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- [00:00]
Justin Carbonneau
Welcome to Excess Returns, where we focus on what works over the long term in the markets. Join us as we talk about the strategies and tactics that can help you become a better long term investor.
- [00:09]
Jack Forehand
Jack Forehand is a principal at Valida Capital Management. Matt Ziegler is managing director at Sunpoint Investments. No information on this podcast should be construed as investment advice. Securities discussed in the podcast may be holdings of clients of Validia Capital or Sunpoint Investments. Hey guys, this is Jack. In this episode of Excess Returns, we're featuring an episode from our separate podcast, Two Points and the Financial Planner. On the podcast, we highlight our favorite clips from our Excess Returns episod and break down the most important lessons we think investors can learn from them. In this episode, we look at our biggest takeaways from our interview with Cliff Asmos. If you want to subscribe to 2quants on the Financial Planner, you can find it on all major podcast platforms. Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoy the episode. So Matt, we've been doing Excess Returns now for I think it's like a little over five years. There was always like I always think about guests I would really like to get. I know are hard to get and like the person we're going to talk about today is probably was on the top of the list for me until he finally came on the podcast. So we're going to talk about founder of aqr, Cliff Asness, probably the person in the quant world I've learned the most from and we were lucky enough to interview him a few months ago and there was so much great stuff in there. We're going to pull out our favorite clips and we're going to talk about what they think, what we think they mean for investors.
- [01:15]
Matt Ziegler
I just such a legend for anybody who's been doing finance I think in the modern era probably, and especially anybody I don't know what under, would you put it? Like under 60? Like anybody under 60, certainly under 50. You haven't been able to escape some snarky comment, some wonderful quip, some brilliant research piece that you're like damn it, AQR already wrote about this. Like he is just pervasive as somebody who's there and kudos. You know, you finally broke the barrier down. You kept asking, you kept asking until finally they relented and they were like here you go, here's, here's, here's some, some time with Cliff for you, Jack Forehand, to come up and even surprise him with a couple of questions which I can't wait to get to later.
- [01:58]
Jack Forehand
Yeah, you know, it's funny. Like, you. You typically. And this may shock you, Matt, but you typically don't have the quant guys on there and have tons of humor in the episode. But Cliff is one of the rare people who actually can do that. Like, I mean, there was. This episode was hilarious, but we were talking about concepts which, by their nature, at least, they're not hilarious.
- [02:14]
Matt Ziegler
No, because. And this is one of the brilliant things is in another life, Cliff probably could have been a comedian or something. Like, in another life, he's got a skill set that translates into some other areas, both in his speed and ability to respond. And as is with just like, dealing with ridiculous stuff. Watching him get mad on Twitter has been one of the greatest reasons to be on Twitter for years. And it's really great to watch him humanize something that otherwise is a lot of math and spreadsheets, because there's a lot of ways you can imagine him being dreadfully boring. And he is anything but so on.
- [02:47]
Jack Forehand
The idea of him being hilarious. This is something we led the podcast with because I wanted to. Because I remembered it. He had done it a while back, but I. But I remembered it because I hate this morning routine, stuff that goes on where everybody's talking about these crazy morning routines. So I asked Cliff what he thinks about it. I was really excited that you gave all of us a little bit of hope. So when I'm on Twitter all the time, I always hear that if I want to be really successful in life, I have to do a variety of things. And one of those things is I have to have a certain morning routine. That morning routine has to include some sort of ice bath. It has to include drinking something I don't want to drink. It has to include all these terrible things. And so I just want to thank you because you tweeted something that gave all the rest of us hope that maybe we can have a normal routine and be successful. So what you tweeted for people who are not watching us on video is you said your morning routine is, alarm goes off at 5:30am I text my trainer, not today. I sleep another hour. I awaken, drink coffee, and go into the office. Then I get mad, mad about something. I'd recommend it. So thank you very much for. From the rest of us for saying we don't have to do all those things.
- [03:43]
Cliff Asness
Yeah, there's a little bit of humor in there, but it's uncomfortably close to accurate. You know, some of these. It's a great example of correlation versus Causation, those morning routines may be correlated with very highly productive people. The same mindset that can make you wake up and do some wacko, uncomfortable, painful routine. But I don't, I don't think it's as causative as people, as people think. You know, Winston Churchill used to wake up at, in the afternoon and work in bed till the evening and then stay up till 4am different things can work for different people.
- [04:21]
Jack Forehand
I thought his tweet was great because this is, this is what the real world looks like for most people. Like I'm not getting up in the morning, like and thinking about an ice bath. I'm getting up in the morning and I got kids going on. I'm getting ready for, you know, whatever I got to do. There's a work emails that came in overnight. Like it's like a normal thing, you know, the most of us do. And I think it's great to talk to someone who is a billionaire in Cliff and say I don't have to do those things. Like, not that I'm ever going to be a billionaire, but to be successful, I don't have to do those things. I can probably follow like a normal routine for a normal human being and it can work out okay.
- [04:54]
Matt Ziegler
Just this idea, the correlation, causality. And again, only a quant would go and explain morning routines of correlation and causality and, and the sense of humor that he brought to this, this idea. It's just like, oh, oh really? You think like because that guy got up early and had a nice bath, that if you get up early and you have the ice pack, you can be as successful as the guy. Like you realize the stuff he does or she, the stuff they do after the ridiculous morning routine is actually the thing that makes the money. Unless they're like an influencer and they're selling the ice baths in the first place. The whole morning routine was mind boggling. And I just could never understand why people would, I don't know, brag about that stuff. So hearing him just be like, yeah, here's the reality. I mean, listen, this morning, before this, like I had a, I had a shopping list, I had prepped for some podcasts, prep for a bunch of client meetings and stuff like that, all that goes out the window when I, you know, slip on the stairs in the house and spill coffee, like all through the, the rug, on the carpet, on the stairs and everything else. It's like, yeah, this is the way the morning goes. This is reality. But here, here you are, you got to just go out in the world and do the thing and survive. Humanity is rough. It's great to hear Cliff admit it so bluntly. Yeah.
- [06:08]
Jack Forehand
And to his point, maybe the fact that you're willing to sit in an ice bath for, like, 30 minutes and go through the pain and suffering of that, maybe that means in other areas of your life, you're willing to go through pain and suffering to achieve success. So maybe there's some sort of tie there, but it's not necessarily what leads to the success.
- [06:22]
Matt Ziegler
Yeah. Maybe that's the pain and suffering of reading something idiotic on Twitter and responding or whatever, like, thing that gets him fired up and angry. Maybe anger is his cup of coffee in the morning, and that's okay, too. You just got to figure it out for yourself. And I love the honesty by which he. He tweeted that out. Just poetic.
- [06:39]
Jack Forehand
And I love being able to talk to people like you and Jason Buck because you guys explained this in terms that I'm. You know, I'm thinking about this in really simple terms. Then you guys explain it, like, in the real terms. So Jason Buck had actually retweeted this thing when I put this clip out. And he's like, the problem with morning routines is they introduce fragility, which. Which I think is probably a good way to look at what we were trying to say, but in a different way. Like, if you have this exact thing you have to do every single day, and in order to be successful, you have to keep doing the exact thing. You probably live a pretty fragile life.
- [07:04]
Matt Ziegler
Yeah. As the. The great. The great DC band, the Pie Tasters, they had a song, and the first. The first. The opening line was, drinking beer for breakfast makes the whole day painless. I remember being like, no, no, no. This is not a good sign for how long this band is going to be around. If we're leading with that, there are a lot of problems. There's a lot of fragility.
- [07:27]
Jack Forehand
11:00Am NAP, right. Or something. Right. I would think drinking beer for breakfast. I've never done that, so I don't know. But I would assume I'd be asleep fairly quickly if I was doing that.
- [07:36]
Matt Ziegler
I am pretty confident that the whole day would not be painless, or at least the days as they stack up, take the ice bath over the cold beer, maybe start there.
- [07:45]
Jack Forehand
So now that we're off our tangent, let's go to the actual investing clips here. And the first one was the reason we had Cliff on the podcast, which is he wrote this great paper called the Less Efficient Market Hypothesis. So here's Cliff talking about why he thinks the market is less efficient?
- [07:57]
Cliff Asness
Yeah, I'm starting admittedly from two, rather only two observations with a statistician never enjoys having two observations but they were giant observations that were very anomalous given you know, 75 years of history. And essentially it was the dot com bubble in the late 90s and then surprising because you know, it happened once and I thought it pro be honest, I thought It'd probably be 50 years till it would happen again. Very similar event in 2019 and 20 where the difference in valuation between so called growth and so called value stocks, I prefer to call them expensive and cheap stocks because every once in a while the cheap guys are actually growing pretty well. But the difference in valuations hit easily, far and away a record level compared to history in the dot com bubble and then actually surpassed that during COVID And I can't even blame Covid because it was getting right up there pre Covid and you know, that led to anyone, you know, quantitative value strategies, but anyone who cared about price. I don't care if you were a, a concentrated stock picking Graham and Dodd manager, you generally hated those periods to a level that was unprecedented. In both cases they've massively recovered and the round trip has been fine. So the main challenge was holding on. But after the first one it shaked my faith maybe in efficient markets a little bit. I wrote a paper called Bubble Logic during it that was a little sarcastic about some of the valuations. That maybe was an odd title at that point for a Gene fama disciple. I still love Gene, even if I differ at least on the spectrum of how inefficient the market is then than he is. But then when it happened again, I sat back and I said, all right, I'm pretty sure there's something out there causing either general levels of inefficiency to be somewhat bigger or occasional massive bouts of mania to be somewhat bigger. So you know, I was reasoning from data points, I didn't predict this. And then it's always more valid if you predict something and then it comes true than if you observe it and then try to come up with a story. But with that caveat, I do believe markets have gotten somewhat less efficient. I want to be clear, I don't think they're grossly inefficient. I don't have a better way for society to allocate capital. I'm fond of the Winston Churchill quote. It's my second Winston Churchill reference in six minutes. I didn't mean to do that, but he has this great quote about democracy. It's a good data for this quote. It's a good day for this quote. Actually, democracy is the worst system for governing ever devised, except for every other one that's ever been tried. And you know, you might say the same about markets. Gene Fama. I, I sat through his class three times. First as a student in two, two more years full time. Sat in every lecture as the ta. And he always tells the class about a few weeks in markets are after introducing the concept that markets are, are assuredly not perfectly efficient. And Gene's, you know, if anything, super intellectually honest, he admits perfect efficiency is ridiculous. Nothing's perfect. But once you admit things aren't perfect, how imperfect they are and how much that varies through time, become a legitimate object to test. And if it's hard to formally test, to even speculate on. I think the intuition you mentioned that markets would get more efficient over time is largely based on technology. The speed of trading, the cost of trading has gone down. The ubiquity of information. But I think most of that is about speed, not about correctly processing information. I think it's almost a certainty that information gets into prices faster than 35 years ago, which is roughly the beginning of my paying attention to this stuff. But I think the difference is 10 minutes versus 10 milliseconds. I, you know, I'm old, but I'm not carrier pigeon old. We had Bloombergs and we had phones and you know, when news would come out, prices, prices would react. So, you know, information itself has to be processed well. And I then I advance a bunch of theories as, as to why that processing might be less efficacious these days.
- [12:58]
Jack Forehand
Yeah, so this, this is a really interesting debate. Like, you know, whether the market is efficient at all is a debate people have all the time. But whether it's changing over time, as he kind of alludes to on, on the podcast, is a, is an even more difficult debate. So it's, it's hard to figure out whether the market's efficient or not. I mean, although most of us think it's pretty efficient if not very efficient. But whether that's changing over time is an even harder thing to figure out.
- [13:20]
Matt Ziegler
There's the way he says this, there's almost a like game theoretical part of it. And whether or not market efficiency is this gravity that we drift away from and then get sucked back into. It's the reality that you can cheat the markets, you can do whatever, whatever scam you want to go run or whatever else you can get away with it for a little bit of time, or there can be stretches of history where market efficiency doesn't really matter by its classical definitions here, the way that he'll, he'll describe them. But the reality is you can only get away for so long if you still have to transact with somebody else on the other side. Market efficiency exists because we have to clear prices somewhere. And society needs markets for those clearing of those transactions. And you can only be a bad actor so long before you either get booted out of the system or the system completely falls apart. So there's a huge amount of optimism I take from kind of like the meta lesson from this, where it's, are they less efficient? Well, sometimes, yeah, we drift away from that gravity. But the reality is like society needs this. So having it in place and just getting the deals done and going, you could have your little fancy fantasy, but we got to actually get some reality going here. I believe in that over time. And that's, I really like the way he explained that.
- [14:34]
Jack Forehand
And it's hard if you look at what's going on in the world right now. It's hard not to agree with them. It's hard not to agree that the market is at least getting somewhat less efficient. I mean, is there an efficient market for fart coin right now? Like, is it being priced appropriately? Like, I don't really know. I mean, I think there's just so much stuff going on in the world right now. And this is obviously not. That's not the stock market, that's something else. But like all the stuff we're seeing, it feels like there's a little bit less efficiency. And as he alluded to, like social media and all the stuff that's being thrown at us, you know, that probably is one of the biggest reasons why it's going on.
- [15:04]
Matt Ziegler
Yeah. And the fart coin cannot be a large scale collaboration game. Like, there can't be a whole bunch of people who are like, oh, we are making this, this great resource for humanity. Behold the great and sacred fart that we're trading back and forth with each other. Like that actually can't be the case. Now. It can be fun. It can be like gambling, sportsbook betting without, without the addictions, without the other things where people are actually having fun. It's providing entertainment. I am a believer in things providing entertainment as value. You know, go see a comedian at the nightclub. We're not going to say like, it's an inefficient market because you gave your money to the comedian, the comedian took it all like if you laughed and had a good time. That's a beautiful thing. But don't mistake the idea that we still need this stuff for capital projects, for all the things we need the world to do so that we can have a good life. That's yes, less efficient in areas, but at some point that efficiency comes home to the stuff that actually matters.
- [16:02]
Jack Forehand
And the next clip is kind of a logical flow from the idea that the market's less efficient, which is Cliff's talking about this idea here, that we have to get comfortable with discomfort, particularly if we're investing in the way he does and the way I do.
- [16:12]
Cliff Asness
I think get comfortable with the discomfort. I think the more you talk about it, I have a presentation where I talk about, and in the paper I talk about how to get more comfortable, how to. But it's hard, right, because I'm effectively saying, you know, holy grail of finance is to get more long term. And in some sense I'm just saying get more long term. Don't obsess about the short term as much. So it is far easier said than done. Mostly I'm just trying to be honest with people. I think the payoffs are bigger and the extremes will be bigger. Though I do think the very act of discussing that up front ex ante will make tolerating it when it, you know, I'm not predicting it happens again tomorrow. It could be 20 years again, it could be 50 years again. But we'll make, ultimately, if it does happen again, you'll be, you know, forewarned as forearmed. I think we've now seen two episodes of this and as I've, as I've said in other forums, I'm keeping the receipts. You know, I, business wise, it was still quite difficult, but from, for our own ability to stick with it and keep confidence in what we do, we were open minded. We did listen to every possible story for why this time is different and it's never coming back. And ultimately we rejected those stories, but not after taking them seriously. But having lived through the movie once before and seeing how it ended, it did make it considerably easier, at least for me. Maybe, maybe not emotionally every day. But in terms of keeping intellectual confidence, yeah, the second time is easier than the first and the third time should be easier than, than the second. So I think number one is do everything you can to before the fact, get more long term. And one major thing you can do is look at history and say, you know, we've seen this happen a few times before and, and, and, and, and we've seen how it ends. I think the second is, I hope I don't sound like a hypocrite here, but we're also savagely pursuing things that would make us less dependent on this cycle. We think, and I'm going to do a little commercial for our stuff here, I apologize, but we think we've radically improved what we do in trend following, moving into very esoteric markets, fundamental and price trends. We think those hold up a lot better than pure rational investing. At times when there's irrationality going on, we've moved more, like many quants have, into the realm of alternative data and machine learning. And sometimes those two combined and some of those overlap with what I, what I've been calling rational investing, but some are considerably more short term and idiosyncratic. So I, I am, again, I hope this is balanced and common sense, not hypocritical. But with one, with one voice, I say get more comfortable with discomfort. As you said, you will be paid for it. The other I say if you can make money in other ways, and I think we can, then a portfolio of the two can be better and the first one can be easier to stick with during the downturns because it's not your whole world, it's 2/3 of your world, half your world. So I am very optimistic about the future, but that doesn't mean I'm not hopeful that it will be my descendants at AQR who have to live through the next one. I've done my time in bubble land.
- [19:42]
Jack Forehand
Yeah, this is, he's 100% right about this. This is always something you have to do in investing and obviously the more different you look than the market, the more you have to be comfortable with this. But I think he's also right that this is getting more extreme. I mean, we'll look at a clip in a little while that'll talk about like the 90s and today. But a lot of this stuff is, I think has gotten more extreme than it used to be. You have to sit through the longer periods of underperformance. The magnitude of that underperformance might be greater in those periods. It's just, it's a very hard thing to do. And you're the financial planner, you know, you're better at me on the behavioral stuff. Like it's easy to say get comfortable with the discomfort. It's much harder to do getting, getting comfortable with the discomfort.
- [20:21]
Matt Ziegler
Well, we got Dr. Cliff Asness basically doing the work here. Like he went Full Brene Brown on part of this answer with this, you know, go to therapy. People get comfortable with the discomfort. But talking about the stress and talking about the anticipation of stress, and this is me with financial planner. Hat on for a second. Talking about the anticipation of stress is most of financial planning. It's, you can run all the scenarios and go look how much more money you're going to have, look how much this is all going to work out because you've, you're only hiring somebody like, you know, me or you to do stuff if you've actually amassed some wealth or you're off on some path where you can afford to do the thing. So now like you got to anticipate, all right, well, what if some stuff goes wrong in front of us? How are we going to get through that thing? It will still suck. Like it will still suck. It's going to be awful. But if we have a five year buffer, a three year buffer, a ten year buffer on here is how we will deal with the suck. That's a really important thing to say. I am positive for, for you like running the concentrated value factor strategies or any concentrated factor strategy. This is the conversation you probably have like up front. I'm thinking of Wes Gray too on this. Just literally saying you are going to hate this for a period of time. Are you prepared to hate the thing you think is smart today?
- [21:36]
Jack Forehand
Yeah, we actually did at one point. And Wes is the best at this. Like Wes is really good about before people get into his funds. He really talks about the pain you're going to suffer if you get in this fund. You know, in order to achieve the long term returns, what you're gonna have to go through. Like we did at one point we wrote a document basically that outlined the pain that talked about like we essentially listed a doc in a document that we gave to clients before they came on. Like, here are the horrible, awful things that are going to happen to you along the way if you want to follow these concentrated factor strategies. And it did help a little bit. I mean, I think unfortunately, until you feel the pain in the real world, it's, you're never going to understand what it's truly like. And so we can write whatever documents we want and we can talk about it and we can give examples. It helps. But you're never going to get all the way there until you actually see it with your face. Like until you see it with your actual money going down or your money underperforming the S&P 500 or whatever it is. Until you get there, you're not going to understand it.
- [22:28]
Matt Ziegler
Hey, who's the smartest person who ever lost the most of your money? Like, that's not, it's just not a good feeling for that. So it's, it's, it's gotta be tied to you and your personality and your identity in a way where you go, I believe in this process even when it's not working. How can I know I can get comfortable with just the reality that, yeah, life is uncomfortable. You don't need a nice bath to prove it.
- [22:52]
Jack Forehand
And although Cliff is an active investor and so am I, this is an argument for indexing to some extent. This is for many people. This is an argument like, if you can't endure that pain, you probably shouldn't try to endure that pain because you're going to panic at the worst time. You're going to sell something that's eventually going to come back at the worst time, and you're going to end up worse off than you would have been just buying the index in the first place. So, like, understanding up front whether you can, it's very hard to do, but understanding up front whether I can endure that pain or whether I should just not even try is such an important thing.
- [23:22]
Matt Ziegler
Yeah, and especially, I mean, we're talking about money here. And it's like buying the index fund is basically, oh, I'm going to get the average return. No, nobody wants that. And this is like, like money is like people's kids in this, in this sense. Nobody wants below average kids. Nobody wants average, you know, even average kids, they want above average kids. You work so hard, you save this money, you put it away so diligently, so carefully, and now you're gonna settle for average. That feels so horrible. But in many cases it's the best thing you could do because there's so many other things that are better to care about.
- [23:55]
Jack Forehand
So this next clip is an argument for the less efficient market hypothesis, which is something that all of us that are value investors have seen for a long time here. But this is Cliff putting up a chart and looking at value spreads and using Fama French and how they've evolved over time or how they've changed over time.
- [24:08]
Cliff Asness
From 1950 to 1998, it had looked like a very well behaved series. Either the straight series or the five year moving average that you referred to. Looked, looked for an economic series fairly well behaved. It varied between about three and six, which meaning means the top 30% of stocks was at the most about six times more expensive on this scale than the bottom third, 30% and at the tightest was only about three times more expensive. And then in the dot com bubble it exploded to. I don't know, I don't remember exactly but 10 something. It looked like a broken chart or you know, the famous the world has changed. At least on this measure the world did change. I don't think ultimately the gravity of the world that, that, that would pull this back to normal went away. But there was a change. Then over the next 20 years you saw meander around. I think those periods where it spends long periods around the median or below the median, those are kind of a normal periods where maybe even if markets are less efficient in extremes, nothing extreme is going on. What I'm talking about are really these bouts of crazy. But the point of the five year moving average, and I do it a few different ways, five year moving average is of course going to be more extreme if the numbers are more extreme. But it also shows things lasting for longer. In the paper I also quote number of months it's been above median where when you have, you know, big spreads, how long and that's gotten radically longer.
- [25:48]
Jack Forehand
Yeah, you can see this chart and to the point Cliff makes in the clip, something changed. You know, before the late 90s, like this was pretty consistent. Like it was, it was up, it was down, but it was in a pretty tight band. And then in the late 90s it blows up and then now it blows up even more. So obviously something's changed. And you know, that is an argument for a less efficient market. That something is different in the second half of this data set than in the first half.
- [26:11]
Matt Ziegler
What do you, when you look at this. So quant guy Jack, when you look at this chart and you think about it in this way, um, how do you feel about just this as an argument? Does this bother you at all? Or does this, does this feel like this is the right, this is the right question to ask about describing why this has gotten weird again and even weirder maybe than it was in the 90s.
- [26:32]
Jack Forehand
Well, I think, I think spreads are a good way to look at whether people are being somewhat rational. So when spreads break out to levels beyond what we've ever seen before, you could argue again it's not, and the Cliff's not arguing like there's no efficiency in the market, but you could argue the market is getting less efficient because things are blowing out relative to their value more than they have now. There's other things you could argue and they've adjusted for all this in aqr. So it doesn't hold water. But you could argue companies are different and intangible assets need to be accounted for. And so when we, when we do that, the spreads widen. You know, the spreads aren't as wide and maybe we're missing or mismeasuring value. But AQR has done a good job of measuring all kinds of different ways to look at this, and they really haven't found an explanation that makes sense.
- [27:13]
Matt Ziegler
Can you imagine a future? So let's say this goes back to normal for a while and now here's, you know, Matt and Jack in, you know, 2045 or something, and now we're at an even new high in the spread. Can you imagine that future?
- [27:27]
Jack Forehand
I don't want to imagine that future. And Cliff kind of alluded to that in one of the clips. He's talking about, like, I've been through my two times now. Like, hopefully it'll be my, like the people after me at AQR that'll be through the next one. And I've been through the first one. I wasn't really investing that much, so I've been through one, so I'm hoping I'll stop at one and there won't be another one. But if you look at the example there, the 90s was one thing. We thought it would never get worse than that the next one's bigger. If the next one's bigger than that, God help us, all those of us that are value investors. At least it's going to be ugly.
- [27:55]
Matt Ziegler
Well, the market should be 99.99% passive at that point. What could go wrong? It'll all be fine, right?
- [28:02]
Jack Forehand
I hope so, at least. So. So this next clip is. This is something we've talked about with a lot of our guests and it's, it's Mike Green's arguments about passive investing and how passive is impacting the market. And one of the things we've tried to do in the podcast is get a wide range of opinions from a wide range of people about this. So here's Cliff talking about passive investing and its impact on the market.
- [28:21]
Cliff Asness
Now here's where I think the rise of passive can matter. There is one number when let's ask the question, what percent of the market could actually be Jack Bogle style passive and still have some degree of an efficient market or not? I don't know. Some. You haven't hit inflection point where it gets really crazy. Well, there's only one number we know for sure that can't be 100%. This is something I joke in the paper that PhD students drunk at 2am and then I admit it's one wine cooler at 9:30pm you know, it's almost like a cone like, like where you, how do you, how do you even think about a world where everybody is trying to free ride off everybody else? There's literally nobody doing the work of saying is Nvidia worth more or less than the corner drugstore? We're all just assuming the other person did it and copying them. And so let's just say that would be nuts. I don't know what it would look like. It's hard to think about. This is funny. We once had Jack Bogle himself on a podcast we were doing. We did a podcast for a while because as you know, legally in America everybody must have their own podcast at some point. And I was lucky enough to be friends with Jack. It was an odd friend. 85 year old godfather of passive and at that point a 50 year old long, short, active quantum. But Jack was a wonderful man. I think the fact that his son was a long, short, active quant probably softened everything about me to him. You know, I know anything one of my kids do, I'm predisposed to maybe think isn't the devil. Actually one of my kids, I would assume it was the devil. But I'll keep that to myself. Had Jack on the podcast. We got into this discussion and Jack, like Gene Fama, I'm going to say this about another famous person, is incredibly intellectually honest guy. He's like, of course 100% of the market can't be passive. I think my marginal recommendation to most investors to be passive is the right one. But 100%, everything breaks down. He freely admitted that. And I said Jack, so how much of the market can be passive before it starts to get weird? And he said 75%. And I'm like, oh, that's really cool. That's, you know, where'd you come to that Jack? And he just looks and goes, and he gets a little twinkle in his eye and goes oh, I completely made it up. And when you're, I don't know, he was 85 at the time and you're Jack Bogle, you can get away with that. I think those of us who didn't create Vanguard and probably shouldn't make that joke. But, but his point, even that has a point. No one really knows. A lot of people are very histrionic about this and think passive is the devil and everything has fallen apart. I think it is unlikely to me that all the craziness that I Admit happens at 100% passive happens magically at 99.999% passive at 100. Most things in life are some continuum. So the idea that we're much more passive now than we used to be has contributed to maybe some. Some smaller tethered to reality, I find fairly intuitive. But assigning a magnitude to it, and particularly again, I think markets are less efficient than they used to be. But I don't think I've proven they're inefficient to where you can drive a truck through. And just as the rational investor make free money all the time, I don't think it's that far gone. So I think passive is part of the story for the reasons I outlined. But I think, and I admit this is all this is still in the realm of hard to prove that putting a magnitude on it is difficult. And my instinct is those who are absolutely freaking out about it are overstating its role and have kind of made it their life's work to be kind of anti passive.
- [32:24]
Jack Forehand
Yeah, this is always an interesting. Like, there's no answer to this, as he alludes to, but this idea of like, if there are going to be problems with passive, like what percentage of the market could become passive before it happens? Like, it's a really. It's a really impossible argument to have. I mean, I think Mike thinks. I think first of all, I think Mike thinks we're somewhere in the 40% range in terms of where we are right now. And I think he thinks maybe you get to 50, you start to get above that, some of these problems could appear, but it's really hard to figure this out. And it's certainly for people smarter than me to try to figure it out.
- [32:55]
Matt Ziegler
Yeah. And then there's the whole percentage of the assets in the market versus the percentage of the daily trading volumes and all those fun adjustments that people make. And I mean, full disclosure, we're both very drunk on wine coolers right now. Right. We have to get that out of the way. Lots of wine coolers.
- [33:10]
Jack Forehand
I've never had a. I've actually never had a wine cooler. Have you had one?
- [33:13]
Matt Ziegler
Yes, yes, I've definitely had a wine cooler before. I don't necessarily recommend it.
- [33:17]
Jack Forehand
No.
- [33:17]
Matt Ziegler
You know, and I'm definitely at the. I saw somebody doing. Trying to do the dried January type thing or whatever on social media, and they were talking about how they had the mocktail, but the sugar in the mocktail gave them a worse headache than they would get for drinking alcohol. And I'm pretty sure that's the age that I am in right now too, where I look at stuff like that and I'm just like, ah, that's just a headache in a glass.
- [33:37]
Jack Forehand
Are wine coolers still a thing? Like, can you still buy those at the. I mean, I haven't seen them at the liquor store, you know, that often.
- [33:43]
Matt Ziegler
But yes, they evolve. Let's just put it that way. They evolve. If you still wanted a daiquiri in a bottle or something, I am positive you could find it in the back of your beer or liquor store, depending on the state of your residence. And I'm pretty sure that like the seltzer market probably like tapped into the wine cooler market or something stupid. Lots things that apparently you and I don't drink and don't know anything about. But you could argue that.
- [34:06]
Jack Forehand
You could actually argue they were innovative in terms of like all these cocktails in a can and stuff that we have now. Like maybe wine coolers are really innovative. And they. They led to that whole revolution.
- [34:13]
Matt Ziegler
I can't remember which it was some like consumer packaged goods analyst or like somebody wrote all about this. I remember being deeply fascinated by this for a period of time.
- [34:23]
Jack Forehand
It was.
- [34:23]
Matt Ziegler
It was a Twitter account or a. A blog pre substack or something. And it actually like tracked disruptions in places like this. And it was. I remember them like calling the top in the seltzer market and it was. It just. I don't know. I. I love people who care about stuff like this way too much. So the passive debate though. I don't want to completely derail us with the wine cooler comment that I thought was so funny. The. Actually, I do want to de. What's going on with the trophies in the background there? What do you think the Silver Chalice is behind cliff as this. Like a s. Yeah, there's no.
- [34:56]
Jack Forehand
It's a good question. We'll have to ask them.
- [34:57]
Matt Ziegler
I want to know what the silver Chalice thing is and then I want to own. No. Is it like a. Is it like a Diet Coke or like, is it a weird capped Sriracha bottle? There's another one like in the middle of a bunch of other stuff. It's like there's kids and then there's a suspect bottle that I really want to know what is the contents of this?
- [35:14]
Jack Forehand
So it wouldn't be one of our podcasts if you didn't evaluate the backdrop because you pretty much do that in all of them.
- [35:19]
Matt Ziegler
So many questions. Mine's almost back to normal here. We're getting, we're making progress. This, this, this idea. And both him and Mike green on the 100% passive is impossible. Where's the line I love, love, love, love the Jack Bogle story about Basically, you know, 75% would probably be weird and then winking that he made it up. But like this idea that the mechanism has influence but there's no way to assign a magnitude of it, that just that sentence I think is really important. We both of us marvel at the back and forth between really smart people arguing about that stuff. Dave Notig had that mammoth blog post list where he broke all the, the passive arguments down. And they're fascinating. But like we agree, and correct me if I'm wrong, we all agree that the mechanism must have some influence. Like more passive is doing something but actually assigning a magnitude that is really hard. And unless you can find it in a corner like Mike Green did on the, the volatility trading stuff on the those vol securities, like unless you can find a corner where it's coiled up, it's really hard to do anything with what the magnitude of the impact would be. Is that fair to say?
- [36:22]
Jack Forehand
Yeah. And I think that's why that gets at why the average investor probably shouldn't do much with this because we don't know when the impact is going to come. We don't know what's going to happen. Like there's, we don't know what percentage. There's so many things we don't know here that. And if you listen to Mike's arguments, like if you believe, even if you believe what he's saying about passive, like he'll argue until the bad thing comes. Owning The S&P 500 is probably the best thing you could be doing because you're benefiting from the flows into passive. So your average investor probably can't do too much with this. But, but I think it's really interesting and I think it's really great that, you know, one of the great things about the guests we have in the podcast is this is something you might look at Cliff Asness or you might look at another quant guy and say they're just going to dismiss this thing. Like this is, this makes no sense. Like, and he's thinking about this in a thoughtful way. And we'll have another clip later where he does the same thing with another thing that a lot of us believe, like as quants. So I think this idea, this is one of the biggest things you can take from someone Like, Cliff is like, be open to it, analyze it. Figure out whether you think it makes sense. Look at the data, run the tests, and come to a conclusion. Don't just throw it out the window, you know, right away and say, like, no, this makes no sense.
- [37:24]
Matt Ziegler
Plus a million to that. Understand there's stuff that matter, but understand that people will disagree on how much it matters and why. And that is probably a common theme that. Yeah, all the people we talk about that have brilliant insights about this stuff, they can see something that matters. They just have different ways of expressing their views around it.
- [37:42]
Jack Forehand
So we have a standard closing question we ask at the end of every episode, which is, if you could teach one lesson to the average investor, what would it be? Here was Cliff's answer to that question.
- [37:49]
Cliff Asness
Look at your portfolio as little as possible. Probably 20 of your other people have said the same thing, but that just means it's true, particularly for what you call the average investor. I think there have actually been studies on this, but just intuitively, you know, whoever looks at it more loses. I don't know what the right frequency. I. I can't imagine someone not checking once a year. Hey, how's it going? But perceive Vol. Perceive risk when you look frequently. I. By the way, I think the answer is a little different for professionals. I have to look at how we're doing each day. It's just a little weird if one of my clients calls and goes, oh, big event happened today. How you guys doing? And I go, I don't know. That's. That's just a little odd. But. But I'm a hypocrite. I look at it all day when I'm in the office. I look at it all day when I'm out of the office. I'm actually much better. I can check it on my phone, but I just. I just do it a lot less. But I will tell you myself, and if anyone should be aware of these biases, I'm up there with people who should be. I don't know if I. I'm going to tell you, I'm not that good at it, which is embarrassing. But if we have a day where we've been up, we've been down, we've been up, we've been down, and we ended up flat. I feel like it's been a bad day. The downs hurt me more than the ups made me feel good. The formal term for that is prospect theory, and it applies intraday. My perception of how crazy the world is is probably larger than it. Than it really is. So to the extent people, you know, once a year make sure your money wasn't embezzled or something, that's probably a good idea. But short, much more than that. No one, no one will probably get to that. But if you're looking daily, look weekly. If you're looking weekly, look monthly. If you're looking monthly, go further out the spectrum. Certainly the individual investor and most professionals, including me, don't have a lot of short term predictive power and their instincts are probably to do the wrong thing to sell at the bottom and buy at the top. So look less would be my one, one liner.
- [40:05]
Jack Forehand
This is a simple one, but I think it's, I think it's a really impactful one because I can't think about like, even for me, like when I look at my portfolio, I was trying to think about, like, what are the positive things that could come of me, like going, when we're done with this podcast and taking a look at my portfolio, like, like, what action could I take that would make it better? Like, is there any possible positive associated with that?
- [40:25]
Matt Ziegler
You're not day trading your personal account right now. I thought, I thought that was why we did this. We were just day trading our personal accounts. Like there's zero tte options that we have to get right? Jack, come on, that's not what you're doing.
- [40:35]
Jack Forehand
And obviously like my quad portfolio, like, it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't matter whether I look at it because I'm not gonna. There's nothing running by a quant strategy. But let's say I am owning like individual stocks or something like that. Like, what benefit would there be from me looking at it? And the only thing I could think about is if there was some massive move in a stock that would make me like it was. I'm a big believer in a certain company and a 50 decline. You know, I think the market's wrong and it would make me want to buy more. It goes up, it doubles. And I'm thinking, like, I probably should pare that back a little bit. Like that's the only thing I could think about. But that happens very, very infrequently. So most of the time we're doing this, we're doing ourselves no good.
- [41:09]
Matt Ziegler
An extra, extra, extra. Because, you know, just like an asset manager, please don't look at my performance. Right, right. Just like an asset. No, I, uh, this idea that anybody who sits in a professional advisor, allocator, investor, fund manager, whatever seat, you get this idea of the stuff that you have to look at and how much, what you just said, how much it actually messes with you and actually saying, like, what good could possibly come of this? I have to know what's going on. I. I actually have to look. But understanding the people who hire you, like, if somebody hires you to manage their money or whatever the situation may be, like, you are being hired in part to bear the pain of looking, which there's a transfer of pain that's supposed to be going on in that relationship. Even if you're just buying an index fund, you've transferred some of the pain of worrying about that to the index fund provider or to the advisor or the allocator or the fund manager, whatever it is, you did the hard work to transfer the pain to them. To look on an intraday basis, you should probably step back and ask the question that you asked. What possible good could come from me looking at this? As professionals, we have to look. But I also think. And do you feel this way? I know me as a professional, being forced to look has really calloused me to a lot of nastiness and a lot of just like, well, that sucks today, but I know I shouldn't try to do anything about. There's a whole laundry list of stuff you're like, I shouldn't try to do anything about that out of my control. And I'm only going to make myself. Fussing with it is only going to make it worse. Do you feel like you're more callous to that because you're a professional?
- [42:48]
Jack Forehand
There's probably a point as a professional where you've looked so much or like, at an extreme of it, where you're like, yeah, I just don't care. Like, not that you don't care, but it's like, I know I can't do anything about it. And also, I'm a quant investor. So for me, like, there's not any value in terms of. Like, even if you want to argue, like, a professional investor could make changes based on looking. Like, there's nothing for me to change. Like, if I look at what our portfolios are doing on any given day, it doesn't matter. Now, now, to your point before and to Cliff's point in the clip, you can't say, as a money manager, I'm not going to look. It's impossible. And I learned that early in my career. Like, if someone calls you up and says, like, what are we doing this month? Or I see the performance is bad this month, you can't be like, not only do I Not know what the performance is this month. I also don't even know the securities in your portfolio because we're a quant manager. Like, I really know nothing about this because it's just the system that's running. That's correct. That's the right way to manage money when you're a quant manager. But people do not want to hear it. Like, you're going to get the redemption order from that person very quickly when you tell them, I don't know what your performance is, and I also don't know what I hold in your portfolio. Like, you have to look, you have to know, but you also have to be able to not react, which I think is easier as a quant. But, like, for all managers, to your point, I think we all get, like, callous to this to some degree. We realize we shouldn't be making changes. We become able to look without making the changes.
- [44:01]
Matt Ziegler
Yeah. Professional just means you have chosen to make it your profession to endure some specific pain that somebody else doesn't want to endure. You know, like, I don't want to be a dentist. I don't want to be in other people's mouths. I think that's weird and gross and all these things. But the dentist has chosen the noble profession of looking at all those mouths, at all the grossness and all the other things that I don't even want to think of. And there's laundry lists of those jobs. So it shouldn't be a surprise to us or anybody. That profession means you're transferring the pain onto somebody else. You should both realize the value of that transference of pain, but then also just realize if you're going to choose to do something, know where you got to build a little bit thicker skin. Because, yeah, looking at markets every day is. Of all the things that can mess with your head, this is one of the ones that. I mean, we're preaching from experience here to people who also feel the same way. Like, yeah, this. This stuff will mess you up emotionally if you let it, and you better have a way to deal with that.
- [44:57]
Jack Forehand
Well, I could argue the dentist is one of the professions that actually transfers the pain onto you, maybe in a different way.
- [45:04]
Matt Ziegler
But can we splice?
- [45:06]
Jack Forehand
Having had a lot of teeth work.
- [45:07]
Matt Ziegler
Myself, so can we splice in Steve Martin from Little Shop of Ours doing the Dentist song? I think we'll get in trouble for that clip somehow. But, yeah, you're. You're right. Valid point, Jack. Thank you.
- [45:17]
Jack Forehand
Like I will say, a. A dental implant is not that fun. I mean, Again, you're, you're pretty numb for the whole thing. But like here, here in your mouth, like grind something grinding away at your mouth for like a very, very long period of time.
- [45:25]
Matt Ziegler
Jackhammering into. Yeah, right.
- [45:28]
Jack Forehand
It's not something you enjoy either way, whether you're feeling the pain or not.
- [45:31]
Matt Ziegler
All right, I'll pick a better profession next time. My apologies to the dentists out there and all their patients.
- [45:36]
Jack Forehand
And we've digressed too much in this episode, so we probably should go to our, to our last clip here. But this gets back at this idea of being open minded to other ideas. And we had Alejandro Lopez Lira and Andrew Chen on the podcast and we talked about this idea, which is something that factor investors, I think a lot of factor investors are talking about right now, which is typically if we invest in a factor, whether it be value or momentum, we want to have some explanation as to why it worked. And usually that's either a risk based explanation, you know, we're taking more risks so we get a better return or it's a behavioral explanation. There's some sort of mispricing going on there, but usually we want to have one of those. But there's been a rise of these types of factors where people are saying it doesn't even really matter as long as it works. Who cares why it works? And so we asked Cliff about this idea.
- [46:18]
Cliff Asness
This is really interesting. I, I, I've only paged through the paper but, but I a lot of things I'm lazy these days and I'm old. So a lot of times I send this to I have a literal macro email address called Academics at aqr of which we have quite a few that I will occasionally say give me the too long didn't read version of this paper. So I don't want to claim to be an expert on it, but it's a really cool paper. I think there's a lot more to be done. I'm not willing to throw away intuition tomorrow, but I will note first of all you have to remember and they, they're very clear about this. They're so I'm not, it's not a criticism of them but you have to remember their, their, their factors without explanation. We're still dealing with economic data, returns, accounting information. They weren't sunspots. They weren't the famous data mining example at Max Darnell at First Quadrant. Max Darnell knows different guy at First Quadrant did many years ago that butter production in Bangladesh helps predict is the best predictor of S and P returns the next the next year or something. I always thought he might have cheated on that just to create a funny one but you know so, so they're not dealing with ridiculous data which would be much more extreme. I'm unwilling at this point to say we should throw out intuition intuition or guardrails around things but I will say separate from their findings the rise of machine learning even us building something we've done in the last five years a far more systematic Bayesian approach to allocating among factors where we let the data speak more has pushed us don't these are made up numbers are just as for a concept But AQR has always prided itself on being relying on both economic intuition and that's that's any good story. It could be behavioral, it could be risk it could even be more common sense kind of kind of thing and data roughly equally the the rise of better statistical techniques. Let's push test I don't know 2/3, 1/3 data. We're moving in the direction of that paper and that is a little hard for me when you've touted something for many years and you got to go no I'm going to philosophy is going to change a little bit but if the, if the, if the data, if the data science gets better at doing its job our intuition and our and our theoretical models ain't getting better. So I you know I think the old Keynes if the facts change I change my mind. What do you do sir? I'm unwilling on one paper to throw out intuition but their paper is really interesting and for maybe some different reasons we have been moving at least a decent step in that direction anyway. I mean there are some fascinating results a day of the week momentum where the day of the week years ago that something has gone up seems to have efficacy for predicting the day of the week going forward that I'm willing to admit the results are so strong that I'll do at least a little risk without theory. One way to think about 5050 even in the old days is 5050 doesn't require both 5050 says if you don't have one the other better be massively good. And if you create a strategy that's non ridiculous not super high turnover butter production in Bangladesh search everything but it's based on economics and has incredibly high Sharpe ratios we can't explain. Yeah I'd probably take a little risk on that just not as much as if I had a story to go with it going the other way. To be honest I probably wouldn't. You could have the best theory in the world. The capital asset pricing model might be one of the best theories in the world. Makes perfect sense that your contribution to risk of a portfolio of a diversified market portfolio, not your idiosyncratic risk, should drive the required expected return. It just is a spectacular failure for 75 years everywhere it's been tried. So I'm willing to short that theory. I think we have good reasons. That's the famous betting against beta factor. I think leverage limitations or lottery preferences are actually a pretty good behavioral story. So that's not quite the example from this paper where there's no story, but it's always been a mix of the two. And maybe this paper pushes me even a little further, but only in a direction that we were already voluntarily going. And I'm a little mad at myself for resisting it for a while, but a little proud of myself that approaching 60. I can slightly change my philosophy slightly.
- [51:23]
Matt Ziegler
You watch Excess returns so that Jack Forehand can take a semi obscure academic paper, send it to Cliff Asness, who can then say no, I haven't seen that paper, then drop the homework assignment on the good people at AQR who apparently are in some mass email box internally who are all way smarter than either of us and will now analyze said semi obscure academic paper that Jack Forehand sourced and provided interview material on said excess insurance channel to see. Also, Cliff could give this response. I mean just bravo to Jack Forehand for actually getting this question into the interview. First and foremost, how did you feel about his intro to your first point?
- [52:08]
Jack Forehand
I did feel bad about this because when he said he emailed all these academics, I felt really bad. Like I don't want to cry. One thing I hate in the world is creating any work for any other human being. Like it makes, it makes me feel really bad. So I'm like, I hope these academics read it very quickly. Or maybe they gave it to Claude and like said, you know, give me an analysis of this. I hope they weren't grinding away reading the paper too much.
- [52:25]
Matt Ziegler
Have you, have you checked the AQR filings? Did the expense ratios on any funds tick up the time of this interview?
- [52:33]
Jack Forehand
Well, I will, I'll issue a formal apology to all the academics, whoever they are at aqr because if you had to do this because of me, I feel bad. But it is, it's something we try to do a lot with the podcast, which is we, we try to find like a lot of the guests that are on a lot of podcasts and Cliff doesn't do a lot of podcasts, but he has, over a long period of time, like they get asked about the same stuff. And you know, Cliff, I'm sure when he goes on a podcast, he's like, I don't want to be asked about value investing being dead anymore, please. Like, nobody else asked me about this. I mean, he didn't say that to us, but I'm sure he says that in his head. I'm sure he says that. So I try to find other things we can think of that are things they haven't been asked about or things where. And it goes back to Mike Green's too. It's why we ask a lot of people about Mike Green's work, is most people have not been asked about Mike Green's work and a lot of quants have not been asked about this stuff. So that's why we asked it. But yeah, I thought his answer was really good. And it gets back to the idea of being open minded at the end. It's very easy to just throw this out and say, obviously a factor should be intuitive, it should make sense or it shouldn't work. But there's starting to be more and more data that maybe says maybe that's not true. And the other thing is, and I think, and we talked about this with Adam Butler when he was on the podcast, is to some degree the more intuitive these factors are. This is not what's necessarily going on right now, but the more intuitive these factors are, the more people want to follow them. And you could argue the more that people follow them, maybe the less effective they're going to be in the future. So as long as there's some basis for why the factors should work in terms of the testing. But also, also, as Cliff pointed out, we're using financial statement data here in this paper. We're not like throwing butter production in Bangladesh, I think was an example. We're not like throwing random numbers that should have nothing to do with stock prices and trying to create a factor out of that. Like you could argue there is some sort of signal in this financial information that maybe we just haven't. We don't understand why it works, but there is an explanation as to why it works. So I think going outside of this intuitive thing with factors I think makes sense. And you know, Cliff alluded to the idea that AQR is doing a little bit more of it, but they're doing it in the right way, which is you want to do this slowly if you're going to do something like this, if you've been doing something a certain way for a long time, and you want to change it. Like, all of us have to slowly embrace this idea, but I don't think we should just throw it out like some people have.
- [54:35]
Matt Ziegler
He even says that. He says, you know, starting with the economic intuition, it starts there. And that's where it started years before even he started to do it. You know, University of Chicago and all the other work that came into it that he added to, it starts there with the economic intuitions. But then we get better tools. Just even over his career, to think about the advent of computational power and now the advent of machine learning and AI in this process, there's nothing wrong with saying, I still understand the intuition that got us up to this point, but now I have new tools that I want to use to push us beyond. And I love that he says that in the answer. Like, even with him, where they're going, man, the machines are figuring out how to do stuff that we never could have seen or never could have found. And we are definitely not closed to that being an advantage. That's really. That's really cool. To me, this is like a Buffett expanding the circle of competence type thing. Finding new bridges and new ways to use new tools.
- [55:27]
Jack Forehand
Yeah. And I don't think we can go out and, like, launch the cost of goods sold divided by accounts receivable ETF anytime soon, because most people are going to be like, why are you dividing those things, two things? And I think that actually is one of the things in the paper that actually did very well. But it's at least important to understand, like, this could be something that could add to another factor strategy. You know, maybe if. Maybe if you're using a factor strategy where many of the factors are intuitive, but around the edges, you could maybe do some things with this. Like, I just think it's something where you learn. And when you're a factor investor, when you're any kind of investor, like, you get humbled over time, you realize, like, I have really strong opinions about this one thing, and then over time, I have to evolve it. And at the beginning of my career, I was probably like, yeah, I'll just throw this stuff in the garbage. But now, like, this is a great research paper. It's really well written. It's really, you know, the tests are done the right way. Like, there. There's nothing you can criticize about the actual work in this paper. So I think all of us have to look at it and say, like, what type of conclusion should we draw from it.
- [56:18]
Matt Ziegler
Yeah, you gotta admit it's there. You gotta admit it's there with like good, empirical, well researched, well presented arguments. And again, how awesome is it that Cliff was able to give us response for thinking through this and talk about how it's working inside of AQR? That's very impressed by you, Mr. Forehand.
- [56:36]
Jack Forehand
And so hopefully Cliff will come back someday. Hopefully we didn't embarrass ourselves too much. You can find out whatever the chalice is behind him if it's still there when he comes back. But yeah, it was very cool. I learned a lot from being able to interview him and hopefully we'll be able to do it again someday.
- [56:49]
Matt Ziegler
One of the great minds in our business. Absolute pleasure to get to spend some time with him and share it with you all here. Thanks for joining us.
- [56:55]
Jack Forehand
Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.
- [56:56]
Justin Carbonneau
Hi guys, this is Justin again. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. Follow jack on Twitter PracticalQuant. You can follow me on Twitter jcarbonneau and follow Matt on Twitter oltishcreative. If you found this discussion interesting and valuable, please subscribe in either itunes or on YouTube or leave a review or a comment. Also, if you have any ideas for topics you'd like us to cover in the future, please email us@excessreturnspodmail.com we would like this to be a listener driven podcast and would appreciate any suggestions. Thank you.