Jonathan Ruffer is the founder of the eponymous asset management firm, a bold and successful investor (a combination unusual to survive, let alone thrive) and considers himself a financial historian. He remains the figurehead of the firm although has stepped back somewhat from the daily combat with markets. In this episode, he explains why he thinks the Yen could double, why the equities age is behind us, why inflation is here to stay and much more. And in a first for this podcast, Jonathan turn...
Mar 21, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 32
Emmanuel Lagarrigue is the Co-Head of Climate at KKR and in this fascinating discussion, he explains why he joined the firm and what they are seeking to achieve in financing the energy transition. He explains how KKR sees a gap in the huge $7tn pa investment needed to fund the transition between the early stage investments and the mature infrastructure-like renewables area. This middle area is not really served today and he explains where they see the greatest investment opportunities, why decar...
Mar 01, 2024•53 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Explaining what to expect from a new series of podcasts focusing on the investment opportunities (and risks) in the energy transition. With co-host, climate finance expert Huw van Steenis. Sign up for the newsletter.
Feb 22, 2024•6 min
Bill Browder is a human rights activist who championed the Magnitsky Act, signed into law by President Obama. It not only sanctions Russians, but others around the world. Similar legislation is now in place in over 30 countries. He is also a bestselling author and former hedge fund manager. In this episode, we talk about his career, about how he coped with a 90% fall in the value of his fund, about how he subsequently engineered a 37x recovery for the portfolio, about his deportation from Russia...
Feb 15, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 31
Grant Williams is a former hedge fund manager who now publishes the monthly newsletter Things that Make You Go Hmmm and a subscription-only investing podcast channel that incredibly is one of the top 0.5% of all podcasts globally. In this fascinating discussion, Grant explains his fascination for Japan and why we should all pay attention. We discuss US Treasuries, and why there is a risk that the current glut of supply could meet a dearth of buyers. And of course we talk about gold as well as ho...
Jan 18, 2024•1 hr 34 min•Season 1Ep. 30
James Aitken is an expert in the plumbing of the financial system. We go on a world tour of the hotspots in global finance. You will learn why James is relaxed about the US; why the Japanese government will Make Japan Great Again and why this could have serious repercussions for global bond markets; and why China will likely muddle through, in spite of massive problems in its property sector. Show Notes Behind the Balance Sheet is a fundamental investing podcast for serious investors. Each episo...
Dec 14, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 29
Sebastian Lyon is a conservative investor who manages two highly successful multi asset funds. His motto is simple over complex and he is intent on protecting the downside. In this interview, we discuss his views on markets (spoiler: not super bullish); how he built Troy into a significant asset management business from scratch; how he has managed his fund to deliver only 3 down years in 20 and create outstanding performance as a consequence; what he looks for in stocks; why he invests only in q...
Nov 16, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 28
Bill Smead has been in the investing business for over 40 years and has seen multiple cycles. He has an idiosyncratic investing philosophy which seeks to buy high quality stocks when they are out of favour. He has a concentrated portfolio of 26 stocks with 45-50% in the top 10 positions. Yet his holding period averages over 6 years. He explains why he thinks the stock market is going down over the next decade and offers his views on the stocks that will deliver great returns, focusing on demogra...
Oct 19, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Alec Cutler runs one of the best performing low risk global funds and has a pragmatic investing approach. In this interview, we discuss inflation and markets and what this means for stock selection. Alec explains his views on what makes for a successful investment team. And he explains the principles of investing he learned as a child from his grandmother, which still guide his investingframework today. Show Notes Behind the Balance Sheet is a fundamental investing podcast for serious investors....
Sep 21, 2023•1 hr 19 min
Guy Spier is a successful value investor and has spentconsiderable time creating an environment which will protect him and his fund from making mistakes through his own temperamental idiosyncrasies. He talks much more about environment design than valuation which is refreshingly different. We discuss why the best ideas are simple, yet analysts always want to impress with their understanding of complex situations. Guy talks about his university chums, David Cameron and Chris Hohn and why his fath...
Aug 17, 2023•1 hr 34 min•Season 1Ep. 25
Beth Lilly is a highly successful value investor and an amazing woman. She has set up two asset management firms, worked with and learned from some of the most famous and some of the most successful valueinvestors in the world, and now runs money for the multi-billion Pohlad family in Minnesota. We discuss the power of compounding, Beth’s research processand how she conducts company meetings. We disagree on the attractiveness of the auto dealership industry, and Beth explains how she approaches ...
Jul 20, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 24
William Green is the author of Richer Wiser Happier, an outlier in investing books as a best-seller. He is a craftsman and a perfectionist and having interviewed 40 of the world’s top investors for the book, has some fascinating perspectives on investing and on life. We split this interview into two parts. Last time we heard Green explain that the great investors are such thoughtful practical philosophers because they are students of life. Green quotes Munger who says that he watches what works ...
Jun 15, 2023•44 min•Season 1Ep. 24
William Green is the author of Richer Wiser Happier, an outlier in investing books as a best-seller. He is a craftsman and a perfectionist and having interviewed 40 of the world’s top investors for the book, has some fascinating perspectives on investing and on life. William spent five years painstakingly crafting the book and distilling his learnings from interviewing the world’s top investors. This was a labour of love for him – he didn’t take a vacation in that time – and he went to extraordi...
May 18, 2023•45 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Mario Gabelli is the billionaire founder of GAMCO and still managing money in his 80s. He believes in an in-depth research process, limiting his investments to the sectors he feels he understands. He believes in visiting companies – not just investees but their competitors and their whole value chain; in reading tradejournals; and in monitoring the results of the sector. The day after we spoke he was due to visit a company he first visited in 1967! Few investors active today were investing back ...
Apr 20, 2023•55 min•Season 1Ep. 22
Gavyn Davies is an economist and a former partner of Goldman, Sachs. He is the Chairman and co-founder of macro asset manager Fulcrum Asset Management and a co-founder of 3 other multi-billion asset managers. He is a former Government adviser and was Chairman of the BBC, the UK public service broadcaster. Of course we talk about economics, about investing, and about financial services; but we also cover public service broadcasting, streaming and politics. See the website for full show notes....
Apr 19, 2023•59 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Tian Yang was a fascinating guest and we covered a wide range of subjects. He explains why ChatGPT may be useful in solving accounting problems, but it produces gibberish when asked about investing. We talk about his work on the commodity super cycle, looking at rubber, whaling and fur. He explains how he applies quantitative techniques to the capital cycle framework championed by Marathon Asset Management and featured by Edward Chancellor. His work encompasses 3 different timeframes – the long ...
Apr 19, 2023•51 min•Season 1Ep. 20
Chris Bloomstran is best known for his incredibly detailed analysis of the valuation of Berkshire Hathaway. Not only is he an outstanding value investor, he is a highly accomplished analyst. His Semper Augustus annual letter runs at over 100 pages and in recent years, it has included an evaluation of Berkshire Hathaway – his analysis of the stock is the best I have read. In this interview, we discuss his start in the business, his investment approach, why college investment funds make a great ap...
Apr 19, 2023•1 hr 10 min
Dominique Mielle had an illustrious career as a distressed debt hedge fund manager, including building a $5bn CLO business from scratch at Canyon Advisors. She retired from hedge funds, wrote a book, amusingly titled Damsel in Distressed (it was too good not to borrow), about her story to inspire women to follow her lead. In this interview, she talks about why there are not more women in hedge funds and in investing more broadly; about the complexity of the distressed debt business; and about be...
Dec 30, 2022•56 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Vitaliy Katsenelson is an investor and writer. Born in Russia, he now runs an investment adviser in Denver which specialises in picking individual stocks and eschews the usual 60:40 portfolio with equities indexed. In this podcast we talk about investing, about his third book and about his life philosophy. Vitaliy has a wisdom beyond his years and his positive attitude can improve anyone’s life. An illustration of this philosophy is his belief that scarcity is an essential concept that enables h...
Dec 15, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 17
Barry Ritholtz hosts Bloomberg’s Masters in Business, one of the most popular business podcasts in the world. He rather modestly says he was one of the first. Ritholtz not only has managed to interview investing heroes like Ed Thorpe, Ray Dalio (twice) and Michael Lewis (four times) but also has built a $3bn wealth manager in just ten years. In this interview, Barry explains why financial TV is irrelevant, why the F.I.R.E. contingent (Financial Independence, Retire Early) have it wrong, why 70:3...
Nov 17, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 16
Carson Block is one of the world’s top short sellers, and one of few still managing a specialist fund. In this interview, Carson explains the business of short selling; the difference between fundamental shorting and his business of shorting and exposing frauds; how he spots these fraudulent companies; where to find frauds; and why it takes Muddy Waters 3 months to launch a short campaign. We discuss the economics of a short fund, why short selling is so much more difficult than long only invest...
Oct 20, 2022•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Sir Clive Woodward is a winner. He is best known for managing the England rugby team, taking them from world #6 to a world cup win. In this revealing interview, he explains that there is no difference between managing a sports team, a business or an investment team. It’s all about managing people. Winning teams are made up of winning individuals - you can persuade the individuals in a team to strive to improve performance and the team will benefit. He is a proponent of continuous learning, and h...
Sep 15, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 14
Richard Oldfield is a true value investor. Author of the delightful commonsense investing book, Simple but not easy, in this interview he recites several wonderful anecdotes from his long experience as a value investor. We even get a song (while Steve recites one of Richard's investment poems). Richard has an innate belief in the cyclical nature of markets and the madness of crowds. He is a classic contrarian investor and he came out with numerous gems about how to think in this way. Richard is ...
Aug 18, 2022•56 min•Season 1Ep. 13
Chris Pavese, President and CIO of Broyhill Asset Management, is a seriously thoughtful investor. We talk about how investing straddles left and right brain thinking, about whether the advantage of being located outside the bustling environment of a New York or London will continue to confer the same benefit in the days of Zoom, and about the benefits and joy of reading widely. Chris explains his investment philosophy, why he has fewer than 20 stocks in the portfolio, why the only research he bu...
Jul 21, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 12
We speak to Dan McCrum, the award winning FT journalist who exposed Wirecard as a fraud. Once a stockmarket darling valued at over €25bn, Wirecard crashed to worthless in June 2020, when its auditors could not confirm €1.9bn of cash. Dan pursued the story for six years and has now written a book about the saga. “Money Men” is an amazing account of how the company used every tactic possible to disguise its activities. This is an extraordinary tale and Dan, a brilliant raconteur, explains the high...
Jun 16, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Former Goldman, Sachs partner, Jim O’Neill (more properly, Baron O’Neill of Gatley), is best known as the man who coined the term BRICs. He correctly identified that this group of emerging markets would drive global growth and published a paper on it over 20 years ago. In this wide discussion, we talk about the BRICs, about why for the first time in 30 years of close study of the country, he is puzzled on Chinese policy, and what inevitably lower Chinese growth means for the global economy. Of c...
May 19, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Russell Napier and Jeremy Hosking discuss how the capital cycle will become an even more important driver of equity returns as we move into an age of financial repression. This series of macro episodes focuses on the changes we should expect in the new era, as we exit a 40-odd year period of falling rates, globalisation, cheap energy and disinflation. In this fascinating interview, these two giants of the investment world discuss the way forward, covering everything from banks to ESG, from Tobin...
Apr 21, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 9
In this wide-ranging interview, recorded before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chris Wood, Global Head of Equity Strategy at investment bank Jefferies, talks about his route to success, why he is bullish on energy stocks, some of his fun trades (long Ryanair, short Zoom), why he doesn’t use Zoom, how the pandemic has altered his approach and why his multi-million air miles account won’t get built up quite so much going forward. We cover the long-term outlook for the global economy, why the Fed ha...
Mar 17, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 8
In this interview, Dylan Grice and Rob Crenian discuss how markets work, how “stupid” investors have been winning of late but will not do so for much longer, how quants think, how real alpha will be more difficult to come by, and how this will likely be found not by being smarter but by doing something different; and they explain how they are seeking to preserve wealth with an unconventional investment strategy at Calderwood Capital. Full show notes here . Behind the Balance Sheet is a fundament...
Feb 17, 2022•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Former hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry is best known as the man who made 30% in 2008, when others crashed, including many so-called hedge funds. He described his cockroach mandate as being a survivor no matter what. He closed the fund in 2017 after a period of lackustre but far from shocking performance and has become a property developer and landlord of upmarket rentals on the billionaire favourite Caribbean hideaway of St Barths. But few owners of vacation lets could tell you what the 10 year b...
Jan 20, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 6
