We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP335: Mastermind Q1 2021 w/ Tobias Carlisle and Hari Ramachandra

Episode Date: February 7, 2021

In today's episode, Preston and Stig speak to Tobias Carlisle and Hari Ramachandra for the Mastermind Discussion of Q1 2021. Together, they sit down and talk about where they see value in the financia...l markets. They try and shoot holes in each other's stock picks and help each other as much as possible. It's a fun conversation that shows how they currently think about investing in these extraordinary times.  IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN: Whether equities can be a temporary placeholder for cash How to invest long/short in value stocks  Which return can you expect if you invest in Brookfield Asset Management?  Why ARK Fintech Innovation is still a buy despite a more year return above 100% BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Mastermind Discussion Q4 2020. Preston and Stig’s interview with Jeff Booth about his book, The Price of Tomorrow. Our interview with Cathie Wood. Ray Dalio’s argument of why stocks could be trading at 50x earnings. Wes Gray’s research on momentum and value performance. Preston and Stig’s tool for stock selection and determining the correlation of all US stocks and ETFs, TIP Finance. Preston and Stig’s FREE resource, Intrinsic Value Index. Subscribe to Preston and Stig’s FREE Intrinsic Value Assessments. Tobias Carlisle’s podcast, The Acquirers Podcast. Tobias Carlisle’s ETF, ZIG. Tobias Carlisle’s ETF, Deep. Tobias Carlisle’s book, The Acquirer's Multiple – read reviews of this book. Tobias Carlisle’s Acquirer’s Multiple stock screener: AcquirersMultiple.com. Hari’s Blog: BitsBusiness.com Hari: Twitter Tobias: Twitter Stig: Twitter | LinkedIn Preston: Twitter | LinkedIn NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.  SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax HELP US OUT! What do you love about our podcast? Here’s our guide on how you can leave a rating and review for the show. We always enjoy reading your comments and feedback Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to The Investors Podcast. On today's episode, Presta and I speak to Tobias Kailalai and Hari Rambachandra. Once a quarter, we sit down and talk about where we see value in the financial markets. We try and shoot holes through each other's picks and help each other as much as possible. It's a fun conversation that shows how we currently think about investing in these extraordinary times. So without further delay, here's our discussion for Q1, 2021. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most.
Starting point is 00:00:39 We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Hey, everyone, welcome to The Investors podcast, and we've got the Mastermind Group here. Fellows, welcome back to the show. Hello, good to see you again. Good to see you guys. Great to see you guys. I always love doing these. We've already hashed this out ahead of time.
Starting point is 00:01:06 Stig's going to go first. So Stig, fire away. Looking back here in 2020, despite the pandemic, the Dow Jones Industrial Average did 9.7%. And the S&P 500 did 18.4%. And then NASDAQ did 45%. And you would think of all years, you know, this stock market differently, it wouldn't soar.
Starting point is 00:01:30 So I've been thinking a lot about it, you know, using my typical models and just, seeing pick after pick that just seems so expensive. And then I read through the Ask Me Anything that Redalio did on Reddit. And he talked about how these current interest rate levels. And he said, if we assume that to continue, there would be no reason why stocks wouldn't be trading at 50 times earnings. So I kind of felt that was an interesting talking point in itself. But I kind of like the way he thinks. And if that is indeed true, you can definitely make the assumption that there are plenty of stocks out there worth investing in, but also as a value investor, I just tend to be
Starting point is 00:02:07 very skeptical. Like most investors, I have a monthly cash flow that I can set aside to investing. And due to the Kermak condition, it just becomes harder and harder for me to find those undervalue of stocks. So I want to pitch a method to have a placeholder for a cash. So that's going to be my pitch here for today. And I could, of course, choose to just hold actual cash, but giving the excessive money printing that we're seeing, I really don't want to have that with the opportunity cost of inflation. So I wanted to have that invested in something. And I kind of like want to talk to you about where that something could be. And being a value investor, I tend to think about how about a value ETF? And I'll be the first one to say that
Starting point is 00:02:51 value ATFs probably haven't performed as well as we would have hoped here in the recent years. So I was trying to think about, well, what if we did a value into F, but also a momentum ATAF and just set 50-50, and then use that as a placeholder to dollar cost average into. And I also want to say that's until, you know, we find something that's really interesting. So it's not necessarily like this is what you're supposed to do, but more like, hey, if you're just building up cash, why not get a return and, you know, have lower opportunity costs by doing so. And we know that historically momentum upperforms the SNP 500 in bold markets and value outperforms in bear markets. So thinking about that, you know, I wanted to have my cake
Starting point is 00:03:31 and eat it too by saying that I also want to have this placeholder that could still outperform the market. And obviously that is a tall order. There's a lot of value ETFs and momentum ETFs out there. I also just want to say that as such, there's no strict definition about the rules of and value ETF. It's not like you can only call it. Fs and moment. It's not like you can only call. You call yourself a value ETF if you by definition only have stocks that's trading at, I don't know, single PE or single digit price to operating cash flows. That's not how it works. But obviously all value ETFs are built up around classic price metrics that have historically
Starting point is 00:04:07 have been proven to be unperforming. Just like there's no strict rules for value theft, the same is the case for Mentorm Ittafs. The criteria are selected according to price performance. So for instance, it could be stocks that are gained most in price the past months or three months, whatever it is. And all momentum ETFs have different rules for rebalancing, but the core is, again, always price performance. So instead of going to rabbit hole with various individual ETFs, really to conceptualize the strategy, I just went with the biggest value and the biggest momentum ETF out there. And both of them are focusing on large-cap stocks, which also traditional have a bit
Starting point is 00:04:44 lower volatility, which a lot of investors like. And the value of eachf I chose, for this example, is Vanguard's value ETF, and the stock ticker is VTV, and it's a huge ETF with 97 billion on the management. And the return the past 10 years have been 11.23%. So 10,000 would have approximately turned into 29,000, whereas the S&P 500 would have turned into 37,000. Now, Vanguard is notoriously known for low fees, and this one only costs four basis points, so that is 0.04%. And right now, I think that low fees are critical for, uh, uh, especially because it's a cash placeholder, but also especially giving the low interest rate environment. And I don't expect equities to yield a high return in these markets. For the momentum
Starting point is 00:05:30 ETF, I've looked at ICS-E-I-USA momentum factor ETF, and the stock ticker is MTF. MTFUM. Total as on the management is $14.4 billion, and is by far the biggest out there. The expense ratio is a little higher, 15 basis point. This is also a relative new, at least according to the value, which I've mentioned before, the inception was 18 of April 2013. So if you invested 10,000 back then, it would worth 32,000 compared to 23,500 for the SNP 500. So not surprisingly, it's unperforming because we've seen a bull market. And as mentioned before, value has underperformed because we have seen the bull market. So when we do the numbers and we have a combination of value and growth, we can see that, yes, it has also performed better than the
Starting point is 00:06:14 SDP 500 in the timeframe that we're looking at. Another way, of course, to make a combination of make this play, not just looking, the US could be to go with a global value and a global momentum strategy, but the idea is more or less the same. The reason why you might want to make this twist is because the US has the third most expensive stock market in the world, mission on a Shiloh-Pe ratio. So perhaps you want to go that route, but sort of like the concept is more and less the same. So I really want to open up to the group. Hari, please go first. there should be a cash replacement somewhere you can have a store hold of value of course some might argue that should be bitcoin or gold who are you talking about harry no nobody here i guess i think this is another interesting option so i really
Starting point is 00:07:08 like the way you framed it but the question i had was when i was looking at the holdings of both these ETS that you mentioned, one is value, the other one is momentum. And then you look at VTI, Vanguard Total Market Index Fund. It's kind of a union of these two. So instead of holding these two, like we can just simplify and hold Vanguard total index fund. And interestingly, the returns for the past 10 years, there is 13.8% higher than these two. And I'm trying to simplify because it's a cash replacement. I don't want to be tracking it all the time.
Starting point is 00:07:47 Somewhere, it's more like a storehold of value. And you brought up an interesting point, which Ray Dolly also pointed out recently is this is a time to diversify and across countries. So another ETAF from Vanguard is VanguardXUS, VEU, ETF. That has pretty much every other country except US. So I'm just thinking from more a simplification, perspective? Would that be something you would consider as a cash replacement? Yeah, so you bring up a lot of good points here, Hari. I think the default answer I would
Starting point is 00:08:24 go to here would be global. But it kind of like depends on how ignorant that you choose to be. Because you could say, for instance, something like momentum really works well right now in the stage right now because we have this bull market. And so to the first point where you said, oh, why not like taking the entire stock market? So if you go with pure value and if you go with pure momentum, they typically perform better. Like, if you do like a 50-50 allocation to that, I have some research on this. It's actually a good friend who is Gray who has done a lot of research on that. And so if you want to dig more into it, I'll make sure to link to some links in the show notes where he specifically talks about what you address there. But again, that also comes
Starting point is 00:09:04 down to specifically how do you, what is value? And in this example, I just took the too big, it's more to conceptualize the strategy. I think you can definitely argue that, oh, why don't we just go for deep value instead of going for value in general. How would that work? I really just wanted to do it symbol. I can see that Toby is smirking there. Before I toss it over to Toby, Mr. DeValue, I just wanted to say that if you are listening to this in the European Union, the stock tickets would be slightly different. I'm in Denmark, so part of the European Union. I'm personally invested in Vanguard Global Value Factor and XTragor's MSEI World Momentum ETF. And so without going too much into what's specific for European citizens, just in case I get flutter with people saying,
Starting point is 00:09:48 but hey, I'm in Europe, I don't have access to these. What do you do? This is conceptually the same strategy. Toby. Like the late 1990s, the last decade has been characterized by the very big, very expensive companies running up the most. And so, you know, it's Microsoft again, but I don't think Microsoft is egregiously overvalued, but I do think that there are a lot of very big expensive names that are unusually overvalued. Same thing happened in the late 1990s. And then what happened was the next decade saw two big stock market crashes, and the very expensive large names basically just drifted sideways with a whole lot of volatility.
Starting point is 00:10:30 And so I kind of think that at some stage, this cycle will change. And that's sort of what's going to happen in this market, that it's going to be the big expensive names that are going to tread water and go backwards. And I think that hopefully what that means is that the smaller value names do better, but certainly the smaller value names have not participated in the last decade. And so don't have that same level of overvaluation. The only way that I would respond to this is you have to look at the interest rates back then. So back whenever all these companies were running up in the 2000 range, interest rates were in excess of what, 7% on the 10-year treasury, something like that, I would guess. So
Starting point is 00:11:09 as they're able to adjust those interest rates, they're able to somewhat normalize the markets. And so you were able to have these contract credit contraction events back then. Now I don't know that you're necessarily in that same situation with interest rates being down at zero. So if that's the factor that allowed them to go sideways because the central banks were allowed to let things normalize, my concern is I don't necessarily know that that's where we're at today. Can they let the markets normalize or are they going to continue to compress interest rates aggressively at any sign? I would argue that in February into April of 2020 was a perfect example of central banks stepping in and saying, nope, we are not going to allow
Starting point is 00:11:59 things to normalize at this point. We cannot afford to allow things to normalize. So my concern is more on the side of are we in a different type of environment just because of the way central banks are going to step in and continue to execute these policies that we've seen for the last 10 years relative to these other points in time where they were able to do that. Ari? This is a very good segue, Kristen, and this is the question I had for both Toby and Stig is the reason Stig is even thinking about this ETF is to have a replacement for cash, and that is the mood today.
Starting point is 00:12:34 It's like everybody wants to get out of cash. and they're looking for a home. So is it a fair assumption that the reason everybody is thinking like this is that we are all pretty confident that the central banks would not raise interest rates? I'm certainly not confident. I was going to go into my answer in a little bit of detail because I wanted to respond to Preston to. The two things that I would say is that the late 1990s and today share the same interest rate characteristic in the sense that they were both falling. interest rates were higher then, but they were certainly directionally down. And I think that the direction of interest rates is more important for stock markets than
Starting point is 00:13:11 the absolute level of interest rates. If you look at, you know, the Fed model is this sort of idea that the Fed kind of pushes, but it doesn't test very well. But the idea is that they look at the basically the dividend yield over or the earnings yield even over the interest rates, so the 10 year or the 30 year, whatever is most appropriate. probably the 10 year they tend to look at. And they show that when there's a big differential between dividends or earnings and the 10 year, that seems to suggest that equity is going to do very well. And when there's a small differential, then you should be in the bonds. It turns out that's
Starting point is 00:13:46 not the case. There's plenty of research out there that shows it doesn't work. It doesn't matter. They always talk about it like it's going to happen. But what that tells to me is that the interest rates really don't matter that much. It's more the direction of the interest rates. Does that mean, though that interest rates can't rise from here. I certainly think that the central banks are heavily incentivized to keep interest rates falling and down, but they are always that way. And they were certainly that way in the 70s, and they didn't raise rates in the 70s because they wanted to. They raised them in the 70s because they had to. And if I look across the inflation expectations over the last five years, they keep on saying we want them over 2%, but the
Starting point is 00:14:24 inflation expectations last time I checked for about, according to the market, we're about 2.18 which is as high as it's been in five years and trending up, which makes perfect sense. If you just reduce the amount of stuff that's made in the world and you pump a whole lot of money into the world, the stuff that gets made as denominated in that money that got pumped into the world, you're going to need more pieces of paper for fewer real things in the world.
Starting point is 00:14:49 They're going to go up in price. That's what happens. And that will be caught by the CPI, and it will show them finally that there is inflation. And I think at some point, they're not going to want to do it, but they're going to have to do it. The only other possibility, if they can't get it done,
Starting point is 00:15:04 is that we look like Japan or we look like Europe. And both of those places, I don't think that they're well known for their stock markets over the last 20 years or 30 years in Japan's case. They've both had shocking stock market performance. So I think there's a very, very nasty outcome on the horizon, like visible. I don't know when it gets here,
Starting point is 00:15:25 but everything's very, very expensive and interest rates have probably got to go up some stage. And if they don't, it doesn't matter because everything's going to get cheaper. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right, I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18,
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Starting point is 00:19:59 that rates are going to go up, I think they're going to go up, but I think they're going to go up all at once. And like you said, who knows when that day is going to come. They're going to throw everything they've got at this thing in order to keep those yields pegged at some percent and lower. I kind of suspect you might be getting to whatever that level is here pretty quickly because they can't afford to issue all this debt. The fiscal appropriation side and the rate at which it's growing is just astronomical. So they can't issue all that debt at higher yields because everything blows up at that point. So that's why they have to do yield curve control.
Starting point is 00:20:36 So although I agree with you, I think rates should be going up. I think CPI is a total farce. I think the real inflation rate is significantly higher. And I think most people in the market would agree with that. But I think everyone has so much faith in central banks stepping in and doing the yield curve control that it's not going to be something that. And so how are prices going to get punished if you continue to limit the amount of yield that's taking place?
Starting point is 00:21:04 And this is my defense for Stig's momentum, ETF, because I think that the central banks are going to do everything and anything they can in order to prevent yields from going any higher from where they're at right now. Do you think that they were doing everything and anything they could in 2000 and 2008? Yeah, but I think if we were talking about nominal yields, they had a lot more flexibility in area to maneuver back then. But now where we're at, it's compressed so much, almost like a spring. Like if you were thinking of it like a mechanical spring before, it had some area to bounce. Now it's compressed so much. And if it even goes up a smidgen, like everything comes
Starting point is 00:21:46 unglued, there's no way that they can allow that to happen. So I'm with Hari. I think people are looking at, I don't know that I would say that they're looking at equities as a new form of cash. I think they're looking at equities as something that won't become completely impaired if that dire scenario of yields going up plays out because anything bond related just blows up, becomes completely impaired at that point. But if you're own inequities, it's going to store your buying power. And everyone's getting all this fiat that's being added into the system. And it has to go somewhere and they're looking at the equity market and saying, well, they're going to have free cash flows and they're not debasing the number of shares they've got outstanding. So I guess I got to go here
Starting point is 00:22:24 to this company or this expectation of this growth rate because they're signing on 100% more users next month? You could look at Buffett's experience in the 70s when he writes about this a little bit when he was the alternative to equities was commodities, precious metals, and he talks about gold. And he says, over a period of time, and I forget exactly, but it was a long period of time, the greatest investor in the world, the greatest equity in the investor in the world, could only just keep up with gold. And everybody else in the world is not the greatest investor in the world. It's like, I don't know whether the running those things starts now where it started 10 years ago, whether you needed to be doing this stuff 10 years ago. Stig, I got one point on your two
Starting point is 00:23:04 picks, the VTV and M-T-U-M. For me, what I've been looking at over the last as like the benchmark or the hurdle rate is pretty much the NASDAQ. And when I look at how manipulated the markets are now, in the past year is a perfect example of how much central bank manipulation is playing out. What I'm looking for is something that can outpace the NASDAQ. I'm not looking at the S&P. The NASDAQ is my benchmark at this point as far as equity performance. So where I wanted to see is before the crash, before we had the February into April crash that was dramatic, the government policy response, and then all the performance had happened afterwards. So we're almost at exactly, it was 341 days from that scenario that I'm describing, the peak,
Starting point is 00:24:01 the crash, and then the recovery. I'm using that as my benchmark of what can beat that performance through this manipulated period of time. The NASDAQ performed at a 37% return from that top to where we are today. When I look at VTV, the value ETF, it had 1% performance through that same period of time. When I look at the momentum pick, it had 24% performance. The reason I want to look at the top to the bottom to the top again is because I think it gives us a sense of what's to come in the future. I suspect we're going to have another big liquidity shock to the market. The policymakers are going to step in. They're going to come with two times or three times the amount of stimulus that they had previously. And the companies that were able to do well
Starting point is 00:24:49 during that period of time, in my opinion, are probably going to be the ones that continue to perform through the next manipulated pump. So when I'm looking at those, I'm a little bit concerned because if this theory that I have that they're just going to step in and do what they did last time, but just two or three X the numbers, I suspect that both of those picks are going to underperform just the NASDAQ in general if that theory holds true. Yes, I absolutely agree with that. But to me, NASDAQ is not the benchmark. I understand why you would do it because you capsulate into that theory. NASDAQ did really well because we had this crazy pandemic and what performs well.
Starting point is 00:25:29 Quite obvious that what performed well would be the stocks that would be in NASDAQ. That's the new world, the new digital work that, well, that we were in. I don't know if that's the right benchmark to have. The way that I would instead conceptualize this strategy is saying, I don't really know what happens. I can probably pick different ETFs that would be doing different things that would capture late XYC happening, but I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know if the interest rate is going up or down. I don't know if I want to have too much exposure to these index with these major major
Starting point is 00:26:00 companies that are just taking up all of it. You could even look at something like the S&P 500. I just want a place where I don't get inflated away until I find something that I find interesting. What can I dollar cost average into without doing a month? analysis of that. And I was thinking about perhaps that could be, you know, 50% value or 50% momentum. And then we can go in and talk, well, how do we avoid being too exposed into some pegs? If you look at the value itself, I think the biggest position there would be Berksa
Starting point is 00:26:30 Holloway with a little less than 3%. So I think that's one component. The other component I would like to throw back to the group here is that I spoke to Monis Papra about this last year. and he said that he thought a lot about placeholders for cash because we all need placeholders for cash. And he said he didn't want to use an value ETF. He didn't want to use MENTEMETF, but he thought about having his placeholder for cash being Berksa Heatherway. He didn't want to do it simply because if the market crashed, then Berksa Hellerway would crash
Starting point is 00:27:00 with it. So I kind of like wanted to throw that back to the group and like here, regardless of what you think about this proposed strategy, what do you do for placehold for cash? I almost don't want to ask Preston because I know what he's going to say, but if I can throw that over to Harry and Toby, what is your placeholder for cash? Well, this might be a reasonable segue into my pick, which I'm going to propose my own ETF. I'm sorry about that, but I have to.
Starting point is 00:27:26 So I have two. I have one is a small and micro ETF, US based small and micro, and it has about 100 names, and I look for things that are cash rich, generating cash flow and undervalued. And that comes from a universe of stocks. So the ETF, we've only taken it over and changed it to this strategy since October last year. October 26 was a switchover date. That ETF, that universe of stocks, that small and micro value has had a very bad decade.
Starting point is 00:27:53 It's fallen over the entire decade while the rest of the market has gone up. The other ETF that I run is called Zig, which I've spoken about in the show lots of times. It is long, short value. So what we do is we're long value names and then we're short, overvalued. heavily indebted companies that have statistical earnings, manipulations, statistical fraud, indications that they not only are they not worth a lot, but that they're potentially worth nothing.
Starting point is 00:28:19 And so that's the sort of stuff that we look to short. And the reason I like that, because before I launched, I thought about this a lot, what would you launch into a market that is extremely overvalued and has been hostile to value for a long time? You know, I'm a contrarian, and I do think that at some stage,
Starting point is 00:28:34 the cycle will flip to a value type cycle. And so I wanted to be long of value names. then I felt like it needed some protection because I was concerned that if I launched into a market like this, at some stage we were going to get this earth-shattering blow-up. And the way that I solved that problem was by having a lower exposure to the market and by having those shorts in there that when the market goes down, these are the sort of things that tend to go down more than the market goes down.
Starting point is 00:29:00 So that's sort of my solution to it, that before we launched, I did think through this possibility. We carry a little bit of cash. we have some shorts and we're long undervalued names that are cash rich. One of the names that were undervalied is Berkshire. We hold that we have a little bit more than 3% of that in the portfolio. You know, I don't buy these things as cash replacements. I buy Berkshire because I thought it was extremely undervalued at the time that we bought it,
Starting point is 00:29:23 which was about March 23 last year. The differential was about as wide as it's got in the last sort of 20 years for Berkshire. And Berkshire had exposure to Apple at that stage. Berkshire's never got credit for the Apple, but it's in there. I would never invest on the basis of having a cash substitute. I don't fully understand what Monash is talking about when he does that because I'm investing in something that I want to hold forever, ideally.
Starting point is 00:29:52 And Berkshire is one of those things that you can basically hold forever. It generates enormous amounts of cash. There's approaching zero chance of that having a material blowup, but that's just not a zero under almost any circumstances. There are very, very vanishingly few sort of possibilities of zero in Berkshire because it's so well managed. You've got the world's greatest investors sitting on control of the cash. It's generating cash all the time. He's redeploying at high rates of return.
Starting point is 00:30:20 I think you can just hold Berkshire. Now, are you going to get some volatility through that period possibly? But like you said, Stig, you're investing every month into these things. Just dollar cost average into stuff that's undervalued. You'll be okay. If you look at the characteristics of a cash versus equity, I mean, it, it, doesn't really hold on its own, like when we put it to test. And when you need it, you probably will not be able to take it. And that is the risk of using equity as a cash replacement. So I hope
Starting point is 00:30:49 whatever we are talking, it's not for our emergency funds. Our emergency funds should be in cash. This is beyond that discussion. One thing is it can go through just having a monthly cash loan, then setting aside that money. You know, that's one way. Another way is that I happen to sit on some cash for different reasons. And I think this is something that other investors risen it with, specifically, I sold my position in Spotify here last week. I saw some different castoristics in that space that meant me want to sell it. And it doesn't really matter what the case was. Because I kind of feel that would be a long tangent what's happening in the music space and podcasting space and all that. But for whatever reason, I decided to realize my gains on
Starting point is 00:31:27 that and just then sit with cash. And then suddenly I was sitting with what I felt was too much cash. and I see a lot of money printing. I saw a lot of inflation like events before. I don't want to be sitting there with that, which was why this whole idea of having something like an intermediate between I find something real value to invest in and then something I just know for a fact is going to be worth less and less. So I guess my question to you would also be, do you even have such a type of investment? Because it's not something I've tried before. before I was either in cash or I was in something I wanted to hold for ever, preferably. Do we even have that middle step?
Starting point is 00:32:07 You don't think that you'll find something over the next 12 months to deploy that cash into? I probably would. I guess it also depends what you think the inflation rate is. If you think the inflation rate is 2%, you can probably just sit on it. I think the inflation rate is higher than the current interest rates. I think that we're losing money. We're certainly losing purchasing. Let's assume that that's a given. I still think that if you look at every year in the market, there is some time in the year when stocks go on sale.
Starting point is 00:32:38 It's happened regularly, even since not counting the 2007-89 megabare, every other year has had this opportunity. If you have your list of stocks that you want to own and you've got a rough kind of valuation for them, you just have to sit there and wait for the stocks to go and sell. Be like the apocryphal pig farmer in the Fortune article. he hangs out on his pig farm raising pigs. And then when he reads in the paper that, you know,
Starting point is 00:33:02 the market's gone down 200 points for the day and it's going to go down another 200 points tomorrow. Then he goes in and he buys his stocks. And then he goes back to his pig farm. And when he's on the pig farm and he sees the market was up 100% last year and experts think it's going to go up another 100% this year. That's when he goes into town and he sells all of his stocks. He's selling the optimism and you buy and the fear and greed. We're in a very, very optimistic point in this market.
Starting point is 00:33:26 but I do think that there's going to be like the annual sale comes around. Sometimes that annual sale turns into a megabare that goes on for a few years. I think that that's becoming increasingly likely. But whether it turns to a mega bear or not, you're going to get an opportunity when the stocks go and sell this year. This was a fascinating discussion, by the way. And my theme was also very similar. I was looking for a storehold of value. My pick today is Brookfield Asset Management.
Starting point is 00:33:56 This has been a company that I have been following for a while, and it is well known among value investing circles. And basically, it's a global diversified alternative asset manager, and it has nearly $600 plus billion in asset under management, and it's spread across 30 countries, wild continents. 50% of their AUM is in North America, but the rest is spread across. and they're growing really fast in Asia, and especially India, they have been making some really interesting investments in India, including they bought a company that owns the cell phone towers in India. And cell phones are a really hyper-growing business in India and a lot more to grow.
Starting point is 00:34:44 But in general, their investments can be or their businesses can be classified into real estate, infrastructure, private equity. And recently they bought Oak. or 62% stake in oak tree, so they won't credit as well now. And in infrastructure, they invest both in renewable energy and also what they call as data infrastructure. In fact, from their annual report, what they say is they invest in critical global infrastructure that facilitates the movement of storage, of energy, water, freight, passengers, and even data. So if you want to move anything, they're investing in it. So what I like about them is definitely their track record, obviously.
Starting point is 00:35:29 They have a very strong balance sheet and good liquidity and more importantly, access to capital. I think they can raise funds more than anybody else. And they have been growing their asset under management at a rate of almost 20% CAGR. they were managing around 20 billion in 2002, and today they are managing upwards of 600 billion. And apart from that, if you look at their fee-related earning, I mean, the way I look at their valuation is they have fee-related earnings value, they have carried interest value,
Starting point is 00:36:08 and then they have their own capital invested in their partnerships. So the way they work is they create this partnership in these different areas. they invest their own money, so they become the managing partners. So they get revenue out of the fee that they charge for the rest of the partners and also from the appreciations and the cash flows of their businesses. And if you look at their fee-related earnings, they have grown 3x from 2015 and their accumulated, unrealized, carried interest. If you look at a grass that has grown around six times, six-x, in the market,
Starting point is 00:36:46 last five years starting 2015 and net has grown around four or five X. So overall really strong growth, both in terms of revenue, carried interest or asset under management. Another interesting thing that people don't look at them like a read, but if you look at their dividend, even though they are not really high, they have been raising their dividend around 10% annually for the last nine to 10 years. And they have been increasing for the consecutive last nine years. So some of the trends that are going in their favor are the infrastructure build out, especially in Asia and even in U.S. in terms of renewable infrastructure, renewable energy infrastructure or data center or IoT infrastructure. And there is an increase phase in the allocation of funds to
Starting point is 00:37:38 alternative assets because of the low interest rate we were just discussing. A lot of the lot of lot of countries and family officers and sovereign funds are all also looking into a place where they can put their cash. They don't want to hold cash, obviously. And all these votes well for Brookfield Assess Management. And based on their own valuation, today's price for Brookfield Asset Management is way below their own assessment of what their fair value to be. Again, we don't want to take their number.
Starting point is 00:38:14 And I'm not an expert at valuing businesses. I'm looking to you guys to give me insights on their valuation. But in terms of downside protection and slightly contrary in bet, because the market is not so happy with them because of all the stuff that's going on with COVID and their exposure to real estate in commercial real estate, especially in malls and whatnot. But they have been aggressively buying up. In fact, they are taking their read, which was focused on retail and commercial real estate private. They even offered to buy back their shares in their REIT. And Bruce Flatt, who is the CEO, has a good track record and has good insights in this area. So all this gives me confidence to park my money with them for the foreseeable future.
Starting point is 00:39:03 So I wanted to hear your thoughts on valuation and what do you think of the risks. I like to pick, Harry, and I've had a look at Brookfield. asset management quite a few times in the past because Bruce Flat is very well known. Brookfield asset management is very well known. Great operators, great investors. If they can continue to do what they've done in the past, it's probably going to deliver above market returns here. I have looked at it and passed in the past, and I'll just tell you why I've passed. I'm probably excessively nitpicky when it comes to these things, so feel free to dismiss this. But when I look at this structure, I just can't understand it. I can't figure it out. And I have this kind of
Starting point is 00:39:40 bias because I, you know, I'm Australian. I've seen a lot of fad in the early 2000s, led by Macquarie for sort of securitization, and they became very good at finding big assets, securitizing them, selling them off in these reasonably complex structures. There were a lot of copycats around who did the same thing, putting together these complex structures, and I've seen them collapse. And so I always get very nervous when I see a complex structure that I can't understand. And I've gone through it and I've tried a few times. It's just there are too many moving parts in it for me to figure out what it's worth. That's just my bias. I'm not saying there's anything that's going to happen with Brookfield, and it's just, I'm limited in that regard,
Starting point is 00:40:19 but it's just for my own purposes. I need to understand exactly what I'm owning, and I just can't get there with Brookfield. I'm really happy you said that, Toby, because I kind of feel the same way. I looked at it for quite some time, not because it's, I wouldn't say at all, it's too similar to Berksdale-Hathaway, but it has some of the same characteristic, and people very often put them in the same sentence, even though there are quite different companies. Like you, whenever I look at it, I kind of feel, I don't understand accounting anymore. I tried to do some valuation that came up with some sort of five to seven percent expected return with a strong downside, which is definitely appealing to some investors in this environment. But to me,
Starting point is 00:41:00 I just need a much larger margin of safety for a company I do not understand as well. that is an above market return at the moment, by the way. I forgot to mention this earlier, but my estimate of what the market's going to do, so if you assume that we go back to normal valuations over a decade, so that's the assumption that some people are going to say that's ridiculous, we never going back to normal valuations. But if you go back to the long run average that we've had since 1850 in the stock market, which is a P of about 16 or 17, you trend that way over a decade.
Starting point is 00:41:30 What the next decade's returns look like in terms of returns are 0.9. percent compounded and that includes 1.5 percent in dividends. So the index is actually going to go backwards. Your return is going to be mostly from dividends. So that's the context of looking at something that's got a 5 to 7 percent return. That doesn't sound like a higher return, but that is in this market. You brought up really good point there too because it's all about assumptions, right? Like we talked about inflation before. Do you think inflation is 2 percent? There's definitely a lot of people who are listening to our Wednesday shows who would feel that inflation
Starting point is 00:42:04 is much, much higher. Like, do we think that interest rate are going to stay this low and we're going to have P's of 50? Is that going to be the new normal? Well, then we have a lot of undervalued equities out there. Or do we look at more historical data who would say, like what you suggest there, Toby, like perhaps, I think you said 0.9. But that's, you know, that's in a very different interest rate environment that we're looking at. So we can talk about five or seven or 10% returns. And Preston's pick is like, the historical performance of that is just, Absolutely amazing. But it really, really depends on what are the assumptions that you're looking across this lens. And I also think that's why we have, to some extent, we might have different
Starting point is 00:42:41 picks also here because we're looking at it through slightly different lenses. I probably shouldn't say it's slightly different. We were looking at very different lenses. And when is five or seven percent enough, it really depends on the assumptions you're looking at right now. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up. And customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC 2 or running an enterprise GRC program, VANTA keeps you secure
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Starting point is 00:46:17 So, Hari, using the benchmark that I was using before to looking at Stig and Toby's pick, I'm going back and I'm looking at that date. before we had the big market contraction, looking at how it performed through the drop, and then looking at it how it performed through the rebound. And when I'm looking at this particular pick, which the ticker is BAM, the performance was not good. And where the performance really struggled was during the credit contracting event. So when you look at how much it dropped compared to those other benchmarks, particularly the NASDAQ, This pick was down 51%, and then from that drop of 51%, it rebounded probably, what would it be, 10 months?
Starting point is 00:47:03 It rebounded 68%, which wasn't bad, but if you're comparing it to the NASDAQ, the rebound from the bottom matched the S&P 500. But during the liquidity event, it was significantly lower, and that's why it had such a significant underperformance. So if we're comparing through that entire cycle, through this, I'm calling it a manipulated cycle event over the past year, it underperformed the NASDAQ by 50% approximately. So that's where I'm looking at this and just saying, you know, because my expectation moving forward is what we've seen over the past year is what we're going to continue to see moving forward for the next year. I kind of want to defend Harry here a little bit because I don't know that you can look at one drawdown. and recovery and sort of conclude anything meaningful from that for a number of reasons. One is that you don't really know what the characteristics of the companies were. You'd have to adjust for where were they trading before they went into it.
Starting point is 00:48:00 And secondarily, you know, we're in this market cycle that is still a large cap growth cycle that hasn't ended yet. And so it's always going to favor large cap growth. So we went through the dip, large cap growth bounced the hardest out of the bottom. There's no guarantee that that's what happens. the next time around. And in fact, I think it's probably not going to happen that way. I think it's much more likely that we're coming to the end of this cycle and that we're, I don't know if it's the next drawdown or the one after that, but the relative return, so good old school investment manager, Rich Pazina had a note that came out earlier this week where Pazina said, you can look
Starting point is 00:48:37 at the, he's talking Russell 1,000, which is the biggest 1,000 names listed, and he's looking at dividing that index into 2, one half his value and one half his growth. The, growth side of it is expected to grow earnings at 16% a year and trades at a P.E. of 22, the value side is expected to grow earnings at 23% a year, which is 6 or 7% higher than the growth side, and it trades at a P.E. of 15. So it's going to grow faster and it's trading at a discount. I know which side of that I want to own. So I think that this market is primed for a change. I definitely think it's prime for a change. I don't think we're talking about a small cap company. I think the top line on this company is $67 billion. So it is not a small company. This is a large cap company.
Starting point is 00:49:26 And if we wanted to extend out the manipulation cycle to let's just make it 2012, the performance on this is 231 percent and the NASDAQ is 478%. So my opinion is everything that's happened since 2008, 2009 has been a totally manipulated cycle with quantitative easing, inserting itself through the fixed income market. My expectation, is that's not only going to continue, but it's going to aggressively continue. And for me, I'm just looking at it saying, we're just going to have more of the same because the central banks aren't going to allow this thing to melt down. So my expectation moving forward is that the NASDAQ will continue to outperform this pick.
Starting point is 00:50:01 Really good insights. And that's the reason I bring my picks here, just to get through this shredding machine and see if it survives. Going back to what Toby was saying, one of the things I was looking at is, which are the stocks that will have a surprise to the upside. And I think Toby kind of referred to that when he was talking about the split in Russell 1000. And with Brooksfield also, right now, I think people have written them off because of pandemic. And if the vaccines work and if people get back to normal life, then the surprise is always to the upside for them. Because that is where they're hardest hit right
Starting point is 00:50:44 now, both from a sentiment and also from a bottom line and top line perspective. So that was one of my thinking when I was picking this talk for this mastermind. All right. So, I mean, you guys have heard a little bit of my thesis on where I think this is going. And, you know, who knows whether that's a valid thesis or not. I will say this. A lot of my thinking changed after reading a book called The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth. I don't know if you guys had a chance to read this book. So in this book, Jeff pretty much outlines why the impacts of the incentive structure that inserts itself after so many decades of this inflationary monetary policy and how it effectively creates technology that's moving so fast, and I would even argue moving so fast now that
Starting point is 00:51:36 it's starting to outstrip humanity's ability to handle this speed at which the technology is growing. And so that's one of the reasons why I've kind of started looking at the NASDAQ is kind of my benchmark of performance. If you're not outperforming that over a long period of time, call it five years, four years, whatever you want to use. From an equity to equity basis, you're comparing a stock or multiple stocks to a basket. I think this is the basket to beat. And if you're beating it, then kudos to you. When I look at the value filter that we've got, The thing that is just so prevalent, irregardless of market cap, is finance. There are so many financial companies that are in the top valuation categories.
Starting point is 00:52:20 And I have to ask myself, why? Why is that the case? Why are so many people not applying the premium to financial equity companies, especially the big ones, that they're applying to everywhere else in the market? it. And my opinion is that I think most market participants can suspect or they're anticipating a change in the air as to how finance is going to be conducted in the future. Everyone knows my top pick, right? It's Bitcoin. That hasn't changed. My expectation in the coming 12 months is that it's going to go 8 to 9 or 10x from where we're at right now. And we're at, what are we at?
Starting point is 00:52:57 Like $32,000 right now on Bitcoin. And this is another important thing. I hear from people all the time I just can't understand Bitcoin or it's just too much work for me to dig in and understand network effects, protocols, all that kind of stuff. And they're saying, but I want to have some type of exposure because when I listen to some of your conversations, I do agree that there is something that's systematically going to change in the way that finance is conducted. But I just don't, I'm not buying into the idea that it's just Bitcoin. It might be these other things. So my pick today is for FinTech, financial technology. The ticker for this, is arc F, A-R-K-F. Last week on the show, we had Kathy Wood. Kathy, I believe, I don't know if you
Starting point is 00:53:43 know this stat or not, Toby, but I think I read somewhere recently that her funds are attracting more capital than any other ETFs in the entire space right now. And if you listen to Kathy or you listen to last week's show and you listen to any of her other interviews, she is brilliant. She is somebody who I think has a real beat, especially when it comes to technology, the things that are up and rising in the space. I think she's one of the smartest people out there in the ETF space. So this is her ticker for FinTech, anything that's financial related. When you look at this performance over the baseline that I measured everybody else to, it's performed really well. It's up 99% from pre-crash before the April or you go back to the beginning or the end of February when the market was at its top before the big liquidity crunch.
Starting point is 00:54:38 If you go from that top to where we are today, it's done 99 to 100%. Whereas the NASDAQ has done 37%. So it's nearly three times the outperformance of the NASDAQ over that same period of manipulation cycle. is how I'm calling it. My expectation moving forward is that this is actually going to get aggressively better, mostly because when you look at a lot of these large-cap banks, I think a lot of them are very late to the game. I think that the companies that are in this space call it the square, the PayPal's. There's some over in China that are part of her basket. They're going to do extraordinarily well in the coming year, especially with some of the
Starting point is 00:55:20 expectations on where I think some of the other things are going to go, particularly Bitcoin. When you look at how they're adding or kind of their metric for companies that fit the basket, they're looking at things that have transaction innovation. We just saw probably three weeks ago, the OCC came out and is now allowing big banks, small banks, it doesn't matter. If they want to use blockchain technology in order to conduct clearing, that's now based on regulation, approved and allowed, which demonstrates to me that the regulation that many people kind of suspected was going to take place in this space, which was that they're going to regulate everything and that it's not going to materialize, is actually the exact opposite.
Starting point is 00:56:04 The other thing that they're looking for in this basket for this ARCF is anything that's dealing with blockchain technology. They're looking for something that's risk transformation. Maybe they're using artificial intelligence in order to start assessing risk in a more analytical way than some person sitting at a desk saying this is triple B or double B or whatever. Frictionless funding platforms, customer facing platforms, and new intermediaries is the metrics that they're using to drop things into this basket. I had mentioned Square, PayPal, Tencent is in here, Zillow Group. These are some of the top holdings. Alibaba's in there. So I think that this is a great place for a person who
Starting point is 00:56:47 is looking at the current dynamic that's playing out in the banking industry and saying, I think there's a lot of change in the horizon. This is a massive industry, but I just can't wrap my head around all the technical things that are happening. I think this is a great place to park some of your money. And I suspect that it's going to continue to aggressively outperform the NASDAQ. Kristen, this is an interesting pick. I was looking at their holdings.
Starting point is 00:57:14 And I agree with you. I think Kathy has a great track record. She was one of the investors who found Tesla early on and held on to it through all the ups and downs. She has a lot of conviction and great insights. One interesting observation was Pinterest is number two with 5% almost of their holding. So if Pinterest is there, why Facebook isn't there so that I wasn't able to square that? Like 10 cents Facebook go together. But anyway, that's a nitpick.
Starting point is 00:57:43 She must have her own reasons. This is a complete tangential question. So I'm sorry for bringing it up, but while we are discussing about all this, are we also thinking about unrealized gains tax or taxing unrealized gains that Janet Allen is talking about? And how will it impact all of these, whether it is Bitcoin or whether it's this fintech. These are all really high growth ETFs or vehicles. I had a person asked me the same question on Twitter. If I was Janet Yellen and she has to know that the QE is inserting itself straight into
Starting point is 00:58:21 asset prices, because I mean, she's the one buying the bonds and then the cash that's being stuffed into these people's hands is obviously trickling into other asset prices. So if you're her and you're doing all these things to manipulate the market to make asset prices go higher and it's not trickling down into payments because you can clearly see that through the velocity of money, it just keeps dropping. what would you try to do if you were here in order to handicap that growth rate that's happening for the upper, call it 5% of the population that their asset prices just keep going higher and higher?
Starting point is 00:58:57 Well, start taxing their unrealized gains. It's the only way that you could claw some of that back off the market and account for top line revenue for tax receipts. Now, do I think that this is going to go through? I suspect she can't do that without intervention or votes from Congress. So I don't know if that's going to be something that can actually be performed. I know it gets into a really interesting discussion when you start talking about Bitcoin in particular and self-custody. If you've got an e-trade account and they want to exercise an unrealized gains tax, they can do it. But if you've got a
Starting point is 00:59:34 self-custody wallet that no one can possibly access, how are you going to implement an unrealized gains tax without people wanting to run to another country very quickly, especially if you've got some large holdings, it gets a little bit trickier. So I don't know how they would possibly be able to do that from a technical standpoint. But as far as equities, unrealized gains on equities, yeah, I mean, they could claw it back. I think it's more of a talking point than something that's actually going to get executed anytime soon. And I think that they have a huge uphill battle with respect to lobbying if they're going to try to do something like that. Yeah, I think They'd struggle to get that through because there are a lot of people out there who've got
Starting point is 01:00:15 unrealised capital gain to, you know, until you realize it, you've got no way of paying it, you've got a service that it's just, it's virtually a dead duck. It's kind of interesting that Yellen's gone from monetary to now she's going to be on the fiscal side working in the Biden administration, and that's her first proposal. So that's going to be an interesting idea to see if she can get that through. The only comment that I would make, it's going to sound like sour grapes because Kathy's done so well and I've done so badly over the last 24 months. But the only thing I would point out is that her ETFs tend to be exactly the kind of thing that I was describing. They tend to have been
Starting point is 01:00:49 beneficiaries of, probably as Preston would describe it, but this environment, I don't know that I'd necessarily just tie it to the Fed, but, you know, they are large cap and they are high growth. And so when you look at the ETF, if you have a look at the characteristics of the things that they've got in there, the average price earnings is 54 times as at the time that we're recording this. The historical earnings growth is not that impressive. It's 6.46%. And I think that's because a lot of these companies, while they do grow pretty quickly, if you're a shareholder in them, you're not such a beneficiary of that growth. I realize that the stock prices are going ahead, but in terms of what you own, you're constantly diluted because there's such a huge amount
Starting point is 01:01:27 of share-based compensation paid out, and they just don't tend to make a lot of money. So my main concern for Cathy, and I'm hugely impressed by her. I think she's a, you know, phenomenal intellect and I take my hat off to her with what she's achieved in a very difficult marketplace. My concern for her is that she's a little bit like Janus funds. So you guys might recall, Janus funds were kind of like the arc of the first dot com boom and they were very successful buying these very high growth companies and so they raised a lot of capital which they then reinvested into these high growth companies. And in many instances they were sort of the driver of the stock price. The stock price went up a lot because they raised a lot of money.
Starting point is 01:02:06 I think that Kathy has sort of got to that point now where, as you, I think Stig said, more money now flows into the arc ETFs than flows into spy. It's close to that. They're one of the biggest ETFs around. So what that means is that when she gets those flows, she redeploys them into these companies and she's the one pushing them up. If at any stage that reverses, there's not going to be a lot of room to get through that door. and I think that that could go back very violently. So I just think it's overvalued and it could come backwards. I don't want it to sound like sour grapes, but I understand if everybody thinks that.
Starting point is 01:02:45 So Toby, I like this point that you're bringing up. And it's also ties into the Mike Green argument about the ETFs driving the valuations on so many of these companies that fit into these baskets. If I was going to push back and it's almost like a counter to the counter, for me, it implies that the next. drop in the next liquidity event where everybody runs to the fiat and runs to the dollars all at the same time is going to be that much more aggressive and that much more of a decline per number of days than the one that preceded it, which is going to further cause central banks to step in and quadrupled down on what they did last time because if they don't, they're going to realize that they are at such a systematic pitfall, if they do nothing, that it's going to
Starting point is 01:03:38 generate the 4x response. So as the system becomes more and more unstable, I think the reaction is going to be that much more profound as this continues on, because we are at, in my opinion, we are at an end game from a systematic level for 80 years of an inflationary monetary policy being exercised not just in the U.S., but globally, because everyone was tied to the dollar through all this period of time. Then everyone, you know, adjusted their federal funds rate lower and lower and lower. And now we're getting down to zero and you're seeing these systematic issues arising in the market. In my opinion is that they're going to continue. When it turns, it's going to be nasty. But I think you have to have some type of sound money that supplants the
Starting point is 01:04:26 previous system before everyone starts to go back to measuring market cap based off of bottom line instead of new users adopting a platform, which is pretty much how it's done today, based on this incentive structure of inflationary monetary policy, which I think Jeff Booth's book outlines probably the best out of anything I've read in the last probably five years. Ari, what do you go? I think both of you have good points, but I want to follow up on Toby's point. I didn't know about the genus funds during dot-com, so that's an interesting historical perspective to have. But even in the last few years, we have seen this play out in the valley.
Starting point is 01:05:05 People who are in the valley are glued into this. So they know it. I'm talking about Bay Area Silicon Valley is soft bank. They also had a very similar experience where they were raising so much funds. This was all in private equity, though. So that's why most public investors wouldn't be aware of. this. When they come in to a round of funding, series B or series C, they would just raise the value of those funds. And that was basically having a impact on those valuations. And then it kind of,
Starting point is 01:05:40 you know, went on for a while till it didn't. And we all know we work. That's like a poster child of one of their investments. So I just wanted to bring that up. I might hide with Toby here once again during this conversation and I'm raised, I think that's what you said, Toby. A lot of great things to say about Kathy, you know, how can you find smarter people than her? And just as I'm about to say that, you know, I'm going to say something negative right after. So let me try to go a long way around this because I might be biased.
Starting point is 01:06:09 I might be one of those grumpy old men thinking, you know, being skeptical by nature also by being a value investor of all that pains that have really come with that. Perhaps I just haven't kept up with the times. I'm looking at this. Same thing as Toby is saying about prompting up those same stocks. You know, it's big growth stocks. 53% of the picks are large-up stocks, larger than $10 billion. 32% is allocated to mega-stocks, more than $100 billion.
Starting point is 01:06:36 If you look at the median market cap, it's $58 billion. The weighted average market cap is $231 billion. So I'm looking at it. I'm saying, this is going to turn. And sorry for being so next. I'm thinking, this is going to turn. And one of the things that I'm a bit worried about with everything that's been going on here is whether or not we're going blind in terms of like big numbers.
Starting point is 01:07:01 I'm looking at it. I'm thinking, oh, that's an expensive expense ratio of 0.75%. Perhaps that's not what I should be thinking. Perhaps I should be thinking, well, the NASDAQ last year did 45%. Oh, and last year, I think like, yes, Kathy's fund did almost 108%. Perhaps I shouldn't even care about expenses because all of these numbers are just going great.
Starting point is 01:07:24 This is just going to continue. I think naturally I'm skeptical about this. And I just want to put up some stat here that I looked at. It's an index for unprofitable tech stocks. If you look at the index for unprofitable tech stocks, it has outperformed the NASDAQ 100 by 268% all the past three years. And so we can talk about whether, you know, Cass is trash or we can talk about it's profit trash.
Starting point is 01:07:51 He's just thinking about it and saying, this has to end one way and the other. And I completely agree with what you guys are saying as far as the valuations on this are not what we typically talk about on the show. My concern is what are we seeing right now that suggests we're about to have a change in policy? When I look at the landscape of the policy that's been executed since 2008, 2009, it's like the toy economy broke and we keep taping the wheels back on the toy economy and we keep pushing it forward. We've got plenty of tape left.
Starting point is 01:08:26 The wheels are still intact. We can just keep taping them back on there. And like everything that I look at that they're doing from a policy standpoint suggests to me that they're not even close to being done taping the wheels back on this thing. So, although I agree with you, there's going to be a day when the transition comes. And in my humble opinion, the thing that's going to cause that to happen is there's going to be some type of money that forces a sound money back into the economy. And then all of a sudden, value investing, like, there's nothing that's going to beat it.
Starting point is 01:09:01 But until that happens, we've learned through the last 13 years, 12 years, that risk is incurred risk is incentivized. And I just kind of suspect that that incentive structure is still in place and there's nothing that I can see on the horizon that's going to change it anytime soon. All right, guys. So before we're ending off this show, Harry, Toby, thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to join the mastermind group here today. Where can the audience learn more about you? I manage WIRA's funds. We've got two funds. Zig, which is a long, short, mid-cap, Valdi Fund. and Deep, which is a small and micro value fund.
Starting point is 01:09:45 And I have a website, Acquireasmultable.com, where you can get free stock picks. And I have some books. Most recent one is Acquireas Multiple. And that's available at Amazon. And I'm on Twitter at Greenbacked. It's a funny spelling, G-R-E-N-B-A-C-D. Thanks, fellas.
Starting point is 01:10:03 Thanks for having me. This was really fun. Always fun, Toby. Ari? It was a great conversation today. Thank you for having me back. and you can reach me at Twitter. Ari Rama, H-A-R-I-R-A-R-A-M-A is my handle or my blog,
Starting point is 01:10:19 BitsBusiness.com, and look forward to feedback and conversations. Fantastic. And just a quick message to our listeners out there. If you like our mastermind episodes, make sure to subscribe to our show in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss out on future episodes like this. Preston will be back with a new episode on Wednesdays. And then Trey and I are typically hosting the episodes over the weekend.
Starting point is 01:10:43 Next weekend, Trey is speaking with Sal Bloom about mental models. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to millennial investing by the Investors Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only, Before making any decision consult a professional.
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