Gene Hoots is the chairman of CornerCap Investment Counsel, an advisory firm that he co-founded in 1989.  He has worked in finance and investments for over fifty years.  His career in the corporate world included 21 years with R. J. Reynolds Industries where he spent a decade managing that company’s $4 billion employee benefit and savings plan investments.

1. Have Americans had it too easy for too long?  What does the word “duty” mean to you, and why is it so important?
   
   
2. What was it like leaving the corporate world and starting your own business? Are there any lessons you learned that would be helpful to others who want to start an investment business?
   
   
3. You presided over RJR’s massive pension plan in the 1980s.  What was it like there?  What do you think about the M&A world having been so close?
   
   
4. Who was Malcolm McLean and how did you meet him?  What was so special about him?
   
   
5. What lessons did you learn from the late 90s tech bubble?  Do any of them seem especially pertinent to today?

Adam Levin is a consumer advocate with more than 30 years’ experience in personal finance, privacy, real estate and government service.  A former director of the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs, Levin is Chairman and founder of Identity Theft 911, Chairman and co-founder of Credit.com and serves as a spokesperson for both companies.  An expert on personal finance, credit, identity management, fraud and privacy, he writes a weekly column which appears on Huffington Post and ABCNews.com.  He is a frequent guest on television, and has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business News, Good Morning America, Fox & Friends, CBS Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight and scores of radio stations throughout the country.  He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

1. Identity theft seems like something that everyone thinks only happens to other people.  I watched the first season of Mr. Roboto, so assume I’m an expert hacker now.  :)  But seriously, how big are the risks we talking about here, based on probability and impact of lost time and money?   
   
   
2. I think everyone knows not to advertise your social security number to the world, but what are a few of the easiest changes people can make that could make the most impact in protecting themselves?
   
   
3. How has social media really changed the identity theft game?
   
   
4. I have about a million online logins; it’s daunting.  How should I manage them?  Are passphrases the right idea?
   
   
5. How has technological progress like the Internet of Things made us more vulnerable that we realize?  Also, I found the concept of medical identity theft to be especially scary.  What’s that all about?

Chris Mayer is the Investment Director of Bonner & Partners, a financial research firm.  He is the author of Invest Like A Dealmaker: Secrets from a former banking insider, World Right Side Up: Investing Across Six Continents and, most recently, 100 Baggers: Stocks that Return 100-to-1 and How to Find Them.

Five Good Questions:

1. What are some of the key ingredients that might point to a 100x investment return?  Do we just have to depend on luck and strike oil or benefit from a big pharmaceutical drug approval, or is there any skill involved?
2. When I was teaching at UC Davis’s MBA program, we did a study where we examined the performance of investing gurus vs. various value investing studies (Tweedy Browne, Magic Formula, What Works on Wall Street etc.).  It was amazing how the studies trounced even the pros.  One reason is likely liquidity, the bigger pros couldn’t get into smaller investments that the study did, which could constrain returns.  But another hypothesis I had was that because the studies are so mechanically driven and only sell after certain time periods, perhaps the studies participated in some of the market irrationality to the upside for a given stock.  A guru would have taken advantage of the downside irrationality of a low P/E, but then sold out before it ever got to an extreme high P/E.  How does this fit into your “coffee can” approach.
3. Your book is full of off-the-beaten path stories, including a tontine.  What the hell is a tontine? ;)
4. We all know about Graham and Buffett, but what made Keynes such a great investor?
5. Buffett has a great article from way back in the day called “How Inflation Swindles the Equity Investor.”  It’s early Buffett, so it’s a little technical, but I thought you did a great job of simplifying it in your book and explaining how light-asset businesses are a better bet in inflationary environments.  Can you walk us through your reasoning?  

Tadas Viskanta is the Founder and Editor of Abnormal Returns.  Tadas is a private investor with over 25 years of experience in the financial markets.  He is the co-author of over a dozen investment-related papers that have appeared in publications like the Financial Analysts Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management among others. Tadas is also the author of the well-received book: Abnormal Returns: Winning Strategies from the Frontlines of the Investment Blogosphere that culls lessons learned from his time blogging.

Five Good Questions:

1. With traditional media, TV, bloggers, twitter, etc., there’s so much information flow these days.  It can feel overwhelming.  How do we go about curating signal from noise?
2. As special businesses have transitioned from primarily key PPE advantages (more readily quantifiable by accounting) to instead relying on IP, knowledge, network effects, intangibles (less quantifiable and more subjective), you could make an argument that the balance sheet is increasingly divorcing from economic reality.  Given this trend, does a quantitatively driven approach to value investing still work in the future?
3. I’ve heard many great investors say you shouldn’t compare yourself to the S&P, and yet every does.  What do you personally use for your benchmarks?
4. You often hear that ETFs are a better mousetrap?  What exactly makes them so much better than mutual funds?
5. You have an interesting quote: “The primary role of the financial system is to coax risk-adverse investors into risky securities.”  What did you mean by that, and do you think it’s even more of an issue with zero interest rate policies like we see today?