The Meb Faber Show

In Episode 74, we welcome Jeffrey Sherman from DoubleLine. We start with Jeff’s background – it’s a fun recap, including stories of running the scoreboard for The Stockton Ports… being a bank teller… earning graduate degrees… there’s a brief aside into catastrophe bonds which is a good primer if you’re less familiar with them… then back into Jeff’s background with DoubleLine. This dovetails into Meb asking about the type of shop DoubleLine is, as well as its overall investing framework. We learn that DoubleLine will go into whatever market it finds interesting. They’re also a macro shop, which led them to fixed income. After all, Jeff tells us “If you want to know what’s going on in the world macroeconomically, the bond market tells you.” Next, Meb asks how the world looks to Jeff today. Everything is growing, but it’s not the same old growth. The difference is debt. Overall, it has been a positive environment for investing; inflation is low, but the price of assets now reflects this good environment and peop

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

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

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. Learn more about your ad ch

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 fo

In Episode 68, we welcome Meb’s friend and Newfound Research founder, Cory Hoffstein (or as Meb refers to him, a “fellow nerd”). Per usual, we start with Corey’s background, but then Meb jumps in by asking Corey to describe his general, 10K foot investing framework.  Corey tells us that a specific product and/or style doesn’t necessarily define him or Newfound. Rather, he believes in a consistent, well-researched process that takes into account the behavioral challenges that accompany any given investment strategy. This is because the journey is often just as important as the destination. Meb asks where Corey starts when creating a portfolio. Corey tells us it’s about the balance of risk. This is because “risk cannot be destroyed, only transformed.” Therefore, when building a portfolio, there’s no single holy grail. You need to understand the goals and fears of your client, then figure out how to balance various strategies in order to find a robust, flexible portfolio that handles risk appropriately. This dov

In Episode 67, we welcome Simon Black, founder of the newsletter, Sovereign Man. We start with Simon’s military background, having been an intelligence officer. He spent lots of time overseas, yet became disillusioned after the promises of WMDs failed to prove accurate. From this, he began challenging the status quo. Underpinning everything was an ethos of personal freedom, which is at the core of what Simon’s newsletter, Sovereign Man, is really about. Meb asks what global red flags and/or issues Simon is seeing now which might be challenging our personal freedoms. Simon tells us “I see a lot of red flags.” Specifically, he’s seeing a global trend toward socialism. People have a sense that the system is rigged. There’s an intuitive understanding that something is wrong, though people aren’t quite certain what it is, so they blame capitalism. But when people gravitate toward socialism (“I want more free stuff”), we run into the challenge of too many people wanting to jump on the cart, without enough people ac

Episode 66 is a radio show. We start with Meb referencing the just-published book, The Best Investment Writing, which he edited. It’s a great collection of essays from some of the smartest minds in investing. Check it out. Next, we jump into market commentary, using Meb’s recent “office hours” as our vehicle for discussion. What that means is Meb had some extra time over the last few weeks, so he opened his calendar to his followers, scheduling loads of 30-minute phone calls with various individual investors and RIAs looking to pick Meb’s brain on a variety of subjects. Meb tells us the topics which came up the most often, as well as his thoughts. There’s talk of U.S. equity valuation (and at what level Meb would start selling even before a crash), angel investing, portfolio allocation weightings, and far more. We end with several listener questions. The first involves how Meb views market breadth in light of the growth in index investing; the second solicits Meb’s thoughts on the dangers of ETF investments i

In Episode 65, we welcome CTA and commodities expert, Emil van Essen. Meb starts with a fun bit of trivia – if you mesh his and Emil’s name, coming up with “Emil Faber,” can you guess in which movie that name appears? It turns out it’s from the classic comedy, Animal House. “Emil Faber” was the founder of the movie’s “Faber College” and under his statue was his quote, “Knowledge is good.” After Emil gives us a bit about his background, the guys jump into the deep end. Emil trades managed futures, and while most people think “trend following” when they hear “managed futures,” there are other styles. Emil tells us about a style he uses often, spread trading. Emil looks at the term structure in commodities futures contracts. There’s a price for every month going out in time. You can trade the differences between those months (calendar spreads). He also trades relative value and roll arb. Emil likes these strategies because there’s tons of alpha available. Meb pauses to explain a bit for any listeners who are les

In Episode 64, we welcome David Varadi from Blue Sky Asset Management. David tells us a bit about himself before he and Meb jump into investing. Meb starts by referencing a quote from Blue Sky’s website: “Unlike endowments, investors do not have an infinite time horizon. For this reason, we believe that a traditional strategic asset allocation approach based on modern portfolio theory is suboptimal. It makes more sense to adapt to changes in the economic environment. We favor a dynamic approach to asset allocation using market information to guide our investment decisions. Most importantly, we believe that a systematic, quantitative approach is necessary to avoid emotions and biases in decision-making.” Meb’s a fan of all the ideas in that quote, so he asks David to expound and discuss his general market framework. David tells us how it’s easy to be a buy-and-hold investor when market is going up; much harder so when the market is falling – especially when nearing retirement. Significant drawdowns can be deva

In Episode 63, we welcome Gary Beasley and Gregor Watson, co-founders of Roofstock. If you’re one of our listeners who has written in requesting an episode on rental real estate, be sure not to miss this one. We start with some quick background on the guys, how they came to found Roofstock, and the way in which their company is aiming to make rental real estate investing far easier. In essence, they want to simplify things by separating the “investing” side of rental real estate from the “operational” side of owning a rental home. After the background, Meb starts with a broad, contextual question: So how would a new rental real estate investor start? In the old way, you would identify a market in which you’re interested, look at tons of homes, make some offers, perform due diligence on the ones where the offers have some traction, renegotiation the price and finally buy, then find a property manager to handle operations for you. But the guys then tell us how Roofstock is making this traditional process far si

In Episode 62, we welcome journalist and author, Ron Lieber. Meb begins by congratulating Ron, as it was Meb's pregnant wife who read Ron's book about how parents should discuss financial matters with their kids, and promptly told Meb he needed to read it and get Ron on the podcast. Turning attention to Ron's book, "The Opposite of Spoiled," Meb begins by asking about Ron's motivation for writing it. Ron tells us there were three factors: one, a pointed question from his three-year-old ("Daddy, why don't we have a summer home?"); two, the focus of Ron's writing at work (young people who borrow vast sums of money to pay the huge college tuition bills); and three, his own situation as a teen, having seen the collegiate financial aid application process thanks to his mother. All of this together led Ron to the conclusion that "we're not having the right kinds of conversations with our kids about this stuff." Meb mentions how it's a shame that they don't teach personal finance in high school, which makes it all

In Episode 61, we welcome Jack Vogel, CFO/CIO of Alpha Architect, and the partner of Wes Gray, who you may remember as one of our earliest Meb Faber Show guests. After Jack tells us a bit about his background and how he came to be at Alpha Architect, Meb jumps in, starting with "factors" - specifically, the value factor. Meb asks about Jack's value philosophy in general, and how he creates a value portfolio. What follows is a great look at how a professional portfolio manager/asset allocator creates a portfolio. Using quantitative tools, Jack starts by constructing the universe of potential assets to include, keeping in mind scale. Next, Jack applies some forensic accounting in order to exclude certain toxic assets that one wouldn't want in a portfolio. Then, he screens for value. Jack likes using enterprise multiples. Finally, he looks for "quality." These are things like free cash flow, margin growth and marketing stability. Meb then points the conversation toward momentum investing. Jack offers us a gener

In Episode 60, we welcome the great William (Bill) Bernstein. Bill starts by giving us some background on how he evolved from medicine to finance. In short, faced with his own retirement, he knew he had to learn to invest. So he studied, which shaped own thoughts on the matter, which led to him writing investing books, which resulted in interest from the press and retail investors, which steered him into money management. After this background info, Meb jumps in, using one of Bill's books "If You Can" as a framework. Meb chose this as it starts with a quote Meb loves: "Would you believe me if I told you that there's an investment strategy that a seven-year-old could understand, will take you fifteen minutes of work per year, outperform 90 percent of financial professionals in the long run, and make you a millionaire over time?" The challenge is the "If" in the title. Of course, there are several hurdles to "if" which Meb uses as the backbone of the interview. Hurdle 1: "People spend too much money." Bill give

Episode 59 is a radio show format. This week we're diving into some of the recent market stories which Meb has found most interesting. We also bring back some listener Q&A. We start with a Tweet from Cliff Asness, in which he rebuffs a Bloomberg article titled, "The Death of Value Investing." The article states that value isn't working. Sticking to that approach has resulted in a cumulative loss of 15 percent over the past decade, according to a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. report. During roughly the same period, the S&P 500 Index has almost doubled." So is value investing dead? Meb gives us his thoughts. We discuss its underperformance, mean reversion, and factor-crowding. Next up is a New York Times article referencing a recent stance-reversal from Burt Malkiel, a passive investing legend. He's now saying he recognizes where active investing can exploit certain market inefficiencies. The same article has some great quotes from Rob Arnott on the topic of factor investing, and the danger in tons of quants all lo

In Episode 58, we welcome Axel Merk from Merk Investments. After a bit on Axel's background, the guys jump in, discussing the Fed's decision to raise interest rates today (recorded on Wed 6/14/17). Axel discusses how the Fed has announced the normalization of its balance sheet and the pace at which it would like to do so - but they've left out lots of details. He likens it to driving into a tunnel with no lights on. In essence, the Fed doesn't know where it wants to go. Axel's response touches upon our current low volatility. Meb hones in on this, asking if the low volatility is in part due to actions from the Fed. Axel believes this to be the case (central banks in general, not just the Fed). Yet there's plenty more, involving how central bank activity has fueled this up, up, up market, with investors piling into risk assets. But Axel thinks asset prices are likely to come down from here. He says "A lot of that (rising asset prices) has been induced by central banks. The unwinding of that is going to be, at

Episode 57 is another "radio show" format, yet this one is different than our others. In this episode, Meb discusses his 17 different "million-dollar" fintech ideas. In essence, Meb has had various business ideas over the years which he's wanted to pursue, but hasn't had the time. Some he's tweeted about, some he's blogged about, others he's kept to himself. But in Episode 57, he'll run through all 17, diving into more detail. Can a listener take one and run with it? Sure. Let us know how it works out! Or work on it with us. We're open to ideas. Either way, here are the 17 concepts: Our new "podcast compilation" idea Liquid alts newsletter Quant backtester Tax harvesting Best ideas newsletter Research boutique for crowdfunding companies Syndicate podcast/newsletter Ruykeyser reborn The Street 2.0 HedgeFundLetters.com NewsLetterSampler.com Tactical roboadvisor Free Acorns/Stash clone Free ETF trading brokerage FreeShares ETFs Quant cookbook The "Forever" fund Are all of these ideas good?

In Episode 56, we welcome Meb's good friend, and CEO of ETF.com, Dave Nadig. Per usual, we start with some background information. Dave tells us about his early days in the investment industry, starting a consulting firm that was working on a then-new idea: fee-only financial advising. His first client was a little shop that went on to become none other than BlackRock. After some professional twists and turns, including running money for a while, Dave ended up at ETF.com. Meb then dives in by referencing an article Dave wrote toward the end of last year, called "Outlook for ETFs in 2017." There were several key points in the article which Meb thinks can help provide a general, 30-thousand-foot overview of the ETF space. The first point - ETF flows. Dave tells us "this is a big year for ETFs." He then takes us through a quick recap of the evolution of ETFs, going from a purely institutional product back in its early days, to something embraced by investment advisors, to an investment vehicle for retail investo

In Episode 55, we welcome Ed Easterling. Meb starts by referencing a survey he just conducted, asking readers’ opinions as to the single best investing book out there. It turns out that Ed’s book, Unexpected Returns, made the top 50 list, so Meb offers Ed a kudos. But the guys hop into market discussions quickly. Ed tells us that the stock market is not driven by randomness. It’s predictable in the long run, driven by three components: 1) earnings growth, 2) dividend yield, and 3) the change in valuation level. Stock market returns over the short-term are unpredictable, but over the longer-term they’re highly predictable. And the key driver is the starting level valuation. Meb brings up how numerous investors are currently expecting 10% returns (based on long-term averages). He asks Ed if that’s warranted. It turns out, we need to distinguish between long-term returns (say, 100 years) and a return-period that’s more relevant to the average investor (say, 10 or 20 years). This is because changes in PE levels

In Episode 54, we welcome Elizabeth “Liz” Dunn, author of the book, “Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending”. Meb suggests they walk through the book using its five broad takeaways as their outline. But before they dive in, he asks Liz about her inspiration for writing the book. Liz tells us that when she began making a “real, grown up” salary, she wasn’t entirely certain what to do with it. She was curious how to use it most effectively to promote her own happiness. Interestingly enough, there wasn’t a great deal of research on the topic. Next, Meb asks Liz to discuss her first main finding (and likely the best-known finding) – our happiness tends to increase when we spend money on experiences rather than things. Liz gives us the key takeaways, after which Meb asks why buying experiences over things is hard for us, when we know that’s what we should do. Meb and Liz soon move on to the second takeaway from the book: “make it a treat.” One of the greatest misunderstandings of happiness is the idea that i