Introduction

My guest, this episode, likely needs little introduction.  His paper, a Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation is the highest ranked paper on SSRN with over 200,000 downloads at the point of recording.  

But Meb Faber’s interests go far beyond tactical asset allocation.  His work over the last decade-plus – from his blog to his podcast to the books he has authored – spans broad topics such as shareholder yield, global value, hard asset alternatives, risk parity, and angel investing to name a few.

I rarely enter these podcast conversations with a singular objective.  Being a prolific writer, however, there is very little that someone cannot find out about Meb’s investment beliefs through a simple Google search.  What I was keen to learn in this conversation is what drives those beliefs.  Why does Meb keep searching and exploring?  Is it simple curiosity, or is there a deeper, underlying philosophy that unifies his body of work?

As you can likely guess from the title of this podcast, there is indeed a unifying theory.  But I’ll let Meb explain.