A Reflective Journey Through the ETF Landscape

My guest today is Bob Elliott, the CEO and CIO of Unlimited, which creates low-cost index ETFs for alternative investment strategies. Prior to co-founding Unlimited, Bob was a senior investment executive at Bridgewater Associates where he served on their investment committee and led Ray Dalio’s personal research team for a decade. His breadth and depth of experience makes him a great person to assess the current macro landscape. We discuss the relationship between rates, inflation, and asset classes, Bob's approach to identifying data with the most signal, and finish with his view on quantitative strategies in private markets. Please enjoy this great discussion with Bob Elliott.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. 

Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.

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Show Notes

[00:02:45] - [First question] - The Economic Organization of a POW Camp and key lessons one can learn from the paper

[00:07:22] - The way that supply and demand clears a price and how that plays into his thinking about investing across asset classes 

[00:09:58] - Whether or not he has a generalized investing worldview or framework

[00:11:46] - Deciding on what data is signal and matters most when analyzing markets 

[00:15:46] - A crash course on easy money and tight money regimes and the implications of both in a macro environment 

[00:20:28] - The rise and role of inflation and what should be done about it

[00:24:00] - What the next couple of years will look like if we draw lessons from history

[00:30:12] - Why gold could ever belong in someone's portfolio when it doesn’t produce or yield anything back to the investor 

[00:35:08] - Supply and demand constraints and the state of the housing market today 

[00:40:42] - What might happen in future labor markets given our current macro environment

[00:46:27] - Currencies, energy, geopolitics, and what he’s most focused on globally

[00:52:19] - What movements in the charts are worrying him the most 

[00:56:04] - The original “All Weather” portfolio and what one would look like if he built it today

[01:02:05] - How his career has taught him to find talented individuals who might deliver alpha

[01:07:19] - Lessons learned from early-stage and venture investing and thoughts on that world now

[01:12:41] - Why there hasn’t been an iconic early-stage technology investing firm driven by systematic strategies

[01:16:10] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him