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Michael Batnik
Today's Animal Spirits Talk youk Book is brought to you by Wasatch Global. Go to WasatchGlobal.com to learn more about their Wasatch Long Short Alpha Fund Ticker W A L S X which we're talking about on the show today. That's WasatchGlobal.com.
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 Rith. 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.
Michael Batnik
Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, I've always been really interested in the psychology behind people who are able to run long short books and funds and strategies because I feel like you have to be able to separate the two parts of your brain, right? Because long only people that they have this certain mindset. I think even like you know, long term optimistic glasses half full. I feel like a lot of fixed income people are glasses half empty because bonds are there for the as the anchor. But long short, you have to have both of those abilities. You have to like be able to fight through the cognitive dissonance.
Mick Rasmussen
Long short was a huge category of hedge funds back in the day. Right. Like this is what everybody wanted to be. This was the sexiest strategy out there and they went through a really rough period as I would say, like valuations got disconnected. But whatever the case was, it went through a really tough environment.
Michael Batnik
2000 and tens was not easy to be a long short manager.
Mick Rasmussen
Yeah. Because typically long value oriented names and short expensive that just blew up. That was not a sustainable strategy in 2010s for reasons that are obvious in hindsight.
Michael Batnik
The higher valuation stocks did better than the low valuation stocks. So that was typically the strategy, right? You go long the low valuation stocks, you go short the high valuation stocks and hope that they come back and meet the middle through mean reversion. And look, I made money on both of them that that didn't work anymore. So on today's show we talked to Mick Rasmussen who's a.
Mick Rasmussen
An addendum to the intro. They use that word, right? Addendum. This is not a 50 50. This is not a market neutral strategy.
Unknown
Right.
Mick Rasmussen
Where the shorts off offset the longs and therefore all you're left with is the residual alpha to the extent that there is any.
Michael Batnik
Yeah, well, that was a new world comment by you. Because everyone who knows what a long short fund is knows that.
Mick Rasmussen
I don't think so.
Michael Batnik
Yeah, there's long short funds, which are usually long.
Mick Rasmussen
Oh, and then market neutral.
Michael Batnik
Then market neutral.
Mick Rasmussen
Okay, fair enough. Not everybody's a hedge fund professional on this show.
Michael Batnik
Okay, that's true. So we talked to Mick Rasmussen today who works at Wasatch Global, and they are known for investing in small and mid caps, mostly small caps. They run like $30 billion small cap investing. And then this is their first long short fund. And so it sounds like they typically go long 90% to 140% or so, and then short between 0% and 60% or negative 6%, I guess it would be. But I think they kind of try to match it out, it sounds like. But actually having a short book in the small cap exposure in the small cap universe, that makes way more sense to me than trying to short large cap stocks. Right. Because we've talked about it. There's a lot of junkie small cap stocks that don't make any money. So if you're gonna do it, this would seem to be the place to do it. Mm, right. Okay. So we get into all this with Mick and how they work their strategy, the way small cap stocks work, how they're sort of under followed. So here's our conversation with Mick Rasmussen from Wasatch Global. All right, Mick, welcome to the show. So I have a question for you about long short funds. I have some hedge fund investing experience. In my past, the thing that I always thought was the hardest question to answer for a manager of a long short fund was not necessarily on stock selection. Obviously stock selection is important, but it's the gross and net exposure that you have. And I think that's the hardest question to answer because you could have great stock selection. But if your gross and net exposure is not correct in terms of the direction of the market or the direction of your stock picks, it could throw you off. So how do you determine that? Is it a static level for you? Do you change how that exposure works? Because it's obviously not going to be just 100% invested like a typical long only stock fund.
Unknown
Yeah, I think the main thing with all long short investing is knowing your strengths and being really intentional about the risks you want to be taking. So for us here at Wasatch, we are fundamental, bottom up small cap managers. So we're quality growth investing in the small and mid cap markets. And for us it's really, we think we can find really differentiated companies and excellent businesses within this space. But it comes with this source of risk that we're not, that's undiversifiable in a long only portfolio. So you end up with whether or not small cap growth is what's in favor at the time, that's your biggest source of risk and return, not whether or not we're able to find awesome businesses and compound over long periods of time. So with this strategy, it's all about taking that source of risk we want in the long side and hedging away the piece we don't want, which is that small cap factor, the growth factor, the sectors and industries we don't want, the interest rate risk we don't want. So we're left with much more of what we're really good at and much less of that associated risk that comes with our style of investing. And the only way to really do that is in a long short Strategy.
Michael Batnik
There's some 130, 30 funds that are relatively static. They go long, 130% long and 30% short. So effectively your net is netting out at 100. Do you try to get into that range or does your net exposure move up and down?
Unknown
So we're a directional long short fund. So we're always going to be somewhere between market neutral and fully long only invested. So through a full market cycle called a 0.5 beta is exactly what we're looking for. That's going to fluctuate through time. Really what we're solving for is a Sharpe ratio. The best thing we want is that risk adjusted return. So for every basis point of return we're getting, how much risk are we taking for that? But with our style of investing in small caps, with this inefficient high alpha space of the market, it tends to be about half the risk or half the exposure you'd get in our long only strategies.
Mick Rasmussen
So I want to talk about the inefficiency that you just mentioned. How confident are you that the prices of the stocks aligns with the fundamentals of the business? Because there's been a lot of debate over this. Einorn has been out recently saying like a lot of the stuff that he used to do, like you could find a great business at a wonderful price, but if there's nobody else to realize the price with you, that it could just stay underpriced or overpriced for that matter, forever. And being that you're, you're, you're in the arena doing this I would imagine that you're still confident that actual stock selection does still work. So talk to that.
Unknown
That dynamic, you know, it absolutely does. It just can take many, many years for that to play out sometimes. So, you know, if you hold a compounding business long enough, eventually those fundamentals are going to be what drives the price and you will get paid for that in from the market at some point. The difficulty is, you know, yes, we have seen huge dislocations at specific points in time and you have to be able to manage and live through those short term risks and big inefficiencies in the market so that ultimately you end up getting paid a much more fair price for the companies you're investing in.
Mick Rasmussen
If one of the stocks that you're involved in somehow becomes a target of one of the squeezes. That makes no sense. But they exist, right? Like it's a dynamic in the marketplace that you didn't have to deal with 15 years ago. If one of your companies is embroiled in that, would you be like, all right, we're out, or would you be more likely to add to your position or how would you deal with such a situation?
Unknown
100% we're out in that environment and we actually tend to try.
Mick Rasmussen
That's the right answer.
Michael Batnik
You're not trying to step in front of GameStop.
Mick Rasmussen
That's the right answer.
Unknown
Ultimately, hopefully we can avoid those in the first place. We have some pretty tight restrictions on our short book. A typical holding is call it 50 basis points, maybe 70 basis points or anything that has a high borrow cost, high short interest. We're going to avoid those. And if a short's going against us, there's thousands of small cap companies and mid cap companies we're looking at. So if something starts to show those types of behaviors, we're going to replace it with another company that we think gives the same hedging characteristics and the same negative alpha profile, but without the embedded risk of hey, this is going to have those market dynamics really go against you.
Michael Batnik
One of the stats Michael and I have talked about over the last couple of years is it's something like 40% of all Russell 2000 stocks make no profit. People have been beating the drum for a while. Is it easier for you to find short candidates in the small and mid cap space because of this? I would imagine there's more short candidates in that bucket than there is in the large cap space.
Unknown
Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's what drew us so much to the strategy is within small caps, the breadth of great Companies and terrible companies is massive. So there's a ton of differentiation between if you can find these really awesome businesses, there's still hundreds of these every year that are growing 20 plus percent compounding earnings, great management teams and that's really our source of alpha. But on the short side, you're seeing the exact opposite where there's tons of businesses that frankly shouldn't even be public right now. Unsustainable business models. Companies that worked in a zero interest rate environment but now definitely don't work with the cost of capital increasing to where it is today. So we think there's tons of opportunities to find great shorts that work best when they're paired with our high alpha long. So naked short selling some of these companies doesn't make much sense because you still have a positive expected return on a lot of them with a lot of risk that comes with that. And that's why having this directional long short is we think a really, really nice way.
Michael Batnik
So you're more playing the dispersion spread basically. Right, like these ones are going to underperform these ones by a lot.
Unknown
Yeah, no, that's exactly right. I mean the primary goal of our shorts is to hedge away the risks that come with our style of long investing. So if we have a lot of software companies and a lot of healthcare companies, we have an insight on this management team and their ability to deploy capital and grow over long periods of time. But we don't have a take on whether the market's going to put this industry in favor over the next six months and have a lot of flows and see large market moves. So it's protecting from those market dynamics is the primary goal of our shorts.
Mick Rasmussen
So you mentioned that you would avoid high short interest stocks. It's funny because again back in the day, a high short interest, Tesla side and obviously a few others aside, generally indicated lousy businesses. All the short sellers in the world, as you know better than anyone, can't put a good business out of business because these are businesses and ultimately a good business will thrive no matter business.
Michael Batnik
Like 12 times there I did.
Mick Rasmussen
I'm sorry, that's what's important.
Unknown
I love it.
Mick Rasmussen
Yeah, yeah, these are businesses, Ben. But it's funny. So, so you will avoid these stocks that have, have a shy, have a high short interest because as I alluded to earlier, they could be the targets of these coordinated attacks.
Unknown
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Like all else equal, I would tend to, you know, be less interested in owning long something that has a high short interest. Because you know, the market's not dumb and they're usually picking up on something. I think within our universe there's just, there's enough opportunities out there that, you know, there's plenty of unattractive small and mid cap companies that aren't going to potentially be caught up in those same dynamics. So if it's crowded shortly. Yeah, no thanks.
Michael Batnik
I have to imagine that the short interest cost has to be relative to large caps. Is there enough liquidity where you can find enough candidates where it's not too cumbersome from a cost perspective? What is your line in the sand of? No, we're not paying short interest this high. That's ridiculous. The hurdle rate is too big.
Unknown
Yeah, it tends to be about 5% is the borrow cost where we're not going to initiate or maintain a position. The dynamics of short selling, you're borrowing stock at actually a much cheaper rate than you would be borrowing dollars for. So it's a really nice cheap source of leverage for us and that's why we're able to go more than 100% long as well. So for every time we're, let's say a typical borrow cost is 50 basis points, we get to take that stock, sell it in the open market and then take that cash and reinvest it in our best long ideas as well. So I mean that's what allows us to be, you know, to actually get more of our, of our stock picking in this portfolio and we end up with even higher weights in our top ideas. And because we're hedging some of that risk as well, it's, you know, it allows for a lot of optimization there.
Mick Rasmussen
Can you talk about the idea of you mentioned, like where the shorts come from? How does, how does interest rates impact this? Because this is like a double whammy for a lot of the era where interest rates were at zero. So you were getting nothing on the cash. Talk about how that works and how that might be a tailwind for your strategy.
Unknown
Yeah, it's mostly just reflected in the equity prices themselves right now. So it's the fact that the market's not willing to pay nearly as much for a company when you can get 5% on your cash balance as they were when you could get 0% on your cash balance. So for small cap growth investing, that's going to be especially exposed. We're long duration and there's a lot of businesses in the space that need external financing which is going to be really sensitive to that and tied to what overall rates are but in terms of the ability for us to short and the structural dynamics of the portfolio, it doesn't change much.
Mick Rasmussen
Do you have bands where you won't either get too long or too short? How does the sizing of those positions and not the positions themselves, but how long you are and how short you are?
Unknown
Yeah, so our maximum long exposure is going to be 100%. So in a really extreme environment we could actually cover all of our shorts. Let's say that the borrow cost goes through the roof on all small caps and we've had a major sell off market and we want to be 100% long. We have the capability of doing that. I doubt we ever would. On the short side it's 50%. So we could never be more than 200% gross exposure, which would mean 150 long and 50 short would be. That's kind of the structural limits within a mutual fund for us.
Mick Rasmussen
When was the time where you were max short?
Unknown
Call it the late 2020, early 21. Kind of that peak of the post Covid mania. That was actually a really difficult environment for us coming out of that period because risk on was the most important thing. And a lot of these really speculative, high multiple, low quality businesses that we were short were doing extremely well through that period. But we were able to maintain that high short overall portfolio throughout that period and then got paid very well for that as the tide went out in the market.
Michael Batnik
That's when you tell your clients this is a junk stock rally, right?
Mick Rasmussen
No, but for real. I was going to ask, but it was. I'm curious if your clients, because I would imagine that this is mostly an institutional product. I would imagine, despite the fact that you were getting your face ripped off by the shorts, I would imagine that they were like, this is going to turn. This doesn't make sense. Or am I giving, am I giving people too much credit where they like, this sucks. What are you doing, you idiot?
Unknown
I think we just launched this mutual fund about three years ago. So throughout that period we were managing this internally at Wasatch. We're very long term focus. We managed the strategy for five years with just our own partner capital before we went public to the markets with this. We didn't have external clients through that period, but certainly it was all right.
Mick Rasmussen
So what were you saying to yourself in the mirror, you idiot?
Unknown
No, it didn't make any sense. And it was trying to stick to what our predefined game plan was and our discipline, which fortunately our net long bias allowed us to be up in Absolute terms, a healthy amount in that period. And I would expect that going forward. But we certainly weren't keeping up with the euphoria of the markets. And I'd say we're seeing the same thing to a much smaller degree today since there's clarity on rates being cut from here post election, we've seen a much smaller degree of those same things playing out where there's a renewed risk appetite in the markets. And with that, we've seen our shorts start to outperform our longs just in the past. Call it month or two.
Michael Batnik
I'm curious how the dual process works. So you have these specific variables you look for in your process when you're going along a stock, whatever it is, you can tell me a certain level of earnings growth or a certain level of ROE or whatever it is you're looking for. Those stocks is a short book just the opposite of that. You're looking for companies that aren't growing. Is that how the long short aspect of it works or are there different variables you're looking for between the different buckets?
Unknown
No, I think it's really helpful to ground this in who we are. At Wasatch, we've been managing the same types of long only portfolios for 50 years now, doing this very specific deep due diligence, getting to know management teams, getting to know business drivers, getting to know industries in this portfolio and across our entire $30 billion platform. It's the same insight and the same. Every name that we own in this strategy is owned across our US franchise and other portfolios. That really is the heart of how we win. And we have a process that's been proven to add alpha in this space for many, many years, doing exactly that. On the short side, the first thing is that risk management piece is number one. So all else equally, we want our shorts to look a lot like our longs. If we have specific exposures, it's a matching exercise first and foremost.
Michael Batnik
Does that mean sector based? If your biggest holding is in the healthcare sector, you want to have a short that offsets it.
Unknown
Exactly. We have risk models, which is the primary thing. That's groupings of country risks and sector risks. It's factors. So how fast is the overall portfolio growing and what's the leverage and cyclicality? It's also return correlations. So we're looking at when interest rates are up, when GLP1 drugs are doing well, when the AI Infrastructure Group basket of stocks is doing well. How's our portfolio performing? Because that's not our insight. Our insight At Wasatch is always company specific. It's very bottom up. We're not particularly great at the hey, let's make a big macro call. We want to own a lot of this sector. We want to own a lot of this macro theme right now. So if we have that as an output of our long portfolio, the first thing we do is let's get rid of that. So it's back to that intentional about risks. We don't want to have a call there. And a long only portfolio, we would have to have a call there. Let's go find a risk that a short that can offset that and go hedge that away.
Mick Rasmussen
I want to talk about your fundamental the stock picking and how that works. But before I just don't want to forget, I'm curious, was your worst drawdown in 21 or like what is it weird where like you had the worst drawdown in a bull market or would it be in a bear market?
Unknown
Bear market for sure. So you know, we have that 0.5 beta roughly in this strategy. So you know, 2022 was a really tough year for us. We were down about 8% that year with, with the sound so bad, small cap growth was down, call it 25%.
Michael Batnik
Yeah.
Mick Rasmussen
So that doesn't sound bad. An 8% down year in a really bad market. Why? What would you have expected? And they say, I don't know, a different bear market.
Unknown
That's what we're hoping for. We were pleased with that period, absolutely. But that's going to be an absolute basis. Our worst periods are going to be when the market's down. But we should provide some downside.
Mick Rasmussen
I was wondering if that was like a humble break because down 8% to 22 is pretty damn good.
Unknown
We're proud of it for sure.
Mick Rasmussen
So are you guys, is there a quantitative screen and then you get working on the businesses or how does it work?
Unknown
So a little background on myself. I was actually our first full time quantitative analyst that was hired here at Wasatch. We've been in business, As I said, 50 years and 40 person research team, 39 of them before me were doing stock specific research. And I was brought in to come in and say, hey, what can we learn about our specific data, our style of investing, our process to add value and the key insights we had there were what I've mentioned, it's company specific insights are how we add value. Our stock picking is actually great. We're really good at knowing which companies to own. What we need some help with is when we own those businesses how to put weight behind our best ideas and how to manage the portfolio level risk. So a lot of, a lot of what I'm working on and not just this long short strategy but across the firm is exactly that. So you know, we'll have certain ideas and when they hit characteristics that historically we've done really well and that's when we'll add a lot of weight to those ideas and kind of double down when our thesis starts playing out.
Michael Batnik
So as a quant, you go back and you look at the 30 year track record of your firm and you figure out these are the attributes we picked that made sense or this is the attribution and this is where we made our living basically. And because we hit these specific variables more or less.
Unknown
That's exactly right. Yep. So it's saying we've done a really good job of documenting our company modeling. We'll say what are our five year earnings estimates for every business we own? One thing that I think is incredibly unique to Wasatch is we actually rank our management teams. In small and mid cap investing, there's a ton of variance in management quality. There's some people behind these businesses that have no right being there and there's some really top tier teams that we've known for many, many years. We actually survey everyone on our team every 18 months and say here's our portfolio. Rank the best management team to the worst management team. We measure that, we turn it into a quantitative output and it's been by far our best source of, of outperformance of everything we've measured internally. So the fact that we are getting to know these management teams and that we have experience meeting with so many, we now use that as an input in our portfolios. When we have a top scoring management team, we put a lot of weight behind those names and vice versa. If it's one of our lower quality management teams, we're going to limit our exposure there. Which that's certainly not a screen you could run on Bloomberg or Facta, but it's something that we've built a decades long process of measuring and now have a, a systematic way to harness that insight.
Mick Rasmussen
The short position, it's not necessarily to generate alpha, obviously that's the idea, but it sounds like it's more for risk management. I'm curious what the turnover looks like on that side of the book.
Unknown
Yeah. On the long side we like to hold things for three plus years is a typical investment horizon. So call it 20 to 30% turnover there outside of flows and on the Short side, it's going to be maybe three times that. So about 100% annualized turnover on our shorts is what we're going for. A lot of that's because we don't want to take that stock specific risk. On the short side, we want to hedge away a profile. We want to protect from a certain risk. So we run much smaller names at a much flatter list. So as the shorts going against us, we're covering it as your shorts working for us, we're likely going to add to that position. So it requires a lot more trading there and being a lot more nimble as we're adding in and out of positions specifically because the volatility in some of these small cap shorts is huge and we want to make sure to keep our overall exposure small.
Michael Batnik
I'm curious to hear what your process is for picking small cap growth companies. Is it growth at a reasonable price? Are you looking for the best, highest growing companies that the market hasn't identified yet? What are those variables that you guys try to tick off?
Unknown
Yeah, I'd say the center of the plate for us is companies that can compound their earnings growth for 10 plus years and the market is underappreciating that duration to their compounding. So it tends to be excellent businesses at premium multiples that we think deserve even higher multiples. So we always are going to skew a little bit more expensive than the market because it really is. If you can find a company that's able to compound for that amount of time, you're able to pay some pretty insane multiples for them and still have the stock price workout. So our insights very rarely on the stock price alone and the insights much more frequently on this is a business that we want to own for 10 plus years.
Mick Rasmussen
So you've got 50, this is as of the end of September, 56 longs and 58 shorts. Is that about what it normally looks like?
Unknown
Yeah, we'll typically have few more shorts than longs because the typical position size is so much different. You know, on the long side, we're comfortable owning a 5% weight there if it's a company that we really like and know a ton about. On the short side, anything above about 1% we're going to start covering. So we do need a longer list to offset that for us.
Michael Batnik
So the one thing that I've always been told is that active management works better in places like small cap because there's not enough analysts covering them and it's easier to find a hidden gem. Is that still true? Do you find that happens in that space?
Mick Rasmussen
Yeah.
Unknown
So we definitely seek out the inefficient parts of the market here where we're small and mid cap specialists, but we actually invest globally. This strategy is us only, but firm wide. We've found that it's the small and micro caps in the US and then international markets where we've tended to find those biggest dislocations in price. I think the double edged sword piece of that is with those less efficient markets, your risk management also needs to be stepped up a tier because you might have to live through those periods of extreme volatility and extreme mispricing.
Mick Rasmussen
Can you do this inside of an etf?
Unknown
Yes, you can. I think for us the reason we haven't gone that route is the needing to show your hand the transparency piece of ETFs today in these relatively illiquid companies. We don't want to be showing our trading every day and frankly the semi transparent ETFs haven't shown that much success yet. I think that creation and redemption mechanism, if you aren't showing exactly what you're holding there just hasn't been the same liquidity there and so you end up with a bigger bid ask spread. But we do want to be as vehicle agnostic as we can. So right now we have two shares of a mutual fund in this strategy, but about half our business is in separate accounts. We have limited partnerships that we can offer. So that's the least important part of how we're building a strategy for us. But the ETFs and small caps, active small caps just really isn't a great fit yet.
Michael Batnik
Do you have to have operational controls in place when you're building a position or getting out of it? You have to leg in and leg out because of liquidity provisions at times.
Unknown
Yeah, absolutely. So I mean firm wide, our US small and mid cap franchise is about $20 billion right now.
Mick Rasmussen
Are those mostly long only or long short or what?
Unknown
Exactly, mostly long only, yeah. So this is our first long short offering and our product roadmap here at Wasatch. It's research driven as opposed to marketing driven. So we've never sought out and said hey, long short, quantitative, fundamental is this big market need that we think we're going to raise a bunch of assets in because frankly I don't know that there's many other products that exist like this. It's much more. We see an opportunity, we want to put our own capital in this. We think it's a really interesting way to harness our investment insights. Let's go find a product and make that work. So this was very much an organic development from our research findings, but yes, the majority of our firm is long only small cap growth.
Mick Rasmussen
All right, Mick, if people want to learn more about the Wasatch strategy that you guys run, where can we send them?
Unknown
Yeah, wasatchglobal.com is going to be the best place to reach us. And you should see an advisor services email there as well if you'd like to reach out. We've got lots of resources on that website, recent white papers about how we use quantitative and fundamental research together that we think are very relevant for this audience. So happy to set something up as well.
Mick Rasmussen
All right, we will link to that in the show notes. Mick, great job. Appreciate the time. Thank you for coming on.
Unknown
Hey, thank you guys. Love what you do.
Michael Batnik
Okay, thank you to Mick. Remember, check out wasatchglobal. Com that's was at. And check out the Wasatch Longshore Alpha Fund. Email us animalspirits at thecompoundnews. Com. We'll see you next time.
Animal Spirits Podcast: Detailed Summary of "Talk Your Book: Matching Longs with Shorts"
Podcast Information:
The episode opens with Michael Batnik expressing interest in the psychology behind managing long short books and funds. He highlights the necessity of balancing optimism and caution, akin to "separating the two parts of your brain" to navigate the cognitive dissonance inherent in long short strategies.
Notable Quote:
Michael Batnik [00:47]: "Long short, you have to have both of those abilities. You have to be able to fight through the cognitive dissonance."
Mick Rasmussen provides historical context, explaining that long short was once the most sought-after hedge fund strategy. However, the strategy faced significant challenges in the early 2000s and 2010s due to disconnected valuations and unsustainable performance dynamics.
Notable Quote:
Mick Rasmussen [02:18]: "Long short was a huge category of hedge funds back in the day... but it went through a really tough environment."
Wasatch Global, traditionally known for managing approximately $30 billion in small cap investments, has ventured into long short strategies with their Long Short Alpha Fund (Ticker: WALSX). Mick discusses the fund's structure, typically going long 90% to 140% and short between 0% and 60%, aiming to match exposures within the small cap universe.
Notable Quote:
Mick Rasmussen [06:37]: "Our strategy is all about taking that source of risk we want in the long side and hedging away the piece we don't want."
A significant portion of the discussion centers on risk management. Mick emphasizes that Wasatch's long short strategy is directional, maintaining exposures between market neutral and fully long. The primary objective is to enhance the Sharpe ratio by optimizing risk-adjusted returns.
Notable Quote:
Mick Rasmussen [05:59]: "Really what we're solving for is a Sharpe ratio. The best thing we want is that risk adjusted return."
The guests delve into the efficiency of small cap markets. Mick contends that, despite debates on market efficiency, there remains ample opportunity for stock selection based on fundamental analysis. He acknowledges that mispricings can persist for extended periods but asserts confidence in long-term mean reversion driven by solid business fundamentals.
Notable Quote:
Mick Rasmussen [07:09]: "It just can take many, many years for that to play out sometimes."
Mick explains Wasatch's approach to short selling, highlighting the challenges posed by stock squeezes and high short interest. The firm avoids high short interest stocks to mitigate risks associated with coordinated attacks, ensuring that their short positions do not become liabilities.
Notable Quote:
Mick Rasmussen [08:04]: "100% we're out in that environment... we have some pretty tight restrictions on our short book."
The conversation touches on the prevalence of unprofitable stocks in the Russell 2000 index, making the small cap space ripe for short selling. Mick notes that Wasatch leverages the vast differentiation in small caps to identify both strong long candidates and weak short candidates.
Notable Quote:
Mick Rasmussen [09:07]: "There's tons of differentiation between if you can find these really awesome businesses, there's still hundreds of these every year that are growing 20 plus percent."
Mick discusses how rising interest rates affect small cap growth investing, particularly for companies reliant on external financing. While higher rates make equity prices less attractive, they also influence the short side by impacting company valuations.
Notable Quote:
Mick Rasmussen [13:00]: "It's the fact that the market's not willing to pay nearly as much for a company when you can get 5% on your cash balance as they were when you could get 0%."
A key differentiator for Wasatch is their quantitative analysis combined with qualitative assessments of management teams. Mick explains that top-ranked management teams receive more significant allocations, a strategy that has historically driven outperformance.
Notable Quote:
Mick Rasmussen [21:31]: "We rank our management teams... it's been by far our best source of outperformance."
The fund maintains a higher turnover on the short side (around 100% annualized) compared to the long side (20-30%). This approach ensures agility in responding to market dynamics and minimizing exposure to volatile short positions.
Notable Quote:
Mick Rasmussen [22:59]: "On the short side, it's going to be maybe three times that. So about 100% annualized turnover on our shorts is what we're going for."
Mick highlights operational controls necessary for managing liquidity and position sizing in small cap stocks. He also touches on the potential for expanding the long short strategy but notes the current preference for mutual funds and separate accounts over ETFs due to transparency and liquidity concerns.
Notable Quote:
Mick Rasmussen [27:07]: "The ETFs and small caps, active small caps just really isn't a great fit yet."
The episode concludes with Mick Rasmussen directing listeners to WasatchGlobal.com for more information and resources. The discussion underscores the complexity and disciplined approach required in managing long short funds, especially within the small cap universe. Key takeaways include the importance of robust risk management, the value of qualitative assessments in stock selection, and the strategic alignment of long and short positions to optimize risk-adjusted returns.
Final Notable Quote:
Mick Rasmussen [28:37]: "We have lots of resources on that website, recent white papers about how we use quantitative and fundamental research together that we think are very relevant for this audience."
Key Insights:
Listeners who seek to understand the intricacies of long short investing, particularly within the small cap realm, will find this episode invaluable. Mick Rasmussen’s insights provide a comprehensive look into the sophisticated strategies employed by Wasatch Global to navigate and capitalize on market inefficiencies.