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- [00:01]
Hannah Fry
I'm Hannah Fry, and I'm on a mission to find out about a mysterious day called Q Day, which experts think could be the moment our most precious encrypted data is suddenly at risk. Learn more later in the podcast on.
- [00:16]
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- [01:17]
IBM Advertiser
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- [01:46]
Hannah Fry
Stay cozy, stay home and save big online during Lowe's December deal drops. Because honestly, why go anywhere when the deals come to you? Check this out. Lowe's is Gonna give you two free select tools from DeWalt, Craftsman or Cobalt when you buy a select battery or combo kit. Yep, two tools free. It's basically a holiday miracle. Plus rewards members get free standard shipping all month long. Yet another reason not to leave your couch. Kick back, click around. Let the savings roll in. Shop New December deal drops on Lowe's.com every week this month, fresh deals, cozy vibes, zero effort. Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio news.
- [02:32]
Ebay Advertiser
This.
- [02:32]
Hannah Fry
Is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.
- [02:38]
Barry Ritholtz
This week on the podcast, an extra special Masters in Business live from the Phillips collection in Washington, D.C. i sit down with Samantha McLemore of Patient Capital. She's known as really the protege of Bill Miller, who she's worked with for the past 20 years, first at Legg Mason, then at Miller Value. She runs Patient Capital and has taken over the Opportunity Equity Fund from Miller Value. Her firm now runs it. I thought the conversation was fascinating and I think you will also. With no further ado, my live conversation with with Patient Capital's Samantha McLemore. All right, let me look at my notes, which says, I'm Barry Ritholtz. I'm the host of Masters in Business, a podcast that's been on Bloomberg for the past 11 years. The first Bloomberg podcast. Now there are dozens, many, many award winning podcasts. Forgot to button my shirt after they ran the backup mic. So let's get that taken care of since we're on tv. So most of you have some idea who I am. Sam, why don't you tell people who you are?
- [04:04]
Samantha McLemore
My name is Samantha McLemore. I'm the founder and CIO of Patient Capital Management. I started my career many, many years ago. Now I don't know how it's been so long as an analyst at Legg Mason, working for Bill Miller, who is a very well known value manager.
- [04:21]
Barry Ritholtz
So I want to talk a little bit about your time with Bill Miller. But before we get to that, let's start in college. Magna cum laude from Washington and Lee, originally chemistry, but eventually changes to accounting and business. What was the original career plan?
- [04:41]
Samantha McLemore
Well, I didn't have so much a plan when I first decided to major in chemistry. I took chemistry in high school and thought I was really good at it. And then I got to. So I was like, I'll major in this. I like to be good at things. And I got to college and that first class, I quickly realized I was not so good at it. I'd never worked so hard for a B. And so I was like, some of my friends were doing much better. So I was like, no, that's not, we're going to have to re examine this whole thing. So I wound up in the business school because I was analytical and that was a much better fit.
- [05:12]
Barry Ritholtz
So accounting and business, not necessarily finance and investing, when did that spark light?
- [05:19]
Samantha McLemore
Well, it was. They didn't have a finance degree at the business school, so again, I was very good at accounting. It just came naturally. I don't know what that says about my brain. And I got involved with the investment club. I'd had some investing experience with my dad who tried to get me interested in markets. And in high school in the late 90s, it was a roaring tech bull market, much like we're seeing today, although I don't think we're peak bubble. And he bought Dell and I had some funds that were for college. So he had invested those and tried to get me engaged. So I'd had a little bit of experience in high school and then I joined the investment club and I just liked that a lot.
- [06:00]
Barry Ritholtz
How did you find your way over to Legg Mason? Was that your first job right out of college?
- [06:05]
Samantha McLemore
That was. And I like to say I won the job lottery because it was the fall of 2001. So now we were in the tech market crash. It wasn't a great job market. Fortunately, there were a lot of investment banks recruiting from my alma mater. So my plan was to go there. I was ready to do the all nighters in New York. And Bill, who also went to Washington and Lee, happened to come back the fall of my senior year. He did some speaking. He met with the investment club and I got very lucky. I asked him if I could send him my resume and he said sure. So I sent him my resume and joined him as a junior analyst right out of college.
- [06:44]
Barry Ritholtz
So I imagine Bill Miller comes to an investment club at his alma mater and every person is handing him a resume. Is that accurate or were people a little more circumspect?
- [06:56]
Samantha McLemore
You would think. I mean, if I have advice to.
- [06:58]
Barry Ritholtz
Young people, it's like, give Bill Miller your resume.
- [07:01]
Samantha McLemore
Give anyone your resume. Go after it, Go for the job. Everyone said there's no way you can get a job in investment management. And so I just think people thought, okay, this isn't what, you know, I'll go do banking. I'm not going to try. So actually I think I was the only, the only one that sent in my resume.
- [07:16]
Barry Ritholtz
Yeah, that's a.
- [07:17]
Samantha McLemore
The only one that asked to do that.
- [07:19]
Barry Ritholtz
There's a lesson in that. So you start as an analyst at Legg Mason. How long did you do that? When did you transition to a portfolio manager?
- [07:28]
Samantha McLemore
I was an analyst for a few years. So I started in 2002 and became the assistant portfolio manager of the Opportunity Trust, which is the mutual fund that Bill and I worked on for many years together that I now run in 2008. In August of 2008. Right.
- [07:43]
Barry Ritholtz
Good timing.
- [07:44]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah. Right before the markets fell apart during the financial crisis.
- [07:47]
Barry Ritholtz
The next month was all hell broke. Yes, we'll talk about that in a bit. But you spend 20 years working pretty much shoulder to shoulder with Bill Miller. What was that like? What did you take away from that experience?
- [08:02]
Samantha McLemore
I mean, it was amazing. I can't express how lucky I was. I was just so lucky. I think it's an apprenticeship business, so I really. My desk was Always right beside Bill's. And he liked to teach. And so I would go in his office, we would look at the Bloomberg and look at stock charts. And I got to attend a lot of meetings with great CEOs. Jeff Bezos spoke at our investment conference in 2003, the year after I joined. And I got to hear his speech and be in some meetings with him. And so I couldn't have been luckier in terms of what I was exposed to and that learning opportunity.
- [08:40]
Barry Ritholtz
So it's kind of interesting. You work with a legendary value investor who doesn't really fit the mold of a traditional value investor. How much of his philosophy did you make your own? How similar or different are you to the Bill Miller style of investing?
- [08:59]
Samantha McLemore
Well, we have a lot of similarities. I think that's one of the reasons we hit it off. And I would say, at my core, I'm a contrarian value investor. I didn't grow up with a lot of money. I had to make money, go far. I looked at the markets. I like stuff that was down, that was generating cash. Bill and I, when I first applied, talked about Eastman Kodak, which ended up being one of our biggest mistakes, both of us. But we kind of bonded over that. And what was much more transformational to me was Bill's view. And he was. He was criticized when I joined him as not a true value manager because he had invested in names like Amazon in the early 2000s. And people said, you can't possibly be a value manager if you're investing in these very high multiple stocks. And Bill used to joke that he liked to hire people young so he could imprint them like the baby bird that whatever the first thing it sees, it thinks is its mother. So I was definitely imprinted. But when Bill made the point, listen, we don't know what the best values in the market are today because it depends on the future. And the future is unknowable. So no one knows what they are. But we do know, if we look back over long periods of time, what the best values are, because we have hindsight bias. And we can look back and say, well, what went up the most? Clearly, that was the most, the best value. And if you look, it's always names that can grow and compound value over long periods of time. And those types of companies, because their prospects are so promising, they don't tend to trade at low multiples. So I said, as a value manager, why would you have a process where you explicitly exclude what you know are the best values in the market? That doesn't make sense. And I thought, well, yeah, that just doesn't make sense now to a contrarian type investor. You know, it's not easy to because it depends on a future that's unknowable. It always does. And so where can you get that conviction that that can be challenging. But I think that had a, you know, certainly a big impact on me. And it's a core part of our process to look at a mix of different types of opportunities in the portfolio.
- [10:51]
Barry Ritholtz
So you use the word conviction a couple of times. Opportunity Equity has always been a high conviction fund. Somewhat idiosyncratic strategy. Tell us a little bit about the fund's philosophy and what makes it so unique amongst I don't want to say value funds, but funds that look at reasonable purchase prices for equities.
- [11:16]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, well, I think we are unconventional and we've always been unconventional. And Bill started the opportunity trust in 1999 at the peak that tech bubble. And the idea was let's create a fund with the maximum flexibility possible to go wherever it wants. And again, there's lots of structures in the business that make that hard because style boxes don't like that. People allocators want to put you in a box. And so it hurts demand for your fund when you're like, no, I'm just going to go wherever the best values are. But the idea was over time that should allow you to earn better returns if executed properly. So I think the fund has migrated around over time. It has had a different mix of what we call attractively value compounders like Amazon and Alphabet, which we own. More classic value names that everyone would recognize as value like Citigroup and General Motors. And then we like to look at companies early in their life because they're more likely to be misunderstood. There's a wider range of potential future outcomes and a lot of people feel comfortable, especially in the value investing community where I think it's a more risk averse group who want to see the value today there, what's today's value and what's today's price. And again, growth people tend to look further out in the future. But we like to have a mix and I think that helps the fund do well in different environments.
- [12:34]
Barry Ritholtz
And let me put a little flesh on those bones because this morning the first thing I did was, hey, let's see how Opportunity is done. Year to date, it has beaten its benchmark year to date, one year, three year and since inception. So it's not just like this is a theoretical stock picking approach. It's Done better than average. Is that a fair way to describe it without getting you into trouble with the compliance department?
- [13:02]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, you're going to get me in trouble with compliance, but.
- [13:04]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, I said it, not you.
- [13:05]
Samantha McLemore
So we have had a good track record, especially for, relative to value managers, which have recently struggled in a very.
- [13:13]
Barry Ritholtz
Growthy sort of market since the financial. So since you went there, since the financial crisis, value has been a pretty ugly laggard compared to growth. We've been in a very strong era for growth, especially since the end of the pandemic. What sort of challenges does that create to someone that's labeled a value manager?
- [13:38]
Samantha McLemore
Oh, well, I mean, I think it creates a lot of value in terms of. Some people say, oh, you're value. We only want to talk to you. So my colleagues here, she had a conversation the other day and they're like, we just don't have any demand for value. No one cares. We're like, but we've done really well and we're beating the market every year since Sam took over. And it's like, it doesn't matter. So I think it does. You know, my view is our, our primary job is to deliver for our clients. And so if we do that, everything else will work out. I've seen this in this business time and time again. If you deliver results, everything else will work itself out. And so, and I, I, I strongly believe value will have its day in the sun again. But it might take an ugly market. So I'm not, I'm not hoping for that.
- [14:20]
Barry Ritholtz
So I've always tried to figure out a way to more appropriately describe what you do. What Bill Miller does, is it growth at a reasonable price? Is it value and growth? Like, how do you sum it up in a elevator pitch?
- [14:34]
Samantha McLemore
Well, again, I think it's value because if you look at every name in the portfolio, we think they're all undervalued. But the value of any business is the present value of the future. Free cash flows and growth is a very, very important input into that calculation. We are valuing businesses, but I also think it's important to have diversification between different types of names in the portfolio. I wouldn't feel comfortable being fully invested in this market and all the growthiest stuff that has higher valuations. You know, I like having some cheaper names in there that are likely to perform well in a different sort of environment. And there's really attractive values in the value area that have just, just been left for dead. So we'll be patient waiting for the market to close those Gaps.
- [15:21]
Barry Ritholtz
So, so since Patience was brought up, let's talk about Patient Capital. What inspired you to launch the firm and tell us a little bit of the thinking behind the name?
- [15:33]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, so I think, I mean I've always been pretty driven and I've always had entrepreneurial interests and so when I became the co manager with Bill on the opportunity fund in 2014, I was also interested in developing my own independent track record. So Bill gave me some of his personal money to run independently and be the sole decision maker. So at the end of 2019, that had a really good track record. We didn't have an institutional business at Miller Value Partners, we had back in the day at Legend. But Bill was more optimizing for the kind of life he wanted to live. He didn't want to grow and build a business. So I said, hey, let me go after this institutional business. And there was at least stated interest in women and minority led opportunities there. So I said it looks like there might be interest in the marketplace for this. It was important to me to have, I think it's a great profession for women. I think I've read a lot of research on the importance of role models in the industry. So that was part of my decision. So we decided to turn it into a private fund, like a hedge fund fund structure. And we did. We made the decision in 2019 and then we actually launched it in 2020 right. In Covid, which was not the best.
- [16:41]
Barry Ritholtz
Time, not a good time to launch.
- [16:43]
Samantha McLemore
Whenever I make these big decisions, the market, you know, goes a little wonky.
- [16:47]
Barry Ritholtz
Right. So. So since you've become the sole manager of the Opportunity Equity strategy, is it run the same way it was? How has it changed since Bill has retired from being co manager there?
- [17:00]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, so the philosophy and process is exactly the same as what we've always done and the decision making is different because it used to be a co decision making structure. When I first became co manager with Bill, he said, okay, great, you're co manager, but I'm not going to let some 30 something year old tell me what to do on my fund. And I said, I got it, I have to convince you. And so over time it became more equal co. And then I took it over obviously when he stepped off at.
- [17:26]
Barry Ritholtz
The end of 2022 and patient capital has acquired this, it's now a wholly owned subsidiary.
- [17:33]
Samantha McLemore
Is that right now Patient Capital is, you know, the, the Opportunity Trust mutual fund business and the institutional business that I started under Patient. And so the, all the team and.
- [17:42]
Barry Ritholtz
The structure, how do they differ aside from a mutual fund has its own rules, regulations and well, that's the primary way.
- [17:49]
Samantha McLemore
Again, for me, I like to think one philosophy, one process, one team and we're just looking for the best ideas in the market and then if it's a appropriate for the strategy, the mutual fund has more restrictions on what it can do, even though it has the widest latitude possible for a mutual fund. So you know, we owned bitcoin starting in 2020 in the private fund, but we couldn't in the mutual fund. Now we own the Bitcoin ETFs, but it would be differences like that.
- [18:15]
Barry Ritholtz
Coming up, we continue our conversation with Samantha McLemore, Chief Investment Officer and founder of Patience Capital, talking about the state of the economy today. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
- [18:46]
Hannah Fry
Right now, bad actors are harvesting our data, hoping to decrypt it later using quantum computers or on so called Q Day. I'm Hannah Fry, host of the Exponential Era, a series that explores the real world impact of future network technology. And I sat down with two experts to discuss how we protect our data from this quantum threat. Find out what I learned@bloomberg.com Nokia on.
- [19:16]
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- [20:19]
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- [20:46]
Hannah Fry
Stay cozy, stay home and save big online during Lowe's December deal drops. Because honestly, why go anywhere when the deals come to you? Check this out. Lowe's is Gonna give you two free select tools from DeWalt, Craftsman or Cobalt when you buy a select battery or combo kit. Yep, two tools free. It's basically a holiday miracle. Plus, rewards members get free standard shipping all month long. Yet another reason not to leave your couch. Kick back, click around, let the savings roll in. Shop. New December deal drops on Lowe's.com every week. This month, fresh deals, cozy vibes, zero effort.
- [21:24]
Barry Ritholtz
I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Let's return to my previously recorded conversation live at the Phillips collection in Washington, D.C. with Patient Capital's Samantha McLemore. So that one doesn't think of bitcoin as a value trade. Tell us what your thinking was there.
- [21:48]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, well, my thinking was I really screwed that one up because Bill got involved in bitcoin when it was like a couple hundred dollars a coin. And I was like, oh, this is another one of those things that's going to go to zero. Because Bill said it could go to zero, but if it goes up, it's going to go up a lot. And I was like, I don't need another thing going to zero. Big, big, big mistake. But, you know, then it had its run. It made it almost to 20,000 in 2018. You know, I again was telling Bill, when it got to 3,000, Bill, you should, he had a fund. And I was like, it was a huge position. I was like, you should cut it back. You know, this is, you know, has some risk. And it went to 20 and then it did crash, but back to 3,000. So that was another good lesson. But by 2020, again, I thought that there was potential inflation risk given all the monetary and fiscal stimulus. And by that time, Bill was on the PH every day with institutions and big individuals that wanted to get up to speed. And there was a bull case early on about it being digital gold, but I thought it was very unlikely because there's one gold and it has a special psychological space in the investment universe. But by 2020, I thought it was much more likely and it was developing along the path. And usually after you have these crashes, things don't keep coming back. So I bought it in the fund there on the belief that it was digital gold, which I could actually analyze. And you can look at the market cap of gold and look at the younger generations are much more inclined to digital assets. So if this is a proxy for the long term potential here, what's the upside? And if you do that math today, Bitcoin could be worth 1.3, $1.4 million a share or a coin sometime in the future. And so again, I still believe that to be the case.
- [23:34]
Barry Ritholtz
I would not have guessed that that's a fairly contrarian perspective for a so called value investor. Let's talk about some other fairly contrarian approaches. You were an aspiring innkeeper in Vermont. I have to ask about that because it's just so off. What I know of you. Tell us about adventures in innkeeping.
- [23:59]
Samantha McLemore
Well, I was an innkeeper in Veronica. I'm not the actual innkeeper, but yes, I like to learn lessons the hard way. That's, you know, part of my unfortunate lot in life. And you know, so 2011, we'd gone through the financial crisis. You know, Bill was this genius. We'd had a really poor performance. He spent all his time working. I just had my first daughter, which totally rearranged everything in my life and my priorities. And I was like, you know, do I want to work that hard and do that or, you know, now I have this daughter and she's so important to me. So I was considering a whole bunch of things and innkeeper was one of them, as crazy as that sounds, because it's so not my thing. And then it was the real estate, obviously, bubble and crash. And so I think I had mentioned this to my family. They live in Vermont. My dad was like, oh, the Vermont inn is going up for auction. And I was like, oh, this is very interesting. It's a sign of our times. Let me go to this auction. So my husband and I went to the auction. I did work on what I thought the inn was worth before going into that. And there was a first bid for the inn and then we bid the second bid. And then I'm like, what are you doing? That was crazy. Don't do that again. But that was it. It was over. There were no more bids. And so we ended up with an inn that was closed down because it had gone through foreclosure. Fortunately, my family was all there. So then I made. I compounded the error by getting my brother in law and sister involved to run the inn. So got family involved in an absentee business. And you know, we also were on a reality show. We won't go into that.
- [25:39]
Barry Ritholtz
Did you really do a reality show?
- [25:41]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, we did a reality show. Because I'm not going to tell you the name because I don't want you to go watch it. But I needed someone to help me figure out how I was going to run this inn. But we got it open. So the auction was in October. I wanted to get it open by the holidays because that's obviously the big ski season there, which we did.
- [25:59]
Barry Ritholtz
You did?
- [25:59]
Samantha McLemore
We did that, yeah. My dad, my husband's dad, we got everyone involved in getting the inn reopen, and we had to figure out how to get people to come. And so it was not for me. I quickly figured that out. But, you know, we kind of got the business running and then sold it, so.
- [26:15]
Barry Ritholtz
And what was the lesson we learned, aside from don't scratch your nose at auctions?
- [26:20]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, the lesson was, I like markets. I can sit at my desk and make a lot of money doing very little versus managing a chef who has, you know, a lot of issues on when I tell him the food's not so good and he thinks he's an artist. And, you know, I was like, this is not for me. And the maximum amount you could make on him, like, that was not that much.
- [26:40]
Barry Ritholtz
So not a lot. Bad business model.
- [26:42]
Samantha McLemore
We did make some money, so it was okay. But it was a lot of work for, you know, how much you could make. Yes.
- [26:48]
Barry Ritholtz
And you were working full time?
- [26:50]
Samantha McLemore
I was working, yeah. I was working full time. So, you know, I wasn't on site again. I had people there working.
- [26:58]
Barry Ritholtz
That's an amazing story. Let's talk a little bit about philosophy. You have talked about Buddhism and stoicism as related to finance and investing. Tell us a little bit about that.
- [27:11]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, well, I think in investing, in marketing and markets, having the right mindset is probably the most important thing. And, you know, it's a mixture of art and science. And a lot of people think the scientific part is more important, but I think the art part is more important because there's a lot of data on how much more you can make in equity markets over time. And so the reason that you can make more is because you have these periodic losses. And, you know, I liken it to dieting. It's like, people don't fail at dieting because they don't know they shouldn't eat the cookie. Right. Like, you know, you shouldn't eat the cookie. It's because it's too tempting. And people know you shouldn't sell when the markets are down, mostly. But it's hard to do that because you feel like you're, you know, your wealth is at risk. And so I think having tools that help you have the right structure for how you think about things and how you behave are really important. I mean, some people are naturally wired that way and different people, you know, you have different abilities. But I think having certain tools and mindsets can help anyone be better. And so, you know, staying calm, understanding that there's only certain things that are within your control and that's what you can focus on. And then understanding that there will be times when you lose money, but over time, again, it's so sensitive to time horizon. If you have a long time horizon and you can put your money away for a long time, there's almost nothing safer. If you have a 20 or 25 year time horizon. You know, equities have never been down over, over that time Horizon period. Yeah, U.S. equities. Yes. And so I meditate regularly and I keep a journal and I remember during the COVID pandemic we were all locked away, but I was emailing with Bill and he was reading Stoicism and that kind of got me interested and he was sharing quotes. And so I think it can really help you in the moment to make better decisions if you have these tools.
- [29:09]
Barry Ritholtz
Recognizing what is and is not within your control and a sense of calm, it turns out to be useful in markets.
- [29:15]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, yeah, imagine that.
- [29:18]
Barry Ritholtz
Whoever would have guessed that? And yet most people don't reach that conclusion. They go the other direction. So let's talk a little bit about where we are in the state of the market today. I'm watching Real Time Transcription, which five years ago would have been magic. There's been dictation software for decades. It's always been pretty terrible. It's amazing how good this is in real time. So let's talk a little bit about artificial intelligence. What are your thoughts? How does this affect how you're looking at overall markets and how you're looking at individual companies?
- [29:56]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, well, I think it's anyone who knows anything about technology. I have not heard anyone who's knowledgeable about this space not say that it's completely transformational. And more important, I think the Capital One CEO, he claims to have the first fintech at Capital One because they were very into data. But he said it's bigger than the agricultural revolution, the invention of fire, the industrial revolution, the digital revolution. I haven't really heard anyone dispute that. There's lots of questions about how long does it take, what exactly does it do? Are companies overvalued now? But I think anyone who knows anything believes that the impact of this is just going to be huge. And so when you're in that sort of situation in the markets, you obviously need to be aware and try to learn everything you can. I think we bought Nvidia in January of 2024. The interesting thing about this is I love markets because they're so interesting, but in their complex adaptive systems, which make them very, very difficult to outperform, they're extremely difficult, but they adapt. And so what's interesting to me is that we have this AI bubble hysteria, basically, where everyone. It's all you read all the time. And that makes sense, given that we've had the tech bubble, we had the housing bubble, we've had some of these bubbles. But I think, and it's possible that there will be something negative here, but you're not seeing valuations at all in line with what we saw in the tech bubble. And the companies that are spending these enormous amounts of money, which they are very large sums of money, they're basically the best companies that ever existed in the history of the world, if you look at their returns on capital, their free cash flow margin, you know, their revenue growth rates. And so. So I like that there's all this AI bubble talk because it keeps a lid on the valuations. I think it actually makes it more sustainable, not that they're, you know, I would have concern in some of the companies like OpenAI, which, you know, had under 4 billion in revenues last year and has committed to $1.4 trillion in spend. So we're watching that very closely. And I think for me, I have children, and I'm thinking, what does this mean for the future of employment? And is, you know, what can I advise them to go into? Which I think that's a much tougher question now than so.
- [32:22]
Barry Ritholtz
So I'm glad you went over there because I wanted to ask. You've talked about the value of mentorship, about training young people, whether analysts or fund managers, what have you. If you look at the unemployment rate today at 4344, and then you look at the college graduate under 30, unemployment, it's more than double that. It's in the nines. What does AI do for that demographic? Learning to being mentored, learning a trade, being able to get a job at an entry level when their competition seems to be software.
- [33:00]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I'm not sure I have the answer to that. I mean, what we know is you can look at industries adopting AI and those that haven't, and there's clearly an impact on junior hires, so it is having an impact. And Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic has said, said he believes that the white collar unemployment rate will be 5 to 25% in one to five years. So huge impact. And so I think that's why I'm thinking like, what do you advise young people to do? I think I asked people at my college that I went to where I'm on the board. The professor's there. They've worked hard to set up an AI program and help students be literate and well versed in this. I think if you can use it as a tool to your advantage, you still need humans to do this work. Being capable in that is really important. I was at a Santa Fe Institute meeting a couple of weeks ago that was on AI and they talked about what the models aren't good at, which I thought was really interesting, is complex problem solving and creativity. So those seem more unique human endeavors. So leaning into areas where those are critical skills I think are important. But areas like law or obviously customer service coding, some of these areas are getting quite disrupted.
- [34:28]
Barry Ritholtz
And you're saying complex problem solving and creativity AI is not great at.
- [34:33]
Samantha McLemore
These models cannot do it. Now will they get there? I don't know. But I think what's useful is to have a human who is well versed and can think critically about. Because these models hallucinate, they'll make up lies, they'll tell you incorrect information. They're getting better at that. But having someone who knows how to check facts, use different models in different situations, that's going to be very valuable, I think, who can figure stuff out that you haven't been taught. Go and solve real problems in the real world, I think is also valuable.
- [35:04]
Barry Ritholtz
So every time we see a back test that's based on historical data, it always looks great. And built into the back test of the assumption the future is going to look like the past. How much of what we're seeing in artificial intelligence is sort of paralleling that? Hey, we're working off the corpus of all these documents that have been previously written. If you want to do something that's not going to get replaced by AI, you have to go in a different direction.
- [35:32]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. I mean, what the models do is they look at all of the information that's out there and they can do things with it instantaneously. And so I think there's a belief in the technology community that they will eventually have a breakthrough where they can have novel ideas. That's unclear if and when that'll happen. It hasn't happened yet. And so if you can do that, if you can use ideas in an innovative way, if you can. Certainly, I think in the investment business for long term investors, what you've seen is machine learning and large language models have already been used to optimize short term trading models. And again, we don't compete there because I think it's extremely difficult to compete. But I think long term, those models have not been used to think about long term investments. We talk about time arbitrage and patience and what do we think the world's going to look like in 5, 10, 15 years? The future is uncertain, no one knows. I don't see how the models are going to get an edge there. If they become smarter than all humans at some point maybe, but it'll be one of the last things, hopefully.
- [36:49]
Barry Ritholtz
Are you using AI in, in your firm and if so, how we are.
- [36:56]
Samantha McLemore
And we talk about AI all the time. And so I tell the employees all the time, like you have to be all over this and learn how to use these models because they're going to displace you if not you specifically, but all of us if we don't. And so it's still so early. So I think a lot of what's going on now is more experimentation both at big companies and small companies. There was an article in the Journal yesterday about how small businesses have had, you know, have been transformed by this because they can do so many things. Like I used one to create a profit sharing plan and I just went back and forth with ChatGPT like, no, I don't want this, No, I want that. Like, what is this model? And it like created it for me, you know, with the back and forth and I sent it to the lawyers and it was good to go. I mean it was good, it needed no changes. And so I'd been, you know, I've been wanting to do that for a long time and the team was busy with all sorts of stuff. So I finally just did it and it probably took me like an hour to do that. But we try it, we try tools on the investment side, you know, that are both specialized and more generalized. I use ChatGPT all the time for everything in terms of doing research and it's really quite amazing. And we have a new tech person that we hired who has played around with automating and using agents to do certain tasks that people did. So I do think it is going to replace some work now. I don't think we'll have less jobs. People will just be able to do.
- [38:22]
Barry Ritholtz
More higher level work makes sense. You earlier compared this to the dot coms. What are the parallels that are a fair comparison to the late 90s tech and telecom bubble? And what do you think is really separating this era from the late 1990s?
- [38:43]
Samantha McLemore
Well, I think the clearest parallel is the market valuation overall is at high levels that we haven't seen since then. So I think the market's at 22 times the next 12 months earnings and it peaked at like 25 times then. So we're, you know, after the financial crisis we were at very low levels and we've spent the past 16 years having great markets, some of the best markets we've ever had and the valuations have risen again as value managers. That makes us on alert for signs that things might be going awry. But there's many more, I think more significant differences during that there was, I think technology hit 50 times earnings as a sector and a lot of the technology companies were losing a ton of money and there was a lot of debt financing. So there's a lot of unsustainable things. The build out of the fiber networks they were building for future demand that wasn't yet there. So that's very different than today. We have this big infrastructure build out, but there's still shortages of demand. They can't meet the demand that already exists, exist. That's a very different situation. And the companies that are building them, building this infrastructure out for the most part are extremely, the hyperscalers are extremely well capitalized with great balance sheets, high free cash flow margins. So that sort of risk doesn't exist. And also at the end of the tech bubble, everyone was piled into Bill recognized the peak and actually got out of those names. And what made him recognize it was that, you know, I think in the first quarter of 2000, you know, a very high percent, like 75% of money managers outperformed and only two sectors outperformed, tech and telecom. And so everyone was piled into a very narrow area of the market that is not at all, you know, what you're seeing now. And so I just now, you know, I think the bear case would be that for some reason, you know, the demand doesn't exist and the spend rolls over again. I still think it would be a much more modest pullback just because of those underlying fundamental business factors. There are other areas of the market like quantum computing and nuclear fission that are much more speculative that have already pulled back 50% actually just in this decline. So that also is a good thing. I think it keeps the market healthier, longer.
- [41:14]
Barry Ritholtz
So you don't explicitly talk about economic cycles, but every now and then I hear you drifting over to unemployment and growth and infrastructure and economist type speaks. How often do you use what's going on in the broader economy as part of your process? Do you think about that or economic cycles significant to your process, or is the economy going to do what it's going to do and it doesn't interfere with your approach?
- [41:45]
Samantha McLemore
Well, we definitely try to understand what's going on in the economy because it can have big impacts on investments. There's a lot of no one can forecast the economy. There's a lot of good evidence that no one does that. Economists don't do it, investors don't do it. So it's a futile effort. A lot of people claim that they have some view about the future forecast of the world, but what are we.
- [42:06]
Barry Ritholtz
Seeing a recession forecast exactly? Every year for the past three or four years. They'll get it right eventually, right?
- [42:14]
Samantha McLemore
And so, you know, the best strategy is just, you know, if you have a long time horizon to stay invested. But we want to be aware of risks and the impact. I mean, our whole process is analyzing the fundamentals of businesses and looking at what the intrinsic value looks like. And that's a distribution of outcomes because the future is uncertain. So we're doing different scenarios. And then we compare it to market expectations. And so we like a clear gap in those two things and we like better risk rewards. But there's a lot that goes into both of those things. Sentiment goes into the market expectations, where people are positioned. And obviously the economic cycle for certain businesses has a big impact. It's very sensitive to your time horizon and just how much it matters. And the longer your time horizon, the less it matters.
- [43:04]
Barry Ritholtz
Coming up, we continue our conversation with Samantha McLemore, Chief Investment Officer and founder of Patience Capital, talking about the state of the economy today. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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- [45:55]
Barry Ritholtz
I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Let's return to my previously recorded conversation live at the Phillips collection in Washington, D.C. with Patient Capital's Samantha McLemore. So you mentioned sentiment. I'm trying to remember a moment in history where collectively the investor class, the pundit class, the media, all in real time, identified a major market bubble at once. Is it just too glib to say, hey, everybody's forecasting a bubble, therefore it can't be a bubble?
- [46:33]
Samantha McLemore
Well, I'm a contrarian, so, you know, like that kind of thinking appeals to me. I think it is true that usually what Howard Marks wrote a great memo on the whole tech space in January, and I thought the most important line in that was a bubble is characterized by psychological extremeness. And so it is that psychological state. So we're not when everyone's bemoaning a bubble and fearing a bubble and claiming a bubble that Makes a bubble much less likely because people are then not positioned in it. And usually where the biggest risks are are not where you're focused on. If you know there's a risk in a certain area, you treat it much differently, you manage it much differently. If everyone's doing that, you know, Nvidia, you know, so the risk would be Nvidia's earnings are unsustainable and they've had this huge run up and they've captured so far about 90% of the economic profits in AI. Again, they're going to report tomorrow night. If I were a betting man, which I'm not, I'm an investing woman, but I would say they're going to beat and then the market might really like that because it's coming into it oversold. But I think the risk is something happens to earnings and they have an earnings cycle. Again, I don't see that in the near term. But there's no, you know, valuation, you know, excesses are just not there like these companies. If you look at Nvidia's growing, you know, 40 plus percent this year, trading at 28 times next year's earnings, that is not a bubble, you know, that's not bubble valuations at all. It's not what we saw in the tech bubble. So again, I think it is true that when everyone's worried about a bubble, it's likely not a bubble.
- [48:16]
Barry Ritholtz
So people have been talking about a K shaped economy, that the upper arm is doing great, the lower arm is doing poorly. Can you apply the same thing to valuations with the market? If you take the top 10 or 20 stocks, they seem to be much more richly valued than the rest of the whatever you want to use. Wilshire 5000 or S&P 500. How do you think about that bifurcation?
- [48:40]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, well, I think there are certain areas in the market like quality or like return on capital, where those, again, if you have high quality, high return on capital, high free cash flow margins, those companies should be valued at overall a higher level. But we've seen very wide gaps there. So I think I have a huge respect for the market though because every day we're doing the work on, okay, this company might be attractive, let's do the work on that and see what the market's pricing in. And we'll say, what is the market telling us this business can do? And usually the market's pretty good at like, okay, yeah, that's the easiest case to make and the market will reflect that. So it's more anomalous. To find areas where that's wrong. Especially, you know, the market's had a huge move up. So the more it moves up, the harder it is. But we're still finding opportunities. I think we added significantly to health care and small caps earlier this year. And health care until recently was at a 50 year relative valuation low. And those are good businesses with good returns on capital. And so, you know, the market gets so hyper short term focused. You know, so many people these days are focused on the next quarter and they want to outperform every month and every quarter. So again, if you can look out longer, I think you, you do have opportunities, but the reason people don't is because you sometimes have more downside in the short term if you're buying into, you know, weakness.
- [50:02]
Barry Ritholtz
So how do you think overall about valuation and future return expectations when generally the markets had a good run and valuations are, if not bubblicious, a little more rich than average?
- [50:16]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, I mean, my view on valuations is they're at the high end of the historical range. So again, that makes me more alert, more cautious. I think if you look at the underlying fundamentals and just the returns on capital of businesses, the free cash flow margins, the balance sheets, higher valuations are justified. But markets go through these cycles of undervaluation to overvaluation and then back again. And so that's just part of markets. You know, again, I, I don't think we're at, you know, levels that I'm extremely concerned. I still think there are, you know, attractive opportunities in markets, but where we can add ballast to the portfolio. Defensive areas like health care. Again, I think that helps position the portfolio for a variety of different sorts of environments. And there's still plenty of cheap, you know, cheap, cheap names in the market.
- [51:08]
Barry Ritholtz
So I have three of my favorite questions I always ask guests, but before I get to that, I want to throw a little bit of a curveball at you. What do you think investors are not talking about when, when they're not thinking about AI bubbles? What are they overlooking? What topics or ideas or strategies are they just not thinking about that Perhaps they should be.
- [51:32]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah, well, that's a really hard one because I think there's so many investors out there thinking about so many things. And now in today's day and age, with great podcasts like yours and Twitter and X and all the research online, you can get access to all of the thinking. So I'm not sure that there's things people aren't thinking about that much, but I would say one of My biggest lessons from Bill was the big money are made in the big moves. And so you need to be looking for those, and you need to hold those. And actually holding them is even harder than looking for them. And so I think people focus. If you have a long time horizon and you're interested in growing your wealth, which is what we want to do, that's our number one objective, is to make money. I never saw Bill get upset about a stock that went down or losing money on a certain stock because you know that in our business, the best investors are wrong about half the time. Like half the stocks go down. And that's just part of the business. So you get really comfortable with being wrong. I never saw him mad. I saw him mad when he identified a stock, Qualcomm, and an analyst said, no, this is really bad investment. Don't buy it. And then it went up 10 times because he's like, you just don't get the opportunity to make money. And most of those type of errors, when something's not in your portfolio, you don't see it, you don't notice it's not there, but it has a huge impact on your ability to grow wealth. So I think there's not enough discussion about that. And if you look at endowment returns, I think for the last decade, they're like 6.8% on average. And so the US equity market's up over 13%. So that's a huge shortfall that if you do the math on like 30 years of 13 versus 6.8, it's like you either you're up seven times versus you're up 30 plus times. I mean, that compounding math is. It's shocking actually, even to me, who I'm in this business. I know patients. I'm all about compounding, and I do the math and I'm like, oh, my goodness, the amount of wealth left on the table.
- [53:39]
Barry Ritholtz
All right, so let's jump to our speed round, and then afterwards we'll open it up for questions from the audience. I always like to get book ideas from people. Tell us what you're reading and what are some of your favorite books.
- [53:51]
Samantha McLemore
Well, I'm not reading right now. What I'm reading is 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin. So that's nothing new. Everyone's reading that, but I think it's. It's in the.
- [53:59]
Barry Ritholtz
Probably helps all the bubble talk.
- [54:01]
Samantha McLemore
Well, it's, you know, you have to be aware, and I think studying history is really important. You know, I think. Have you read the Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. No, that's a really good book. And, you know, my kids get sick of me preaching. But it's all about how, you know, we are in a society where, you know, it's all about comfort and the benefits of, you know, he has this thing, Masagi, where he goes into nature and does really physically challenging things that are challenging enough to. That he will. And it's not his thing, it's actually a Japanese thing, but that you are most likely to fail and make it challenging enough just shy of like, maybe dying. So, again, I'm not a promo. I'm not a proponent of taking it to that level, but I am a proponent of, you know, if you listen to Jensen Huang at Nvidia, and he talks about the value of pain and suffering, and he's like. He talks about being a CEO. He's like, a lot of people want to be a CEO. He's like, but the experience is not power and glory. It's pain and suffering. And, like, all the hardest problems come to you. So I think, you know, exposing yourself to things out of your comfort zone, where you have the opportunity to grow and have some pain, you know, I think that's kind of what makes life interesting. And so that would be a book that I would recommend.
- [55:18]
Barry Ritholtz
So, final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in investing in finance?
- [55:26]
Samantha McLemore
Well, I mean, back to my experience, I would say go for it and be persistent. I mean, we have a few job postings now, and so we're trying to fill those postings. And it's amazing to me, you know, a lot of people will go on LinkedIn and they'll blast out their resume to everywhere and that they're putting very little time and little thought into that. And we actually have on our site, you have to email it, and we're paying attention to who's actually reading that instruction and emailing it. But very few people follow up. I think we had one candidate who followed up, like three times. And it makes a huge difference. It demonstrates interest. It demonstrates you're paying attention to it. So I would say in a tough job environment especially, it's easier than you think to distinguish yourself if you're actually interested in something. Perseverance, taking the time to learn more, really, what the firm is, the person you're talking to, who they are, what they're trying to accomplish with this. It's amazing to me how little people actually spend doing that.
- [56:27]
Barry Ritholtz
Good advice. And our final question. What do you know about the world of investing today would have been useful 25 years ago or so when you were first getting started.
- [56:38]
Samantha McLemore
Yeah. Buy Nvidia. I know you told me I couldn't do this. Buy Amazon. Buy Bitcoin. Don't miss, you know, but if there's a broader point, I mean, part of it is like, you know, again, this kind of will go full circle, but the power of patience and compounding, again, it's like, teach what you need to learn. But Bill used to tell me when I was young, I'd be like, bill, you know, I need to make more money. I need to find more stocks. You need to give me more responsibilities and, like, calm down. Like, be patient. I'm like, no, I can't be patient. As my friend who I graduated with, he's at Goldman Sachs, he's making like $10 million a year.
- [57:09]
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- [57:10]
Samantha McLemore
And he's like, calm down. And, you know, now, 20 years, 25 years later, it is amazing. Just the power of compounding. If you find a name like Amazon or, you know, and you invest, and again, you're going to have a couple, you know, number of big drawdowns in those, you know, stocks that go up a lot, go down a lot. And that's just part of the journey. But it's so easy to underestimate, you know, just how powerful that can be.
- [57:35]
Barry Ritholtz
That was my live conversation with Samantha McLemore, formerly of Legg Mason and Miller Value, now with Patient Capital. I have to thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together, especially the live event. Alexis Noriega and Elizabeth Sedron have been instrumental in making these sorts of things happen. Sean Russo is my research researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to a special live edition of Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
- [58:25]
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