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The Meb Faber Show

Ready to grow your wealth through smarter investing decisions? With The Meb Faber Show, bestselling author, entrepreneur, and investment fund manager, Meb Faber, brings you insights on today’s markets and the art of investing. Featuring some of the top investment professionals in the world as his guests, Meb will help you interpret global equity, bond, and commodity markets just like the pros. Whether it’s smart beta, trend following, value investing, or any other timely market topic, each week you’ll hear real market wisdom from the smartest minds in investing today. Better investing starts here. For more information on Meb, please visit MebFaber.com. For more on Cambria Investment Management, visit CambriaInvestments.com.
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All Episodes
Archives
Now displaying: September, 2017
Sep 27, 2017

In Episode 73, we welcome Jeff Porter and Barbara Schelhorn from the financial planning group, Sullivan Bruyette Speros & Blayney.

We start with Jeff’s background. He was a contemporary of Meb’s at the University of Virginia. The guys share a laugh recalling running out of class to check stock quotes back in the Dot Com boom.

As the conversation turns to investing and financial planning, Meb asks about changes in the industry – with the rise of robo-advisors, indexing, target date portfolios, and so on, how does Jeff, as a financial planner, continue to add value on the investment side?

Jeff tells us how the aforementioned products can be great for many investors, but less so for others. For investors who need more handholding, and/or have more complex financial situations, advisors can add significant value.

What follows is a great discussion on questions Jeff asks his clients as he seeks to evaluate the right market strategy for them, as well as the right implementation. There are myriad issues: what’s the best asset mix? Do you add hedges? Active or passive? Factor tilts? And so on.

Jeff looks to understand what his clients need from a return perspective in order to reach their goals, as well as their ability to handle risk. This includes variables such as when will the client need to take withdrawals. This leads to an interesting conversation about those risky years shortly before and after retirement begins. If luck is against you, and the market is down in those years, it can make a huge difference in your portfolio’s balance and therefore, your retirement lifestyle. Jeff tells the story of how retiring at two different points in time led to two very different outcomes.  

Another question Jeff asks clients is what percentage, or dollar value, could they accept as a temporary loss in a bear market?” He tells us another story about a husband/wife client who realized they had very different answers to this question.  

Meb asks what’s the average answer to “how much can you stomach being down?”. Apparently, most clients say they can handle about 15-20% declines.

Meb then brings up how portfolio creation and management is just one part of a person’s entire financial picture; therefore, as Jeff and Barbara think about risk and a client’s holistic financial view, where do they begin?

Barbara answers this one. She tells us one of the most important things she does is help clients organize their financial lives. She accomplishes this by asking three questions: Who? What? And how much?

She goes on to give us great details on what really goes into these questions. In essence, she’s helping clients gain far greater control over their financial lives. You’ll hear Meb sound a bit overwhelmed in response, noting how simply the organizational side of getting someone’s financial life in order can be massive – and that he could personally use the help.

The conversation drifts toward allocating cash and savings. But one of the problems is that many investors have way too much cash sitting in accounts earning nothing. At a minimum, they could use that cash to pay down various debts or mortgages. Meb makes the point that countless investors are bad at optimizing the cash/debt equation. He says there are simple techniques to easily turn cash earning 0% into cash earning 1% per year.

Meb continues to steer the conversation toward traditional financial planning topics: Social Security, retirement benefits, health and liability risks, and so on…

Barbara provides some wonderful information on insurance and long-term health care. As an interesting aside, she tells us that most of her male clients don’t want to waste their money on long-term health care, while her female clients find it to be more of a need. Barbara says the reality is somewhere in between.

This hardly even begins to scratch the surface of what’s covered in this episode. (It’s our longest to date!) You’ll hear about umbrella insurance policies (and why Meb could use one for some property he owns in Colorado)… The importance of proper titling of your assets and how it can protect you from litigation… Gifting loved ones with stock rather than cash to get around big capital gains… Effective financial strategies using tax bracket trends… SEP IRAs versus 401Ks vs Roth IRAs… When to start taking Social Security… And way more.

And of course, you’ll hear Jeff and Barbara’s most memorable investments. While Barbara’s is interesting, Jeff’s involves a huge market loss thanks to a bad tip from a certain college friend (you guessed it – Meb was to blame).

What was Meb’s bad investment advice that cost Jeff thousands? Find out in Episode 73.

Sep 20, 2017

Episode 72 is a radio show format before we start back with guests this fall. Some of the questions and topics you’ll hear:

  • You've said that bonds can face significant drawdowns. But because of the way bonds work, is it the case that bond ETFs guarantee a positive return over time (assuming held to maturity and no default)? 
  • I have heard that equal weight beats market cap because it sells the expensive stocks and buys the cheaper ones. I also have heard that most of the stock market gains over time are due to a small percentage of companies. So why does selling the winners down to equal weight and buying the lower performing stocks beat just letting winners run?
  • Are markets, in fact, growing more correlated?
  • Last week’s episode about a dividend strategy without the dividend… Why are so many investors against the idea of creating their own synthetic dividend despite its various advantages?
  • Robert Shiller’s new piece in The New York Times about current investor sentiment and its potential implications for this bull market
  • What are best practices for trading low volume ETFs?

As usual with the radio show formats, there are plenty of additional rabbit holes including the potential direction of the U.S. dollar, the velocity of money, and the tug of war between inflation and deflation.

What is Meb’s take on all this? Find out in Episode 72.

Sep 13, 2017

Episode 71 is a solo-Meb show in which he reads a white paper we’ll soon be publishing. The white paper might be a tad controversial as it calls into question an investing strategy that’s so beloved, it borders on sacrosanct.

What’s the strategy? Since this is a shorter episode, we won’t reveal it here. Instead, here’s a bit from the paper’s introduction…

“…Similarly, if you worship at the altar of this wildly-popular investing strategy, you too may find this paper’s contents equally blasphemous.

Yet if you find yourself feeling that way, I would encourage you to keep an open mind, for rejecting what you’ll read today would only shortchange yourself. That’s because I believe the approach I’ll suggest you consider in place of this beloved strategy has the potential to increase your returns significantly. And that’s just the start, because it also carries benefits that could result in even greater improvements for taxable investors.”

What are these strategies? Find out in Episode 71.

Sep 6, 2017

Episode 70 is a radio show format. We start with a quick catch-up, discussing the recent eclipse and Meb’s upcoming travel, including Iceland, Reno, Orlando, Amsterdam, among others.

Before jumping into listener questions, we get Meb’s thoughts on Episode 69, which featured Jason Calacanis (Meb dabbles with some angel investments himself). Meb tells us a bit more about his own angel experiences and his reflections on interviewing Jason.

This dovetails into a question about how Meb allocates his own money between private investments, public investments, debt, and so on (with a “capital allocation” comparison to Thorndike’s book, The Outsiders). You’ll hear Meb’s thoughts on his personal asset allocation.

This segues into our first set of questions from listeners, focusing on where to put “safe” money right now. Meb gives us his thoughts, leading into a discussion of which asset could be right for listeners wanting to keep some money on the sidelines, yet without inflation taking too big a chunk of it.

What follows is an assortment of questions and rabbit holes: If Meb had to short just one market right now what would it be and why… How an individual investor should look at leverage in a portfolio (includes a recap of risk parity)… Who is Meb’s favorite 13F guru… What hedge fund replication strategies Meb finds most interesting… And even a cryptocurrency challenge to listeners from Meb.

What is it? Find out in Episode 70.

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