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Host
Today's guest, Bill Mann, is the Chief Investment Strategist of Motley Fool Asset Management, an asset management firm that offers six three passive and three active exchange traded funds or ETFs. Motley Fool Asset Management's three passive ETFs attempt to track separate proprietary indices of the Motley fool llc, or tmf. TMF is a separate legal entity for Motley Fool Asset Management. All six of the Motley Fool Asset Management funds are managed independently from TMF and will not necessarily align with the holdings in any of TMF's proprietary products. No TMF analyst is involved in any investment decision making or daily operations of Motley Fool Asset Management.
Ben Carlson
Today's Animal Spirits Talk youk Book is brought to you by Motley Fool Asset management. Go to fooletfs.com to learn more about the Motley Fool 100 Index Ticker TMFC. Again, that's fooletfs.com to learn More.
Michael Batnik
Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
Ben Carlson
Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, one of the things that I'm constantly reminded of is in working in the investment management industry is how many gigantic companies there are some that you've heard of, some that you haven't heard of that you just go, whoa, they made it so much money. Or they, they do this as well. And they also do this. There's, there's many such cases. All right. Motley fool is one of them. Where they I was first introduced to them, I don't know if it was through Yahoo. Finance or what it was, but they were real. I mean they were ahead of the game in terms of the content stuff. Right. Because they started it in the 1990s.
Guest
Yeah.
Ben Carlson
And they're synonymous with growth stock investing. And it was, you know, these, these write ups on individual companies. And now they've expanded into so much more to where the fact that they now have their own asset management, they have for a while now, but just way bigger than you would assume. It's just interesting to see how these companies grow, grow and morph. So on today's show we talked to Bill Mann, who is the chief investment strategist for the Motley Fool Asset Management. I've been trading emails with Bill for years now. I think this is the first time I've actually talked to him in person.
Guest
Oh, yeah?
Ben Carlson
Yeah. For a long time. And so we talk about the Motley fool and 100 index. It's kind of interesting. I guess I would consider it something like. It's kind of like a marriage between the S and P and the NASDAQ 100. Is that fair?
Guest
Yeah.
Ben Carlson
Okay. What did you ask him before? What did you ask him about it?
Guest
I'm not giving it away. Listen to the show.
Ben Carlson
Okay. All right. Well, we get into kind of the history of the Motley fool and Motley Fool Asset Management, and then some really good stuff on investor behavior, too. So here's our chat with Bill Mann from the Motley Fool Asset Management. Bill, welcome to Animal Spirits.
Bill Mann
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Ben Carlson
So you've been with a Motley fool for a very long time, Is that correct? How long have you been there for?
Bill Mann
You're just calling me old, right? Yeah. I started in 1999. I was in the telecom industry in the regulatory space and found that pretty boring, but also found telecom to be something that seemed like it was going to take over the world but was destroying capital. And we kept getting business plans on our desk that each of which said they were going to take over just 2% of the entire industry. And I had 50 of them on my desk. That's pretty much everything. So I thought that was a pretty good time to get out and go do something else and moved over to the Motley Fool. You know, really started in the. In. In the. You know, as an analyst in telecom.
Guest
The Motley fool is such a gigantic organization today. What was it like when you started and bring us forward to today? I think. I don't know how people think about it, but I think it's a lot bigger than most people realize.
Bill Mann
Yeah. So today we have. We. We have the publishing business, which is what most people know. And you can. You can get us everywhere from on the World Wide Web to newspapers still. We've got podcasts. That's the part that most people know about. But we also have an asset management arm, which we started in 2008, which is a pretty important date in terms of why and when you would start an asset management division. We have a venture division, and we have a wealth management division, and we also have a charitable arm. So it's a pretty extensive company. We have, you know, we have operations in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom. So yeah, it is a much bigger company. It kind of feels like that proverbial elephant where people know one part of it. Like, oh, yeah, yeah, I know this, you know, or I know that, but. But yeah, it's a, it's a pretty dynamic company.
Ben Carlson
So was the company still a startup effectively when you joined back in the 90s? Because, I mean, that's when it really ramped up as a firm. From my recollection of it, yeah, we.
Bill Mann
Were very much like a college dormitory where people were pulling all nighters. And so I started in 99, which was a time in which you could write about any company that ended in.com and you would get a huge amount of attention again. I came in as a telecom guy and I came in as a bit of a skeptic. And so that was a little bit of a tough, that was a little bit of a tough entry. People, people were interested in telecom, but they were really, really interested in equipment and the move onto the Internet and onto, I don't know if you remember things like how SIP was going to take over the world. It was just a protocol for having conversations with each other and file transfer protocols. So at the time, the Motley fool, we had real money portfolios that we were manag. We were all advertising based. And so the thing that happened with us and I think happened with a lot of companies that were in that space at that time is that we thought we had 7 million customers and what we had were eight customers. It was Daytech, we had Waterhouse, we had Ameritrade. And so once the bubble burst Starting really in 2001, you saw a huge amount of consolidation in terms of those online brokers. But you also saw them ratchet back very quickly their advertising spend and their customer acquisition spend. And so that's when we had to grow up a little and become a business, you know, and become a business. That's when we launched our portfolios, our, you know, our pay services. A couple years after that was when we first launched our asset management business.
Guest
So what does the chief investment strategist at the Motley fool do?
Bill Mann
Talks to you guys a lot. So we have six funds right now, six, six ETFs, three of which are active and three of which are passive. We are doing studies to figure out how to broaden out that space. So I do a lot of, you know, I, I do a lot of product market fit and, you know, just ensuring that people know first and foremost that Molly fool has an Asset management arm. So there's a huge amount, you know, a huge opportunity for someone like me who, you know, loves getting out and talking to people to. To talk about the fact that we, we do manage money and we've done it for, you know, for 16 years now. We have $2.3 billion in assets under management, which, you know, which, you know, for. For a secret business, I think is pretty good. So, yeah, that's. That's most of my day.
Ben Carlson
Molly fool has always been synonymous with the sort of retail investor, the DIY person. Is that. Is that retail crowd, most of your ETF flows as well. Is that the sense you get at this point?
Bill Mann
It's much less. So we are much more RIA driven. But we got our start in 2008, really, because we had seen the Motley Fool's ethos was always that you could. You were the best person to manage your own investments. And we still do think that that is true. But one thing that we've noticed about retail investors in particular is that they tend to have a pretty poor idea of what their own risk tolerances are. And so one thing that we saw in 2002, and we saw it before this and were trying to figure out what to do with it and never really hit upon what the strategy was, was that we were seeing individual investors focus on maybe the same 20 or 30 stocks they were all invested in Cisco, they were all invested in aol, they were all invested in a lot of companies that at the end of the day, there's that social proof, but you're not necessarily sure that that's where they should all be. And so as 2007 came along and we really saw some more concentration and we saw some amongst investors, and we saw what I guess you could describe as a financialization of the American economy. We thought, what is it that we can do this time around to help people? What can we do to help people to hold their nerve to stay invested? And the thing that we came up with was, look, let's launch an asset management company. Let's get out there and put some mutual funds that are out there that have the same exact principles and philosophies of the Motley fool and hopefully have that be a helping hand for investors for what we thought was going to come and which indeed did come starting in 2008.
Guest
What are the investment principles of the Motley Fool? I've listened to the founders on some podcasts and it pours out of them, but for people that have not heard them speak before, how would you describe them.
Bill Mann
I would describe us as being optimists first and foremost. We are people who believe very deeply in the power, particularly of the ingenuity of the American economy and the power of the wealth creating principles of the stock market. We are people who are fundamentally focused on owning stocks for the long term. And a lot of times when people talk about long term buy and hold investing and whether it works or whether it doesn't, I go back to April 9th of this year when in the height of the fear, people were once again saying, buy and hold investing doesn't work. So for us, the principle of buy and hold investing also comes along with it a belief in power law, which is if you hold companies that have the right principles and have the, you know, have the types of characteristics that have tended to generate outsized returns in the past, you're going to make, in some ways you're going to make the same mistake over and over. Because, you know, you know, when you're, when you're, when you're playing a pattern recognition game, there are a lot of companies that will fail those patterns over time. But what, you know, one of the things that we have done is when we have identified companies that have some of those characteristics of the, you know, the biggest winners over history, we've bought them and we have held onto them really no matter what. And sometimes that is, you know, that has turned out to have been a company that has done really great for a while and then has, you know, and then has faded away. But then sometimes you end up with, you know, with, with these businesses that you have identified as having superior economics and they go on to be 50, 100, you know, in the case of some of the biggest companies, 500, 1,000 baggers, you just have to be willing to hold them long enough.
Ben Carlson
So when you talk about your fact that you have a mix of active and passive ETFs, how do you, how do you put that investment process or that ethos into these different funds?
Bill Mann
Perhaps I can describe the. We have six funds and so we have the three passive funds. We have two domestic large cap passive funds, TMFC and tmfe. And then we have a mid cap one which is tmfx. Then on the active side we have a small cap and a mid cap and then a go anywhere fund. I tend to think of investing now as moving away from really active versus passive or how we do it and being more programmatic versus discretionary. Right. So all of the types of, you know, all of the types of investments that we have, you know, are ones that we have, you know, that we're identifying through pattern recognition. On the active side, it really is more, you know, it's really more how do you trade it and how do you build the portfolio on the passive side where, you know, we are, we have a proprietary set of data that we get from our sister company at the, you know, the Motley Fool Publishing. But then we go through and say, you know, you know, which of these companies are actually ones that have those highest, you know, those highest factors amongst the, the largest companies that they hold and which of, you know, and how should that portfolio be assembled, you know, to generate the best portfolio characteristics? So they all really do come from the same exact, the same exact philosophy. It's more of a, you know, a thought process of how do you put the portfolio together as to where, whether it is more, I guess, what you would traditionally call active versus passive.
Guest
So, Bill, today we're going to be talking about the motley full 100 index ETF. The ticker is TMFC. And I'm very curious and excited to get your take on the large cap growth space because you've been doing it for a long time. We are at a very interesting period in history. But before we get into the meat of it, as I'm looking at this, I say, you know, this looks a lot like the NASDAQ 100, not that there's anything wrong with that. There are a lot worse places where it could have put their money over the last 10 years.
Bill Mann
Thank you, Michael. Yes.
Guest
In fact, I wish that I put all of my money in the motley for 100 index when you guys launch it. I would have a lot more money today than I do. And so as I'm thinking about this versus that, well, I suppose the proof is in the pudding. There is one and a half billion dollars in the fund. There is a five star Morningstar rating. For what it's worth. What is it about this fund that has attracted so many dollars versus some of the. Is it contemporary is the right word? Versus some of your pure funds that might do something similar. Talk about that.
Bill Mann
So you started by mentioning NASDAQ 100. I would say that the primary difference between us and NASDAQ is that we do go across. We do. I would say that the NASDAQ 100 is much more technology focused as its core, based on the simple fact that the NASDAQ index and the NASDAQ Stock market is so heavily technology focused. We can go to the New York Stock Exchange as well. We have plenty of New York Stock Exchange companies within Berkshire Hathaway. Yeah, for example. I'd say that's maybe a primary example. Eli Lilly would be another that, that you can't access if you're simply buying the NASDAQ 100. Now every fund and every fund company has to set their boundaries somewhere. So the fact that Nasdaq has a NASDAQ 100 that's limited to NASDAQ companies, that's not necessarily a knock on them. The reason that we look a lot like them at this point is simply because we were very, very early in a lot of the companies that are now dominant within the NASDAQ 100 as well. So I would say that we look very much like them now. We are not. We don't look like them as a matter of policy. We happen to because the area that has been most successful in the market mimics the area that we have already been playing in.
Ben Carlson
So people have been worried about tech stocks for a lot. I think Mark Cuban, I don't want to like call somebody name, but like 2015, he's like, this is another tech bubble.
Guest
Michael Baldman, 2011.
Ben Carlson
Yeah, people have been saying this for a long. I mean, I think Scott Galloway wrote his book about the. He called them like the big four. It was Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft, whatever the. Yeah, probably. And that was like 2017. So I mean, this has been going on for I think a lot longer than anyone could envision. And it's gone straight from, you know, high margin, free cash flow producing businesses, tons of scale because of the Internet, right into the AI now, like, I'm just curious what would cause you to become concerned about these companies? Because anyone who's been concerned in the past has just been flat out wrong.
Bill Mann
Yeah. And it is obviously a very unique place. The fact that the stock market as measured by The S&P 500 is so deeply concentrated in the top seven, the top 10 names, the top 20 names, however you want to divide that and that so many of those are within the same industry as far as we are concerned. I think that that is obviously something that is a structural concern when you're talking about TMFC. Nvidia, for example, is a 10% position in the portfolio. It still maintains those same exact characteristics that we were looking for when we first recognized recommended on the publishing side, Nvidia 15 years ago. So I guess there are two different conversations. One is the market dynamics and the market dynamics I would describe as being something that we don't spend a whole lot of time really focusing on in terms of how we make our moves, with the exception of the fact that we are making calls from time to time when we are seeing areas of the market that are maybe underrepresented. But we're going to stick to our knitting that way and keep looking for the types of companies that have driven the S&P 500's success. And in some ways let, come what may, and over time, I think that we would naturally move away from those types of companies if it comes to pass that they have less economic power than they have at this point.
Ben Carlson
What causes you to make a change in the portfolio and how often is there turnover since this is technically index. And I like your point earlier about the fact that discretionary versus rules based. I completely agree. That seems to be the way a lot of people are thinking these days. Within your rules based process, how often are there changes to the portfolio?
Bill Mann
So the turnover for TMFC is about 24%. So you can extrapolate that. We turn it over about each share about once every four years. Tmfe, which has a slightly different role, has a slightly higher turnover simply because it's meant to be. It's got a smart beta factor placed on top of it. So it has a little bit of a lower threshold in terms of the max size that we can have and some other rules that we have in place. I think that ultimately I tend to think of. Maybe I'll answer your question in an incredibly bizarre way, but have you ever thought of the S&P 500 as a portfolio manager?
Ben Carlson
Yeah, I guess not really. That's a good point. It seems like it's just this entity that occasionally makes changes, right?
Bill Mann
Exactly, exactly. I would view us as being kind of the same way. And this is how I get to flatter us very kindly. The S&P 500 has in the last 90 years had about 25,000 different names in it. And you had a guest on a couple of weeks ago who was talking about a study that showed that over those last 90 years a very small number of companies have accounted for the majority of the gains of the S&P 500, which if you think of the S&P 500 as being a portfolio manager, then that would suggest that their slugging percentage is really good, but their hit rate is awful. You've got 25,000 companies, most of which have been sold at a low. Because the reason that most companies leave The S&P 500 is because they are no longer one of the 500 largest companies. Occasionally you have ones that get merged out. But generally speaking, the S and P as a portfolio manager holds too long. And yet the proof is in the pudding. The returns of The S&P 500 have nearly beaten almost any portfolio manager that you can think of. And I take that lesson very seriously. I take the lesson that you don't have to be all that clever about your moves if you are good at identifying and holding onto the companies that win. Because they will in fact, you know, again, the power law would suggest that they will in fact carry the day.
Ben Carlson
Yeah, I've always said that index funds themselves are nothing special. You could take what index funds do and kind of apply them to your own process. Just the whole, you know, tax efficient, long term buy and hold ish nature and fit it to your own investment process.
Bill Mann
Yeah, we just all want more exciting stuff, right? Like ultimately, you know, ultimately an index fund just. It just sounds so proletariat. Right. But in actuality, and you know, to your point, it is. But if you think about an index fund as a portfolio manager and then look at, you know, and then look at the returns and look at the results, it's pretty remarkable what the mythical guy or gal who's run The S&P 500 have done all of these years and doing things in ways that the average portfolio manager would say, no, that's a terrible way to run a portfolio.
Guest
Bill, I know who I'm talking to. I know that your investment philosophy, as is ours, is not to time the market, certainly not to use your intuition to time the market.
Bill Mann
Okay.
Guest
With that out of the way and understand that this is long only, et cetera, et cetera, where do you think we are in this unbelievable market that we're in? I mean, it's been a 15 year bull market. Now that surely overstates the ride that we've been on. There have been some really nasty corrections and bear markets along the way. It has hardly been up until the right. I think that you could very credibly argue that this is a new bull market that started and has accelerated because of a new revolutionary technology. So Forget about, you know, 09 or 13 as a start date, whichever you choose. Think about back to 2022. All right, all that caveat aside, does this feel late cycle? Are we pricing in the best that's yet that's to come? Or does it feel like we haven't even begun to see the fruits of the labor of the AI or the lack of labor? I guess like we're cnbc.
Ben Carlson
You'd be asking what inning are we in?
Guest
Yeah, what inning is this? Come on, tell me.
Bill Mann
Are we talking cricket innings or are we talking. It's hard. And I love the point that Ben made earlier about Mark Cuban and again, not to mow one guy down because we all sort of worry about these things all the time. And talking about the four horsemen of the apocalypse, now we're up to seven, right. We just keep adding companies that are driving the train. I don't, if, if I look in my, if I look in my crystal ball, I do see other companies that could, you know, that could add, that could take over, that could be, not necessarily the next Nvidia, but there are plenty of other areas in what is, maybe however it is that you want to call AI, if you want to call it a bubble, if you want to call it a promise not yet kept. There's a lot of money that's being spent chasing it, and that money is going to be spent regardless. And as we found out with the early the dot com days, some of the money that's getting spent is going to be absolutely right. And so our game is much more, you know, is much more trying to figure out the part of the pond where the fish are because we know that there's, you know, that there's most likely to be, you know, fish in that part of the pond that are going to be, you know, that are going to turn out to have been the ones that we wanted to have all along. So I have a really hard time. I don't know about you guys, I'm a bit of a math guy, but I'm a very simplistic math guy. So when I take the market cap of Nvidia at 4 trillion and I just divide it by the population of the earth, which is 8 billion, that means that there is a massive amount of earnings that are being presumed by the share price of Nvidia, even on every man, woman and child basis. And one of those two things has grown exponentially and the other has grown logarithmically. And so I could spin myself around a poll and say I have a hard time seeing how they're going to do it, but I'm pretty comfortable having a hard time seeing how the best of the brightest do it. I've spent 28 years of my career being dumbfounded by ingenuity.
Ben Carlson
Yeah, Michael and I were just talking about this recently that it seems like there's always something else that sort of steps in and maybe eventually that ends up being bad stuff that steps in. Right. I still remember after the 2008 debacle, people thought we were never going to get out of this mentality of a lost decade and crashes. And it took a long time for that idea to. And I'm sure it'll be the other way when this cycle turns and we do get a bad period. So I guess my question to you is, you said you have a lot of RIAs that use your products. How do you go about setting expectations for this stuff? It's like we're going to be a long term buy and hold investor here for the most part. But there's going to be rough patches along the way.
Guest
Why don't you just sell before the rough patches?
Bill Mann
Hello, that's right. Exactly. That's right. We do get a lot of questions from registered investment advisors and they'll take all of the statistics, statistical inferences, they'll take our Sharpe ratio and they will go to a 2022 period and they'll say, hey, you kind of track the market during the downside. And it just comes from repeating the same message over and over that we are simply not trying to get out of the way of those types of moments. Of those types of moments. But at the same time, because we have pretty strict bounds around the types of quality of companies that we're looking for. They're almost always going to look expensive. I mean, it's very rare that you find a secret quality company. I wish that weren't true. I'd sound a lot smarter all the time if I knew where to find secret quality companies. Quality companies tend to be expensive. But I also know that the activity of trying to avoid downturns has tended to be so much more expensive than actually just going through those downturns. It feels better to have sidestepped. We can go from February to April this year. We know that there were a bunch of investors because the market told us who said, well, I'm out and they have not been well served at all. So if the lesson really, truly is that a really great time to a really great way to underperform the market is to try to avoid downturns, then it really as hard as it is, and you end up losing people because of this. You end up having people say, I don't accept the answer that you are going to be that you're going to be relaxed about this and I'm going to sell. But ultimately I just think that if an activity has not proven itself to be useful in the past, why in the world would we embrace that as a strategy that we would take on now just because we feel like we're smarter this time, because we aren't.
Guest
Well, obviously market timing is a much more seductive way to generate eyeballs and revenue and all that sort of stuff. The way that I put it, I'm fully aligned with you. Obviously the way that I put it is. All right, let's just stipulate that there is no perfect investment strategy. Buy and hold is probably the best of the bunch, but certainly not without its flaws. I mean, my God, living through a 57% drawdown is frankly probably an unreasonable expectation for most investors. But what's the alternative? And so what's, what's more reasonable? What's a more reasonable exercise that you are going to time the market on the way down. Right. Let's say that you don't. Nobody's gonna sell the tippy top. You'll sell on the way down. You'll get back in somewhere around the bottom. Lol. We know that bottoms happen or panics happen because the world is ending or things are very dark. Of course that's difficult. All right. Or maybe you just say, okay, I know that in order to get the long term gains of the market, whatever they're going to be, whether it's going to be 9 to 10% or 4 to 6%, can't control that. I'm just going to do my best to focus on the North Star, which is to your point earlier. Ingenuity, progress, ambition, and I'm going to survive. That's my strategy. I'm just going to survive.
Bill Mann
That sounds hard.
Guest
Yeah, it is.
Bill Mann
Geez. How are we going to do it? I completely agree. That's the exact right way to think about that dichotomy. To me, there's a little bit of a third and it's something that I think that AI is really going to be able to help us in. When we think about the continuums of, of that experience that you get in the market, it really goes from the easiest way to think about it is if you're buying growth companies, you're going to be on Mr. Toad's wild ride. If you buy value companies, you're going to have probably lower returns, but you're going to have a much less volatile portfolio. So we tend to think, when we're thinking about what type of an investment someone should be in, we also want to know what type of investor they are. And I think that there's not been enough good work being done about people's capacity to withstand the worst day. And so much of that. Yeah, so much of that has to do with the fact that it's a path dependent question, right? Like we don't really have the capacity in our minds as humans to conjure up the fear of something that is theoretical as opposed to it being actual. And so, you know, so again, one of the things that I talked about earlier with the Motley fool is that we don't tend. I would not describe the types of areas where we're looking as being value parts of the market. We don't really have much in the way of financials in our portfolios and you probably never really expect us to, but we could take TMF C versus tmfe. One of the things that we are trying to provide for people on the quality end of the stock market is a rules based portfolio. One of which will provide much more of an aggressive, we're going to try and shoot the lights out. The other of which having some rules in terms of capital quality, in terms of the predictability of the cash flows of companies that should, when overlaid with slightly higher thresholds for rules for portfolio holding size, should provide and has so far provided a less volatile experience. So when you think about people, the most expensive mistake I think that investors are making is that they are not aware of their own capacity to withstand risk. And so we are really trying to get at ways to map that risk onto products and portfolios that match them. So at the end of the day they have just a little bit more self knowledge and a little bit more capacity to withstand that desire and that need to run at what usually turns out to be the worst possible time.
Ben Carlson
Bill, if people want to learn more about The Motley Fool 100 or Motley Fool Asset Management, where do we send them?
Bill Mann
You send them to fooletfs.com and we are on the World Wide web and you know, you can find us there. And you know, if people are interested, we have, you know, we have folks standing by to, you know, come and you know, explore all six of our funds.
Ben Carlson
Perfect. Thanks Bill. Okay, thanks to Bill. Remember, check out full etfs.com if you want to learn more about their products. Email us animalspiritscompoundnews.com.
Animal Spirits Podcast Summary: "Talk Your Book: How to Hold the Biggest Winners"
Release Date: July 28, 2025
Host: The Compound
Guests: Bill Mann, Chief Investment Strategist at Motley Fool Asset Management
Podcast Title: Animal Spirits Podcast
The episode opens with Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson welcoming Bill Mann, the Chief Investment Strategist at Motley Fool Asset Management. Bill provides a brief overview of the firm, highlighting its six exchange-traded funds (ETFs)—three passive and three active. He clarifies that Motley Fool Asset Management operates independently from The Motley Fool LLC (TMF), ensuring that their investment strategies and holdings do not directly align with TMF's proprietary products.
Notable Quote:
"All six of the Motley Fool Asset Management funds are managed independently from TMF and will not necessarily align with the holdings in any of TMF's proprietary products." [00:00]
Ben Carlson reminisces about his initial interactions with Motley Fool, noting their early adoption of digital content in the 1990s. He underscores the firm's transformation from offering insights on individual growth stocks to expanding into asset management, venture capital, wealth management, and a charitable arm. Bill Mann elaborates on this growth trajectory, detailing the diversification into international markets and the establishment of various divisions since 2008.
Notable Quote:
"The Motley Fool is such a gigantic organization today. What was it like when you started and bring us forward to today?" [02:30]
Bill Mann:
"Today we have the publishing business, podcasts, an asset management arm, a venture division, a wealth management division, and a charitable arm. It's a much bigger company than most people realize." [04:06]
Bill Mann articulates the core investment philosophy of Motley Fool Asset Management. He emphasizes optimism, belief in the American economy's ingenuity, and the significance of long-term stock ownership. He discusses the concept of "power law," where holding onto high-potential companies can lead to extraordinary returns, even if some investments underperform.
Notable Quote:
"We are optimists first and foremost, believing deeply in the ingenuity of the American economy and the wealth-creating principles of the stock market." [10:14]
Bill Mann:
"When you hold companies with the right principles and characteristics that have historically generated outsized returns, you're essentially making repeat winner bets." [12:00]
The conversation delves into the specifics of Motley Fool’s ETF lineup. Bill explains the distinction between passive and active funds, detailing the three passive ETFs focused on domestic large caps and mid-caps, and the three active ETFs targeting small caps, mid caps, and a flexible "go anywhere" fund. He highlights the firm's shift towards a more programmatic investment approach, blending pattern recognition with structured portfolio assembly.
Notable Quote:
"We identify companies through pattern recognition and apply the same philosophy across both active and passive funds." [12:25]
A significant portion of the podcast is dedicated to discussing the Motley Fool 100 Index ETF (TMFC). Bill Mann compares TMFC to the NASDAQ 100, noting that while both indices are technology-heavy, TMFC offers broader market exposure by including companies from the New York Stock Exchange, such as Berkshire Hathaway and Eli Lilly, which are absent from the NASDAQ 100. This diversification is presented as a key differentiator that has attracted substantial investment to TMFC, evidenced by its $1.5 billion assets and a five-star Morningstar rating.
Notable Quote:
"The primary difference between us and NASDAQ is that we do go across. We include companies from the New York Stock Exchange, allowing for a more diversified large-cap growth exposure." [15:11]
Bill Mann:
"We were very, very early in many of the companies now dominant within the NASDAQ 100, which is why our portfolios resemble theirs even though it's not by policy." [16:00]
Ben Carlson brings up historical skepticism around tech stocks, referencing opinions from notable figures like Mark Cuban and Scott Galloway who have previously labeled segments of the tech industry as bubbles. Bill Mann responds by acknowledging the concentration of the S&P 500 in a handful of tech giants, expressing structural concerns but also highlighting their confidence in holding onto robust companies like Nvidia, which exhibit the characteristics Motley Fool seeks.
Notable Quote:
"The S&P 500 is so deeply concentrated in the top companies, many within the technology sector, which is a structural concern." [16:46]
Bill Mann:
"If we stick to our principles of identifying and holding companies with superior economics, we believe they will continue to drive market success over time." [19:00]
A central theme of the discussion revolves around investment strategies. The hosts and Bill Mann advocate for a buy-and-hold approach, emphasizing its historical effectiveness compared to market timing. Bill critiques the S&P 500's long-term performance, noting that a small fraction of its 25,000 historical constituents have driven the majority of its gains. He underscores the difficulty and often detrimental results of attempting to time the market, aligning with Motley Fool's philosophy of maintaining steady, long-term investments.
Notable Quote:
"The returns of The S&P 500 have nearly beaten almost any portfolio manager that you can think of." [20:45]
Bill Mann:
"Trying to avoid downturns is often more expensive than enduring those downturns, leading to underperformance if not executed perfectly." [30:13]
The conversation addresses the challenges investors face during market volatility. Bill Mann acknowledges that enduring significant drawdowns, such as a 57% decline, is daunting for most investors. He emphasizes the importance of understanding one's risk tolerance and maintaining a disciplined investment approach. Motley Fool Asset Management seeks to align their products with investors' capacity to withstand market fluctuations, aiming to provide portfolios that match individual risk profiles.
Notable Quote:
"The most expensive mistake investors make is not being aware of their own capacity to withstand risk." [34:49]
Bill Mann:
"We are trying to map risk onto products and portfolios that match investors, helping them gain more self-knowledge and resilience during market downturns." [34:49]
As the podcast wraps up, Ben Carlson directs listeners to Motley Fool Asset Management’s website, fooletfs.com, for more information on their ETF offerings. He also provides contact details for listeners interested in exploring Motley Fool’s investment products further.
Notable Quote:
"If people want to learn more about The Motley Fool 100 or Motley Fool Asset Management, they can visit fooletfs.com." [34:53]
Final Thoughts
This episode of the Animal Spirits Podcast provides a comprehensive look into Motley Fool Asset Management's strategies, particularly emphasizing their commitment to long-term, pattern-based investing. Bill Mann's insights shed light on the firm's evolution, investment philosophies, and approaches to managing diversified ETF portfolios. Listeners gain a deeper understanding of the benefits and challenges of holding major winners in a concentrated market and the importance of aligning investment strategies with personal risk tolerance.
For more insights and updates, visit Animal Spirits Compound News.