In episode 191, we welcome our guest, Simon Hallett. Simon and Meb start off the conversation with a run-down of Simon’s firm, Harding Loevner, cover its quality growth investment approach as well as its long-term focus. Simon gives some insights into “short-termism” and what it takes and the incentives in place to keep everyone at Harding Loevner focused on long-term investing.
Simon walks through the investment framework at Harding Loevner in detail. From a high level, they care about growth, quality, and price and beyond that, Simon walks through the details and what it looks like as ideas work their way through the process.
Next, Simon and Meb get into skill vs. luck. Simon emphasizes the role process plays in skill vs. luck, and the post-investment review he and his team go through to analyze the role skill vs. luck played in the outcome of a position.
As the conversation winds down, Simon and Meb touch on behavioral finance, and Simon discusses introducing behavioral aspects to the investment process wherever they can. He mentions he think there is a behavioral edge in any market.
All this and more in episode 191, including a discussion about Simon’s football club and his most memorable investment.
Episode 190 has a radio show format. We cover a variety of topics, including:
There’s this and plenty more in episode 190.
In Episode 189 we welcome our guest, John Parise. John and Meb kick off the conversation with the idea of the family CFO and wealth planning. As John gained experience in financial planning, he investigated the family office model, and he consistently saw a lack of planning. That eventually led him to the foundations that helped him eventually form his firm, Copper Beech.
Meb and John then cover to the process of what planning looks like at Copper Beech. John describes the interview, discovery process, and the types of conversations the firm has with families. They then get into some examples of the mechanics of what the planning process really looks like, and some methods to pay zero estate tax.
The pair then shift to talking about teaching young generations to handle wealth.
As the conversation winds down, John covers some of the major items people can consider to improve their planning outcomes.
All this and more, in episode 189 including John’s most memorable investment.
Last year when we published The Best Investment Writing Volume 2, we offered authors the opportunity to record an audio version of their chapter to be released as a segment of the podcast, and listeners loved it.
This year, we’re bringing you the entire volume of The Best Investment Writing Volume 3 in podcast format.
You’ll hear from some of the most respected money managers and investment researchers all over the world.
Enough from me, let’s let Ray take over this special episode.
In episode 188 we welcome our guest, Andreas Clenow. Meb and Andreas start the conversation with a hat on what hooked Andreas on trend following, and his book, Following the Trend.
Andreas discusses running trend following as a portfolio strategy, not something that is optimal to run on a single market. He talks about some basic fundamentals of trend following, including the premise that it’s about taking a lot of bets on a large number of markets independently.
Meb then asks Andreas to get into some detail about risk management and position sizing. Andreas defines the way he thinks about risk, and goes back and forth with Meb about the reality of return expectations and compounding. Meb follows by asking what has changed with his approach over the years. Andreas responds with the idea of realizing it’s about strategy and business, and the business has changed a lot.
The conversation transitions into how trend following can fit into an investment portfolio. Andreas offers that the strategy can serve as a core building block of a larger portfolio. He talks about some of the environments where trend following has done particularly well, and the challenge with diversification in equities.
As the conversation winds down, Meb asks about Andreas’ new book, Trading Evolved: Anyone can Build Killer Trading Strategies in Python. Andreas describes the book as a guide for readers to build backtests and strategies in the programming language, Python.
All this and more in episode 188, including Andreas’s most memorable investment.
Last year when we published The Best Investment Writing Volume 2, we offered authors the opportunity to record an audio version of their chapter to be released as a segment of the podcast, and listeners loved it.
This year, we’re bringing you the entire volume of The Best Investment Writing Volume 3 in podcast format.
You’ll hear from some of the most respected money managers and investment researchers all over the world.
Enough from me, let’s let Jack take over this special episode.
In episode 187 we welcome our guest, Kevin Carter. Meb and Kevin start the conversation with some background on Kevin’s career, getting to know Burton Malkiel, and launching EMQQ.
Kevin offers some of his thoughts on investing in China, including his initial thoughts about the prominence of state owned enterprises. Kevin mentions that a key component to investing in emerging markets is that it’s about the consumer. He notes that emerging and frontier markets are 85% of the world’s people and almost 90% of the people under the age of 30, the GDP of those people are still growing twice as fast as the rest of the world, and their incomes are growing.
Kevin discusses that once he figured out that the indexes that were available to invest in these markets were allocated relatively heavily to the legacy, inefficient, state owned enterprise portion of economies, he got to work on building indexes that were more targeted to capture emerging market growth.
Meb and Kevin then discuss the reality of emerging market allocations for most investors today, and talk about the current weights of emerging market indexes and the implications for investors.
Kevin gets into launching and running EMQQ, and how the index is constructed. He follows with a discussion on emerging market internet company valuations and the current pace of revenue growth.
Meb then poses what he thinks is some of the most common “pushback” he hears about why people can’t invest in China. Kevin addresses some of the arguments he hears for not investing in China, including made up numbers and communism and explains why he doesn’t think there is a lot of merit to those arguments.
As the conversation winds down, Kevin covers his thoughts on India, which he thinks is a particularly interesting opportunity from the standpoint of population size and growth.
All this and more in episode 187, including Kevin’s most memorable investment.
Last year when we published The Best Investment Writing Volume 2, we offered authors the opportunity to record an audio version of their chapter to be released as a segment of the podcast, and listeners loved it.
This year, we’re bringing you the entire volume of The Best Investment Writing Volume 3 in podcast format.
You’ll hear from some of the most respected money managers and investment researchers all over the world.
Enough from me, let’s let Scott take over this special episode.
In episode 186 we welcome our guest, Carter Malloy. Meb kicks off the conversation with Carter’s background in finance and growing up in a farming family. When conducting research on the asset class. He saw attractive returns historically, but there wasn’t a great way for most people to invest in it. That insight spurred the idea for AcreTrader.
As Meb and Carter dig a little deeper into farmland, they discuss the return drivers, yield and asset appreciation, and the imbalance of demand vs. supply as a driver of returns.
Meb then asks Carter to get into the cycles of farmland investing. Carter covers leverage and cycles. The pair explore the Macro themes that have been in play over the last few years. Carter comments that it has been tough for farmers, and commodity prices have been low. He clarifies that if you separate the farmer from the land owner, the land owner has continued to do great.
The pair then get into the ideas behind Carter’s firm, AcreTrader. Carter walks through the inefficient nature of farmland investing, the platform, and the process AcreTrader goes through to bring investment opportunities to market as well as the ultimate vision for the platform.
Next, Meb and Carter also get into some examples of additional opportunities for farmland property including potential income opportunities like wind farms, solar farms, and mining that may be available to some properties.
As the conversation winds down, Carter lays out his thoughts on how farmland fits with investment portfolios and highlights the role it can play from a wealth preservation standpoint as a noncorrelated asset class in addition to providing protection from inflation.
All this and more in episode 186.
Last year when we published The Best Investment Writing Volume 2, we offered authors the opportunity to record an audio version of their chapter to be released as a segment of the podcast, and listeners loved it.
This year, we’re bringing you the entire volume of The Best Investment Writing Volume 3 in podcast format.
You’ll hear from some of the most respected money managers and investment researchers all over the world.
Enough from me, let’s let Larry take over this special episode.
In episode 185 we welcome our guest, Ben Claremon. Ben and Meb start the conversation with some background on the blog Ben started in school, The Inoculated Investor. From there, the pair move on to discuss Cove Street and the investment process.
Ben gets into investing, and what value investing means to Cove Street Capital, bifurcated between Warren Buffett style investing and Benjamin Graham style investing. Next, Ben discusses the investment and portfolio construction process he and the team undergo at Cove Street, including sell discipline applied to fund positions.
Ben and Meb get into the outlook for the investment landscape, covering Value investing to opportunities in China, as well as the auto industry. He also discusses some things to avoid.
Ben then gets into the importance of proxy statements, and the role corporate governance plays in the investment process.
As the conversation winds down, Meb and Ben get into the bogeyman of buybacks and talk about the idea that the focus should instead be on the short-term nature of the earnings cycle.
All this and more in episode 185, including Ben’s most memorable investment.
Episode 184 is a Meb Short. In this episode, you’ll hear Meb discuss the CAPE ratio, flawed logic behind the conclusion that “CAPE doesn’t work,” probabilistic investing, and a global perspective on CAPE.
All this and more in episode 184.
In episode 183 we welcome our guest, Ben Inker. Ben and Meb start the conversation with a chat about Ben’s thoughts on markets which include the overriding theme that non-us markets are currently presenting opportunity for investors.
Next, Meb asks Ben to get into his thoughts on current valuations and Ben walks through some ideas on high valuations for US stocks and reduced forward looking returns. On the subject of valuations, the pair then discusses interest rates and monetary policy. Ben follows that with an interesting paper he wrote that explored how high profitability has skewed toward large capitalization companies.
Ben expands on his thinking about valuations and markets outside the US, the past decade being the worst for value stocks, and being excited about opportunities like emerging market value stocks. He goes further in his discussion by getting into a concept he credits Robert Shiller with, clairvoyant fair value of a stock market, and shares that two pieces of information are critical, the starting valuation of the markets, and the return on capital.
As the conversation winds down, Ben and Meb discuss GMO’s benchmark free allocation strategy, and investing with the goal of making absolute money and worrying about absolute risk.
All this and more in episode 183, including Ben’s thoughts on hedging currency risk and his most memorable investment.
Last year when we published The Best Investment Writing Volume 2, we offered authors the opportunity to record an audio version of their chapter to be released as a segment of the podcast, and listeners loved it.
This year, we’re bringing you the entire volume of The Best Investment Writing Volume 3 in podcast format.
You’ll hear from some of the most respected money managers and investment researchers all over the world.
Enough from me, let’s let Gary take over this special episode.
In episode 182 we welcome our guest, Larry Hite. Larry and Meb start off the conversation with Larry’s origin as a trend follower, and the parallels to trend following and life. Larry follows with personal challenges he overcame in life, and how he found a path to success through a life lesson, weeding out what he couldn’t do, and include the things that gave him a lot of enjoyment and potentially a lot of money (or both).
Next, Larry gets into his start in investing, combing through hundreds of years of data and finding that cutting losses and letting winners run really works. He then transitions into some underlying foundations about how he thinks about trading, including, putting the odds in your favor by creating asymmetrical bets.
Meb then talks with Larry about founding Mint, one of the earliest systematic CTAs, and was the first hedge fund to raise over $1 billion.
As the conversation winds down, Larry talks about systematic rules, trend following, and making an array of bets.
All this and more in episode 182, including concluding thoughts on challenges and resiliency, and Larry’s most memorable investment.
Episode 181 has a radio show format. We cover a variety of topics, including the new ETF rule:
There’s this and plenty more in episode 181.
In episode 180 we welcome back our guest, Rodrigo Gordillo. Meb and Rodrigo start the conversation with a walk through Rodrigo’s background and his experience growing up in Peru. Rodrigo then gets into his framework for thinking about investing and how that evolved into what he and his team is doing at ReSolve.
Rodrigo then spends some time on the knowledge gained by studying and backtesting investment strategies. He stresses the use of “ensembles” rather than isolating single parameters for more robust investment processes.
Meb shifts the conversation and asks Rodrigo to talk about ReSolve’s machine learning project. Rodrigo discusses applying machine learning to finance, and how it is a tool, and another element of the ReSolve team’s process.
Meb and Rodrigo chat about risk parity, and some of the common misunderstandings that exist, as well as the basic functions of how the strategy works.
As the conversation winds down, Rodrigo gets into some research projects on the horizon for ReSolve.
All this and more in episode 180.
Last year when we published The Best Investment Writing Volume 2, we offered authors the opportunity to record an audio version of their chapter to be released as a segment of the podcast, and listeners loved it.
This year, we’re bringing you the entire volume of The Best Investment Writing Volume 3 in podcast format.
You’ll hear from some of the most respected money managers and investment researchers all over the world.
Enough from me, let’s let Justin take over this special episode.
In episode 179 we welcome our guest, Dan Ferris. Meb begins with a discussion of Dan’s background as a guitarist, and his path into finance.
Dan then provides a high level view of his framework for how he thinks about investing. He discusses bottom-up value investing, and developing a powerful respect for the effect of cycles. When it came to evaluating companies, he took issue with traditional DCF analysis, and focused more on using DCF as a tool to provide guide posts to probabilities of various outcomes.
Next, Meb asks Dan to walk through the Extreme Value portfolio. Dan discusses there are 17 names with average days held of 1100, reflecting his thinking about equity as “permanent capital.” He covers names like Altius Minerals, Starbucks, and Dollar General. Dan also touches on his thinking behind the sell decision.
As the conversation winds down, Dan discusses some of the most influential books and passages he has read on investing: Chapter 20 of the Intelligent Investor, The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks, The Elements of Investing by Ellis and Malkiel, and more.
Don’t miss episode 179.
Episode 178 is a Meb Short. In this episode, you’ll hear Meb discuss the transactional nature of investing, finding an investment approach that works, and deploying an objective framework to govern removal investments and considering new ones.
In episode 177, we welcome back our guest, Alex Rubalcava. Alex and Meb start the conversation by discussing startup company fundraising, and how it has gotten more difficult to attract top-tier VC firms.
The two then get into Alex’s firm, the track to seeing over 1500 startups this year, the process of evaluating them, and doing meaningful work on about 75 per year.
Alex shares his thoughts about the current IPO market, and some reasons he thinks it’s not in a bubble right now. Meb then asks about the SaaS business model, and how the world has changed. Alex weighs in with some comments and some ways he thinks about looking at these types of companies.
Next, Alex gives a brief review of QSBS rules, and the potential tax benefits available to investors.
The conversation shifts into the current deal environment, and competing for allocations for deals. Alex provides an example of seeing an opportunity and fighting for an allocation. He also describes how his initial optimism about an investment correlates with the results in ensuing years.
Meb then asks Alex about AI and the opportunity there. Alex describes his firm’s bullishness on AI, and why he thinks AI isn’t going to take over as many jobs as we think it will right now. Alex then gets into AI deployment doing one of four things; segmentation, optimization, anomaly detection, and recognizing objects. Commercial AI systems are being built to automate a process or make a prediction about the future.
As the conversation winds down, Alex describes portfolio investments deploying AI to bring new approaches and ideas to their respective industries.
All this and more in episode 177, including what the future looks like for Alex.
Last year when we published The Best Investment Writing Volume 2, we offered authors the opportunity to record an audio version of their chapter to be released as a segment of the podcast, and listeners loved it.
This year, we’re bringing you the entire volume of The Best Investment Writing Volume 3 in podcast format.
You’ll hear from some of the most respected money managers and investment researchers all over the world.
Enough from me, let’s let Wes take over this special episode.
In episode 176, we welcome our guest, Adam Tkaczuk. Adam and Meb kick off the episode with an overview of opportunity zones.
Meb then asks about the best way to source investments in OZs. Adam provides some background, resources, and some wisdom that it is important to look closely at fees and be careful about diligence into OZ investments. He notes that there are all types of projects available, not just real estate, and that location can have a huge impact.
Meb asks Adam about location based sources of capital. Adam describes examples of what that is and some examples of how business can use this practice to find money to fund business projects.
Adam then gets into the role he plays with small business owners in helping them navigate tax credits, find project funding, and maximize after-tax income. He talks about tax and investment strategies, and business sale tactics such as considering OZs and a structured sale.
Next, Adam talks about some case studies on helping clients find tax credits.
As the conversation winds down, Meb asks Adam to get into the general flow of how he works with clients.
All this and more in Episode 176, included some great resources and Adam’s most memorable investment.
Episode 175 is a Meb Short. In this episode, you’ll hear Meb discuss a key development to be aware of in global markets, the valuation spread between the most and least expensive markets around the world. Meb explains why it is important to study history before assuming the U.S. deserves a valuation premium to the rest of the world, what global equity valuations look like, and the reality of investor home-bias.
All this and more in episode 175.
In episode 174, we welcome our guest, Amlan Roy. Amlan and Meb start the conversation off with a discussion on demographics, why we need to understand them, and the idea that monetary policy is relatively ineffective in the demographic environment the world faces today.
Amlan then lays out some prescriptions for some of the issues he’s seeing today, including, the idea of doing away with traditional retirement ages, more fairness toward women, and updated immigration policies.
Meb and Amlan then get into negative yielding interest rates, the impacts they have on investors, and how we should be thinking about economic and finance theory. He also hits on falling productivity growth, and a trying to solve that issue in China, India, and the rest of the world by bringing more young people and women into the workforce.
Amlan then shifts to some additional thoughts on growth, and his idea of the “Demographic Dividend.”
Don’t miss all of this and more in episode 174, including some of Amlan’s most memorable and important market calls.