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- [00:00]
A
On this episode of Full Signal, I sit down with Bob Elliott. He is the CIO and co founder of Unlimited Funds and he used to work directly with Ray Dalio at Bridgewater. We get into his macro outlook, the Iran conflict, what the oil shock could do to asset prices, how he's thinking about the rest of the year for investors and much more. This is a fantastic conversation. It is full of insight.
- [00:22]
B
I think you're going to love it. Bob, it's great to see you.
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A
I would love to just get right
- [00:29]
B
into your big picture overview of markets. My understanding is that you're a bit more cautious than maybe some of our other colleagues in the industry right now.
- [00:37]
C
Yeah, well, I think when we were coming into this year, the beginning of this year, we were, we had sort of transitioned from what I called the income driven expansion, which is where, you know, households were making good income and they were spending it and that was powering the economy, to what I now what I called the savings driven economy, where, you know, the slowing of income growth for households had meant that they had to start to draw down their savings in order to maintain their spending. And in addition, the government, you know, the fiscal deficit was expanding and businesses were starting to borrow in order to invest. And that sort of put the economy a bit on the knife's edge. You know, if nothing, if there was no other issues, we probably would have had a fine year here in 26. But unfortunately, in the last couple of weeks, an issue has arisen. We're experiencing an oil shock and oil shocks, they don't come around very often and a lot of folks can easily sort of forget the dynamics. But in some ways it's very simple, which is when oil prices rise a lot, that means input costs rise, which really create a tough scenario because both inflation rises, which reduces the ability for a central bank to ease monetary policy, but also real spending falls because people are spending more on gas and less on other essentials in their book. And that's a big drag on the economy. And so right now, given oil prices where the curve is right now we're looking at something like a one to one and a half percent hit to real spending in the US Economy for consumers. And that would transition the US Economy from on a knife's edge, still barely getting to that 2% growth that we're all used to, to something that's going to look a lot closer to through the rest of the year.
- [02:23]
B
Is all of this contingent on the Iran conflict being a prolonged conflict? Or you see this, let's say an Oil shock and inflation fears, can those headwinds persist even if it's very short lived conflict?
- [02:38]
C
I think one of the challenges with any sort of oil shock and really on the supply side disruption is once you start to get shut ins where producers are starting to reduce their production because they literally don't have places to store the oil, it can take a extended period of time to not only sort of clear the storage that has been filled and then get production back into the market. And so let's say even today, if the Strait of Hormuz opened, the conflict ended, there was no more kinetic activity, we'd probably see elevated oil prices and elevated gas prices for several months. And as far as I can tell, and certainly when you look at what's priced into the financial markets, the expectation is maybe there's a 50, 50 shot this gets resolved over the course of the next couple of months and some reasonable chance that we continue to have a conflict through the rest of the year. And if that happens, we're really going to have a difficult circumstance given the magnitude of the oil shock in the economy.
- [03:41]
B
How does the Fed fit into this? Because we're not getting a cut this month, most likely, and expectations keep getting pushed back for cuts in this year. How are you thinking through that?
- [03:52]
C
Well, for a central bank, this is a very, this is a very, very tough situation, right, because the oil shock both weighs on growth and household spending and could easily have second and third order effects on labor markets and incomes. And at the same time it's pushing inflation higher. And here's the basic situation, which is inflation was already too high for the Fed. We'd already missed been above the Fed's mandate when it came to inflation for years post Covid. And so what this does is it creates a re acceleration pressure. So two years ago it looked like things were starting to trend down to normal. Then we had the tariffs and we ticked up in terms of inflation. We started this year thinking it was gonna go back to the Fed's mandate. And now we have an oil shock which is gonna tick it up into certainly well into the threes, maybe into the low fours, depending on exactly how it all flows through. And given that circumstance, the Fed cannot cut when the possibility of 4% inflation is on the horizon. And if you look back through time, even in times when the economy was weakening relatively rapidly, maybe you look at the 2008 cycle or the 1990 cycle, the Fed in the face of an oil shock during those periods favored just standing pat for an extended period of time, rather than responding to the weakening economic conditions. And that looks like what they're going to do here today.
- [05:14]
B
How do you think the Fed should be balancing, let's say, all the inflation pressures from the oil shock and Iran war versus the weakening labor market? Because to me, I look at the jobs numbers we've been getting for the last year, it looks like the labor market's asking for a cut. What do you think?
- [05:32]
C
Well, remember, the Fed is really focused on the unemployment rate, the tightness of the labor market. And if you look at that, we've basically had the unemployment rate between 4.2 and 4.4 for the course of the last 18 months. 4.4 ain't so bad. It's certainly not a deep recession. It's certainly not a challenging. It's not the sort of labor market that would create a need for aggressive cuts. And to be clear, we already got almost 200 basis points of cuts. Right. So the Fed has already eased relatively meaningfully in the context of a relatively stable labor market. It's helped. It's been part of the reason why the labor market has stabilized at these levels. But there's not an urgency to cut further given where the labor markets are now. And again, I draw you to to the oil shock periods like the 2008 oil shock, where oil went up to $150 a barrel. During that period, the US unemployment rate rose in 2008 nearly a percent, while the Fed stayed pat. The same thing is true in 1990 when you had the first Iraq war and you had an oil shock there again, unemployment rate rose about a percent, and the Fed stood still while that happened. Until the oil shock, it was clear the oil shock was going to come off on the backside. And so part of the story here, you don't want to totally translate every lesson from history into what policy is going to be today, but it gives you a sense of what the reaction function is. And that reaction function is the Fed really does have to prioritize the inflation side of their mandate, particularly because they're not seeing enough weakness in the tightness of the labor market.
- [07:14]
B
Yeah, I think that makes sense. What do you make of Kevin Warsh coming in, expected to, let's say, be more willing to cut than Powell has been? Do you think that changes the, you know, the macro outlook if he does, in fact, come in and say, let's flatten rates?
- [07:32]
C
Well, you know, I was hoping we wouldn't get another politically connected lawyer running the Fed, but, you know, this is where we're at. I think it's pretty clear. Anyone who's looked at a chart of his rhetoric through time sees that more than anything, he is a partisan actor. In fact, some of his language, I would think some of his language when he was at the Fed back in the financial crisis would be disqualifying from being able to be in the position that he is likely appointed to. But pay that no mind. It's clear you have a political actor, one which what did the President say? He said that he can rely on him. I think that's very coded, not particularly obscure, but obvious language around expecting him to come in and cut. Now, there's a lot of decision makers on the Fed and just because one person comes in does not mean that the whole committee is going to move sharply in one direction in particular, into an easing direction in particular, in the context of elevated oil prices combined with inflation being elevated for an extended period of time relative to the mandate. You're not going to get a lot of receptivity at this point to aggressive cuts. So Warsh might be yammering on about the need for more cuts, but he's more likely if he does that to sound like Myron on sort of the easy end of the spectrum than he is going to sound like a leader of the Fed in terms of pushing it in a certain direction.
- [09:07]
A
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- [09:49]
B
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- [09:51]
A
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- [10:14]
B
One of the things that defined Powell's term is that he's a very good, almost like a salesman of his own policies and he's been able to get everyone on board on the same page. And war, I think is going to run into this headwind, let's say, of having to convince each individual on the committee to hey, come side with whatever I'm going to propose at the next meeting. So Bob, let me ask you about the stock market here. How have the, let's say, last few weeks with the Iran conflict impacted your outlook on equities?
- [10:46]
C
Well, I think one of the challenging things with the stock market is that when we, when we started the year you were looking at a market, we were seeing equity earnings growth in the mid, in the teens and in the mid teens it's pretty darn good. You saw in general, you know, sales growth, earnings growth, all of that was, was doing well and without any of these sort of issues, you know, you basically think you do something between, you know, equities earning into elevated value valuations to maybe pushing higher with that strong earnings growth. Now you've got essentially a shock that will hit monetary policy. It's already unwound a couple of cuts expected in monetary policy, the long end of the bond curve with elevated inflation expectations, demand with reduced household demand, and it'll certainly raise some uncertainty from, raises the uncertainty situation for a lot of companies. And so you sort of put that all together and we're just in a worse scenario than we were three weeks ago. And so given the fact that sort of everyone in the market was expecting a relatively strong year for equities and was positioned as such, that creates a lot of vulnerability. I sort of call it like it's somewhat like kindling for a downturn in equities. Now so far we haven't really seen it. Equities remain basically where they've been for the last six months and just a few percent off eyes. This is not an equity bear market. But it does seem as though the market is having what I call a bit of amnesia of how oil shocks play through to the stock market. It wasn't so long ago, so only a few years ago, four years ago, when equity markets fell 25, 30% in response to the post Russia invasion oil shock. Now I'm not saying they're going to fall 30%. There are other things going on at that period. But you know, seeing a move down in stocks of 10 or 15% in response to this sort of shock, particularly if it persists, seems like a very reasonable possible outcome and one that basically no one's positioned for.
- [13:04]
B
So my surprise has come from how little stocks have seemed to Sell off actually. So I'm looking at the market, I think it's down, you said, 4 or 5% from its all time highs. Even with all this craziness, uncertainty, geopolitics, the earnings story, I don't think that's changed too much. Is that part of what's maybe propping up the market right now?
- [13:26]
C
Well, I certainly think that's helpful and you know, try as the world might like, US companies are profit making machines. And that's a great thing. That's a great thing for long term investors who are looking, who are particularly heavy in U.S. stocks. This conversation is not if you're talking about your strategic asset allocation. US companies are still some of the best in the world. Right. So don't really have a change in view on that. It's more like when you think about trading markets over say a couple month time frame, one of the best indications that you can use is basically how does growth come in relative to what was expected. And so when we look at what was expected at the start of the year, most analysts expectations, most economists expectations were sort of 2.5% to 3% real growth. We're now on a path of 1 or less through the rest of the year. And so that is likely to disappoint expectations and likely to weigh on the stock market. And so even in an environment where you could still have reasonable earnings growth. And how will that happen? It'll happen through a re rating downwards of stocks through lower PEs. That's basically how it would work.
- [14:51]
B
So with all that in mind, if we're trying to position for something like a RE rating, I mean, what would your recommendation be or how are you advising the people you work with or the money you're managing? How are you positioning for this?
- [15:06]
C
Well, I think one of the things, and maybe we'll talk about a little later, that I do my day job is track how the most sophisticated asset managers in the world are positioned the hedge fund community across lots of different hedge fund styles and things like that. And what we've seen is I think sort of two key parts of navigating the circumstance. First, fortunately for those managers building up oil positions, and I think the course of the last couple of weeks really should highlight to most investors they're actually quite underweight. Things like commodities in your portfolio. I mean, ask a, a group of investors how many people own diversified commodities or own oil in their strategic portfolio. Essentially no one does. And this is the sort of time when that pays off quite handsomely. Oil's up 50%, you could add a 5% allocation and you'd be doing great with an asset up 50%, 5% or 10% allocation, more than enough to offset maybe stock losses. And so that's certainly one of the stories, is having some commodity exposure, long commodity exposure to help balance the portfolio. The other is just bringing the risk down. Right. And so I, I understand, you know, maybe, maybe it's going short, but at a minimum bringing your risk down across the board. What we're seeing, you know, levered asset managers do is basically say, look, we're in a different risk environment. We were running at a, you know, a 12 volume environment for several years thanks in part to, you know, the flood of money that came into the market post Covid. And now we're running an environment, you know, given this war shock, this oil shock, that's Maybe in the mid-20s or higher, that's just two totally different risk environments. And you just have to recognize that everything you're doing is just riskier today. It's riskier to be long stocks, it's riskier to be long bonds, riskier to be long gold. It's just riskier to be long assets in general in this sort of environment where there's so much more uncertainty related to it.
- [17:07]
B
So if you're a young investor, let's say you're 30 or 35, and you're looking at a 20 year time horizon is, I mean there's no real risk. Right. If you look at these short term fluctuations. But I think we might be like that's a different thing than what you're talking about, right?
- [17:24]
C
Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe I, I, I shouldn't say this, but if you're, if you're a 20 or 30 year old saver and you're investing for, with a multi decade timeframe, you should probably listen to nothing I have to say that is tactical in nature.
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A
Okay.
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B
That's fair.
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C
Nothing. Nothing at all. Right. Part of what you should do though, and I think these sort of environments really highlight this circumstances you should be wrestling with. How do you create a diversified portfolio? Not like a. Well, I hold large caps and small caps. Right. When I say diversified portfolio, I mean to a wide range of different outcomes. Traditional. Just take for example, if you just look at the last, say 25 years, we've had the lowest amount of deaths as a function of conflict in the world in recorded history by about 1/3 relative to the norm. Okay. So everyone sort of has this idea in their head that there's no conflicts. Right. Everyone's investing as if there are no conflicts. I was at a, a lunch a few weeks ago, actually, it was the Wednesday before the war broke out and the topic of the war came up and one of these equity investors were like, wars are transitory. Wars will never have an effect on anything. And I was like, maybe that's true, but maybe it's not true, right? Certainly the 2022 Russia invasion of Ukraine had lots of second and third order consequences on inflation, on asset markets, things like that. If you had retired on February 28th of 2022 and then lost 25% of your assets, you'd be in tough shape. So when you're thinking about a strategic portfolio, I know it's boring, but diversification is a critical component and particularly increasing your defense to real erosion of wealth. So the biggest risk is not necessarily asset prices fall. The biggest risk is that we have persistent inflation, which erodes the purchasing power of your savings. And so how do you build that portfolio? It means adding things like gold, oil, diversified commodities in the bond space, adding things called tips, treasury, inflation protected securities, all part of that sort of diversified, a real diversified portfolio. If you are just holding a traditional 60, 40 or you're highly concentrated in stocks, there's just no reason why you should have the sort of volatility you're going to experience.
- [19:54]
B
Well, I think gold has proven to be an unbelievable asset the last year or two. And have the diversified portfolios won out over equities? I mean, I haven't looked at the data.
- [20:07]
C
Well, here's a question for you. Which has done better since gold became liquid in an ETF form? Gold or the S&P 500?
- [20:18]
B
My guess is gold.
- [20:19]
C
I mean, for sure about the same is the answer. Really, it's about the same and that's a perfect yet I'm sure the people who are listening to this podcast, basically everyone holds stocks and probably you have a few loonies that are those gold bugs who go down the rabbit hole of YouTube that listen to those gold podcasts and store it in their basement, stuff like that, you probably have a few of those. You reach a pretty broad audience, so you probably have a few gold bugs in the audience. The reality is, if you were just looking at it empirically, you just say to yourself, why wouldn't I hold? Gold has demonstrated a compelling return over the course of the last 25, 30 years. It's demonstrated a multi thousand year track record of maintaining real purchasing power. The cost of a worker's hour today in gold terms is basically the same as it was In Roman times, if you just think about that, why not have gold as part of your portfolio? Particularly that's a strategic idea. Particularly in the context of a more, I'd say secular idea where we have a set of developed world economies that are overly indebted, the resolution of which will almost certainly be to devalue bonds in real terms relative to stuff like gold, relative to hard assets. So, so it's not just a multi thousand year strategic view, it's a secular view. It's also a secular view of the current market environment and the current structure of a lot of developed world economies and what monetary policy and fiat debasement is going to look like in the future. Now look, I start talking about this, people think I'm one of them crazy guys with a cabin upstate and a few guns and water. But just look at it empirically, just look at it empirically and the case is relatively compelling.
- [22:14]
B
So let me ask you, this is the variables you've just laid out and the case you're making for gold, do you see that as the same case for Bitcoin?
- [22:24]
C
Well, I think crypto assets in general certainly have some attributes that look in that direction and, and empirically, obviously bitcoin's done very well. But I think it's probably a little too early to just say bitcoin or bust. Right. And again, in the context of a well diversified portfolio. I personally don't invest in bitcoin. Just it's not been a part of a market markets that I've traded. But could you invest? Does it make sense to allocate a modest amount of your portfolio to it, particularly since it's so volatile relative to other assets? Sure. There's no again, whatever creates a diversified portfolio. You know you're and, and it doesn't all have to be the same exact thing. But just think about like how do I create diversification and real purchasing power that's likely to process. That's what you need to focus on real quick.
- [23:24]
A
We'll get right back to the interview. Just wanted to pop in and say if you like this content, I write a newsletter every single morning called Opening Bell Daily. I cover macro, the stock market, asset prices, why things are going up, why they're going down. And if you want to get that for free, you can sign up at the link in the description.
- [23:42]
B
Let's get back to the interview. When you, let's say you look at your peers in the macro and investing landscape, what do you think most people are getting wrong these days?
- [23:54]
C
Well, I think a lot of people are getting are, as I mentioned just a few minutes ago, this sort of amnesia about oil shocks. And I think part of it is that people are going a couple steps ahead. So I think one of the challenges with Liberation Day, which was the day that Trump announced his most of his tariff policy, which was quite extreme relative to expectations, and led stocks to fall significantly. One of the issues that I think people had with that is because he backed away relatively quickly within the matter of, what was it, eight days or something like that. Taco has now become the mindset. And I think it's not just the Trump taco that's become the mindset, because the sort of generation before that was a taco of a different sort, which was the Fed always bails out the asset markets through money creation. And that's really been sort of the idea since, I mean, really since the gfc, the global financial crisis. And so you kind of have everyone sort of looking at this stuff and saying, oh, well, either Trump is going to taco or the Fed's going to ease a ton. And it's almost like, I think about investors minds are they're like burnt out, they're like burnouts. They're like people who have done instead of too many drugs, they've done too much QE and eaten too many tacos. And so they sort of see the whole world that that's what's happening. And so if you take the oil shock situation as an example, it's a bit challenging because I think people are thinking too many steps ahead. So they're like, well, at some point there'll be some easing. The Fed will ease at some point because oil prices will raise overall prices, which will create a drag on real spending, which will create a reduction in the labor force, which will create slower income growth, which will be deflationary and negative for growth, which will create easing. So buy now. But that's not how it works. Because I think one of the things, if you look back through time in terms of how macro and policy works, is first there is pain and then there are policy shifts. And that's very important. Two steps, pain, then policy shifts. And so as an example, Trump's taco on Liberation Day would have never happened without stocks falling 20%, right? Similarly, the Fed's response to either Covid or the global financial crisis would have never happened if not for those assets going down. And so the sheer fact that asset prices are fine, for instance, in response to this oil shock undermines all the possibility that there's going to be A taco, for instance, if today stocks were down 25% in response to the Iran war, probably policy would be different. But until that happens, there's very little pressure on the president to change policy. Now there's a whole other issue, the fact that wars have a momentum of their own. And now it's not just one party the way it was in Liberation Day. It's two parties, but really there's 13 parties involved. So it's a lot more complicated than just putting out a truth social post and saying the policy has changed. It's a lot more complicated. But even laying that aside, we still haven't had the pain to create the taco. And so everyone's betting on tacos before the pain comes, and it actually undermines the likelihood that we'll get a taco.
- [27:36]
B
So one note on that. Retail has been correct to buy the dip for several years now. Are you suggesting that we might be coming to a different regime? Almost like, if dip buying no longer becomes the best case or best strategy, what happens then?
- [27:58]
C
Well, I think dip buying is good in the sense of reflective of. When there is sufficient pain, there is a policy reversal. Right. But that's dip buying down 10 or 20%, not dip buy. I mean, right now you have times when the market is down 100 basis points, and people are like, it's a generational buying opportunity. I'm like, what are we talking about here? And so I think that's part of the challenge is. And that's what sort of created this sort of stability. Sort of at the top level, everything kind of looks stable because you have a lot of immediate debt buying. Even though, look, if oil prices are $100 for the next six months, stocks are gonna fall. No question about that. Right. And so you've gotta be prepared. And only will that. Only probably will. Stocks falling or maybe some other political force, but mostly stocks falling, create enough pressure to either get the Fed to ease or get Trump to back off of the current policies, huh?
- [29:10]
B
Yeah. No, it's a really good way to think about it. Bob, I want to ask you about your time working with Ray Dalio. You were at Bridgewater for eight years?
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C
No, 14 years.
- [29:23]
B
Fourteen years, yeah. I mean, what did you learn working next to him, working alongside him? The investment lessons give us some wisdom here.
- [29:34]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was a great place to start a career and a great place to sort of develop a foundational understanding of macro. I think probably I say sort of two things that really stand out in terms of my time there. The first Is this push to start to really think about the world in these sort of fundamental cause effect type relationships. I think when people think about macro investing in particular, it's like a little overwhelming. It's like all these different people doing all sorts of different things and who's doing what and how do you keep track of all these different things that are going on? And a lot of my time was spent in currencies, so it wasn't just understanding all the things going on, but was about how do you understand everything going on in Europe compared to everything going on in the U.S. that's why currencies are some of the most interesting markets to trade because you kind of have to have everything on a relational basis. But, but you could sort of boil things down and I think people get lost and can get a lot of value in boiling things down. We started this conversation with this idea of a desaving driven economy, the idea of which was relatively simple, which is like households are earning a certain amount that's going down, they want to keep spending that's staying flat. The way that that's happening is they're just saving. Very simple. That seems like an obvious thing to say, right? But it often can get lost in all sorts of other connections. But if you start with those simple frameworks then they can be a really good foundation to then say okay, let's look on a forward looking basis, are incomes likely to go up or go down? Are people likely to save more in this sort of environment or save less? Therefore are they likely to spend more or spend less? And you can kind of build an understanding through the series of fundamental cause effect linkages that I think serve as a really good foundation for trading markets and creating alpha. It's not sparkly alpha in the sense of I know the next Apple product is going to be a wild success. It's like foundational math alpha, which I like. The other thing which almost runs totally in contrast to what I just said is you have to have extreme humility in this business. Like the way, like the very best investors, I'm saying the very best will get a trade right, 55, 45, get a trade right 55% of the time in any given month. If you do that and you do it over multiple markets and you do it over year after year, you will be the best investor in the world. 55%, right. You know what that means? 45% of the time you are fucking wrong. 45% of the time you are wrong. And so you have to have a lot of humility when you're managing money to recognize that you're going to have to navigate through a lot of periods where you're wrong, a lot of trades that you're wrong, a lot of periods that you're wrong. And part of the idea is, if you have edge, what you need is sample size. Because if you have edge, the more times that you go to the plate, the more times you get to swing at the pitch, the more likely you are to realize your full capacity. But the way you do that is by lasting a long time. And so while it's always easy to get sort of hyped on your own special sauce, particularly when you get a few trades right, that's a very risky thing to do because it creates the risk that you get wrong a few times and you blow yourself up. So the best investors in the world have enough humility to recognize, look, I might be right, I might appreciate being right in these circumstances, but I have to trade as if I might be wrong 45% of the time and ensure that I am not over my skis when that happens.
- [33:33]
B
Wow. I think younger investors who started during COVID have learned the complete opposite of that. Everyone thinks they're a genius. If you start trading in Covid, download Robinhood or one of these apps, and you get everything right for like a year, and people in that, you know, and I'm kind of in that camp, that generation that came up in that time as an investor, money was falling from the sky, which was a super unusual macro environment.
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C
Exactly.
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B
And things are sort of coming back to earth now. But even so, we've been in this great bull market for years since COVID So this is a lesson that probably most young investors today, they probably think they're more humble than they are because they think they've been right for years.
- [34:19]
C
Right, Right. It's also important to recognize that if you're winning, say, more than 55% of the time, if you take for granted that the best investors in the world are right 55% of the time, then if you're winning more than 55% of the time, you're lucky. And, hey, no problem with luck. Enjoy the luck. But recognize that luck, like when you're at the gaming table, sometimes luck's with you and sometimes it's not. And you have to be prepared for times when luck is not with you.
- [34:51]
B
It's a great way to put it. So, Bob, you're managing four ETFs at unlimited funds, and one of them I know you mentioned has been crushing it for the last year. Can you walk us through sort of the strategy behind these funds?
- [35:04]
C
Yeah. So I spent a long time in the hedge fund business building proprietary strategies and I basically realized sort of two key things. Which is the first is that once you become an institutional quality asset manager, hedge fund manager, you're really no better than your peers. Anyone here. You might do better or worse, but everyone generates plenty of alpha and just at different times. And the second, which I recognized, and no one would say out loud, is we were getting paid way too much for what we were doing. Way too much. The problem in the hedge fund world is that managers take 50% of the returns in fees. Think about that. Over the last 50 years, hedge fund managers have taken 50% of the returns in fees. So I said, look, if you take as a given that any individual institutional manager is no better than their peers, and number two, the fees are too high. The obvious way to build a world class asset manager is to diversify and reduce fees. Just in the same way low cost indexing is radically changed stock and bond investing. There's an incredible opportunity to bring diversified low cost indexing to the world of 2 and 20, particularly hedge fund strategies. And so that's what we're up to at unlimited doing that now it's obviously a bit easier said than done because you can't invest in the managers because then you pay them and then yourself. And now we have fees on top of fees. So what we've done is basically leveraged our decades of experience in the space to build strategies that replicate how hedge fund managers are positioned in real time and then make those strategies available for investors across a variety of different hedge fund strategies in the ETF wrapper. So anyone can buy it on Robinhood or anything. You can buy $20, you can buy 20 million. Please contact me if you want. 20 million. And everyone can get access to these hedge fund strategies. And, and one of the great things about it is hedge fund strategies have traditionally been kind of boring because they're run at bond risk. But we can take the same views and turn up the size of the positions and run them at equity, like Risk and Equity Mid Teens Target returns. And that's been really great. This last year really has been an incredible time for macro strategies for a lot of the reasons that we've discussed. And so, you know, we're seeing our macro strategy as an example, up 50% since we launched it last April, number one in its Morningstar category, really demonstrating a heck of return, all built on basically gathering the wisdom of all the smartest hedge fund managers in the world and making those positions available to the everyday investor through an etf.
- [37:40]
B
What's the ticker on that one?
- [37:42]
C
That one's hfgm, like Hedge Fund Global Macro.
- [37:46]
B
Wait, can you explain what do you mean you're replicating or taking their positions?
- [37:50]
C
Yeah, I mean what we're doing. Anytime someone looks at active managers returns, what they'll often do is they'll be like, oh, I see that equity manager was up X percent. And that was better than the market. And it was a time when, I don't know, tech stocks did well and so they must have been overweight tech stocks. You do this all the time with people, right? And you kind of, you know what you're doing there is, you're kind of like doing, you're backing out. How they must be positioned from looking at their returns and comparing them to what happened in the markets. And what we do with our technology is basically that concept now a little more quantitatively rigorous than just eyeballing it and using our, our gut to guess. And there's been a lot of advances in things like machine learning and computational ability to be able to do those sorts of inferences. And so we're drawing on those to do it. And it's very simple. Global macromanagers have crushed it over the course of the last couple of really the last year or so. And so you ask why have we been able to do so well in our products? It's because it's been such a great environment for macro managers. That's all there is to it. And we've been able to see how they're positioned and reflect that in our products.
- [39:05]
B
Wow. I mean, even I didn't know that was what exactly was under the hood. I'm going to look into this more. Bob, where can people find your work and follow you online?
- [39:16]
C
Yeah, if you're interested in following me for macro takes and investing conversations and content, I'm under the Bobby Unlimited handle pretty much everywhere. You can follow my deeper macro research on my non consensus substack. You can just Google that. And if you want to learn more about our products, check out unlimited etf's.com
- [39:38]
B
heard it here first. All right, Bob, thank you so much for your time.
- [39:41]
C
Thank you so much for having me.