusually concrete for a program at this level. One episode brings together Mark Higgins, author of Investing in U.S. Financial History, and Leyla Kunimoto, founder and editor of Accredited Investor Insights, to examine what happens when private-market valuations that stayed high for years finally take their lumps. They walk through NAV smoothing as a legally compliant reporting practice that flatters manager performance, then ask whether regulators will force marks to reflect something closer to the present. Another episode follows Stefan Sharkansky through the mechanics of retirement withdrawals, including the smile-shaped spending pattern that runs high in the go-go years, dips through the slow-go years, and rises again as healthcare needs grow. Raluca Filip discusses the advisor's role when a client wants to sell into a drawdown, drawing on behavioral finance, coaching practice, and the way a question is worded. Ashley Herd turns the lens toward management itself and what better managers do for business results. Across all of it, the pacing is measured and the vocabulary is technical, but the hosts keep restating the hard ideas in plainer language before moving on. Long answers are welcome. Guests are frequently the ones doing most of the talking, which is the point. What holds the episodes together is a persistent return to consequences: what a practitioner should do differently, what a governance failure costs, where an incentive quietly points the wrong way. There is little banter and no irony for its own sake. Warmth shows up in the introductions and the closings, and the tone can turn grave when the subject warrants it. For anyone who reads industry research and wants to hear the people behind it argue their case at full length, the show delivers exactly that, several hundred episodes deep.