We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP535: Insights from the World's Top Money Managers w/ Kristof Gleich

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Trey invites Kristof Gleich, together they discuss a wide range of topics, including factor frameworks, advancements in behavior analytics, the qualities that set exceptional money managers apart, and... more! Kristof is the President and CIO of Harbor Capital and is responsible for Harbor’s $40B of AUM invested in boutique managers from across the World. Prior to Harbor, Kristof worked at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN: 0:00 - Intro 01:53 - How Kristof would summarize Q1 of 2023. 14:48 - How working with a wide array of managers helps inform his worldview. 26:52 - What makes a great money manager. 39:13 - Factor frameworks and innovation around behavior analytics.  63:34 - Why Active ETFs are having a huge surge in popularity, after years of indices ruling the investing world. 65:46 - The life lessons Kristof learned from spending over 2 hours with Bill Gross (aka the Bond King) just a short time after his infamous exit at PIMCO. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Harbor Capital Website. Harbor Capital Linkedin. Trey Lockerbie's Twitter. Kristof Gleich's Twitter. 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: River Toyota Range Rover Fundrise AT&T The Bitcoin Way USPS American Express Onramp SimpleMining Public Vacasa Shopify HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! 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 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

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. My guest today is Christoph Gleisch. Christoph is the president and CIO of Harbor Capital and is responsible for Harbour's $40 billion of assets under management invested in boutique managers from across the world. Prior to Harbor, Christoph was an executive director at Goldman Sachs and managing director at J.P. Morgan.
Starting point is 00:00:21 In this episode, you will learn how Christoph would summarize Q1 of 2023, how working with a wide array of managers, helps inform his worldview, what makes a great money manager and how Christoph identifies one, factor frameworks and innovations around behavior analytics, why active ETFs are having a huge surge in popularity, the life lessons that Christoph learned after spending over two hours with Bill Gross, also known as the Bond King, just a short time after his infamous exit at PIMCO, and a lot more.
Starting point is 00:00:49 I got to say, there are some really interesting developments and strategies happening in active ETFs, and I was happy to explore them in more detail. I think you'll get a lot out of this one, so without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Christoph Gleyshe. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Welcome to The Investors podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerbie, and like I said at the top, I have Christoph Gleich here with me and we are so excited to have you, Christoph. Thanks for coming on. Trey, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. Well, let's dig right into it. This market seems a little bit bipolar as of late. No one really seems to know what to do next. I mean, a lot of bears out there thinking we're
Starting point is 00:01:47 going lower rates are just going to keep going up. A lot of bulls saying, hey, inflation has peaked. It's going to be a softer landing. I'm kind of curious, if you had to summarize Q1 of 2023, how would you go about doing that? I think bipolar is a good start, Trey. What I would say is that the headline is teams soft landing is winning. And that's what's happening in the markets at the moment. The thing to understand what's happening so far this year, let's just go back a little bit further to October of 2022 when the S&P hit its most recent bottom. And let's sort of understand where we were then. We were in the midst of a historical interest rate hike last year.
Starting point is 00:02:28 You know, the Fed has effectively gone from, you know, zero to near five percent in about 12 months, which is quite some hiking cycle. And so what did that mean last year? There was obviously a lot of volatility and sentiment got very, very bearished. And there's different ways that you can look at market sentiment, positioning. One of my favorite and most simple is the Bank of America, Merrill Lynch fund manager survey.
Starting point is 00:02:53 It comes out once a month, they survey some of the largest fund managers across the world, consistently with the same questions. It's good quality data. So you can look at time series of, responses and really learn a lot. So what did the fund manager survey of Okobat tell us last year? It told us that sentiment and positioning was crisis level bearish. You can look at it a few different ways. If you looked at the amount of cash held on average, it was a kind of crisis point highs. So you'd have to go back to sort of a 2008 or COVID environment to see it as high.
Starting point is 00:03:28 If you looked at equity underweights versus overweight, equity were underweight, as they have been in prior crises. And then finally, if you looked at the economic indicators of a recession and the percentage of people that thought we were already in a recession was a reading so high it's only ever corresponded to times that we've actually been in a recession. So what does that do? It sets the stage for, you know, markets have this habit, his wonderful habit of course. the most amount of pain to the most amount of people. And when sentiment is that one-sided, it is not unusual to get just a relief rally. And I think that's where things began, and it began to gain momentum. And what happened, we began to get new data points on the economy.
Starting point is 00:04:14 That headline inflation was rolling over. And some of the more worrying indicators like wage inflation has actually been revised down a little bit. And so we went from a very bearish sentiment and positioning, team hard landing. And then we transitioned to sort of a softer landing. And there's more, I would say, optimism now, certainly in the equity markets, that we're going to have a soft landing. What's interesting about that last point is inflation is not going down to the degree that we needed to. And you have to assume that in order for it to get to where it needs to be a lot more pain does need to come.
Starting point is 00:04:52 So what are the bulls really standing behind knowing that there's probably something that needs to happen for the Fed to continue with their mandate? I think what the balls are standing behind is, and what's been surprising to the upside this year, has been how strong the economy has remained and how high nominal growth still is. Ultimately, nominal growth drives nominal wages. and there was a fear that the economy was headed for, I think, an abrupt, hard landing. And the debate three or four months ago was about when the recession is going to hit, if it's not already here, is it going to be Q1 or Q2 of this year? Clearly, it isn't going to be Q1 and it's unlikely going to be Q2, if at all, this year. So I think just, again, what the balls are kind of getting behind is it wasn't nearly as
Starting point is 00:05:49 bad as what was being priced in at the time. And as I said, some of the wage pressures that were running in the high fives at the time, wage inflation was running five and a half, six percent, and you actually had some downward revisions to historical data and suddenly it was running in the fours again. So I think there was this phrase that's been used. I'm not sure if you've heard it, the immaculate disinflation. And I think the bull argument is that we were going to have this immaculate disinflation. You marry that up with the pessimism earlier. You set the stage for a pretty strong rally, which is what we've seen. I think a soft landing, you know, inflation disappearing, going back to 2%. I think it's fanciful thinking, frankly. I mean, inflation is here. We see it
Starting point is 00:06:35 every day. We see it in the grocery store. And you see it in the numbers. And whether it was last week's PCE data, European inflation came out this week, surprising to the upside. If you look at the employment payroll numbers, I think we have a sticky inflation problem. And I think going from a nine handle down to a six or a five is going to prove to be much easier than kind of going from here back to back to 2%. So I think we should get used to higher levels of stickier. inflation and the volatility that that's going to bring in markets. And I think we're going to have shorter market cycles within that. And I think what we're experiencing at the moment is,
Starting point is 00:07:23 you know, an upward trend. But I would caution to believe that we're at the beginning of a, you know, a new multi-year bull market. You mentioned jobs and the economy being strong. One of the biggest surprises, it seemed, was this January report showing 517,000 jobs created. and unemployment hit a 53 year low. So that just kind of leads us to believe more inflation, or at least to your point, it will be stickier for a amount of time as long as people are employed and have the money to spend on these goods and services to keep these prices up.
Starting point is 00:07:55 My question is, beyond that, was there anything else that stood out to you as being uniquely surprising? So yes, there have been some things that have surprised me. And if I was going to pinpoint one, I would say it's the economy's ability so far to absorb this interest rate shock that we've had. And actually the economy appears more resilient to interest rates than I think I thought and probably what a lot of other people thought. I think if we'd sat down a year ago and said,
Starting point is 00:08:27 okay, over the next 12 months, base rating effectively go, let's round up, you know, go from zero to five. Okay, we're at 475. what's going to happen 12 months out to the non-farm payroll number, you'd say it's going to be in the gutter, but it hasn't. We had one of the strongest monthly payrolls in recent history. So there's an underlying resilience here still. And what sort of caution to me a little bit is how much of this is just a lag indicator?
Starting point is 00:08:58 It's that because we haven't been, the last cycle, wasn't a typical kind of binge credit cycle. Generally balance sheets, certainly household balance sheet post the financial crisis are in a much better shape. You know, coming out of the GFC, it was all about deleveraging the household balance sheet. That's effectively done. But we haven't now had that re-leveraging. And so it seemed to be making the economy, the consumer, more resilient to interest rates. And so I think that's the thing that surprised me and why we're watching the incoming data very, very carefully. So there's a phrase I heard recently, which I think really rings true today, is that we hear it, like you've got to be data dependent. And that's generally true always,
Starting point is 00:09:44 but I think especially so now. But in an era where we need to be data dependent, we don't have data that's very dependable. And you see this with a lot of revisions happening two, three, four months after the effect. And there's clearly an echo, I think, left over from COVID in this respect. There's an echo left over from the supply chain dynamics and what was ultimately transitory inflation, because let's be clear, some of the inflation that we've had is transitory. And so trying to figure out and read through the noise of the data is really, really critical. And it makes it even harder. So I think at the moment, the markets are very hard to read. They're always hard to forecast, but they're incredibly hard to read at the moment. And so, sort of any predictions
Starting point is 00:10:30 your listeners here should be taken with a decent dose of humility at the moment. As far as data is concerned, I mean, the idea that our inflation numbers come from a bunch of folks imputing data, you know, manually, basically out in the field from the BLS. In 2023, it seems like, Oh my God, how much room per error could there be in something like that. Exactly. So your specialty is placing managers, finding these synergies between the strategy and a person to actually manage that strategy. And you're dealing with different experts in different fields all day long. I'm kind of curious how that actually helps you inform your own views on the economy and the markets,
Starting point is 00:11:10 especially when I know sometimes it can be an alphabet soup when you hear so many different opinions coming from so many different directions. So how do you navigate that and filters through that to develop your own? So firstly, everybody talks our own book to a certain degree. So if you're building a multi-asset portfolio, you know, we're in a fortunate position here at Harbor Capital. We work with managers from all over the world across public markets, equities, fixed income and commodities. So you hear a range of views. And I would say over time, you begin to get a sense. of when a manager is particularly bullish or bearish versus his or her own style and what they're
Starting point is 00:11:54 seeing. And I think it's a really helpful input into our overall process. You know, we have our own proprietary models where we look at where we are in the market cycle, you know, what's going on, what's the strength of the economy, where valuations are. But I think where it can be really helpful is around some of those more kind of opportunistic ideas or trades or shorter term investments as well where people can come and they can be pounding the table and, you know, lay out in their background, experience set. They haven't seen something like this in, take a number, 10 years, 20 years. And you've really got to like listen into those little nuggets and realize when they mean something versus when a manager is trying to talk their own book.
Starting point is 00:12:36 And it can be a really valuable input. It's kind of reminding me of, I think Ray Dalio calls it believability at Berkshire Hathaway, just having these different experts who can opine on certain things, and almost using that merit-based system to develop your own thinking. Is that similar to kind of how you would look at it? Yeah, exactly. I mean, he's a hard one, Dallio to argue with in terms of the believability. But I think that's right. Another indicator is we can, you know, look what the managers are doing. We have an incredible amount of data. And as well as listening to them, we can see what they're doing. And on the margins, that can be, really strong signal. So if you have a manager that is normally higher in quality, but on the margin
Starting point is 00:13:17 they're buying cyclicality, you know the bar for that manager to buy cyclicality is really, really hot. And if they're going to be deviating towards that, you can use that data. Well, why is that what are you finding cheap about cyclicality? And you can sort of start to uncover a thesis there. Another one would be, you know, market cap going up and down in market cap. You can get a good read on what's happening there. And the other one is regions. You know, occasionally you get US managers that can buy some international stocks and vice versa. And, you know, if an international manager, despite optically cheap valuations, is still buying US stocks, it's hard to make a compelling argument that you've got to be leaning into international diversification when that's happening,
Starting point is 00:14:03 or vice versa. So what I'm really intrigued about, and there's a lot actually throughout this conversation we're getting into, but one thing that stood out to me about what you've done or what you do is you create or have created a systematic way to recognize luck versus skill with these managers that you're placing. I imagine there's some quantitative element to this or something that we can really sink our teeth into here. So I'm excited to learn a little bit more about how you've developed that system and what went into it. For sure. So I'll start at the top with in investing the noise to signal ratio is very high. There's a lot of randomness, there's a lot of short-term noise. And what we try and do is focus on what is ultimately signal and what is noise. And for that,
Starting point is 00:14:51 you know, I studied science, background. You can figure out what are some apparatus that you can look at that can help you, you know, reduce that noise. And if you like, focus in or zoom in or amplify that signal. So that's sort of at a high level. what we're dealing with, that very, very high noise to signal ratio. Let me give you an example of a study that we did, which I think illustrates this point really, really well. And I'll explain it in detail because it had some pretty cool conclusions. So we created something called the Crystal Ball portfolio.
Starting point is 00:15:26 Okay. This is a hypothetical portfolio. The results of this portfolio are impossible to achieve. So just from my compliance hat on, this is a thought. experiment, but you can learn some practical tips from a thought experiment. So we created the crystal ball portfolio where for a period of 30 years, 3-0, we hit with full hindsight as if we had a crystal ball. What are the 20% best performing managers going to do over the next five years? And we held them hypothetically, right? We held a basket of these 20% best performing managers.
Starting point is 00:16:04 You hold them for five years. And you know at the end of that. a five-year period, they're going to be the best performing ones because that's why you picked them. And then you reallocate your portfolio for the next five years and repeat and repeat and then create a chain link of those returns over a 30-year period. So it's the 30-year crystal ball portfolio reconstituted every five years knowing ahead of time what the best managers are going to be. Okay, like I said, an impossible portfolio to achieve. What on earth is the point of doing that, well, you can look at it as if you like a very upper bound of what really good managers can do. So if you look at that portfolio over a 30-year time period, we did this in
Starting point is 00:16:47 US, so US core growth and value. We mixed them all together. So you even get the benefit of picking the right style, which is pretty hard to do. And this portfolio over the long run outperformed the S&P 500. Well, duh, it should. It should outperform it by a lot. You've got a crystal bull, and it outperforms the S&P 500 by about 400 basis points. It was 396 or 397 basis points per year. I can't remember the exact number. But let's just say 400 basis points per year, which is good. So if you can find a manager that you think can do 400 basis points a year,
Starting point is 00:17:24 like buy that manager and hold it for the long run. But what was really interesting about this as well is what about, did it underperform? You know, you've got a crystal bull here. does it underperform? And the answer is yes, and probably more than you'd think. It underperforms almost one year in four. So if you look at all the rolling 12-month windows, over a 30-year period, almost one out of four of them is negative. That surprised me, I would assume it would have been a lower level of underperformance because you've got to press a bull. And then the last thing is, the longest period of underperformance it had versus the index was almost five years. So a really interesting exercise to go
Starting point is 00:18:03 through. And for us, it helps kind of like set expectations at the beginning and set realistic expectations at the beginning. And so we have realistic expectations. And in terms of like, how do we systematize our process? Yes, there's a heavy degree of quantitative rigor that goes into it. But it's really marrying quantitative rigor and quantitative rigor. So I'm lucky we have a team here of professional researchers that all they do day in and day out is research managers. They interview managers, they go looking around the world for managers, they stay on top of the managers that were invested. And it's their calling. It's what they live and breed every single day. What we also have is we have an excellent data team. Our industry, one thing our industry is not short of is data,
Starting point is 00:18:49 and there's some really valuable information inside of that data. And you just need to have the right kind of tools to break it apart and see kind of what's the information in there. So let me be a bit more specific is we apply what we call our alpha edge framework. And one of the things that we look for and that we write down before we make any investment is what is the edge of the managers that we think we have. I'm surprised how people do that, by the way, and I would advise everybody in investing. What is the edge that you think you have? And what is the edge that you think the manager has that you're going to invest in? And then quantitatively, what we do is we have what we refer to as a factor framework. And what do I mean by factors? So whenever you make an unethethical,
Starting point is 00:19:29 Let's just keep it more sort of more simple in equities. If you buy a company, you buy a stock, or if you buy an ETF or you buy a mutual fund, actively or passively is going to be a basket and aggregation of those stocks. There's going to be certain factor characteristics that they have. They might be more leaning into value. They might be more leaning into quality. They might be more leaning into growth. They might be high beta, low beta. And what you find is you can use statistical techniques to disaggregate a manager's portfolio into different factors. And there's normally about three or four that kind of explain the majority of their risk and return, frankly.
Starting point is 00:20:10 And so what we try and do is create a factor framework to understand almost kind of like what's the manager's DNA through factors and what are their exposures to them through time, what are the expected returns on those factors over time. Do they mean revert? Do they persist? And then what's left over at the end is called be, in a model sense, the unexplained bit, or what we would describe it as the idiosyncratic bit, or what our industry would describe that as as the alpha bit. So when we are looking at a prospective manager, we try and take that historical performance, and we try and break it down into its component parts. We're trying to look at what's factor-based. We build expectations over those factors, and we try and look at what idiosyncratic. And often or not, more than 100% of the returns of managers in general is factor-based, that actually the skill bit is actually negative. It's kind of a bit depressing.
Starting point is 00:21:09 But in our view, if you can find a manager that has a positive idiosyncratic alpha, that's the bit as more due to skill. That's the more valuable piece that you should pay for. And I think one of the reasons that active management, the industry, is in not great show. at the moment is because it overcharges for what it provides. And it really has been overcharging but back to based exposures and charging as if it's been kind of skill. And so we really geek out on that as a research team
Starting point is 00:21:39 and try and use all of the techniques that we can to measure that stuff as precisely as we can. And we just think by doing so, it skews your probability for success towards the right, which is what we're trying to do. 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,
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Starting point is 00:26:05 what was coming to mind was for me was Rick Rubin, the famous music producer, who surprisingly claims that he knows nothing about music or even how to play instruments. and his skill is to essentially bring out the best and most authentic version of the artist he's working with. It's a counterintuitive example, but it highlights kind of a different skill set. And even though I know that you know what you're doing when it comes investing in markets, the question came up for me, is there a different skill set that you believe you've developed over time to actually place these managers that's pretty different from the actual act of investing itself? I invest in managers across different asset classes, like I said, fixed income, equities, commodities,
Starting point is 00:26:45 If I had to build, you know, from scratch my own commodities portfolio, I wouldn't do a very good job at it. But yet I can pick, you know, I think I can pick a good commodities manager. So I think there's definitely a parallel there. Why is that? So I studied physics undergrad. I'm not a physicist. If I tried to be a physicist, I would have been a poor one. But it did give me a certain skill set and a distance, I think a different perspective that I've come to appreciate the more.
Starting point is 00:27:15 I've been in this industry. So I've been picking managers now for about 20 years. And the more I do it, the more I realize what I do is because of my three-year bachelor physics degree of Bristol University. So it's taught me to have a very open mind. I think in physics, you have to be open-minded and you have to think about things from first principles. And so I've always questioning like why and trying to understand what people do from a first principle's perspective. So I think that's certainly one element to it. The other element I would say is I'm a pretty transparent person and what I like to be with managers, quite quite a lot of people that do my job do when they go and sit with a manager and they understand and find understand what a manager does. They just let the manager talk at
Starting point is 00:28:02 them and they don't kind of react to anything that they kind of say. And that might work well for some people. But what I found really helpful for me in picking managers is by being transparent back with them and kind of riffing with them, if I can steal that music analogy in the moment, you know, when they're talking about a particular area of their portfolio or a thought process or a company that they're buying is to, you know, pull on that as a thread with them. And it gets them to relax, I think, and open up as well. And so creating, I think, just a pretty open environment, a pretty relaxed atmosphere. I'm not a big fad of like, hey, I'm interrogating, you know, a manager like I'm the Secret Service.
Starting point is 00:28:48 You know, I want them to be the best version of themselves. And so I try and create a pretty relaxed atmosphere when I'm talking to these managers. But I'm always listening and I'm always observing 24-7, you know, how they're reacting, what they're saying, you know, and trying to read the cues that they're presenting. And so, yeah, going back to the previous question, it's really a combination of things that are deeply tangible, like performance, track record. statistical techniques that you can kind of use to break apart and get information from, but then also a focus on intangibles, focusing on the people, their story, how did they
Starting point is 00:29:26 get to be across the table from where you are today? Who do they learn how to invest from? What kind of biases does that give them? And doing that in a transparent way. And then I'd say the last thing is, you know it when you see it, when you've been doing this enough, what good really looks like. most managers by definition are average, right? There's only few exceptional money managers.
Starting point is 00:29:52 And so we need to have the discipline that most of the people that we meet with aren't, we're not going to invest with them. So if I meet with 100 managers, we might invest with one. It's a numbers game to a certain degree as well. But yeah, hopefully that gave you a sense of how I can sort of bring my own personality to this. But it's a difficult question to give us a concrete answer to, but a really good question. There's a saying, right, that everyone's a genius in a bull market.
Starting point is 00:30:18 Is there something to that or is there any other way you maybe grade the managers as they're going through a difficult market? And look, the temptation is always going to be there. The trick is to kind of control for it. And look, our managers are, you know, legally in charge of the day-to-day operations of the funds. So they get on with it and we keep, you know, cut a close eye on exactly what's happening inside our portfolios.
Starting point is 00:30:39 I would say, as a general matter, I always remind myself of the, whatever I'm judging or looking at is with the benefit of hindsight. And when that decision was being made, it was, it had no benefit of hindsight. It was being done with Fawcite. And Howard Marks, Motry has said this point many times in his memos, but he says never judge a decision by its outcome. And you look at that and you think, what does that mean? Well, there's many, when you make something or make a decision with imperfect information, which frankly is what investing's all about, because you don't know what's going to happen in the future. No one had a crystal ball. By the way, even if you've had a crystal ball, it's less valuable than you would have thought.
Starting point is 00:31:17 But you need to have a degree of humility and just always remember if you're looking at something after the fact, you have the benefit of Pineside and the person that made the decision didn't. So I kind of watch rinse and repeat and tell myself and my team that all the time as well. And just going back to the framework, the factor framework, it's really important to do this stuff as well because it helps keep you grounded through times of volatility. Sometimes the volatility is a premium that the market's paying you, like a paying premium, but unless you're willing to accept it, you're not going to earn good returns from the market over the long run. There's kind of diversification aside, that really is the only free lunch that I've found in investing or in life, actually,
Starting point is 00:32:00 that you just need to understand going into any investment that there's going to be periods of volatility. And the only guarantee I think we can make as an industry is at some point we'll underperform for clients. And we need to do as good a job as possible of kind of like navigating them through that volatility. And so when you understand the factor footprint of your managers and what those have been over the longer run, how have they paid off or detracted over the long run? How are they doing today? It helps inform you make less reactionary decisions. I think the one behavior in our industry that is really hard to fight against is overreacting
Starting point is 00:32:42 to the short term. because it gets emotional. Like when you underperform or when you pick a manager underperforms or invest one, you get angry when they're not doing well in the short run. But often, more often than not, the basing an investment process on some kind of short-term performance indicator is a disaster. The 2020s as well are proving to be a very different decade. The post-financial crisis period, the 2010s, was really tough for fundamentally oriented
Starting point is 00:33:13 active managers. And so one more point I'd like to make is just quite how different the 2020s are proving to be versus the post-financial crisis era of really the 2010s and how that's presenting itself and manifesting itself to investors into markets, to active managers. If you look at the post-financial crisis era, we had a decade plus of zero interest rates, quantitative easing, you know, debt deleveraging. and you had central banks across the world, just bludding the system with liquidity to prop it up
Starting point is 00:33:46 and create the wealth effect through the wealth channel. And that was a very, you know, it almost didn't matter what you bought. Just, you know, buy risk assets, own them, you know, buy bonds, you know, you're going to make money from the duration, from the fallen interest rates, by equities. You're going to make money from the same thing, from a falling equity risk premium, from stable and sort of growing earnings as well.
Starting point is 00:34:09 And really what the 2020s have reminded us of and brought back is volatility and uncertainty. And it's really shattered that paradigm that we were in before. So we've got the return of volatility. We've got the return of inflation. We've got the return of interest rates again. I think for the first time that I can remember in the US here, the treasury curve is out, is above 4% wherever you look, which would have seen absurd to have said that just a year ago. And you have this notion of two-way risk again, and you have more idiosyncratic risk as well. It's less of an asset allocation or what's happening in certain factors.
Starting point is 00:34:49 What's going to happen at the companies as they're dealing with the cost of capital again is not going to treat all companies equally or fairly. And so what that has meant in markets and inactive management, particularly that's my area of expertise, as more managers have outperformed. And if you look at the industry stats as well, they're much, much higher than they have been in 10 or 15 years now, which I think is an interesting crin to keep an eye on. But I would just say on that is, you know, ultimately active management, I think is a zero-sum game over the very, very long term. So, yeah, interesting. Do you think that last point is because there's finally a cost of capital to work from to a degree, right, to use a discount rate instead of that's not zero, right, where the prices of assets can basically go to infinity?
Starting point is 00:35:36 I mean, we're now in a world where we actually have discount rates that we can apply and therefore giving active managers potentially an edge? Absolutely. I think, I mean, what is capitalism without a discount rate? It's fundamental to the system on which it operates. And I'm not going to criticize, you know, the Fed for what they did. I think they did a great job coming out of the Depression. And so it's less of a judgment call, but it's so fundamental to the system that as we reverse out of that era, there's going to be all sorts of secondary and tarsory effects and consequences from that.
Starting point is 00:36:11 I read another quote, and this one was from Seth Klaman, about post, and he said, zero interest rates is like sand at the beach, gets everywhere. You know, when you come back from the beach, you're like, how'd sand getting there? It wasn't even at the beach. And I think there's a degree of truth to that in investing and with interest rates. And, you know, I guess there's a lot of sand to clean up, right? you can never get it all. And so that cost of capital just works its way down the entire system.
Starting point is 00:36:40 And if you think about being a CFO in a company and a company is thinking about a new growth project or an investment and their cost of capital is effectively zero, you know, quite zero because there's always a credit spread that you've got to pay on that, but just nearer zero. Or if it's suddenly looking at like seven or eight percent, which it probably would do today with where interest rates are, it creates. a real cost for that company, but it also creates an opportunity cost for that company as well. So that has to get factored in. Obviously, a company's the way it's financing itself, you know, margins can disappear
Starting point is 00:37:19 and turns of losses when you start to have to fund yourself at that much, much higher rate. And so that's if you like the real economy effect. And then if you look at the market, the secondary market, or the primary market, you look at investors, if they're demanding less on their return and that bleeds through to like equities, it distorts the whole incentive structure of the market as well, because if you're not having to earn, you know, a strong cash flow, if it's everything's mania, maniana, mania, maniana, maniana, then, you know, incentive structures reinforce behaviours. So you're going to get people and market participants chasing projects that necessarily they wouldn't do. And, you know,
Starting point is 00:37:59 I think that's something that you need to think about as well, that signal those markets then send back to those kind of corporate behaviours. And so that's all going to take time to unravel. You know, I mentioned how surprised a bit about the resilience of the economy in the face of higher interest rates and how they've managed to absorb that. I wouldn't declare that as a final victory yet. I think it's an ongoing process. And I think that's happening at the company level as well. But ultimately, companies that are run with more discipline, with more fiscal prudence with better balance sheets, with higher quality, are going to benefit in that type of environment. And I would say that's more where active managers spend more of their time. So I definitely
Starting point is 00:38:41 think that is a really important factor to watch how that impacts individual stock returns over the coming, you know, a few years. Well, speaking of factors, we've talked a lot about your factor framework. And I know that you've been recently working more on behavioral analytics as well, through with the FinTech firm to break down active managers into behavioral or decision alpha instead of just portfolio alpha, which I think is really interesting as well. And I know everyone listening to this would love to learn how to make better decisions. So I'd love to learn a little bit more about the research you are discovering through this process. We've partnered with a fintech firm called Ascentia Analytics run by Claire Finn Levy,
Starting point is 00:39:25 He's a former portfolio manager herself. And this is newer for us. And if you think about some of the things that I've said about focusing on managers that have an edge, you know, one of the traits that we look for above all else is continuous improvement. And if we look for managers, we think managers need to continue to invest in themselves and improve or at least seek to improve year after year after year because investing is a really competitive industry. And if you don't do that, you're going to go backwards. So we hold ourselves to the same standard.
Starting point is 00:39:54 so we're continuing investing in ourselves. And if you look at the evolution of assessing performance, disaggregating luck from skill, and I'll look at the evolution of this industry over probably a 30-year period, we've gone from looking at just returns, like naked returns. If they're high, there's skill, if they're low, there's stupidity. I suppose that's kind of like the most rudimentary scale. And then as our developing of markets has changed,
Starting point is 00:40:21 your attribution came along, and we started to disaggregate returns into things like allocation decisions and stock selection decisions. And it was the next step, the next rung on the ladder of our understanding. And then came along and what I spent about 10 years ago developing was this factor framework that we talked about earlier. I was like, okay, there's something more than just stock selection and allocation. Understanding factor biases, stripping those out was left over at alpha. And then I think the continuation of this art now I'm really excited about is behaviour or decision analytics.
Starting point is 00:40:55 And it's looking at what decisions the managers have made and how has that impacted their performance through a different lens, through a different dimension. I'll give an example of where this is really helpful. So if you speak to and if your listeners have heard this and investing in the past, we'll do quarterly calls with all of our investors. and we'll speak to our investors and they might say something along the lines of, oh, I added to stock X, Y, Z on weakness,
Starting point is 00:41:25 because there was no news and we're still convicting in the stock, the thesis, long-term thesis intact, and for whatever reason, you know, Mr. or Mrs. Market decided to sell it off and, you know, we wanted to add to our position. They're like, okay, you know, sounds credible. Okay, how do I, like, test it?
Starting point is 00:41:41 If you hear those type of things frequently, what essential analytics allows us to do is to look at in a portfolio level, like what stocks did a manager buy? So let's just say it's a 30 stock portfolio. What stocks did you buy obviously matters? But you can use prints and attribution and stuff like that. That's not the most helpful. But then, okay, when did you buy that?
Starting point is 00:42:04 What was your position size? How did you build that position size? How did you exit? When did you exit? And did you, you know, sell all at once? Or did you gradually kind of sell? There's tons of different decisions going into this portfolio. And some managers do a better job of making these consciously,
Starting point is 00:42:21 and some of them do it subconsciously, and they have a bit of a, you know, a feel for it. And so what a censure has allowed us to do is just be a bit more scientific with understanding some of those biases. And so then what we can do is we can go back to our managers, because again, we have all of this data on them, and we can say to them, you know how you'll often tweak a position size or tinker with a position size?
Starting point is 00:42:43 We've looked at every stock you've held on every day over the last 10 years. And you know, by tweaking with those positions, you've destroyed 305 basis points of alpha, or you've created 20 bet. And you can start to quantify those behaviors. And then managers can understand what they're good at, where they're adding value, and where they're destroying value. And you see some, you know, in general, managers are bad at exit timing in our industry. industry. But what a lot of them do is they start to sell the position early and then the stock
Starting point is 00:43:19 can kind of unravel a little bit and then they kind of exit the position and they're ultimately late with their exit position. But when you can see that they've started to reduce a position earlier, there was obviously a signal that they looked at that was meaningful enough for them to start to reduce the position size. But for whatever reason, they didn't go the whole way and start to sell it. And so you can start to present this information back to their they can reflect upon it and then use it in a ways to improve their investment process. I'm a real, you know, big believer in this continuous improvement. It is critical to do.
Starting point is 00:43:55 One of my bug bears of our industry is this notion of consistency through time. And consistency equals no innovation, no improvement. And in what other industry is that okay? So like a typical consultant, so I've heard, I've never been one, I've got nothing against them. I'm repeating this, you know, some or secondhand. But what I've heard is the kind of the archetype consultant kind of may go through a checklist. And one of those things will be, have you made any changes in the last year?
Starting point is 00:44:26 And changes are generally thought of as bad. And I'm like, well, imagine if I pulled out an iPhone from 15 years ago and held it up and said, you know, that technology you've had, like it hasn't changed for the last 15 years. You know, we learn about the world. We learn about ourselves. We learn about the markets every day. And the art of a great manager is not to reject that, to compound that knowledge into improvement.
Starting point is 00:44:52 And for us as allocators and investors, it's asked almost from a governance perspective as a fiduciary to hold managers accountable to that. And so I couldn't disagree with the kind of the industry convention more strongly on this point. That's why when we're looking at our managers, we are always asking them, like how have you approved your process in the last 12 months? And some of them, when you ask this
Starting point is 00:45:16 question, well, you know, they'll grab their kind of shirt at their neck and they'll squirm uncomfortably because they're not sure what they're supposed to say. Well, A, just always tell the truth. And then B, you should be striving to improve every year. And so that's what we spend a lot of time on when we're working with our managers. It's like that Churchill quote, right, when the facts change, I change my opinion. I don't know what it is about human beings. We're just such linear thinkers that, I mean, there's nothing in our day-to-day lives that is up into the right all the time. And yet that's how our brains just expect that out of almost everything. It's just, it's a little bit ironic. When you're talking about decisions and quantifying them, et cetera, what was coming to my mind,
Starting point is 00:45:55 I'm kind of curious to get your feedback on it. It's just the where the intuitiveness and the and making decisions from your gut might plan all of this, right? I'm reminded of the George Soros book where he states, I rely a great deal on animal instincts when I was, actively running the fund, I suffered from backache and I used to, I used the onset of acute pain as a signal that there was something wrong in my portfolio. And whether that's true or not, you know, remains as it could be debated. But I'm just kind of curious about where that factors in when we're getting too intellectual about analyzing someone. Where does that play into the mix? So it's a great quote. And I've heard that as well, the back pain. The portfolio is not set up,
Starting point is 00:46:37 right. There's very few investors that can do what he does. does very, very well. I think Stan Drucken Miller is another one that has this amazing ability to synthesize the moment of or the fears of the day and position around that and kind of cool the markets. There's another one who I invested with in the past, Alistair Hibbert at BlackRock, who I believe is still there running hugely successful hedge fund franchise now. And they have this ability that can feel like gut feel. And it is, I think, a little bit having a feel for the markets. But most investors are better served by having a discipline process that they stick to and they adhere to and they, you know, improve over time. I'm not saying those folks don't. I'm sure
Starting point is 00:47:22 they have a process as well, but they just have that innate ability as well to read the markets. I think one thing that you need in investing is you need conviction. This is not a role if you suffer from analysis paralysis. And markets are not a good place to hang out because you can find at anything, something to kind of confirm your own behavioral bias that you may have. And so when I invest with managers and when I ask my team to make recommendations about investing or divesting from managers, it has to be done from a place of conviction. And I think there's that bridge between looking at all of the numbers, the analysis, and being as rigorous as possible and as scientific as possible.
Starting point is 00:48:02 But there is definitely, I don't shy about saying this, there's a gut feel. And that gut feel is based on, it's not guesswork. It's, I think it's a, almost like an algorithm happening in your mind where you've pattern recognition, where you've seen certain things before. You mentioned human beings are really linear thinkers. Some of that pattern recognition is nonlinear thinking. And it's like, okay, where have I seen something similar? And ultimately, you have to make a decision and you have to invest with conviction, whether you're buying individual securities, ETFs, active products, passive products. It's a key part of any successful investment process.
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Starting point is 00:51:52 and expenses. This and other information can be found in the income fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. I know you've also recently partnered with C Worldwide, which is a Copenhagen-based firm, and they've been running this very concentrated strategy of only 30 companies at a time in their portfolio for, I mean, decades now to incredibly successfully. I think they're beating their bench fart by over 6%. And CEO Bo Neutzen describes their ideal companies as those who have what he calls a permanent right to win. And I don't know if that's an original quote from him
Starting point is 00:52:30 or he took it somewhere, but that was the first time I'd heard of it. And I, I'm kind of, you know, when I hear that, I quickly think of brand and pricing power and all these other things that might go into a permanent right to win. If you use that framework to apply to managers as you're placing them, could you come up with an idea of what is an example of a manager who has a permanent right to win? It kind of arcans back to what we were talking about with these characteristics of great managers. Because I think for those of us listening, we're all trying to be our own managers to some degree or we're looking for a great manager for us. And I think just knowing what to look for is really kind of evergreen here. So wondering what a permanent right to win
Starting point is 00:53:08 might look like. So yeah, it's, I think it was his phrase originally. I certainly haven't seen it before as permanent right to win. And you're right, when you think about it as businesses and investing in equities, brand and pricing power, sustainable growth kind of really shine through as those have got to be some of the characteristics. So how do you translate that to managers? First thing I would say is if a manager thinks they have a permanent right to win, by definition they don't. It's those managers that have that innate paranoia, I think stand the best chance of having a permanent right to win. So I'll go through a few of the things that we would look for that I think would be suggested while, you know, superior longer term performance over the long run. And we talked about some of these along the way, but let's just hit them.
Starting point is 00:53:52 So number one is, you know, an edge. A manager has to have a discernible edge that they can do better than the market. and that edge needs to be, you know, repeatable. That doesn't mean every year in terms of performance, but a repeatable edge that they're trying to exploit, and there has to be some kind of moat around that edge, that is just not going to be like Ished or Vanguarded away eventually. And so just spend time on asking,
Starting point is 00:54:15 and as an investor, if you're an individual investor or a professional investor, I'd challenge you all for your investments to write down what that edge is. And if you can't, it probably means the manager doesn't have one. So that would be the first thing, I would say, The second thing is, again, it comes down to this culture. So we look at, you know, I talked about the intangibles performance and, you know, breaking apart factors and idiosyncratic returns, all really, really important. I also talked about intangibles.
Starting point is 00:54:42 I think what gives a manager the permanent right to win is world-class intangibles. What does that mean? Culture, I think. Culture is ultimately a function of the people, but I think culture can pass down from generations to generation. So I'd say culture is even more important than people, even though I'd say buy-product of it, if that makes sense. And so what we look for from a culture perspective is our tagline that we look for is a culture of continuous improvement. We write it down. We look for evidence.
Starting point is 00:55:07 We ask the managers about it. And as I said, we demand that of ourselves. Can we find a manager as going to continue to improve, is going to continue to compound their own learnings and their knowledge over time? If the answer is no, you probably don't want to invest with that manager, because whatever it is that they're doing now, if it's working, it's probably going to erode away, competition, competitive capital is ultimately going to erode that edge away. And so, yeah, we spent a lot of time thinking about that as well. Other things from a culture perspective, I think are really important.
Starting point is 00:55:39 We would prefer a team-based culture than an individual sort of star PM approach. There are some star PMs. We voted quite a few of them throughout this recording, but what they'd probably all say is they've got a great team behind them as well. And so we want to see cultures that generally have. have teams of experts, that they have cultures of debate. One of the cultural traits that we look for is the phrase culture of psychological safety. What does that mean? Essentially it means creating a working environment where people are comfortable speaking up, their mind,
Starting point is 00:56:10 what they think about, something suggesting a radically different idea. Going back to your point, we're all linear thinkers. Well, if you encourage a culture of psychological safety, you're going to engender a culture when nonlinear thinking can kind of come into it as well, where you can really question the status quo and convention, and I think that's really, really important. And then really for that long-term, durable success and edge permanent right to wing, managers have got to have a succession plan. You know, no one's figured out how to live forever. I guess Elon Musk's probably about the best person that's got a good chance to that with everything
Starting point is 00:56:43 he's got going on. But until he figures out a way to live forever, Paul Fulio managers are going to have to figure out a way of replacing them eventually. And so we like to work with firms that have, you know, clear succession plans in place for an idea for a succession plan. And we want firms that will implement a succession plan, not over months or years, but over decades. You know, we have one of our managers at the moment. I won't say which one, but they've had a 20-year succession plan in place that's, you know, effectively been successfully implemented. Think about that for a second.
Starting point is 00:57:16 They've been focused on a succession plan as long as I've had a career pretty much to date. And if you do those things and then you reward people for their work and you, you know, wash, rinse and repeat that year after year after year, those are some of the ingredients. What I will say, everything I just rattled off there is extraordinarily hard to find and very few people do any, if, you know, most of that. But those are the key ingredients. The happy ETF, and you have two of them, HAPY and HAPI. You've partnered with Dan Ariely on this, who's a world. renowned behavioral economist. He's the author of predictably irrational and he's a professor at Duke. And what's interesting about this, and I think everyone understands this idea of ESG and
Starting point is 00:58:02 this, I don't know if it came out of a McKinsey paper at one point or so or Harvard, but it was this idea that companies with great corporate culture actually do succeed. And so it's kind of sparked this whole movement around ESG and trying to find companies beyond obviously the environmental concerns and other things. But now you've somehow taken this. culture aspect and quantified it or created a factor out of it called the human capital factor. So I'd love to learn a little bit more about what goes into this factor and how you came about developing it with Dan. Yeah, this is a really bit of fascinating project for a couple of years that we've been working on
Starting point is 00:58:40 with Dan Ariely, very, very interesting author, researcher, thinker of our times. The ESG has become a bit of a buzz phrase and now it's more likely got a bad reputation. So let me describe what the factor is and what the hypothesis is behind it and why we've backed it and why we've invested in it and why clients are investing in it. So business leaders across the world in different industries and different cultures will say the following statement. Our most important asset is what are people. And I think they say it generally because they believe it and I think it's because it's true. And if you look at investing and you look at accounting, people are not recorded on the balance sheet as an asset, right?
Starting point is 00:59:24 They go through the income statement that's a cost every single year. There's been a lot of academic work done on the valuable of intangible assets as investors, right? There's been so much ink spill on, you know, value doesn't work anymore because price to book has unperformed. Well, yeah, price to book isn't value. That's the problem with that approach. But if you started to take a value factor and adjust for some of the more intangibles, that are really important for businesses, like brand, like R&D, or human capital, are you going to get a fuller picture of value?
Starting point is 00:59:58 And there's been, again, a lot of work done on R&D and the value of brand, so I won't go into that. But what there hasn't been much research around yet, because it's so hard to measure, is human capital, the value of human capital. But my hypothesis would be if you think human capital is important and you don't think it's recorded as an asset on a balance sheet, and it should be, and you can figure out a way to quantify it. As an investor, that's going to give you incremental information that's going to be valuable to potentially generating strong returns.
Starting point is 01:00:30 So at a 30,000 foot level, that's kind of what you have to believe. And if listeners don't believe it, it's absolutely fine. But I believe that very, very strongly. And then it's like, well, how do you measure it? And the old adage of, like, measure what matters, not what's easy, comes to mind. And I think there's why there's been so little work done on this. So I wouldn't have a hope of being out of measure this myself. But we found and partnered with Dan Ariely at Duke University.
Starting point is 01:00:58 He mentioned him. He's the James B. Duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics. And he has spent his life studying and experimenting on people, why we make decisions the way that we do, why we're all a little bit less rational and would care to admit. and he's done that with a focus on understanding what motivates us in the workplace. And he's consulted to Fortune 500 companies that have come to him and said, how do we improve the efficiency or the output of our workers? And then he'll run various tests of, you know, here's the A group,
Starting point is 01:01:32 here's the B group, here's the C group. You know, actually what things improved motivation and improve output. And now, about six years ago, he set up a firm called Irrational Capital, one of my favorite research firms, a rational capital in terms of the names that I've come across. And he set out to empirically measure this statistically in aggregate for public companies. And so what he's done with, you know, again, comes down to data. And I think data's and technology has been kind of a bit recurring theme today. And there's things that you can just measure now today that you couldn't have measured 10 years ago.
Starting point is 01:02:07 And this is definitely a good example of that. So through a combination of proprietary data and public. public data and think kind of sentiment data from Glass Door on the public data, they're able to measure, if you like, the sentiment and engagement and motivation for employees at publicly listed companies, which is really important because you need to kind of have an idea of what actually matters from a motivation perspective. And so designing the factors, actually designing the things that you want to measure that you think are important to then aggregate into a factor that represents the human capital factor, you know, businesses with great corporate cultures
Starting point is 01:02:47 that ultimately we think are going to help perform over the future. Like, there's a lot of work that goes into that. And I'll give you a good example. You know, if I said to you, does compensation matter in motivation, the answer is that you would normally get would be like, well, yeah, of course it does. That's a stupid question. But it matters in a different way than you might think. And what they've actually found out is it's not a level of compensation.
Starting point is 01:03:12 that matters. It's the perception of fairness with compensation. If people feel like they're being compensated fairly, that is the more motivating factor that actually the level that people are being paid. And so you can take that if you like the little nugget. And with data, you can kind of create a subfactor. And then you can identify there's about 30 to 40 of these. And then you can aggregate them all together to create human capital factor score. Give one more example. So like because we talked about it earlier, psychological safety. There's a reason that we look for that in managers because we know through the data through Dan, but that's really important to producing outcomes. Generally, businesses that have employee bases with a high degree of psychological safety
Starting point is 01:03:56 do better over the long run. And so we partnered with a rational capital who, if you like, do the measuring. And then what we've done is we've launched an ETS that tracks these human capital indices and we have two and we've filed for a third that's doing this in small cap that will be out in April. And we think it's a new investment factor. The most simplified definition or description I'd give is imagine instead of taking an x-ray, you could take an MRI scan of kind of corporate culture and you could kind of look into with great precision what people are feeling and thinking about how, where they work. That's just really good information and we've made it investable and, you know, it's resonating in the marketplace.
Starting point is 01:04:41 It resonates with me as a former kind of scientist and scientific thinker. And it's definitely, you know, it's forward-looking. And I do see that if you can do that well, there would be a clear alpha edge. That means that you can produce better outcomes than the market if you do it with, you know, discipline and world-class execution, which we believe we've got. But it's a fascinating subject matter. Well, we've highlighted, like you said, a lot of amazing managers throughout this conversation. and you've just had this incredible career
Starting point is 01:05:09 where you've been able to interact with a lot of the most talented people in this industry. And I know at one point, you were actually able to spend over two hours with Bill Gross right after his infamous exit from Pemco. And I'm really curious to know a little bit more about those couple of hours you spent with Bill and what you took away from it.
Starting point is 01:05:26 So as we're kind of wrapping up here, I thought it'd be fun to kind of just see if you could share your time over those two hours with Bill Gross, what impact it made on you early on and maybe what you saw on a great man like Bill, if we're talking about idiosyncratic, right? What did you see from him that you maybe have seen in others or that was unique to him? Anything you want to share about that would be really interesting to us.
Starting point is 01:05:46 There's so many lessons in this. So I was, I lived in London at the time and I remember coming out of a manager meeting in London. It was a Friday afternoon. And someone said, Bill Gross has left Pimco. And I thought, I looked at my watch to see if it was April, to see if it was April 1st and April Fool's joke. But it wasn't. It was September. And so my initial reaction to that was, you know, I was dumbfound.
Starting point is 01:06:06 they'd like the world. And then they said, and he's joining Janice Henderson. And I was like, what? And so he was a big shot at the time. It was Friday afternoon in London and a busy weekend later with many strings pull. On Tuesday morning at 7 a.m., I was meeting Bill in his new office, stepping out of the elevator and his tie was draped around. And it was his first meeting on his last day as new employer. And so it was, you know, business-wise, really just day late, later after he left Pimco. And he was in very reflective mood. And, you know, we got to spend, it was me and a colleague, my former colleague, Ted Dimmick at
Starting point is 01:06:51 the time, we got to spend two hours unplugged with him, talking to him about, you know, what happened to Pimco, what he's looking to do now. And he was in a very, like, lucid, philosophical, kind of clear-minded framework. and talked openly, and I won't go into all of the kind of the ink that's been spilled at Pimco. But my biggest takeaway was a funny one. It was like, at the end of the day, we're all just people, like even Bill Gross. And Bill, I left that meeting feeling sorry for him because what he told us shocked me. What he told us was all the years he was at Pimco, surrounded by these amazing colleagues.
Starting point is 01:07:34 And there's some brilliant people at Pimco, brilliant thinkers and investors in fixed income. But he never leveraged them. He'd never used them. He'd never create this network with them. And he'd never built like meaningful relationships with them. And he'd always been a bit of a loner there. And he said it was only really in those last six months where he began to get to know some of these people. And here he was talking to us in this office building, you know, 200 yards or so away from Pinko's office.
Starting point is 01:08:03 He was there on his own. There was some wires hanging from the ceiling. There was a box of donuts and the coffee box on the desk. And there was a guy in the background setting up his Bloomberg terminal. And he was all alone. And I just felt really sorry for him that despite everything he'd done in his job. It ended up with like nothing. He was surrounded by no one.
Starting point is 01:08:23 And actually what happened in time was those people, that team he had around him, was a big part of the fuel of the success of PIMCO. And he just wasn't able to approve. appreciate it or make the most of it. And yeah, so I just sort of made a promise to myself then. I wouldn't want to fall into that mistake myself. Even a really successful, you know, multi-billionaire investor like that can kind of end up with deep regrets and end up alone.
Starting point is 01:08:51 And then obviously Janice Anderson, it didn't work out and he ended up leaving a few years later and Pimco, I've still gone on and done very, very well. But it was probably the highlight, like, day of my career because it was, was the story, the thing that was happening in the markets around the world. And I don't know if you remember, but people thought, is this going to bring down fixed income markets? This is the liquidity event that we've all been fearful of. And it was just really unique. And then I was able to go and see PIMCO for two or three hours straight after that. So I came out of that morning, it was a long day, but that sort of triangulation between what was going on at PIMCO, what
Starting point is 01:09:28 Bill had said, what was happening in the markets, what journalists were staying, and really just having that kind of fast-rock front-row seat to that moment in time was, yeah, it was really special. I really appreciate you sharing that with us because while we're all here interested in learning about how to be a great investor, how to understand the markets better and all these things, I mean, we really also want to learn how to live a great life. And what you share just then is a reminder that, you know, the money and the success and the performance, et cetera, is not everything. probably far from it. So I really appreciate you sharing that. And it's a really interesting reminder.
Starting point is 01:10:02 It's always even more, it's a little bit harder when it comes from someone like that, like a multi-billionaire who you can glean these kind of lessons from. So before we let you go, Christoph, and thank you so much for everything you shared today. This has been just such a fun and really fascinating conversation. I'd like to give you an opportunity to hand off to the listeners where they can learn more about you. We talked about a couple of the ETFs, but there are more. I mean, Wall Street Journal just listed the dividend growth leaders ETF. as the best active dividend ETF. So I'm putting a plug in there for you because, you know, I just want, I want people to understand and have these resources. So please direct them wherever you want them to go to learn more about you or to Harbor. Thanks.
Starting point is 01:10:40 Yeah, thank you, Tray. It's a real pleasure to join you. Thank you so much for inviting me. I hope your listeners enjoyed most of what they heard or least learned a nugget or two, something that's going to be helpful for them. If people want to find out more, that probably the best thing to do is just go to our website, which is harbourcapital.com, and that's Harbour with no you, spelled the American way,
Starting point is 01:11:01 which my English friends always tease me about as a you in England. So harbourcapital.com. You can also follow us on LinkedIn. I'm on Twitter with the handle is at Gleisch-Christop. And look, I hope people go and have a click and explore and like what they see. Well, thank you so much again, Christoph. I hope we can do it again sometime soon. Thank you. All right, everybody. That's all we had for you this week. If you're loving the show, don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app. And if you'd be so kind, please leave us a review. It really helps the show. If you want to reach out directly, you can find me on Twitter at
Starting point is 01:11:33 Trey Lockerby. And don't forget to check out all of the amazing resources we've built for you at the investors podcast.com. You can also simply Google TIP finance and it should pop right up. And with that, we'll see you again next time. 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 the investorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only, before making any decision consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written
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