Flirting with Models

I am joined today by Benn Eifert, founder of QVR Advisors.  QVR specializes in managing option-based strategies and Benn describes what he does as volatility investing. We quickly wade into the deep end with this one.  Benn schools me on relative value investing and dismisses my favored mental model of style premia for what he prefers to call “the Star Wars framework.” We chat about volatility ETPs, their impact on the volatility landscape, and how the market has changed since February 2018.  And with some spectacular option-driven blow-ups in the last couple of years, I ask Benn for his guidance on how he would think about due diligence in the space. Finally, while Benn deals exclusively with institutions at QVR, I get his thoughts on how volatility investing might play a role for individual investors.  We go deep with this one.  So let’s dive in.

In this episode, I sit down with good friend Adam Butler, Chief Investment Officer of ReSolve Asset Management.  Rather than take the usual interview style, we thought it would be fun to just sit down at a bar without an agenda and just record the stuff we would have been talking about anyway. With drinks in hand, we dive into a conversation that covers topics ranging from machine learning to analytical derivations of the correlation between trend following signals to the role of defensive strategies in a portfolio. We hope you enjoy.

"How do you come to a rational conclusion as to what a company is worth?"  A seemingly simple question with little-to-no clear answer. For John Alberg, a background in computer science and a passion for machine learning led him to view the problem through the lens of data.  "If it is true that you can use publicly available information to buy companies for less than their economic worth," he thought, "then you should be able to see it in the data." And thus was born Euclidean, an investment firm that marries machine learning with a deep value mentality. Our conversation spanned more than 2.5 hours and covered everything from the basics of machine learning, to the evolution of Euclidean's approach over the last decade, to the implications of adversarial examples in neural networks. This podcast, an abridged version of our conversation, picks up the thread mid-way through, where I have asked John to expand upon his experience with his startup, Employease, and how it influenced his value-based thinking at Euclidean. I hope you enjoy.

Today I am speaking with Jack Vogel, co-CIO of boutique ETF issuer Alpha Architect. I’ve known Jack for some time now and was particularly excited to bring him on the show for two reasons. The first, which you will quickly learn in the episode, is his near encyclopedic knowledge of investing literature. I’ve met few investors who have both the breadth and depth of recall that he does for both academic and practitioner studies. The second was because he helps manage a momentum strategy. Almost every investor has, at one time or another, at least perused the pages of Graham’s Intelligent Investor and value investing is considered by most to be as wholesome as Warren Buffett drinking a Coca-Cola while eating apple pie. Momentum, on the other hand, is often disregarded as performance chasing nonsense, with little foundation in the realm of real investing. Yet, as you’ll find in our conversation, deep care and thought goes into both understanding the anomaly itself and constructing a portfolio that can efficiently attempt to capture it. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jack Vogel.

  In this episode, I am joined by JD Gardner, founder and managing member at Aptus Capital. In his time in the industry, JD has served in the role of associate financial advisor, analyst to a deep-value equity fund, and analyst at short-term, systematic, managed-futures fund. These varying experiences have mixed to culminate into JD's ultimate philosophy: it's all about the investor's return, not the investment return. I like to say, "No pain, no premium" as pithy shorthand for the notion that long-term outperformance requires short-term pain along the way. For JD and the team at Aptus, their funds are first and foremost governed by the question of achievability. For them, the contest is not in the theoretical purity of your factor exposure, but rather whether the investor can stick around long enough to harvest it. A theoretically sub-optimal solution can be best if it helps the investor bridge the behavior gap. In light of this philosophy, the team at Aptus has launched two strategies. We discuss their Fortified Value index, one of the more unique spins on value investing that I have come across. Not only does the strategy aim to employ a measure of value that leads to greater investor returns, but it also rolls out-of-the-money put options in effort to protect the portfolio against sudden, short-term declines in value that may otherwise invite client misbehavior. Classic Graham and Dodd value this is not. But for some, JD argues, a much more achievable alternative.

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.

In many ways, the topic of conversation for this episode revolves around what ultimately amounts to a fairly vanilla, almost-index like  portfolio. The asset class in question, however, may verge on the exotic for listeners with less fluency in the field of derivatives. My guest is Eric Ervin, President and CEO of Reality Shares, and he has joined me to discuss their flagship ETF DIVY.  I would argue that DIVY is one of the few exposures that fits the definition of both being liquid and alternative.  By tapping into the OTC market, Eric and his team build a portfolio of 1-to-5 year dividend swaps, which have historically earned investors a unique return known as the dividend risk premium. Eric’s confidence to bring such a unique product into the market was borne from his experience as an advisor, where he utilized alternatives extensively with his clientele.  Learning more about this experience in evaluating alternatives and the mental framework he used that allowed him to allocate upwards of 50% of client portfolios to alternatives is where we begin our conversation.

This episode I chat with Toby Carlisle, a managing member at Carbon Beach Asset Management and author of popular value investing books such as Deep Value and The Acquirer’s Multiple.  Toby’s approach to value investing evolved from his observations as a corporate lawyer in Australia during the burst of the dot-com bubble.  Watching investors target cash-rich, business poor dot-com companies confused his traditional, discounted-cash flow mentality.  But after watching these activists get their hands dirty, Toby realized that even bad companies can be attractive if they’re trading at a deep discount to liquidation value. We navigate a wide range of topics, including uses and limits of quantitative investing in the realm of special situations, how Apple can be a deep value stock, and why using the opposite of your signal to build a short book might be a bad idea.  

My guest in this episode is Adam Butler, Chief Investment Officer at ReSolve Asset Management. Adam's story is the near quintessential example of my belief that every investor's approach is colored by their experience. From nearly blowing up his firm's omnibus account at his first job, experiencing the tech wreck first hand, and going all in on the commodity and emerging market super cycle narrative, it took "three frying pans to the face" – his words, not mine – to finally rebuild his mental framework from the bottom up. The evolution of his thinking ultimately lead him to embrace what he believes is the ultimate gift: embracing uncertainty in strategy specifications as a means of exploiting the benefits of diversification.