Odd Lots - What the Market Crash Says About How Investing Works

Episode Date: May 7, 2020

We’ve seen a huge market crash this year and a number of firms reporting portfolio losses. So why were so many big investors crowded into the same trades, and what does it say about investing as a whole? Should investors be playing up to their competitive advantage, or following the crowd to profit from momentum? Steven Abrahams, head of investment strategy at Amherst Pierpont Securities, has written a new book about competitive advantages in investing. We talk to him about how different types of investors place their money and why some portfolios can survive better than others.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, odd bots listeners. Joe and I are working our way through a pretty big backlog of episodes. So what that means is what you are about to hear is something that was recorded quite a while ago. We recorded this one back on March 23rd. We were in the midst of the big market crash back then, but we hadn't really seen the effects of that crash work their way through the financial system. So you're going to hear Joe and I, talk a lot about how weird it is that we haven't seen any big trading blowups just yet. Of course, since March 23rd, we have had a few, notably a big oil fund in Singapore and also a hedge fund called Malachite in New York. I think if anything, it makes the episode more interesting and the themes discussed probably more oppression. So hope you enjoy. Thanks for listening. And welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. So, Joe, you know what I've been thinking about quite a lot recently? I don't know. Is it the same thing that literally everyone across the entire world can't stop thinking about and dreaming about and talking about? Or is there something else going on?

Wait. Are you thinking of the virus or the market sell-off? I think I've been exposed to financial markets. for too long because they're sort of both entwined in my mind. I literally like dreamed last night about both the virus and the market crash. And I have not thought about anything else. So but no, what is the specific thing that you yourself are thinking about these days? Okay. It's kind of an offshoot of the market crash. And it's basically, uh, investor blowups.

So. Okay. That's, that's timely. Yeah. So one of the interesting things about this particular sell-off is we still haven't seen a bunch of investors really get taken to the cleaners just yet. We've had a few. One of our Bloomberg colleagues wrote about a hedge fund in particular. But you can imagine with everything that's gone on in the market, you're going to get more and more of these stories emerging.

Yeah. I mean, it's the things, things are moving so fast right now that even by the time this recording comes out, we might hear of a lot more investor blowups. And the one of the reasons I think we will and one of the is because we've been seeing, you know, like so many tried and true strategies in the last couple of weeks have just completely failed, essentially. So various hedges that investors use to mitigate volatility in their portfolio, whether it's treasuries or whatever, haven't behaved the way, all kinds of dislocations. So, A, we're almost certainly going to get those blowups. And B, I think the conditions are now in place from the intensity of the moves that we've seen in recent weeks that will sort of finally cause some of those shoes to drop even beyond just the, you know, the sell-off, so to speak. Exactly right. And a lot of those strategies were things that people supposedly had paled into, like selling volatility or risk parity where you're sort of relying on the inverse correlation between bonds and stocks. All of those seem to fall apart in the recent selloff. So my question is, if you're a professional investor, like a hedge fund or a dealer or something like that, what separates you from the crowd when it comes. to your investment strategies. Because like I said, it feels like a lot of people had sort of just

crowded into the same thing in recent years. Yeah, it has felt like that. And it also is, it's been this puzzle. And I've certainly like thought about this since well before the crisis hit, which is that on the one hand, you don't want to just pile into the same strategies as everyone else. Everyone knows that. That's not a particularly desirable. It's hard to stand out. On the other hand, For essentially the last decade, we've had this situation in which the winning strategy is to go all in on high beta and shorting volatility. If you did anything other than that, essentially for a decade, you faced a situation. And you have to write a quarterly investment letter to your clients and explain why you underperformed yet again. So there has been this real pickle where there's been one dominant strategy for so long.

and if any deviation meant you probably were underperforming. Yeah, exactly. There's been a real tension between doing your own thing and profiting from basically just following the flows in what has been for the past 10 years of really momentum-driven market. But on this note of sort of standing out from the crowd or coming up with an edge in professional investment, it's kind of interesting that when people talk about business in general and in economics, people are always talking about competitive advantage. And you're supposed to organize yourself around what you do best and organize your business around it. And that's what's supposed to make you successful.

But when it comes to professional investing, you rarely hear that. Yeah, absolutely right. Okay. So today we're going to be speaking with someone who's actually been on the show before, but who has really been on the show before, but who has written a book exactly on this topic, competitive advantage in investment and what it means to actually be a big professional investor and how different types of investors will approach investing in different ways. So our guest is Stephen Abraham's.

He's a former Deutsche Bank analyst. As I mentioned, he has been on the show before where he was talking about the changing world of the sell side analyst, which is a really good thing to listen to. But he's now over at Amherst Pierpont. He's the head of investment strategy over there. And his book is out in April. It's called Competitive Advantage in Investing, Building Winning Professional Portfolios. Stephen, welcome to the show.

Hi, Tracy. Hi, Joe. How are you? Good. Thank you for joining us. Absolutely. Exciting times. To say the least.

Yes, indeed. So maybe just to begin with, what do you think about the, the big sell-off recently. Pretty dramatic. Oh, it has been, it has been a drama of historic proportions. There's no doubt about that. I would say, unfortunately, for some, the drama is probably not over. I know that, as you were mentioning earlier, we've all been waiting around to see if all of the various players are going to make it through this kind of volatility. And as you pointed out, we've been doing okay so far. But I would say just within, you know, recent days, we've started hearing that there are some portfolios that are in serious

trouble and may not make it. So, well, we're going to be watching things very closely. Right. It seemed to take a step up in seriousness really over the last week. And I think there's a good time to remind, let listeners know that by the time they hear this, the entire world may have since changed again. But we are recording this on Monday, March 23rd, so just so that people have a frame of reference, because again, things are moving so fast. But it's one thing I feel like for the value of risky assets to decline and stocks decline, and we all know that stock market crashes are possible. But I think over the last two weeks, what we've really seen on top of that, especially over the last week, is that various hedging strategies that people might have

put in place to mitigate a stock market decline or some other risky asset decline, they've suddenly stopped working as liquidity has started to vanish. Yes. Yeah, this is really a, as you're pointing out, Joe, the normal relationships between assets and hedges or between one asset and another in many markets has. completely broken down. And underneath a lot of this is just a historic reach for cash. That's true at the level of individual businesses up and down Main Street, but it's also true at the level of some of the highest quality investment-grade companies that ply their wares day-to-day around the world. Most of those companies are looking at economies that are effectively

coming to a complete halt and could remain basically closed for 30 to 60 to 90 days. Nobody is quite sure. So they are stockpiling cash and in the process basically selling everything that they possibly can and that includes securities. So the usual ideas of stocks being rich or cheap or bonds being rich or cheap has been completely subsumed under the issue of what is liquid and what can be sold. And whatever is liquid is definitely getting sold. So just on that note, can we talk a little bit about what traditional investment theory would have told us about that big scramble for cash? Because on the one hand, there is a saying that in a crisis correlation goes to one and everything sort of sells off at the same time. But on the other hand, you know, the reason you pay more for

investment grade or something like the U.S. Treasury is because it's supposed to be safe in times like this. So what does investment theory actually tell us about what's going on here? You know, investment theory probably the most relevant theory here is kind of traditional monetary policy theory, which says that when people have doubts about the creditworthiness of their counterparties, then money typically does not flow. And the big issue is that with economies coming to a sudden stop, it really is difficult to predict which companies have the wherewithal to make it through this crisis. Central banks have really been flooding the market with very plentiful and very cheap money. But the issue is the creditworthiness of the people who need it most.

Now, traditionally, this is an issue that monetary policy assumes is going to affect banks. You know, the depositors look at the banks. They worry that the banks are making loans that are not prudent, and they try to withdraw their deposits. Here, in some ways, it's just the opposite. The banks have tremendous amounts of money, but they're worried about the creditworthiness of the restaurants and bars. and taxi businesses that right now for practical purposes are shut down. So many companies are simply looking at whatever can trade, whatever might be liquid. So it's really monetary policy and the ideas around liquidity that apply here.

And those have dominated any idea of the ability to call relative value. I want to get more into some of the ways monetary policy can help this crisis, including, again, some of the things that were just announced this morning. But before we do, I just want to sort of go back to this idea of a historic grab for any cash that people have, the likes of which maybe we've never seen before or very rarely seen. One of the things that's really striking is in the last a couple weeks, how treasuries, which are almost cash-like in the sense that they are completely backed by the full faith and credit of the government, counterparty risk-free, even those started getting sold off, started to be sold off a little bit because if we think, right,

like in this hierarchy of money, yeah, holding a treasury is really great for, you know, lean times and you want to be safe, but if you need to make a bill payment tomorrow, you still just want cash instead. Correct. Yeah, so in the Treasury market, there has been surprising amounts of illiquidity. Usually in the Treasury market, liquidity comes in a couple of tiers, and the most liquid tier is the most newly issued notes or bonds, and those still seem to be maintaining liquidity. But then the older notes and bonds have lost surprising amounts of liquidity, and there have been very large, leveraged treasury portfolios. Traditionally, those portfolios would have reached through the broker-dealer or bank network for financing. They may have used repo or other forms. Many of the balance sheets

that normally would lend to them have been limited in their ability to expand credit. So, among other things, this starts to get at some of the core competitive advantages or disadvantages of some of these investment platforms. The levered players really don't have any source of funding on their own. Banks now have sources of funding. Traditionally, they have sources of funding through their deposit base. Now, the Fed and other central banks around the world are flooding. the bank system with money. But some of the post-crisis rules on the proper ratios of debt to equity

and other issues limit the ability of banks to lend endlessly. And that has partly constrained the system. And it's led the Fed, I think, at times to struggle with what it's supposed to do next. Yeah. So you had a bunch of these levered funds that were effectively picking up pennies in front of a steamroller for years by exploiting the difference between the more liquid futures and the cash U.S. Treasuries. And then that trade blew up rather spectacularly a week or two ago. And then that ended up infecting the U.S. Treasury market and causing all sorts of problems. Just fast forwarding to today again, Monday, March 23rd, just before we started recording this, the Federal Reserve announced its latest attempt to soothe the market.

and that includes potentially unlimited QE and also some help for companies and munis. Steve, I know you've been thinking a lot about this, but is this the right thing for the Fed to do? Are they on the right track? Or would you be encouraging them to do something else at this point? Well, probably the most important thing the Fed did this morning was announce a couple of new facilities that allows the Fed. to buy a much wider range of assets directly from investment portfolios and businesses. So this is now no longer limited to the typical set of primary dealers.

They announced a term asset lending facility, which basically will buy all kinds of asset-backed securities as long as they have the proper ratings. and they will buy those securities from any eligible U.S. portfolio. They also announced a series, two programs directed at the corporate market, one that will buy corporate debt directly from U.S. companies with headquarters in the United States and doing major business in the United States. So this effectively creates a direct connection between, investment-grade companies and the government balance sheet, they announced similar programs for

secondary corporate debt, and they expanded the program that they announced a week ago for commercial paper. So the Fed is slowly stepping in the direction of trying to address this cascading illiquidity across these markets. And my guess is these new programs, for investment grade paper will have a tremendously good effect and should start to eliminate some of the volatility. So just to help people understand, it's not that, you know, we're still going to have the sort of main street economic crisis for as long as people are locked down, as long as the virus is here and so forth. And that's going to continue to ravage the economy. But in the meantime, high-quality companies can at least ease up theoretically a little bit on grabbing hold of any

cash that they can in the system because for the moment, the Fed will backstop essentially their short-term borrowing. So that should, the idea is that eases some of the overall desperation that every person, every company everywhere has for liquidity. Yeah, exactly right. Investment-grade companies, large investment-grade companies at this point essentially have substantial direct access to the Fed. And my guess would be the Fed's going to continue providing and expanding that access as long as it sees signs of stress. The ABS facility starts to walk down the path of providing better access to Main Street. And that would have to come through the willingness of banks to make credit card loans and auto loans.

The asset back facility basically has elements that will allow auto dealers to finance cars and other vehicles more easily. But you still at this point, I think, have a problem getting credit to a lot of smaller mainstream businesses. Right. Maybe the Fed has a couple of tricks left in the bag, but my guess is you're really going to need some kind of physical policy. So I wanted to go back to something you touched on earlier, which was this notion of the dealers or the banks being a little bit more restricted in terms of the amount of risk that they can take. And maybe some of that risk having shifted to the by side, because a lot of people right now are talking about how the current crisis, resembles not necessarily Lehman Brothers in 2008, but more LTCM or long-term capital management back in 1998.

They dabbled in a lot of derivatives and basically exploded. So I'm just wondering if that's the right framework to look at the current state of the financial industry and if that's the reason why the Fed is quite focused on expanding the parties that it can actually do business with when it comes to QE. The biggest difference between this crisis in 2008 is that the crisis in 2008 was in the financial system. The crisis in 2020 is outside of the financial system, really at its core in corporate America. And as a result of corporate America being stressed, it's a problem then. on Main Street and in households pretty much around the world. The Fed as a central bank is

really, really well equipped to pour water on fires inside the financial system. Outside the financial system, it has to get a little bit more creative because the core issue here is the fundamental creditworthiness of Main Street borrowers and many homeowners. The best possible solution, which was in some material within the last few days that I published in Financial Times, is to provide government guarantees of emergency bank loans to otherwise creditworthy businesses. We have a problem that the economies have ground to a sudden stop, but I think it's widely expected that after a 90 or 180-day period, many of these businesses will be viable again. So the trick is bridging that period by providing credit.

Banks, I think, have plenty of money, but I think any banker hesitates to lend to a a business about to see its earnings evaporate. If you had, if you had the government provide guarantees, I think banks would have a lot more courage in that situation. Right. I really, there was this great Larry Summers quote that he said a couple of weeks ago, and I keep thinking about it. He's basically saying like somehow, I forget his wording exactly, but essentially the challenge is how do you freeze financial, or sorry, how do you freeze economic time while financial time continues in its current state. This idea is like, okay, everyone knows we have to stay inside.

Everyone knows that there are a lot of viable businesses that will need to shut their doors for 90 to 180 days or whatever, but the bills keep coming in regardless. And essentially, and as you say, that's sort of outside of the monetary system and outside the banking system per se. So it's somehow going to have to be an act of Congress to come up with a solution that lets everyone paid their bills during the essential time of de facto lockdown. Yes, that's exactly right. So, Stephen, I wanted to get to your book, and we spoke a little bit about it earlier,

but when people talk about investment strategy, they're usually treating all the investors in a sort of similar way, but as you point out, people tend to do things differently according to their competitive advantages. Could you maybe just walk us through the premise of your book and why this was something that interested you? Yeah, absolutely. I think that when you sit in a seat like mine where you're really advising a wide range of investors, you start to see over time that the players matter just as much as the market does when it comes to investing. You can look from banks to insurance companies, mutual funds to hedge funds, REITs, sovereign wealth funds. They all operate with very, very distinct advantages and disadvantages.

And those kinds of things not only shape what they buy, how they use those assets, but it also ends up turning around and affecting the value of those assets in the marketplace. And there are just plenty of examples of that, including the kind of markets that we're looking at right now. And I thought for years that we needed something that went through these different kinds of investors and talked about what their strengths and weaknesses might be and how it affected assets. and that's what led me to write the book. To expand this for the strengths and weaknesses of different types of assets, what does that mean specifically? Well, I'll give you an example that's very relevant to where we are now.

Yeah. Let's take source of funds. Some investment platforms just have tremendous, tremendous advantage in the variety and the low cost of their funding. And for example, right now, the 800-pound gorilla on that front is the banking system. So banks traditionally have a really wide range of sources of funds through their retail deposit base. Some of their retail deposits are a kind of fast deposits from big corporations that are moving money through their accounts quickly. Other deposits are very, very long, steady, and stable. sources of funds. Like, for example, if you looked at my checking account, I've probably had some

at least minimal balance in my checking account for decades. So banks could use my money that's there for decades, your money that's there for decades, other people's money that may be there for far shorter periods of time, corporate money, which may come in and out day to day. And they can use that to buy or fund a wide range of not only loans, but securities. If you want to go to the opposite extreme, you could look at hedge funds, for example, or reits, which usually borrow based on repurchase or repo agreements. And those repo or repurchase agreements often last only for a day and have to be renewed every day. Right. That leaves those kinds of organizations, kinds of investors,

highly subject to markets where suddenly there is a run on liquidity. And those are the folks that are struggling at this point. Right. Some of them would have done that levered U.S. Treasury trade that we just described. So I guess the question is, knowing that you have that sort of short-term day-to-day funding, shouldn't that change the way you invest potentially or at least the way that you hedge? Absolutely. I mean, when it comes to the way you invest and you see this in the portfolios, at least most of the portfolios of prudent levered investors, that almost forces you to hold highly liquid assets. So does it make sense to have less. Levered portfolios of treasuries?

Yes, it probably does. Would it make sense to have leveraged portfolios of agency mortgage-backed securities? It probably does. Would it make sense for you to have leveraged portfolios of less liquid assets, like certain forms of corporate debt or loans that may not be easy to sell on short notice? Once you start leveraging less liquid assets, you begin to take much more risk of a liquidity crunch of the sort that we're in now. And what you can see is that in today's market, in current circumstances, levered portfolios of the most liquid assets have been able to de-lever, not necessarily in a pretty fashion, but nevertheless they've been able to de-lever. less they've been able to de-lever, while levered portfolios of less liquid assets had struggled,

and at times I think some of those organizations have been on the brink of failing to meet calls for additional margin, additional cash, and could go out of business. So a lot of this, I think, makes sense to people right now. I mean, we're looking in a market that's in, you know, arguably some of the most volatile, complete turmoil that many people have ever seen in their careers. But, you know, like in the normal times, you know, 2013, was there just like, how do you get this message across? And how do you deal with the issue that I was sort of talking about at the beginning where

prior to right now, the dominant strategy for an investor would essentially just be to go all in on high beta or short volatility or just bet that historical correlations will maintain. Like how do you apply these lessons to non-crisis periods and be a competitive investor? Well, for example, if we step outside the current situation, take insurers, for example. I know it probably is not the usual way people think about insurance companies, but when you hand, when you pay your life insurance bill or your auto bill in many cases, you're really handing those insurance companies a dollar that at some point in the future, they're going to hand right back to you. I mean, an auto policy is probably the simplest. You don't expect to be in an accident, but if you are fender-bender

or otherwise, the auto companies are going to pay to get your car fixed. You, you can, you could have held that dollar in your savings account, but instead you're giving it to the insurance company and the insurance company gives it back to you. Between the time you give it to the insurance company and the time that company pays it back to you, it has the opportunity to invest in a wide range of assets. So with life insurance companies especially, since the time between getting the dollar and paying it back is so long, life insurance. are just beautifully equipped for owning illiquid assets. They can hold loans of a wide range.

They can hold securities that are private placements instead of public securities. They're able to invest in real estate where the return to the investment really requires a long horizon and the ability to tolerate potential swings in. in prices. If you were running a mutual fund in contrast, it would be very difficult to hold securities that have limited liquidity. That's because a mutual fund has to provide daily returns to their shareholders. So just if you look at funding and then you look at other aspects of these platforms like how the accountants measure these things, some are really well equipped to hold the liquid assets and others aren't well equipped. You can see that in a bunch of

other dimensions as well. Where do you see the most extreme liquidity mismatches in the current sell-off? Is there something specifically that you're watching out for? Well, in this setting, the place you always have to look first are the most highly levered investment portfolios. as well as the most highly levered corporate balance sheets. And both of those markets are struggling, both of them. So we've heard reports over the last couple of days of large hedge fund portfolios that are circulating and looking for bids. We've heard of significant demands for liquidity from real estate investment trusts,

which also tend to be leveraged. And you can clearly look at the corporate world, to some extent, investment grade, but very, very clearly in the leveraged loan market where corporations are drawing down their credit lines and trying to fortify their balance sheet for periods of, you know, really difficult earnings ahead. Those are the places I think that are right now most at risk. we're seeing that they'll pay for liquidity at almost any price. How do you identify opportunities, though, because it's really bad right now.

It also looked really bad a week ago. And if you tried to be a hero and said, okay, I'm going to be the liquidity provider. I'm going to be the liquidity provider that jumps into the panic. And you said that a week ago, you might already be finished or you might already be taken out. So how do you think about risk management? and exploiting these opportunities where people will pay almost any price for liquidity, but not blowing up yourself in the process by mistime. Well, so if I started with these investment platforms,

the strongest players in this market are going to be the ones with the most capital, the deepest and lowest cost, and widest variety of funding. those are the places that are going to have the strong hand. You might think that that would include banks, and to some extent that might be true, but regulations limit the degree of credit risk that banks can take. So while they have great advantages in capital and funding, have some disadvantages in regulatory constraint. Insurers are also likely to be in a a strong position, especially insurers that have strong capital and deep access to funds. So that would probably include most of the larger players and some of the players that are using

the investment grade bond market to raise cash at this point. I mean, notably, you've seen Berkshire Hathaway in past crises ride to the rescue. And although that clearly reflects the genius of Warren Buffett, there is no doubt at all. It also reflects the strength of the insurance balance sheet that he's playing off of. So those are the strong platforms. Those platforms have the ability to buy assets that otherwise would be in freefall. They're not subject to usually to margin calls. their accounting rules are very, very kind to assets that show price volatility. So what we've been advising investors to do when they have balance sheets like that is to buy fundamentally sound cash flows at widespread.

And those would include some government-backed cash flows that are trading at distressed levels. And when it comes to the corporate market, cash flows from corporations that have adequate liquidity to weather the next three to six months and have the potential to come out of this crisis potentially stronger than when they went in. And those would be the kind of investments that we've been advising. So then you don't have to be a hero. It's not really about timing the bottom or anything like that or, oh, this fell another 10% after I bought it. But there are looking for opportunities in which the spreads are so wide and the sort of predictability of future cash flows for whatever reason, as you mentioned, something like car insurance, et cetera, are so consistent

that your margin for error is quite large. Yes. I mean, timing might be everything in comedy. but most research shows that it doesn't really amount to much in investing. So if you look at some of these stronger balance sheets, they are going to be able to absorb these assets and honestly provide good returns to their shareholders for years and years to come. Right. Stephen, we really appreciate you coming back on the show, and we're definitely going to look out for your book when it comes out in April. Thanks so much.

Great. Thanks, Tracy. Thanks, Joe. Thanks. That was great. Joe, I was just thinking Warren Buffett has actually been notably absent from the recent sell-off. Yeah, right. We have yet to see an op-ed from him in the New York Times saying something about Buy American.

I am, and I think, and I wonder if, like, everyone is just so shell-shocked, what, does that, maybe that includes Warren Buffett. Like, the degree of uncertainty, I mean, I don't know, like, I mean, I don't know, like, what he's thinking, but, like, the degree of uncertainty here, and the sort of path dependency and the speed with which things can inspire a lot of control. I mean, like, look, in 2008, 2009, we always knew there was a, we didn't know if they were going to get there, but it was, you know, as our guest was talking about,

it was a monetary phenomenon. It was a crisis of the banks, and you can theoretically always paper over a monetary phenomenon. But when you have a real economic crisis where you really do not know how long it will be before people are comfortable spending money in retail establishments again, then the degree of uncertainty

and the desire to hoard liquidity or hoard cash when you have it, I just think that's like what makes this almost feels like incomparable to anything we've seen. Yeah, the speed has certainly been unprecedented. And even in 2008 in the financial crisis, when we were worried about the banking system collapsing, people still went out and, you know, bought sandwiches or, you know, like, got their haircut and things like that. That's just not happening in the current situation. So it does raise all sorts of questions.

The other thing I like about Stephen's framework, in particular, this idea of, you know, different investors have different ways of funding themselves, different advantages. It's that kind of detail that I find a lot of investment theory just sort of glosses over. Like obviously, big investors want to buy low and sell high, but actually, as Stephen was saying, there's a funding consideration there too, and you always want to be sort of matching your funding with your investment horizon or the assets maturity. Yeah. No, it's a really good thing to think about right now in terms of like how people are thinking about whether there are, in fact, opportunities in this market. Right. And whether there are vulnerabilities, because as we've seen, this is sort of so far, I hope this doesn't change by the time this episode comes out. But so far, this has sort of been vindication for the regulators, right? They encourage banks to hold a lot less risk to term out their funding. And it's sort of.

have paid off in this situation, but the downside, of course, is that you have a lot of stuff that's just held outside the banking system and might be harder for the Federal Reserve and other regulators to actually help. Yeah, exactly right. So so far, there is a, there's a argument to be made that the bank, that the post-crisis regulations have done a good job because we have yet to hear about major concerns with systemically important financial institutions because all of the true risk has been pressed out. So so far, there's definitely a case to be made that the regulations are working as some sentence. The number of times you're saying so far in that sentence makes me nervous, but yeah. Let's, like, you know, yeah. Let's hope it stays true by the time this episode

comes out. Should we leave it there? Yes. Okay. This has been another edition of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Weiss and all, you can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And you should follow our producer on Twitter. Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson. Follow the Bloomberg head of podcasts. Francesca Levy at Francesca Today.

And all of the Bloomberg podcasts, you can find them under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening.