Meb Faber - Factors, Dividends, and Angel Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.53]

My guest this week is Meb Faber, who started a podcast similar to this one right before mine and was a big reason I was open to the idea in the first place. Meb is a quantitative researcher whose firm Cambria has been behind many interesting investment strategies that break the Wall Street mold. We talk investing factors, dividends, angel investing, podcasts and more. This was a fun catch up with a close friend in the industry who has been in a leader in using data to explore the best active strategies in a variety of asset classes. Please enjoy our conversation, which begins with a factor draft. For comprehensive show notes on this episode go to http://investorfieldguide.com/meb For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. To get involved with Project Frontier, head to InvestorFieldGuide.com/frontier. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag Books Referenced Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex Links Referenced Update on the Valuation Metric Horserace: 2011-2015 Jason Calacanis on Meb Faber Show Brent BeShore episode of Invest Like the Best Team Ritholtz episode of Invest Like the Best Show Notes 1:55 – (First question) – Drafting quant factors 4:10 – Update on the Valuation Metric Horserace: 2011-2015 10:25 – Most interesting thing Meb’s learned over the past year 14:05 – Jason Calacanis on Meb Faber Show 14:49 – Brent BeShore episode of Invest Like the Best 16:10 – What is Meb’s process for investing in private companies 18:35 – What part of the fintech landscape would Meb be most excited about 26:50 – What has been working well on the business front for Meb 30:34 – Looking at investor behavior and changing fee structures 35:54 – What has Meb enjoyed most about doing a podcast 36:26 – Team Ritholtz episode of Invest Like the Best 40:55 – A list of guests that meb would like to have on 41:27 – Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex 43:19 – If Meb couldn’t work in this business, what would he do 45:02 – Same question for Patrick 47:28 – Kindest thing anyone has done for Meb Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 0:32Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  This podcast is sponsored by CFA Institute, the global association of investment professionals whose mission is to lead the investment profession by promoting the highest standards of ethics, education and professional excellence for the ultimate benefit of society. CFA Institute serves a global community of investment professionals, working to build an investment industry where investors' interests come first, financial markets function at their best and economies grow. The Chartered Financial Analyst credential is the most respected and recognized investment management designation in the world. The views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent the views of CFA Institute. Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Neal and this is Invest Like the Best.

• 1:15Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Patrick O'Neal is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Neal Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Neal Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Neal Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 1:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  My guest this week is Mev Faber, who started the podcast similar to this one right before mine and was a big reason I was open to the idea in the first place. Mev is a quantitative researcher whose firm, Cambria, has been behind many interesting investment strategies that break the Wall Street mold. We talk about investing factors, dividends, angel investing, podcasts and more. This was a fun catch-up with a close friend of the industry who has been a leader in using data to explore the best potential active strategies in a variety of different asset classes. Please enjoy our conversation, which begins with a factor draft.

• 2:27Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Okay, Mep, so now after a year of doing this together in LA, unfortunately, we're remote and this time I get to host. It'll be a conversation, but I'll try to try to skew it in your direction, at least a little bit, as you did for me a year ago. And we'll start with a draft for quant factors. So the rules of the game are we're each going to pick five. The rules of the game, just back and forth, snake draft, not an auction. And a factor would be defined as say, price to earnings ratio, not value as a category. So it's got to be a specific factor. And the idea is that you can use these five factors in a model, however you see fit. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about how we might do that afterwards, but that it's over the next 10 years. So you're trying to earn the most

• 3:08Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  kind of excess return, let's say, in the US all cap market using five factors. Since you're the guest, I'll let you pick first.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  All right. First of all, congratulations on a year, Patrick.

• 3:18Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Thank you, brother.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  The podcast. In your honor, I have, it's Friday afternoon here in Los Angeles. So I, the only alcohol fueled podcast I've ever done was the one you and I did, which kind of ended poorly for me because you had to go give a speech later and I ended up drinking about six beers. So I'm, I just poured myself a margarita. So your listeners, I would encourage to listen all the way through this podcast because it's probably going to get more interesting as we go. But this was a listener sent us in a bottle of tequila. So cheersing to you virtually for here from LA. All right. So the rules of this draft, it's, is it US or global?

• 3:57Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  US.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  US only, say, stocks above 200 million or something?

• 4:02Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Sure.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  And it rebalances once a year or whatever, but we got to stick to it for 10 years?

• 4:06Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yep.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  And I have to use these in combo or they're, it's going to be like a multi-factor model?

• 4:14Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  That's your discretion. We'll talk about how you want to use it at the end. So think about it first, just like drafting players onto a team. And then you can be the coach and deploy them however you see fit, but you're going to get a roster of five discrete individual factors.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  I can't even name five factors. This is, this is kind of an interesting mind game because now I also got to pick factors that I would like to pick before you pick them.

• 4:36Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Exactly.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  All right, so first I'll take the factor that was named in Wes Gray's, he did a paper called the horse race of something of factors, you can link to it in the show notes, can't remember the name, but the data mined best factor, enterprise value to EBITDA, or some variation of that, I'll take that as numero uno. A traditional value factor, private equity guys love, or Charlie Munger hates.

• 5:01Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Toby calls it the acquires multiple, it's sort of the winner of all those horse races. We did a, in preparation for this, me and the other research guys at O'Shaughnessy did a mock draft, and that was the first pick in that draft too, so.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 5:14Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  The clear leader. So, again, largely because it blocks you from taking it in the future, I'll take buyback yield, which is a component of shareholder yield, but kind of takes that one off the table, since I'm assuming you're not going to, knowing what you think about dividend yield, maybe we could do a short portfolio factor that you might take dividend yield in, so I'll start with, I'll start with buybacks.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  So theoretically, I could not now say shareholder yield, because it encompasses buyback yield?

• 5:38Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Correct, so you could only do, you could only do dividends or something with that.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  Good, I'm going to take market cap, meaning I can, I can slant mine to size, I want small, small enterprise value to EBITDA companies.

• 5:51Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So why? Bust that out, why do you want that one?

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Because that's, that's the, the theory I just gave you, is that the combination of giving me a chance to beat you on, is this just Cager? I mean, are we just talking pure return here?

• 6:05Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Just for our return.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  All right, I'll take the smaller guys than the bigger guys.

• 6:07Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So my pushback there is that a lot of this stuff will cluster you small, small and mid-cap naturally, so a, a bold reach with a number two pick, so for my number two pick, I'll do free cash flow to enterprise value.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  So theoretically.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  I could have selected basically price to free cash flow, which listeners, despite the fact I love shareholder yield, it's basically the same thing. So you kind of swooped in and took that because I was thinking about adding another value factor, but I already got value. Now I got size. What round is this? I'm going to go with, now I'm taking momentum. So let's just do a simple 12-month mo, total price returns, nothing more than that.

• 6:51Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  All right. So you've got good, you've got good, like fairly low correlation stuff with one another. I'm going to do a quality factor, something that can screen out some really scary stuff. I'll go with kind of the classic accruals factor.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Boring. You guys love accruals. I could not even probably tell you what accruals is if I, if I, if I sat down for a CFA level one, and by the way, your favorite sponsor, CFA level one test, I probably would fail accrual section.

• 7:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Okay.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  So I got value.

• 7:23Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Value, momentum. You're going classic.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  And I'm getting ready to crush you here now. And because you know my opinion, the US stock market's expensive and everything's expensive. So buying a bunch of small cap value stocks probably isn't going to save me. So I'm going 200-day moving average factor, if it's above or below. And I think, I think that qualifies as a factor, right?

• 7:49Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Sure, man. We're making the rules up as we go here.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Trend.

• 7:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I like it. I'm going to stay fully invested over 10 years because that the dispersion on that, that starting earning stuff is too wide for me. So next I'm going to do, I'll do return on invested capital. Last, last one for you.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  All right. So I'm going to take, I got one more. I'm going to take 10-year stock cape. And the reason being is that that's going to help me cut down my turnover a little bit, hopefully. So that'll pick up the longer trends. It doesn't really improve the performance too much over the other value factors, but because it's such a long-term metric, it will weed out a little bit of the noise. Hopefully that'll reduce my turnover.

• 8:31Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Love it. These are coming in very true to our Our underlying DNA. So my last one, even though I know that obviously I should take a momentum factor because it's got negative correlation with all this other stuff. This is just for fun. So I'm going to do something different and stick with my kind of value DNA. And I'm going to go price to sales, which is about as far from, from free cash flow as I can get. So I'm doubling down on value.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Price to sales is interesting. If you look at the market as a whole and a lot of these, like the median stock measures for stocks in the entire market, price to sales is hitting the highest it's ever been in the database we've seen. And so I'm, I, I wonder if the distribution is that wide or if it's actually pretty tight. All right. So what were your five?

• 9:12Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  All right. So your team is EBITDA to EV or EBIT EV. I can't remember what 20 said. Market caps, a tilting small, simple momentum, price momentum, a 200 day moving average. So a trend and an individual 10 year stock cape cyclically adjusted. Mine is buyback yield, free cash flow to EV accruals, return on invested capital and price to sales. So I'm going like hardcore capital allocation, quality cheap. And you're going small, out of favor trending.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  How are we going to track this? Or are we going to, are we going to get Oshana, is he going to set up a couple tracking portfolios? Are we going to find a family office listener to pony up 20 million each for a couple ETFs? What's the best idea?

• 9:55Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yeah, let's decide on a, on a portfolio construction methodology. And I would say we just go super simple. So we go equal weighted portfolio. I mean, we could just even just do it for the next year. It'd be fun to check in on.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:09Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Equal weighted portfolio. You want to rebalance it or no?

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 10:12Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Okay. Quarterly rebalance.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 10:15Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You should like that. That plays to your advantage. That's, that's momentum.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  That'll help me. That'll help me. As long as it's gross, gross of tax.

• 10:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So yeah, so gross of taxes, pretends to be passive ETF. So quarterly rebal, 50 or 100 stocks, your call.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  50, of course.

• 10:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Okay. So 50 stocks, equal weighted quarterly rebal. And, and what's the stakes? You want to do a charity thing?

• 10:37Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 10:37Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  All right.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Name it.

• 10:38Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So, so the, the

• 10:41Speaker 03

  $100.

• 10:43Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Let's do, uh, we'll, we'll figure it out offline and we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll report back. But the, the loser has to contribute to the winner's charity of choice.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 10:53Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Cool.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Deal.

• 10:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So, so let's, let's shift gears to what's been going on with you in the last year. You guys have been pretty prolific in, in new strategy research and just tons of new research. You've had the podcast going, uh, what, what in the last year since we last talked has been, uh, the most interesting thing you've learned or area that you've explored?

• 11:12Speaker 03

  There's two that kind of pop to mind. One is an area that, you know, and it's funny, and I'm sure you've experienced this on the podcast as well as, is writing is there's oftentimes you'll spend months on a research study or a concept or an idea and put it out. And you're so excited about it. It's just crickets, you know, you think it's like earth moving, earth shattering research. And then there's other times you'll just write a stupid tweet or article and, and people fall in love with it. But one of those areas that I was really interested in, I haven't seen much research and maybe you have, and, and maybe it's just buried. Someone wrote about it 20 years ago, but is thinking about investing in stocks and avoiding yielding companies,

• 11:52Speaker 03

  but still getting value. So, so this concept, the original idea was can I replicate dividend yield without any dividends? And meaning dividend yield is, I cannot count how many hundreds, if not thousands of dividend funds there are out there. But dividend yield is really just kind of a value factor and it's kind of a crappy value factor. You know, you end up with kind of highly levered companies that have a lot of debt and they're not particularly a great way to express value. So I said, well, what if you could express value, but if you're going to do value, do value. So I set up a bunch of screens and had some research and had Wes's shop, Alpha Architect, run a bunch of these numbers and said, look,

• 12:34Speaker 03

  what if we avoided the top quartile of high dividend yield and the top 50%, the top 75%? The theory being that if you're getting these dividend yields, you have to pay for a taxable investor, you're paying taxes on them once a quarter. And what the research found was that a value composite, so stuff that O'Shaughnessy has put together over the years, very simple, and it doesn't even matter what you put together, but put together a handful of the value indicators you talk about. A value composite destroys dividend yield, which of course beats the market cap average by a percent or two a year over time. So there's obviously worse ways to invest in dividend yield. But value beats dividends. And then I said, okay, well, what if we avoided a certain percent of the universe based on dividends?

• 13:17Speaker 03

  And it turns out you increase your after tax return by theoretically, it could be a ton. Now it depends on tax rates and we did a bunch of different simulations. It depends on the dividend yields over time. So they're lower now, so not as big of a deal. But if you avoid, say, the top half of dividend yields, but still invest in value stocks, basically you should never invest in dividend, a high dividend strategy in a taxable account ever. First of all, and then if you're gonna do that, you should do value and avoid the highest dividend yielders. Now dividends for the last 100 years, like they have such a good brand. You know, it's like talking about Coca-Cola and it's such a good story and people, this is probably going to be universally hated from your listeners, particularly the older set,

• 14:00Speaker 03

  who loves getting their checks in the mail and they equate dividend yields with someone writing them income or some sort of check. But in reality, if you're agnostic and you're what a lot of the topics these day of evidence-based investing, actually, if you're investing in a value stocks and avoiding dividend yields in a taxable account, you can save anywhere between it's like 40 basis points to 400 basis points per year just by avoiding dividend stocks and not paying those taxes. And dividend taxes aren't as much as they used to be, but they still, it's still a drain. So that's one. Number two, we did a podcast with Jason Calacanis and you know, some of the concepts that you've talked about with a lot of your guests over the past year with Brent and some others, where you talk about private equity.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  And so I've been experimenting, doing kind of angel and startup private investments for the last four years. My company has done actually two crowdfunding investment rounds itself. And mainly is trying to learn about the space and understand what's going on. And my portfolio generally is woefully under allocated to US stocks. So mainly to understand, but there's a couple of the biggest benefits I don't think are talked about that much. And one being something that you guys kind of talked about on the podcast, which is so many people talk about angel investing in private equity and the liquidity is a negative. But in reality, I think it's a massive, massive positive.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  And the reason being is that, you know, we all know the behavioral challenges of running publicly mark-to-market portfolios. I saw a stat the other day that the average Robin Hood account checks his balance 10 times a day.

• 15:39Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  God.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  And so, you know, all that does creates horrific behavior.

• 15:43Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  churn.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  But if you buy an investment that you then can't sell for, even if you wanted to, for one, five, 10 years, like you just kind of put it away in a lockbox and kind of forget about it. And you're also a lot more thoughtful before you enter that investment. So that's one on the behavioral side. I think it's interesting. Two, you know, because you're starting in a tiny market cap, you have the potential for the 100, 1,000, 10,000 baggers. And lastly, there's a major tax benefit that no one talks about that shields your gains up to like 10 million in some of these companies as long as you've held them for five years. So even if you just match the S and P 500 on investing in these early-stage private startup companies, after tax, it's a potential really big. So those are the two things I've been

• 16:26Speaker 03

  kind of thinking a lot about. The problem with the latter, which I think is a great business opportunity for someone, I would love to see a research boutique sprout up that focuses on these private, early-stage companies because there's no information.

• 16:38Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Presumably, if you somehow had an edge at selecting and getting into some early-stage investments, it would be in the, you know, the fintech space. Is that where you've concentrated bets and explored companies? And kind of what's, I'm really curious about this world, too. I think it's one of those things where the only way to learn anything is to actually do it and get some, get some skin in the game, maybe even viewing it as like an education expense, given the high likelihood that these things won't pan out. But what kind of companies have you looked at? What's been the process for, for finding them? Is there a process or is it just kind of ad hoc?

• 17:12Speaker 03

  So, surprising or not, I've done basically almost zero deals in fintech asset management. And one of the reasons may, may end up being that I'm now just the dumb money writing checks in other areas that I know nothing about and it's going to end up really poorly. But I've done about 25 and the checks ranging from, you know, most of them a thousand to $10,000. Very rarely does it get more. Some are like $20,000. And some, and it runs the gamut from companies that are $2 million valuation to maybe four or five of these kind of late-stage private like Lyft, for example, or Hotel Tonight, just things that are, you know, maybe the couple hundred million or a few billion valuation,

• 17:53Speaker 03

  but, but still private. There's a great stat from TIA Craft that had a, had a survey that showed that people spent more time researching TVs than they do planning for their retirement, or, you know, before they select a mutual fund. So I'm probably that guy now, but I try to be really thoughtful. And I think some of the things that Jason talked about on our podcast, which is, you know, for me, it's a lot easier to see a product that's already launched with traction and growing. So the kind of the promise of a bright shiny idea or concept, like I think that's a lot harder to gauge and probably really high failure rate. And so I was joking on the podcast the other day, my, my kind of favorite has been these subscription boxes, you know, where you sign up for some box and it's like the Birchbox is the original one,

• 18:37Speaker 03

  but it's incredibly sticky business model because people kind of forget about the payments and all of a sudden a subscription and every month you get a delightful box that is whatever. If it's your animal focused, it's, you know, dog treats and dog snacks. If you're health, fitness focused, and it seems to be a great recurring business. They've done a few of those. That's been the most, but the fintech, asset management, media side has been the least, if you don't count investments and kind of my own companies.

• 19:03Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What about when you're thinking about those acquisition costs? So one of the things that I've been fascinated with in the fintech space, and I know the robo-advisors better than the, the non-robo fintech companies, is just how hard it is to get customers. And those, those recurring revenue models are great if you can get subscribers, but it seems like that's been the variable that maybe has held some of these places back, just really high acquisition costs. What do you think about fintech companies? Like if you had to deploy some money there, is there anyone or any part of that landscape that you would be most excited about?

• 19:36Speaker 03

  As you look at the way the world is evolving, you know, we've been pretty consistent talking about automated space. I love the interview with your dad where he was talking about essentially launching a robo-advisor in the 90s. And a lot of the technology's been around for a decade or two. A lot of the features have been around. And really, kind of the packaging and the user interface is a little bit nicer. So the betterments and wealth runs of the world really kind of pushed that forward. But we've long kind of held the belief that the custodians would dominate. So the Vanguard's and Schwab's of the world, because they have a huge inherent fee advantage by the fact they can use their own funds, would eventually dominate. And that's kind of come to pass.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Vanguard is at like approaching 100 billion in their automated service and Schwab's north of 20 now, I think. And so Vanguard bigger than all the others combined, but that doesn't mean there's not room for a handful of them, of course. And I think everyone will eventually have that technology deployed. You know, our friend Josh Brown says, it's silly, this kind of robo advisor nomenclature is that I was around when we implemented email and no one called us email advisors. So everyone's going to have it and it's already kind of happened at this point. So as far as interesting ideas, I mean, I think there's a lot of early stage asset managers that I would absolutely invest in. Like Wes's shop, they're doing really cool stuff that no one else is really doing.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  I would absolutely invest in that company, you know, and some of the tailwinds of certain businesses that are industries growing 20% a year. You know, that's a nice tailwind to have. So there's a handful of spaces in fintech. And then on the flip side, there's a lot of these getting funded that are actually have great revenue that I think are essentially predatory. You know, so a lot of these savings and investing apps that millennials are attracted to. And I've mentioned these publicly, like Acorns and Stash and a lot of these that charge, it's a dollar a month. So it doesn't sound much until you realize the average account balance is 100 bucks. Right. So they're paying 12% of fees and why in the world would you ever open an account with them when there's alternative like, I don't know, Bank of America or Robinhood or E-Trade that you could do and it'd be free.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  So it's, you know, we're definitely still in, I think, silly season on a lot of these fintech companies. And valuations getting funded. But yeah, I haven't really done hardly anything in that space. I think there's a lot of great ideas and opportunities that no one's doing that I would love to see someone do. But we got to focus on our knitting. So I'd be happy if someone did them, but I'm not doing it.

• 22:10Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Of the 25 that you've made, or for the 25 you made, how many do you think you looked at? So how many no's? What's the no to yes ratio that you've had in your, you said four years?

• 22:20Speaker 03

  This is probably one of the behavioral problems I have. And one of the reasons I'm a quant is I'm at my core, kind of an optimist and maybe a little bit gullible. So I loved, maybe it was one of your podcasts where one of your guests was talking about, no, you got to start at no and then move to yes. But I mean, it's been hundreds. And the way that I think about it and the way that my education over the last couple of years has evolved has been, my first concept was I'm going to approach this just like I would approach 13F investing in hedge funds, which listeners, if you're not familiar, is following some of the top hedge fund managers through their filings. And so you can look at what Warren Buffett buys every quarter. Seth Klarman, you know, Carl Icahn, David Tepper, all these guys, you can look at what they're buying and kind of, one, you can just replicate

• 23:03Speaker 03

  what they do and two, track them. And so the same thing in the angel space where you can follow what these guys are investing and see kind of why and what. And now that they have a lot of the syndicates, despite the high carry, you know, in my kind of first couple of years of doing this, I consider that kind of tuition. You know, when we did our crowdfunding rounds, we didn't, we didn't use any of the platforms because I didn't want our investors to have to pay that carry. I think it's a huge cost. So we just did it at, you know, a normal fundraiser, but I consider it kind of tuition. So trying to follow what some of these top investors are doing and why. But also committing to, you know, 10 years of various vintages, because the same thing with private equity cycle, you know, that certainly even in like two years ago, it got really expensive and they've

• 23:46Speaker 03

  kind of come off since. But year eight bull market, you got to certainly want willing to allocate over the full cycle. You know, otherwise I think you can end up just getting heavily allocated in just a few years.

• 23:58Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What's the most interesting of the 25 that you've come across?

• 24:02Speaker 03

  I've only had one exit out of all of them, which was actually the first one I did and made like 20%. But it was with one of Howard Lindzen's syndicates on a company that was helping people.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Do kind of essentially estate planning and that there's a lot of just ideas that are a huge pain in the ass, particularly once you go through and you're like, God, why is the world still like this? How can it be such a huge pain in the ass to do whatever this might be and find a company that's kind of trying to solve it? And you're just like, ah, this makes, this makes life a lot easier. That was a pretty cool one. I'd have to marinate on that and think about it. I love, there's certain products like Peter Lynch style. And so like some of the late-stage private ones and even some of the startup ones where it's a product you just love. So I love Hotel Tonight, but I'm kind of the perfect use case for that with my travel. You know, I don't think any families of eight are going to be using Hotel Tonight when they plan their vacation for a week. But to me, it's just such a beautiful interface, so easy and simple. And it's, it's perfect because

• 24:58Speaker 03

  it curates. So just a couple of things nice. It curates hotels into a short list. So you only have a few choices and then it gives you the best prices. What's not to like about that? Now, I would also have said that about a company I didn't invest in, but would have loved to, which was BP, which was a company that made selling your car a lot easier. And I actually sold a car on it. And I was like, oh my God, this is so much better. Why would anyone not do this? And then of course, they got, I think, went bankrupt or got acquired. So I would have lost all my money on that despite loving the product. So who knows? I'm just happy if I, if I get a US stock like returns for the next, next decade unless.

• 25:33Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So your two, your two big things, dividends and VC are pretty far apart on the spectrum, which is a cool year of exploration. On the business front, what has been most interesting? Like what? So, you know, we're both part of relatively small asset management firms. I'm really interested in how others in the business are perceiving the environment, the direction, the headwinds, the tailwinds. So what, what has pleasantly surprised you? What has been working well on the business front?

• 26:01Speaker 03

  I mean, we've been at this for a decade and it's kind of funny to think about because try not to get too, I mean, you can. Sympathize with this, running a public asset manager, you know, you try not to get too excited when the flows are rushing in and too despondent when the flows are rushing out because a lot of times you know that it's not in investors' best interest to be doing whatever they're doing. And so we've had years where it's just been, you know, constant, just dribble out. And then years like this year where we've essentially, you know, doubled or tripled our assets that you try not to get too excited about because you know the bad times will come. But, you know, we try to be thoughtful about the fund lineup.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  And so the criteria that we use is, one, it has to be something that I want to put my own money into. And so as you know, I put 100% of my investable public net worth into our funds and strategies. We think skin in the game is really important. I know you guys are big proponents of that, but the stat that I think it's like 60 or 70% of the average mutual fund manager has less than 100,000 or zero invested in their fund is astonishing to me. And why anyone would invest in those people, you know, when they don't is just beyond me. So two, it has to be something that, you know, there's research and we think it works and that isn't out there already. So if Vanguard is running some sort of bond fund for five basis points, like they're

• 27:27Speaker 03

  better. Like, why would I ever launch a competitor to that? And you see all these fund companies just launching me too funds out the wazoo. And I just scratch my head and it doesn't make any sense. And so it has to be something that either doesn't exist, or we think we can do better or cheaper. And the cheaper is rare, but we've had a couple that have been in that category. The hardest part for me is launching something that people actually, knowing that people want. So just because I want it, and I think it's awesome. So my value tax efficient idea, like we'll probably launch those in funds. I'm pretty sure those can be the most hated funds ever. Like maybe a family office or institution will, you know, get it and put in some big chunks. But I can't think of a less popular fund than going out on CNBC and

• 28:11Speaker 03

  saying, we're going to invest and we're going to avoid dividend stocks. I mean, my God, people will probably just run for the hills. So that I think you see a lot of fund managers kind of chasing the topic du jour. I mean, we just saw this week that a fund company is launching a GOP focused. Make America Great Again Fund. But then again, there's dozens, if not hundreds of funds. And I say, that is the stupidest idea I have ever heard of in my life. And it'll raise 100 million or a billion or something. And I just say, you know, all right, who am I, who am I to say, you know, have at it? So we try to be thoughtful about it, but we've certainly launched funds. I mean, we currently have the only ETF without a management fee in wrapper all in.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  It's 25 basis points, but it's been one of our less popular funds for whatever reason. I think over time, if next 10 years, if you said, Mep, this has outperformed all your other funds, like I wouldn't be surprised. But, uh, you know, it's, who knows? So, but it's, it's a lot of this is cyclical too.

• 29:13Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You've always been one of the, one of the people at the forefront of, I guess I'll call it like a super transparent marketing movement in asset management. Where I think, you know, decades ago, it used to be about, you know, I've got the inside edge that no one else has got. And, uh, you know, hire me as your broker because I know more than the next guy. And that there's been a huge transition to, as you mentioned earlier, evidence-based investing. It's sort of now like who can one up each other on white papers and transparency and putting out content, et cetera. Talk a bit about that as a strategy for the business. So there's kind of sales and marketing in asset management. It seems like the pendulum has swung in the marketing direction. Do you get that same sense?

• 29:53Speaker 03

  Well, part of that is because we've been bootstrapping the company and don't have any salespeople. So by definition, we don't do any sales because we don't have any, you know, and the, the marketing for us has been, we know what we're good at and the, the content creation. I mean, if you look back in the history of asset managers in general, I mean, people have done it in many different ways. Edelman did it with radio. Fisher did it with magazines. You know, and now some other shops are better at doing blogs. You look at the Ritholtz crew, they're kind of a Twitter. But, I mean, look at the thousands of, of wirehouse and independent RA's that have done it the old school style. You know, just networking, friends and family, golf course.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  So whatever the kind of marketing sort of sales, you know, that, that fits you. So many people say you have to do. Content marketing and I often say, look, you know, most people, they may not have anything to say, you know, or their message may not be relevant to doing Snapchat videos. Like, why would some RIA be doing that? Because they're not going to get any clients from that, or probably none that they want. So, you know, it's been a very pleasant accident for us.

• 31:06Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If I said, I was an institution, I was a pension plan or something, and I came to you and I said, I will lock my money up with a hefty early withdrawal penalty for seven years, what fee do you want to charge me on that same product? What would you charge them?

• 31:21Speaker 03

  I think it's reasonable to give a discount in that situation. I mean, I don't know, take it down to 50.

• 31:27Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So this is one of those things that I've been thinking a lot about because your comment really resonated earlier about the liquidity being viewed as something you need to be compensated for, when in fact, it may actually be the other way around, that by being less liquid or having fewer opportunities to go and dig up the roots of your tree, you'll actually do better. So it helps your returns, not hurts them, even though you don't have access. And one of the things that we've observed in the institutional and really across the asset management spectrum, is this kind of standard principal agent problem, hiring, firing, mistakes, that it's all performance chasing, good or bad. So you get hired after a good three-year run, and you get fired after a bad three-year run. And I've just

• 32:08Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  been trying to ask around to see what incentive structure could change that for the better. Something where like, every year of additional lockup, you know, you discount another five basis points, or 10 basis points, or something like that, down to a minimum. And obviously, we have different, we have different shops. And I think, you know, you're without a sales force, you know, it's a different cost structure, et cetera. And the churn is a little different with ETFs. But I think that's an interesting issue. I wish more-

• 32:33Speaker 03

  I've got the solution for you.

• 32:35Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Let's hear it.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  First of all, I mean, here's a great example I always give everyone when they think about performance. I say, look, if you go buy Warren Buffett's stocks through 13 and F, every quarter, back to 2000, he's outperformed the market by five or 6% per year. So that beats, maybe it's down to five or four now, but let's call it five, that beats 99% of all mutual funds. And it's even higher if you go back to the 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s, because he had smaller asset base and he beat by 10% a year. You know, how many people raise your hand would you invest in that guy? Like everyone and you pay no fees. You just buy them. There's low turnover once a quarter. He crushes it. Well, he's underperformed eight of the last 10 years. That strategy. And a lot of that's just because values struggled in this period and it destroyed it from 2000, 2008.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  So the long cycles, if you were blinded people to who was running this and showed this performance track record, that person would be out of business six years ago. So forget eight out of 10, you know, two out of three, three out of four, gone. Like you're not in business anymore. Eight out of 10, sayonara. But you know, one of his biggest part of his alpha, we say is not his investment approach, which is actually pretty simple. Value, quality, hold it forever is that it's, he sticks to the strategy and doesn't waver. So here's my idea and you're going to like the first part. We'll, we'll call it the forever fund. And so I spend a ton of time thinking about behavioral issues and the biggest problem with ETFs, daily liquidity. What almost everyone talks about is again, as a benefit, you can intraday trade ETFs. Horrible. Like that's not a benefit.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  That's a, that's a huge drawback. I wish ETFs just traded once at the end of the day. All right. So we're going to start a mutual fund. It's going to be called the forever fund and it's global asset allocation, whatever. Maybe we'll do a whole series. We'll do a US equity multi-factor, foreign multi-factor. We'll do a combo half Cape size value mode trend and half, half your, your portfolio. You got to come up with names for those, by the way. Sure. All right. So the forever fund, so maybe a series, but the first one, asset allocation, low cost, whatever, reasonable, reasonably priced. There is a 10 year lockup and there is a declining redemption fee structure. So if you redeem in year one, you're, you're going to pay 10% penalty, maybe five, 10, 10 may, you may get sued.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  5% redemption penalty. Okay. And it declines each year, five, four, three, two, one, whatever. Or maybe it's 50 basis points a year. So there's a penalty for being an idiot. However, that sales charge or their back end load, whatever you want to call it, doesn't go to the fund company. It goes to the investors in the fund. So maybe once a quarter or once a year, you get a good behavior bonus from not being an idiot and holding your money long-term in this fund. And so you get kind of this dual behavior where. You not only get negative feedback from, you know, you're getting punished, but you're also getting rewarded for good behavior. Anyway, I think it's a cool idea.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  So when you're ready to seed it, let's do it. People that stick get bonuses. It's, you know, yeah, probably get sued out of the wazoo. I actually emailed Jason Zwaig. I was like, have you seen this? You're kind of, you've been around the block for a few decades. What? And he's like, you know, Funk did something broadly similar. They didn't get the rewards, but they did some penalty base. He's like, they definitely got sued at one point, but I like the idea.

• 35:56Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you could write the contract to, you know, inoculate yourself against lawsuits, that's a super interesting idea because even if it's not that big, you're going to get really interesting behavior on all sides. And the key point, which, you know, was a great idea by you, is to pay the other people, not the fund manager. So the fund manager's incentive is that they just have long-term capital lockup, which is what every, every fund manager wants. And they can charge a very reasonable fee. You know, if you, if you've got 10-year locked up capital, you can charge a very reasonable fee. You can plan your business much better. I love it. So, so on the podcast, what have you enjoyed the most about it? You've been doing it a little bit longer than me. If you look forward to the next year, do you think you'll be able to keep up this pace? Has it been challenging to, I think you've done one a week like this one. Give me some general

• 36:39Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  impressions and what you think you might do or change in the second year?

• 36:42Speaker 03

  There's a couple of thoughts. Because we're based in Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles, you know, most of the people that we're chatting with are not in-house. It's a lot more fun to do it in person, but you know, most of ours end up being remote. And the biggest takeaway is a lot of fun. You know, kind of like you mentioned with the Ritholtz crew. It's like going to a bar with your buddies, flipping the on switch, recording and, you know, letting people listen, listen in. And that's a lot of fun. And the ability to connect with people and meet people that actually you haven't met before, or maybe, you know, digitally or, you know, online has been a lot of fun. And like you mentioned, learning a lot. So there's areas, yours tends to be a

• 37:23Speaker 03

  little more wide-ranging than mine does, but talking with people that are doing crazy, interesting things and kind of bucket list people that, you know, I'd love to talk To that never had the chance to ask them these couple of questions like how much fun is that like that's such a such a fun idea. The biggest problem I have and I've been moaning about this for about a year or two is that I go for a walk with my dog once or twice a day, hour ish or go for runs and I often listen to podcasts. That's kind of what I listen to them. Airports, commutes, you know, dog walks and I currently have like 200 in my queue and I would

• 38:03Speaker 03

  say about half are okay. You know, a quarter are just life changing and amazing, wonderful, great podcasts, you know, and another quarter are 20 minutes of the hour is amazing, but the other 40 is just a snoozer. And the biggest problem I'm having is for other podcasts in general is being able to curate them. And I wish and I've been I've emailed every single podcast platform and said, will you guys please add the feature of rating the podcast so people can rate an individual podcast after they listen to it so that at least you can get some sort of curated output because I would love to sort mine by at least, you know, again, going back to the idea

• 38:46Speaker 03

  of curation with Rotten Tomatoes or the Quant Cookbook. If everyone's rating this one a two versus everyone rating one at 95, like good chance the 95 is better. And nothing makes me angrier than listening to a podcast for an hour and it being terrible the whole way. And I'm not a person that can click it off after 10 minutes. Like I have too much FOMO. I'm like, all right, this has to be good. At some point, he may have some investment gem at minute 58 and if I miss it, I, you know, will be so sad. So, but the problem is like, we've thought about starting that as an entire business and like, I would pay someone, I don't know, 50 grand to be able to curate each week. Say here are the top five investment podcasts out of these 30 because every hour that you listen to one, and we were talking about this probably on Twitter, you know,

• 39:29Speaker 03

  whatever you value your time at, if five of them are a waste, you've just wasted five hours that could have been better used listening to these other ones. So, the problem is, I don't know if that's a business. Ideally, one of the platforms should implement it. And I don't have any good ideas there. I'm, I'm, that's, that's the kind of the three ideas you're talking about working on this summer. That's the third that's I'm kind of stuck on. And so we talked about hiring a bunch of people and, and we put out a kind of feeler and we got a couple hundred people said, yeah, I'd love to do it. And the problem is I'd love to hire like five people to do it and pay them all a decent wage to do it. But how do you get to those five from 200? Or is it better to crowdsource all 200? But then the money you would have used to pay five now gets diluted across 200.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  And how are they, and if they do it just out of their own goodwill, are they going to be incentivized? Or, you know, so it's, it's a problem that I don't have an answer to. Maybe you have some good input or maybe your listeners do, but I'm, I'm kind of stuck.

• 40:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yeah, that it's, it still feels like such a nascent platform that has, to me, it's the most interesting way to consume information now. Thus getting into it a little bit, but the tools available to for discovery are just, they're, they're terrible. I mean, it's, it's basically the top 20 shows get all sorts of placement, but it's the same 20 shows all the time. There's no episode by episode. It just seems like such a simple technology solution. I don't know how that hasn't happened yet, but my guess is that I, I've, I too have talked to a ton of people in the world. And I also know some people who are building sort of next generation type iterations of this. But it seems like enough attention is on it that in the next year we'll have, and Apple's changing the way they report data to hosts.

• 41:06Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  That we'll have some, some better, better ways of finding them.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Fingers crossed. I'm open to ideas, but it's a huge source of frustration and I still love it. Like, I mean, there's of the 30 investment podcasts and there's more good ones that pop up every day. You know, of the 30 that are worth listening to, I really struggle with it. So anyway, keep me updated. I'm, I don't have a solution.

• 41:27Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you could choose, because who knows, someone out there might be able to make this happen. If you could choose a couple of people that you would love to have on that you haven't thus far in the next year, who would they be? Who are you most interested to talk to?

• 41:38Speaker 03

  Here's my number one is that one of, you know, my, my background's biotech and. One of my favorite books that I gift to, or at least used to, was a behavioral, or actually it's evolutionary psychology book, and ignore the title. The title is a little off-putting, but it's not what it's about. It's called Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation. And it's about how crazy these behavior of like a dozen or two dozen chapters of these various species of animals and insects around the world behave. And, you know, it's funny, because you can see so, so many commonalities in human behavior. And you kind of say, man, I know people that do kind of like what this bug does. And it's really funny. And you just

• 42:20Speaker 03

  realize a lot of the genetic underpinnings of, of kind of what we do. You know, why, why are people striving to make money? You know, why, why do they go buy that expensive sports car? Well, you know, and it just, it's, it's kind of a nice reflection. But the, the author's name is Olivia Judson. She's, I think, a British professor. And I think we're going to get her on. I was pretty excited to, to talk to her and say, she's got a new book coming out. But, but, but that's kind of the, you know, the benefit of having a podcast. You can say, hey, look, you know, we'd love to have you on and talk and shoot the shit about whatever. And whereas before, if I just called her and said, hey, can we just talk for 30 minutes? She'd be like, no, you stalker. Like, what, what does this have

• 43:00Speaker 03

  anything to do with asset management? Leave me alone. But kind of like you, I also like the weirder, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be the CEO or head of an organization. You know, it could be a guy three rungs down, or people that just are doing, like, there was a guy I was talking the other day that pitched me on, he's like, I have a investment fund that invests in trailer parks, you know, and it's a huge cash flowing business. And I said, that's the weirdest, like, cool, cool idea. You know, I, I never would think of that.

• 43:29Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's a great excuse to explore completely, I think about these as blind spots. And when, when we do what we do, which is get a bunch of data, figure out what works, you get cemented into those ideas. And that's great, because they could, they should work in the future. But you definitely lose track of a lot of the esoterica. And this has been a great, like, excuse to get back into some of that stuff. Venture capital is another good example. So, so last two questions for you, because we're Running along here. So the, the, the first one is somebody asked if you got fired, which I guess you'd have to fire yourself, or somehow you're no longer allowed to work in this business. What would you do?

• 44:03Speaker 03

  I think, I think first I would take a little bit of time and time off, reflect. There's a lot of areas that are just so fascinating that I would love to be a part of. So, you know, again, going back to my background was in biotech and, you know, studied genetics. And this, I graduated in 2000. So the, the late 90s, certainly a very just also like the internet, you know, huge bubble in the stocks, but transformative technology, you know, same way railroads, TVs, plastics, whatever it was for the past hundred years. And you're starting to see a lot of that come to fruition 17 years later. You know, I think the FDA just approved a gene therapy, therapy like a day or two ago.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  And, you know, whether that means it's probably not on the science side. I was always kind of terrible at the lab. I'd spill viruses everywhere and, you know, kind of a little too, not enough attention to detail, but being involved in that world in some aspect, I think would, would be a natural extension, you know? But I, I think one of the, the things that also my old man made clear to me when I was younger was also the differentiation between a hobby and a career. He's like, there's a lot of things that you can do in your spare time and love and not pollute it with having to try to make it a career, whether that's golf or fishing or baseball card collecting or whatever it may be. There's a lot of things I would love doing, but I don't know that necessarily it's like a, a full-time gig.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  So it'd probably be something in the, in the biotech genetics world.

• 45:33Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Cool.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  What about you?

• 45:34Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You know, I, it's so hard and such a hard question because it would just, I would just do the exact same thing, just in a different sphere. So if I wasn't allowed to touch investing, you know, it would be the same research mentality of just like gathering data and trying to come up with conclusions, which is the process itself that I love more than anything. I think maybe my, my second really big passion is, is just the outdoors, generally speaking. So I think if it had to be a career and therefore a business, something kind of almost like your cookbook. Idea that was more oriented towards the best places to go and things to do, not necessarily a travel book, but but something in that world that required like a ton of travel, tons of being outside and somehow sharing that experience in like a formal,

• 46:17Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  in a formal community way, like trips with people or or just informational. I think that would be fun because that's if I think about the way my days are structured, like I always want to make sure there's some big research component and some big outdoor component. So I think it would have to be something in that world.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  The outdoor one's tough and you know, I think a lot about this, but it's the same thing as, you know, whether it's Yelp, going back to the hotel tonight, curating it down to just a few choices. Like I'm getting ready to go to Iceland for the first time and it's like an infinite menu of ideas. It's fishing and hiking and restaurants and coffee and meeting people and all that sort of stuff. By the way, Icelandic visitors, if you're listening, email me, we'll grab a beer, coffee, but it's kind of overwhelming and you know, I don't know that anyone's tackled it in a way that's kind of satisfying. I'll give you one of my favorite, by the way, trips that I've ever done. It was going mountain biking from Telluride to Moab. And it's called the San Juan Hut System and it takes like five days.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  And each night you get to sleep in a hut and they stack it with food and drink and everything you need. So all you got really carries your clothes and what a just amazing trip.

• 47:28Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Wow.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  That's, that's one of my favorites to do.

• 47:31Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How crowded is it?

• 47:32Speaker 03

  There's like zero people. There's, I mean, you, you come across maybe like five. So it's, it's a little single track, some fire roads, like 5% is on pavement or something, but, and you can do it the other way too, but it's, I mean, you got to be like a moderate mountain biker and I probably crashed probably 30 times, but it's more aerobic fitness and just, you know, getting in shape than to do it. But of, of the trips I've done, like I love adventure and travel. That's, that's up there with one of my favorites.

• 48:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Awesome. So you know, my closing question for everyone, which is the kindest thing that anyone's done for you.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  I'm going to answer this trying to be a little surprised by it. I actually talked about this in my last one and it kind of came to me as we were talking about something else. And I said, I'm gonna give you two, one personal and one career. Career was when I was in my mid twenties and had written this first paper, I sent it off to like a dozen people and all names you would know, kind of famous investors. You know, half never responded, another three were like, dude, I don't have time for you. Why are you sending me this? Or market timing is impossible. I got like three really nasty responses and we're not going to name names, but if you search my blog, you'd probably find them, but like really just cruel, mean being like this research is worthless.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  You're an idiot from some very just, you know, respected names anyway. But Rob or not, you know, who manages at this point, like $200 billion was, was like, hey, Matt, well, you know, this is a great piece. It's like a C plus paper, like the ideas sound, but you need to write it in the, the format that will get it into Financial Analyst Journal or something like that. And, you know, it was very like harsh criticism, but it was very thoughtful. And the fact that he took the time to, to answer, so I've tried to answer every single email that, that people have sent me over, you know, the past 10 years and, and they may be short and, and very two sentences and spellings and grammatical errors, but I, I try to respond to all of them. Cause to me that, that meant the world at the time.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  Now, oddly enough, the kindest thing that of those guys that, that they probably did to me was the, the guy that sent the really horrific email, cause that, you know, incentivized me to kind of F you and try to write a great paper and, you know, build a good business. On, on the personal side, and this is the one that came up in the last podcast with Jason, I said, you know, growing up, my parents, middle-class family, I mean, my dad grew up on a farm, no running water type of, type of setup in Colorado. And so growing up, you know, like a normal middle, middle-class family. And they said, however, Matt, look, anything that you want to read, like we're not going to go buy you these, the new Nintendo robot, we're gonna, but anything you ever want to, any book or anything

• 50:13Speaker 03

  you ever want to read, we'll pay for. And so then I just took that and ran with it. And I think the next week subscribed to about 30 different comic book subscriptions. So they started showing up in droves like a week later. Like, and then my poor mind, but they were kind of like, hey, like, that's well played, Mab, you know, like, you can read these and that's fine. And so like, I learned how to read, you know, growing up reading Marvel and DC and everything. And so my mom, at this point, bless her soul, she's even like, kept them, and there's probably, I mean, it's gotta be five, 10,000 comics somewhere in her basement, sitting somewhere that are probably not worth that much because it was later, I guess that was 80s, 80s and 90s comics.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  But, but like, to me, that was something that, you know, it meant a lot, had the right intentions.

• 51:04Speaker 04

  Awesome. Great place to end, my friend. Thank you for doing this. This has been a fun conversation. We'll have to make it an annual event.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Thanks, Patrick.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  Hey, everyone. Patrick here again. To find more episodes of Invest Like the Best, go to investorfieldguide.com/podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investorfieldguide.com/bookclub. After you sign up, you'll receive a full investor curriculum right away, and then three to four suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter, at Patrick underscore Oshag, O-S-H-A-G. If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover Invest Like the Best. Thanks so much for listening.