Donald Luskin (born April 1954) is Chief Investment Officer for Trend Macrolytics LLC, a consulting firm he founded in 2001, providing investment strategy and macroeconomics forecasting and research for institutional investors. Luskin contributes commentaries on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and appears regularly on Fox Business. He was formerly a CNBC contributor, a contributing editor and columnist for National Review Online (NRO), and a columnist for TheStreet.com. His media commentaries and appearances touch on investing, economic and political matters.

Luskin has published three books, Index Options and Futures: The Complete Guide,[1] Portfolio Insurance: A Guide to Dynamic Hedging[2] and I Am John Galt: Today's Heroic Innovators Building the World and the Villainous Parasites Destroying It (co-author Andrew Greta).[3]

Luskin also wrote a blog, "The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid," based on the title of his as-yet unpublished book. The blog's tagline was: "How big government, big business, big media and big academia block your road to financial freedom—and tell you it's for your own good." Luskin is a self-avowed libertarian, and his blog linked to other financial and political blogs espousing similar beliefs.

Biography and achievements

On his former blog, Luskin stated he "attended Yale in 1973–1974; dropped out to rejoin the real world as soon as possible."[4]

After dropping out of college, Luskin worked for several years as a creative consultant to Los Angeles companies such as Mattel and Teledyne, and motion picture studios LucasFilm and Warner Brothers, where he worked on iconic films such as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and Ken Russell's Altered States. He and two colleagues developed a series of all-night treasure-hunts, one of which was adapted into the Walt Disney motion picture Midnight Madness.[5]

Luskin's investment career began in 1979, when he started a hedge fund while an options market maker on the Pacific Stock Exchange. As his fund grew and evolved, he became a market maker on the Chicago Board Options Exchange (where he helped pioneer index options trading, executing the very first OEX contract) and the New York Stock Exchange, where he traded the first option contract in the NYSE's history.

In 1984 Luskin joined Jefferies & Co., a brokerage firm. There as senior vice president, he invented POSIT, a crossing network enabling institutional investors to exchange entire portfolios with each other. POSIT was later spun out of Jefferies as a separate publicly traded company, Investment Technology Group.

In 1987 Luskin joined Wells Fargo Investment Advisors, a division of Wells Fargo Bank, as senior vice president in charge of investment management and trading. He became vice chairman when the firm merged with Nikko Securities in 1989, becoming Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisors. When the firm was acquired by Barclays Bank in 1995 and became Barclays Global Investors, Luskin became chief executive officer of the firm's global business in mutual funds. The firm was subsequently acquired by BlackRock. Over Luskin's eleven years with the firm, assets under management grew from $69 billion to over $500 billion. Luskin was responsible for numerous innovations in index funds and quantitative investing—including the development of domestic and international quant-active funds, every one of which outperformed its benchmark over Luskin's tenure. Luskin developed the iShares ETF family[6] and created the LifePath funds, the first target-date mutual funds, for which he is the named inventor on a US patent.[7]

In August 1999, during the tech bubble, Luskin and partner Dave Nadig started the MetaMarkets Open Fund, the first mutual fund to publish trades and list its holdings in real-time via its website. This "transparency" and "openness," Luskin and Nadig said, was a step forward in the financial world, equivalent to the political revolutions and international democratic transformations of the 1990s, because it leveled the playing field for the average investor and overthrew "financial elites."[8] MetaMarkets.com, the venture-backed company that Luskin and Nadig founded to operate OpenFund, was funded primarily by the venture arm of global luxury goods firm LVMH. It was hailed by Fortune magazine as one of the "coolest companies" in America in 2000. Their model was dismissed by some analysts as being a "gimmick," having nothing to do with investing per se: "They brought chat boards to life in a mutual fund."[9] At its peak, OpenFund received $45 million in investments, and the fund's biggest positions included companies like JDS Uniphase and Extreme Networks. At the end of 1999, OpenFund was among a handful of the best-performing mutual funds in America. After the market top in March 2000, the valuations of technology companies collapsed and many OpenFund investors redeemed their shares.[10] The fund was shut down in the summer of 2001.

Conflicts with Paul Krugman

Luskin has been controversial as a public intellectual. Much of his blog and many of his NRO columns were devoted to arguments that economic facts, figures, and trends are distorted by politicians, pundits and the media. He has a particular animosity towards The New York Times, especially columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, whose economic pronouncements he endeavored to debunk. Luskin was de facto leader of what he called the "Krugman Truth Squad," an ad hoc group of bloggers dedicated to detailing and rebutting what they consider Krugman's lies and distortions.[11]

According to Daniel Okrent, former Public Editor of the Times, "Luskin serves as Javert to Krugman's Jean Valjean. From a perch on National Review Online, he regularly assaults Krugman's logic, his politics, his economic theories, his character and his accuracy."[12] Luskin claims that his work has resulted in corrections from Krugman and "the imposition of a new and more rigorous corrections policy for the entire Times editorial page."[13]

Krugman occasionally responded directly to Luskin's criticisms. In one instance Luskin accused Krugman of making an error in his appraisal of the costs and effects of the 2003 tax cuts.[14] Krugman responded with a series of postings on his website.[15] In one such posting, apparently referring to the persistence of Luskin's criticisms, Krugman humorously referred to Luskin as his "stalker-in-chief".[16] Later, after Luskin appeared at a Krugman book signing, Krugman said of Luskin on the Fox News television program Hannity and Colmes, "That's a guy, that's a guy who actually stalks me on the web, and once stalked me personally".[17] The animosity between Luskin and Krugman became so intense it became the subject of a story in The New Yorker with extensive remarks from both men.[18] Krugman's characterization of Luskin as a stalker was repeated by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) prompting a threat of legal action from lawyers representing Luskin.[18][19]

References

  1. ↑ Luskin, Donald (6 April 1987). Index Options and Futures: The Complete Guide. ISBN 0-471-85464-6.
  2. ↑ Luskin, Donald (16 March 1988). Portfolio Insurance: A Guide to Dynamic Hedging. ISBN 0-471-85849-8.
  3. ↑ "I Am John Galt: Today's Heroic Innovators Building the World and the Villainous Parasites Destroying It | Wiley". Wiley.com.
  4. ↑ "The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid". Archived from the original on May 18, 2007.
  5. ↑ "SnoutCast #47: "Before Midnight"".
  6. ↑ Wigglesworth, Robin (2021). Trillions (1st ed.). Penguin. pp. 196–197. ISBN 9780593087688.
  7. ↑ "United States Patent: 7390056". January 16, 2017. Archived from the original on 2017-01-16.
  8. ↑ "A fund goes live on the Net". CNN. September 17, 1999. Retrieved May 1, 2010.
  9. ↑ "OpenFund closes its doors". CNN. Archived from the original on April 19, 2010. Retrieved May 1, 2010.
  10. ↑ "ClosedFund: Seeking Buyer, MetaMarkets Shuts Down Funds – TheStreet". Archived from the original on September 27, 2007.
  11. ↑ Luskin, Donald (June 13, 2011). "Paul Krugman: The Prophet of Socialism". National Review. In 2003, I set out to expose Krugman's various distortions . . . I started first on my blog, and soon afterward in a series of columns for National Review Online called "The Krugman Truth Squad" (KTS). ... The series of columns was structured as what is now called "crowdsourcing": Within several hours of a Krugman column's appearing on the Times website, I and a network of fellow bloggers would put it under a microscope and discover all the filthy microbes hiding in every crack. We'd fact-check every claim, confirm every quotation, run down every source, and compare every statement for consistency with statements made in the past.
  12. ↑ Okrent, Daniel (March 28, 2004). "The Privileges of Opinion, the Obligations of Fact". The New York Times.
  13. ↑ Luskin, Donald (October 4, 2005) "Boxed in With Corrections", National Review Online.
  14. ↑ "Donald Luskin on Paul Krugman and Jobs on NRO Financial". National Review. Archived from the original on 2007-04-26. Retrieved 2007-05-08.
  15. ↑ "The Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page". www.pkarchive.org.
  16. ↑ "The Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page". www.pkarchive.org.
  17. ↑ "The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid". Archived from the original on June 11, 2007.
  18. 1 2 Ben McGrath, "Blalking", New Yorker, November 17, 2003.
  19. ↑ "Eschaton".
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