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- [00:00]
Michael Batnik
Today's Animal Spirits Talk. Your book is brought to you by Schaefer Cullen Capital management. Go to Cullenfunds.com to learn more about their global High Dividend Strategy, International High Dividend Strategy, and Emerging Markets High dividend strategy. That's Cullenfunds.com to learn more.
- [00:17]
Ben Carlson
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 Rithol 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.
- [00:47]
Michael Batnik
Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, good timing here.
- [00:51]
Raul Sharma
Thank you.
- [00:52]
Michael Batnik
International stocks are so hot right now. People are trying to figure out, is this real? Does this actually have legs, or is this just another head fake?
- [00:58]
Raul Sharma
I'm not going to answer that question, but I'm just going to say, Ben, we're old.
- [01:02]
Michael Batnik
That was rhetorical.
- [01:03]
Raul Sharma
No, we're. Okay. Well, we're still using references from the aughts, the early aughts. And I'm going to. I'm going to give the full story in Animal Spirits, but those references, they don't play anymore.
- [01:14]
Michael Batnik
How about this? That's because the 2000s doesn't have very quotable movies.
- [01:18]
Raul Sharma
That's because it's 20 years ago and people don't remember things from 20 years ago like us underperformance.
- [01:24]
Michael Batnik
That's true.
- [01:25]
Raul Sharma
We spoke about this on the show with Raul. But we're talking about international stocks today and investors. A lot of investors have literally never seen a period of us lagging for more than, I don't know, two weeks.
- [01:38]
Michael Batnik
Yes, there hasn't been a sustained period of outperformance and there hasn't really been a reason for it in this past cycle. And now people are coming around to the idea that maybe there is a reason now. And it seems to have come very fast and the markets moved fast as well. But we get into all that great conversation. Raul Sharma, who is a portfolio manager and executive director at Schaefer Cullen Capital Management, he has been managing strategies for emerging markets, international stocks for well over two decades. Great conversation. Here's our talk with Raul.
- [02:14]
Raul Sharma
Raul, welcome back.
- [02:16]
Ben Carlson
Great. Thanks for having me, guys.
- [02:17]
Raul Sharma
So it's been a long period of underperformance for anything benchmark now that international stocks are benchmarked to the US but in the eyes of clients they are. It's been a long, painful period of underperformance. And some of the narrative headings, the end of the year and really for the last couple of years was what in the world could change the current trajectory, the current narrative of US Dominance, particularly the mega cap tax, like what could possibly change? And I know you, you're not necessarily a macro guy. Nobody could have seen this coming. Just talk through some of the dynamics that are in place that led to a reawakening of investors appetite for stocks domiciled outside the United States.
- [03:01]
Ben Carlson
Well, I think it's a couple things. I mean, I think first of all, the Correction in the mag 7 that we saw at the beginning of the year, I think that was kind of the start of it because just everybody owns these stocks and it's not just US Investors. When we talk to investors in Japan or South Korea and other places, all owning them too, they're not owning their own stocks. And so once those stocks started to finally lose, I think people are really looking for another home. And then probably more importantly, you are seeing some pretty meaningful catalysts, I think, for the, I won't say for the first time, but so many at once. And I think bigger than before in both emerging markets and international developed markets. And I think the short story is that, you know, President Trump's policies are forcing some of these countries to do things that they really frankly should have done a long time ago. And I think Europe's definitely the best example of that. And so I think, you know, that's the start of it. I mean, there's a lot we could talk about within that in terms of specific catalysts. But I think I'll just, you know, pause right there.
- [04:01]
Michael Batnik
So one of the things that we've talked about for years is, listen, international emerging market stocks are way cheaper than US Stocks. But people have been saying that and saying that and saying, well, valuation itself is not a catalyst. And I think this is why it's so hard to predict these things in advance, is because even if you try to come into the year saying I think I know what the catalyst is going to be, no one is, no one is talking about this. The fact that Germany is going to spend billions and billions of dollars building up their, their defense. So, so you. Is that the biggest thing right now? Just that a lot of these countries are going to start spending money and go from the austerity mindset to actually, no, we're going to open up the floodgates a little bit? Is that the biggest one for that.
- [04:41]
Ben Carlson
Is certainly one of the biggest ones. Yeah. And I think kind of led by Germany, but you are seeing it kind of across Europe. They're talking about defense spending, big increases in defense spending, again because of a reaction to Trump's policies. Also an infrastructure fund. I mean, the infrastructure, there's a lot of needs for that. Certainly in Europe and even in Germany, if you look at the rail system and that sort of thing, and they're talking about creating physical unions to do all these sorts of things, things like joint procurement. And when you start spending a lot on defense, it's just not defense stocks that benefit. It's a lot of different kinds of stocks, industrial stocks. Defense is so high tech that there's a lot of demand for technology. So there certainly is the potential for a spillover effect. But there's other things too. I think very encouragingly, we're seeing consolidation in certain European markets, particularly in the financial sector. I think again, after watching the US Banks do so well, they're just looking at, you know, the competitive landscape and saying we need to be bigger to compete against a JP Morgan, that we just cannot do it. And so it's encouraging to see actually governments like, say in Italy actually promoting consolidation. And consolidation is a really good thing for industries that consolidate. Whether you're the consolidator or you're just in that industry, the industry structure improves. So you're certainly seeing that in Europe and that's also a good thing. Then there's the prospects for the end of the war in Russia. That has two impacts. One, you will see the risk premium on European stocks go down. And then there's a lot of reconstruction activity and a lot of increase in bank lending and that sort of thing that can happen. And so you're seeing, you know, kind of markets like Poland and all of Europe that are kind of well positioned for that if it happens. It's certainly a big if, you know, you know, benefit from that. And it's all just happening at a time when, you know, from a contrarian perspective, even after the little rally, equities, international equities are still so out of favor. If you look at the weight of non US equities in MSCI world, it's only about 30% versus a long term average of over 45%. And you know, back in the early 90s when Japan boomed, it was, you know, well over 65%. So there's a lot of, you know, room for mean reversion. But I think these things really do bring the promise of earnings growth which to your point was what was missing. It was just valuations. Now we have valuations and the potential for that.
- [07:01]
Raul Sharma
Yeah, well said. So cheap stocks with a positive catalyst, great things can happen. Talk about so you. So at Schaefer Collin, you manage the global high dividend, the international high dividend and emerging markets high dividend portfolios. Is any of what's going on making its way into how you think about the individual companies and the way that you construct your portfolios?
- [07:20]
Ben Carlson
Yeah, definitely. I mean, like, you know, for the first time in a long time, starting earlier last year, we started to get involved in European banks. You know, those banks had also done a very good job of deleveraging. They started then having these excess capital positions, paying huge dividends with great dividend growth and also doing buybacks. Those are all things, things we like across all strategies. Even our emerging market strategy. You've seen exposure to, say, Eastern European banks and places like Greece and Poland go up for the very same reason we manage with a dividend mandate in emerging markets. We do have a little bit of flexibility with somewhat lower yielders. So the other big thing that's happening is definitely, I think in China with the Internet companies. So we own two of those companies that are still quite cheap. And we could talk about the implications of Deep Seq, which I think has been a bit of another game changer year to date.
- [08:10]
Michael Batnik
That's interesting because that was the. One of the big things is just that, listen, the US is just dominating technology wise and a lot of these other countries can't keep up. And China seems to be like the one place where, I don't know, I guess they've copied a lot of what we did here first and kind of are just doing it themselves. But those companies got dinged pretty bad for a couple years there. So you think that the AI leveling of the world is going to benefit China potentially. What's the story there?
- [08:37]
Ben Carlson
Yeah, I mean, I think it's just the way I think about it. First of all, Deep SEQ was a very impressive model, definitely. And it's hard to say how much lower cost it was, but I think it surely was lower cost then we've seen other Internet companies like Alibaba come up with their own large language learning model that is also even more impressive, arguably. And yeah, when you look at these companies, I mean, the way I see it, if you look at the 10 or 15 companies, they're going to kind of enable AI, particularly by offering things like ChatGPT and Gemini and these models probably about five of them or a third of them or whatever are going to be Chinese companies. And then when you look at the valuations, they're some 50% cheaper than their equivalents in the US with maybe not the same capabilities, but close to them. And then the other game changer was that we saw Xi Jinping get behind the Internet companies for the first time. There was a meeting with all the leading companies, including Alibaba, which had kind of fall afoul of the Chinese government. And he's kind of looking to them to kind of lead the way. That's a huge change in what we saw, say five years ago, because that was the thing that really brought those Internet companies down, the greater regulation coming out of the Chinese government. So I think all those things are definitely a game changer. And it just shows and whether people like it or not, with all the tensions in that, I mean, Sina does have very leading technology. I mean, some of the older technologies, like say semiconductors, they might still be behind, but when you look at new technologies like electric vehicles or AI or renewables, they're quite advanced. And there's a lot of different stats that you could point to that show that. So they're going to be around from a technology standpoint. And those technology companies trading so cheap should really be beneficiaries. I would say.
- [10:23]
Michael Batnik
Do you look at things top down from a country perspective and think that anything that's happened in the last six months or so changes how you view which countries to over or underweight? Or is it more just a bottom up company thing that you look for the companies first in whatever country they're in? It doesn't really matter as much.
- [10:38]
Ben Carlson
We do it both, but we try to separate it. You know, because when I first started doing this about 25 years ago, we were hoping we'd get a very similar experience than we than what we get in the US but we learned quickly that country factors really do matter. So we had to kind of come up with this framework to analyze countries. And so we do a lot of country research. So we're looking at stocks from a bottoms up perspective, but we analyze the countries too. It helps us learn a lot about the strengths of countries and which types of companies might be successful in those countries. But probably most importantly, it helps us lim exposures to countries that might look cheap but have a lot of other problems, whether it be the risk of war, the risk of sanctions, countries that have really weak external positions, that have constantly declining currencies. So that's what we use the country research for but we find it to be very important.
- [11:25]
Raul Sharma
Recently international stocks have had higher yields than U.S. stocks. Is that because prices are depressed or is that just a structural phenomenon that they tend to pay out more of their earnings and dividends?
- [11:37]
Ben Carlson
Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. I would say they certainly were cheaper even over the last couple years, especially the company's focus on their dividends have been raising their dividends at pretty nice clips. So that supported higher yields. But then yeah, I would say in the majority of countries outside of the U.S. the culture for dividends is kind of greater. They've been paying out more for some time than we are of course dominated by the Mag 7 and the US tech stocks which, you know, don't really feel the need to pay dividends because they think they have such great growth opportunities. So I think it's all those factors that make yields, you know, approximately 50% higher outside of the U.S. than in the U.S. and that's also in emerging markets, by the way.
- [12:18]
Michael Batnik
I want to get more into your process in a minute, but I just wanted to ask about one more catalyst. Do you think all of these new policies are going to make for a weaker dollar as well? Because that's been another headwind for international stocks from the perspective of a US investor that the dollar has been so strong in recent years. That's been just another headwind there. Is that going to become a tailwind potentially if there's less foreign capital flowing into the United States?
- [12:42]
Ben Carlson
Yeah, that's always been the single best thing for non US equities. I think the stats are that if you look at the 10 periods when the dollar declined over the last say 30 years or something, IFA, which is developed market stocks outperformed by about 25% with a 90% hit rate almost all the time. And em almost went up even more. It was over 40% with an 80% hit rate. So a declining DOL dollar is the best thing for those stocks. And I do think there's a very good chance of that happening on the back of several factors. One is, you know, just kind of the technical position of the dollar and how well it really it's done, you know, over the last many years. It's kind of where it was back in 2001. It peaked back then and then went down for the next decade, which was a boon for non US equities. You know, we have a lot of countries that are interested in transacting and things other than the dollars to buy basic commodities like oil or Food products. That's something that could also put a bit of pressure on the US Dollar. I think the fact that you see gold doing so well as a direct indication of the fact that people are trying to diversify away from the dollar. But then probably the biggest thing is just I think Trump's policies, I think that he really does want to see the dollar go down. He might not talk about it so much, but certainly. And there's members of his administration that are even more outspoken about it. But if you want to make America great again and build manufacturing and attract manufacturing and investment into the US and you're going to be employing tariffs too, well, weakening the dollar is in my opinion the single best policy tool to do that. And pretty consistently throughout his career he said that he thought that was a good thing. So that's another reason I think that the dollar could go down. I'm not going to say it's going to collapse or anything like that, but.
- [14:22]
Michael Batnik
You could see weakness.
- [14:23]
Ben Carlson
And then a final factor was if the Mag 7 were by chance to continue to correct, that's a lot of dollars coming out of the US that alone could be the biggest kind of near term factor if it were to occur.
- [14:34]
Raul Sharma
If he were to change his mind overnight and there's no indications that he's going to, but who knows. Do you think that this, that the rally in international stocks would fizzle out or is there something bigger at play here?
- [14:44]
Ben Carlson
I don't think it would fizzle out. I think you would have to see kind of more of a turnback in some of those pro growth policies you're seeing in Europe or maybe kind of the war escalate or something like that. I think what we've seen happen has been very good for non US equities. Again, his policies are promoting these countries to finally change. It's kind of unbelievable that they've taken so long to do so. And I can't imagine such an about face. And then it varies by country. He came out kind of really attacking Canada on Mexico. We would say that Mexico is doing a lot better than Canada in reacting to that. And so we think they're in a bit better shape than say the Canadian market. So it differs by market as well.
- [15:27]
Michael Batnik
So for the past, I don't know, five to seven years, but it felt like, really last year it felt like kind of a crescendo for not only people being against international stocks. I made the comment that in my career I've never seen such poor sentiment against international stocks where people are just throwing their hands up and saying, I give up, I'm going to be all us. But it was also the value investing in the dividends. Why am I buying these low fundamental or low valuation stocks or these high dividend stocks when growth is all that matters? So maybe you could just give us a whole background of why you're looking for these certain stocks that for a lot of people were out of favor for some time.
- [16:06]
Ben Carlson
Well, I think because we have great growth too, we demand earnings growth from our companies too. Our only thing is that we're not willing to really pay up for it. And we think that investing in dividend paying stocks is kind of a lower risk approach. You usually do better in down markets. So for our investors, they like kind of a lower risk approach. But you'd be surprised, I'd say probably even more so in emerging markets with the opportunity set that you could get within these dividend stocks. So we kind of have less exposure now because they got a bit more expensive. But certainly, I mean, you know, emerging markets is a great place to play the AI supply chain, arguably better than in the US because the AI supply chain is not going anywhere without places like Taiwan or even South Korea. And you'd be surprised how many of those stocks were quite, quite cheap. And they're actually getting cheap again. But after correcting in the last couple months paying really nice dividends. And so, you know, that's a theme that we've always liked to invest in, kind of playing these big mega tech tech trends through the supply chain to talk about Europe and other places. We think the multinationals are quite interested, we're quite loaded up in them in our international portfolio. Because if you compare some of these global multinationals from say Europe or Japan to US peers, you'll see the businesses are kind of similar in terms of where their revenues and assets are located. But then you just look at the valuation. So I'd say about 60% of our portfolio, if you compare it to US peers, it's about 25% cheaper with literally double the yield. And you know, when you look at companies like Siemens or Munich Re, which is the largest reinsurer in the world, you know, I'm not sure you could say that they're really inferior to the US companies. I mean, I think you can for a lot of other companies, but so we think that's a great opportunity in itself too.
- [17:44]
Michael Batnik
So one of my favorite analogies that investors often use is they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So is that you think what happened in a lot of cases here where you could, you could find these much cheaper companies because people are just putting all international emerging market stocks in the same bucket and saying, get me out of here.
- [17:59]
Ben Carlson
Absolutely, absolutely. You're absolutely correct in that. And I think passive is the big driver of that because, you know, people just sell the ETF and you know, maybe a third of the ETF is actually attractive in terms of the fundamentals of the companies, but they're selling those too. Right, when you sell your etf. So I think that that's definitely been a phenomenon that's happening, one that creates a lot of opportunities.
- [18:20]
Raul Sharma
Talk to us about how people are accessing your products. Are these separately managed accounts only or what does that look like?
- [18:27]
Ben Carlson
Exactly, yeah, we manage separately managed accounts and mutual funds. So the exposure is generally the same because in separately managed accounts, if it's US based, they're almost always custodying in US dollars. So whether it's an ADR or a local security, you're getting the same exposure. I mean, the way I like to think about it, whether you're buying a local share denominated in US dollars or adr, you're basically buying two things. You're buying a foreign currency and you're buying the local stock. And so if the local Stock goes up 1% and the currency goes up 1%, you're going to be up 2% of your position. If each goes up, if the currency goes down 1 and the stock goes up 1, you're flat. But whether it's an ADR or a local, it's the same. And most of our clients through the SMAs or with the big major banks, we have several different relationships and then we have the funds. I think an additional thing is in emerging markets, I think mutual funds make a heck of a lot of sense of the access capabilities. It's very, very hard and much more costly. And also you have to give up a lot of your kind of personal information that you might not want to to access all the emerging market countries in a separately managed account. If you want to get into India locally or into the A share market in China or even locally into places like Taiwan or South Korea, not so easy. So I think the funds are a really good vehicle in emerging markets. People are kind of down on mutual funds these days, but I think EM is definitely an exception.
- [19:48]
Michael Batnik
Early in my career I had to actually do this for separately managed accounts for the endowment fund I work for. For our separately managed emerging markets account, we were sending off letters and getting stuff stamped and notarized and you're right. It's. To get access to some of these countries is really difficult if you want to own these single stocks. Correct?
- [20:05]
Ben Carlson
Correct. Yeah, it's very time consuming. So that's the beauty of the fund. You know, we could just do that on the behalf of investors. And you know, John Doe doesn't have to give up his personal information. We're coming in as Cullen Funds Trust on behalf of our investors. Another advantage is that we could reclaim withhold taxes on the dividends for all the investors. That's a much more time consuming process in a separately managed account where the individual needs to go to his tax account and have that done.
- [20:28]
Raul Sharma
I know this is pretty in the weeds, but I'm assuming that we've got a lot of advisors listening. Why, why the mutual fund and not the etf? What are the differences? Like, why can't you do that in that wrapper?
- [20:38]
Ben Carlson
You know, I guess maybe if it's an active etf, it would be kind of similar. But certainly we think the passive ETFs, you know, they bring another layer of problems, particularly in emerging markets or even in developed markets. I just think that, you know, there's a lot of ETFs that perform pretty, but I always think they're vulnerable in certain environments and you never know when those environments come. So Covid was a great example. When Covid ended up, we ended up having the most dividend cuts that we've ever seen in history. And so we were able to actively navigate through that environment by getting into companies in an extremely uncertain time that we thought had more secure dividends, whereas the passive approaches that were waiting to rebalance could, could not do that, or even the index funds could not do that. And so the dividend streams of those funds went down a lot more than ours did. And then similarly later in the year when Covid, when it was seen that it really didn't have the negative economic impact that people thought, there was a huge increase in dividends and people started paying dividends in 2021 that they didn't pay in the COVID year. And so we were able to reposition into that and then benefit from the best year for dividend growth that we've ever seen in our history. Another example in emerging markets would be the ability to DE risk. So we were able DE risk our exposure pretty successfully and get out more or less completely out of Russia. Whereas the ETFs, again, they have to wait to rebalance and they're stuck holding those positions and they took heavy losses for that that's why I personally think Active makes a lot of sense. And the other thing is, if you're focused on dividend yield and dividend growth like we are, it's very hard to do that just quantitatively, you know. And if you just look for the increasers, you tend to get a lower yield. If you look for the highest yield, you get a lot of companies, very poor corporate governance. So you really need a balanced approach. You really need experience. And I think that's what our team brings to the table.
- [22:20]
Michael Batnik
Table looks like you have a relatively concentrated portfolio too. I think in your EM strategy it says 50 to 70 names. Your international one is more like 35 to 45. What is your opportunity set here? How many stocks are you starting with that you're paying attention to and then whittling down to those numbers.
- [22:37]
Ben Carlson
So if you look at our initial screen, which is kind of a value screen, low pe, above average dividend yield, and then getting rid of companies that we think have negative dividend and earnings growth, because we've looked at them in the past, these days in emerging markets, we're getting about 850 stocks that meet the screening parameters. And I'd say in international developed markets, we're getting about 600 stocks or so combined, non U.S. that's six times the amount you get in the U.S. so it's a very large opportunity set. But seeing that we've been doing this since 2000 and the universe doesn't change so dramatically from year to year, we feel like we know it quite well and it might just be 10 or 15% of the universe that we're unfamiliar with and need to get up to speed with and really get in the weeds with. But the other ones we've kind of.
- [23:23]
Raul Sharma
Looked at before, sure, we're seeing some serious flows into international stocks. I assume that you all are seeing the same.
- [23:31]
Ben Carlson
Yeah, we've been getting good flows, definitely, you know, probably even more so on the emerging market side. But yeah, we're seeing, especially in the SMA side, good flows into the, into the accounts. It's just everyone is so under position. I mentioned, you know, the weight of the index and, you know, and it happens so quickly, too. I mean, and it's not just happening kind of quickly this time, but whatever. In the past, I mean, usually if international, say in the 2000s, outperformed for the whole decade when international stocks were up and US stocks on average were down, probably about 80% of that move came in the first year or so, and then they still kept outperforming. But it wasn't by quite the magnitude. And if it's not just international versus us, the same thing goes for value versus growth where the reversion happens quite quickly.
- [24:17]
Raul Sharma
So for somebody who's listening, who says, I just, just I missed it, I missed it, what would you say to that person?
- [24:23]
Ben Carlson
Oh, you haven't missed it all. I mean, we're still, you know, we could, you know, our marketing team could provide a lot of long term charts that shows either value versus growth or international versus the US we're so far below, you know, the, the, the median average or just the average. You know, I mentioned international stocks being about 50% less in weight than they were on average, value versus growth still being over one standard deviations, you know, below the market. And this being a couple months into what had been, if it is outperformance for international, what had been by far the largest period of outperformance of non US stocks versus US stocks more than a decade.
- [25:03]
Michael Batnik
We look at charts of this all the time and we've looked at these cycles of over and underperformance. And in the past it might have been three, five, seven years potentially. And this one lasted for, I don't know, 12 to 15 years, depending on when you count it. But it's interesting, if you look at the cycles of, of outperformance and underperformance between emerging markets in the US they tend to be even more drastic where the magnitude of outperformance by the one who's leading is far different. So people forget that the US had the lost decade in the first decade of the century and emerging markets did great and it was a huge spread and now it's kind of worked its way back and we had mean reversion. Is that just a currency story? Why are those cycles so much, much more extreme than they are even between the developed nations?
- [25:46]
Ben Carlson
I think it depends kind of almost on which cycle we're talking about. I mean, back in the 90s it was because the Asian financial crisis imploded and then we had the Russian crisis and that just was very bad for emerging markets because all those countries were emerging countries. And then by the way, it also coincided with the tech boom that ended in 2001. In the 2000s you got into a better environment for emerging markets which, because commodities, one reason was commod, commodities were doing a lot better. And that's certainly another thing that could happen and really benefit emerging markets. They always do well when commodity prices do well. So I think that was a big reason. You saw China really growing at its fastest clip. Countries like Brazil were doing very, very well. But a constant theme is the dollar, definitely. So I would be shocked if the dollar went down and international and emerging market stocks didn't outperform. And by the way, the dividend strategies are a great way to get that dollar diversification too. Because if your current, let's say your company raises its dividend organically by 5%, but then the dollar depreciates 5% versus that currency, then your dividend growth is 10%. And it's also a great way to get diversification because when the dollar goes down, international products like think about those trips to Italy or that chocolate from Switzerland or those cars from Germany, they all get more expensive. So having some sort of diversification to allow you to keep your pur. I think is a sensible thing for investors to do.
- [27:18]
Raul Sharma
On the flip side, what would you say to somebody who says, no, I want to own international stocks, but I don't, I just, I don't want any dollar exposure. I just want to own them as if I was a resident. I want to own Italian stocks as if I was an Italian. I don't want any like currency fluctuations. What would you say to that person?
- [27:33]
Ben Carlson
Then they're going to have to hedge their currencies, which is, is costly and is going to, at least from our perspective, eat into, you know, some of the income and you know, timing currencies is, is, is pretty, is pretty difficult. Again, in a separately managed account. It's very difficult in the US to get that kind of exposure. Banks just don't let it do it. They just have to do. It just gets a lot more costly for banks and especially with rates going up, the cost of hedging has gone up too. But I think you want that, especially where we're at now. I think you want that foreign currency exposure. For the reasons I just described.
- [28:08]
Raul Sharma
You're saying get the double whammy. If international stocks are going to outperform, it's likely that you're going to get, get, who knows, but it's likely that you're going to get even more appreciation from a falling dollar.
- [28:18]
Ben Carlson
Yeah, I mean, hey, be overweight the US and the US Dollar if you want, but yeah, get some diversification with international stocks and get some diversification away from the dollar with international currencies. I think that makes a lot of sense to me.
- [28:29]
Michael Batnik
One of the things that we've heard from a lot of people pushing back in recent years saying I'm putting all my money into US Stocks I don't need international stocks is just that if you look at the S and p, something like 35 to 40% of all revenue comes from overseas. And people say, see, I'm already div. Overseas. So what do you say to investors who have that mindset?
- [28:48]
Ben Carlson
Well, first of all, you're just paying a lot more for that international exposure because the valuations are some 40% higher. But you could make the counter argument, why don't you get cheaper US Exposure by investing in international multinationals? Because if you look, I think the CAC 40, they get about 40% of their revenues, I want to say from the U.S. or certainly outside of the U.S. but we have companies like Deutsche, which owns T Mobile, which they're just cleaning up on AT&T and Verizon and that's a good example. We own Zurich Insurance, which owns farmer's insurance. Companies like Toyota obviously have huge businesses here in the US So you could get a lot cheaper US Exposure through really good international multinationals that trade at such more compelling valuations.
- [29:30]
Michael Batnik
Good answer.
- [29:31]
Ben Carlson
Thanks.
- [29:32]
Michael Batnik
I like that one.
- [29:33]
Raul Sharma
Strong to quite strong. All right, Raoul, Very interesting. For people that want to learn more about how to take advantage of, hopefully the early innings of a shift towards friendlier international stocks. Where do we send them?
- [29:44]
Ben Carlson
I would suggest our website. We have a very equipped marketing team. We have regional marketers that could get in touch with you. Feel free to call the office. So those are all great ways to learn more about our products.
- [29:55]
Michael Batnik
Hit us with the website. What is it?
- [29:57]
Ben Carlson
It's www.schaefer-cullen.com.
- [30:00]
Michael Batnik
Thanks, Raul. Hey, thanks to Raul. Remember to check out Cullenfunds.com that's C, U, L L E N. Email us Animalspiritscompoundnews.com.