Excess Returns

Wes Gray, founder of Alpha Architect and ETF Architect, shares his lessons from growing his businesses and discusses the rapid growth of ETFs. He talks about the struggles of value investing, identifying when a factor no longer works, and the pros and cons of sector neutral value investing.

Matthias Hanauer, factor investing researcher, discusses two of his research papers: 'Honey I Shrunk the Factor Zoo' and 'Resurrecting the Value Premium'. They also talk about the state of value investing and share interesting charts that provide context. The episode provides insights on approaching research topics, innovating in factor research, and the challenges faced by researchers. The performance of the value factor and the importance of past realized returns are also discussed.

Lawrence Cunningham, one of the world's leading experts on Berkshire Hathaway and Buffett and Munger, discusses Charlie Munger's life, investment career, core principles, and legacy. Topics explored include his journey and intellectual capacity, investment dynamics and Munger's quotes and wisdom. They also discuss attracting a high-quality shareholder base through candor and humility, the importance of compounding and avoiding interruptions, and Munger and Buffett's investment philosophy.

Retiring fund manager Joel Tillinghast, with an impressive track record, discusses his approach to finding undervalued stocks, lessons learned from Peter Lynch, evaluating value investments, the impact of technology on stock picking, and navigating inflation in investing.

Bloomberg's index construction expert, Athanasios Psarofagis, takes a deep dive into popular market indexes. Topics include the details of how indexes like S&P 500 and NASDAQ are built, the Russell and S&P value and growth indexes, and how index construction impacts investor returns.

Jim O'Shaughnessy, founder of O'Shaughnessy Ventures, discusses his transition from factor investing to venture capital. He talks about the current state of factor investing, his approach to venture capital, and the attributes of successful founders. They also touch on custom indexing as a new asset class, the potential of podcasting as a massive industry, and the value of embracing mistakes as learning opportunities.

Warren Pies and Fernando Vidal from 314 Research discuss their systematic macro process, treasury issuance, Fed policy, changing correlation between stocks and bonds, drawdown prediction model, and outlook for housing. They also emphasize the importance of commodities in macro research and share insights on the challenges in the housing market and implementing their drawdown risk model.

Asterozoa Capital CIO Joe Hegener discusses the basics and current state of the credit market, the potential refinancing wall, and the fundamental criteria he looks at when evaluating companies. They also discuss the limitations of passive investing in credit, the importance of bifurcating the cyclical and secular horizon in macro analysis, and the process of analyzing distressed businesses. They touch on the benefits of ETFs and the challenges of using AI models in investing.

Meng Wang, a PhD student at Georgia State University, analyzes and quantifies self-attribution bias among fund managers using ChatGPT. He discusses his research process, findings, and their implications for investors. The episode also explores the benefits of using prompts in modeling, visual analysis of corporate images, and the advantages of non-native English speakers in language systems.

Eric Crittenden, expert in all weather investing, discusses the case for an all weather strategy, challenges of looking different from the market, international diversification, leverage, and the characteristics of a good back test.