Stocks More Attractive Than Alternatives: Bill Miller

at Bloomberg dot com. We are so lucky, Paul Uh to be able to have the opportunity to sit down with Bill Miller, legendary investor widely respected for his ability to outperform the SMP five hundred with his like Mason Value Trust for fifteen consecutive years, an unheard of track record, and he joins us here currently chairman and Chief Investment Officer of Miller Value Partners with two billion dollars of assets under management. So Bill, thank you for being with us.

I want to start with this idea of out performance because you have achieved that, and I'm wondering as people talk about Bill Gross, for example, talking about how it's increasingly difficult to outperform in an era of indexed funds, do you agree. I think it's always been difficult to

to outperform. In fact, when Warren Buffett set up his partnership in the nineteen fifties, he said that he would consider a good result if he could outperform the Dow Jones Industrial Index and pointed out that I think there might have been eight or eighty five mutual funds at the time, and only about five percent of those had been able to do that over the past ten years.

So it's always been difficult. I think it's it's trickier now a little bit, not because of index funds, but because of the changed i'd say polarity of the market after the financial crisis, and specifically that the financial crisis was so devastating to so many people that that effectively people are risk and volatility phobic, and so whenever there's a perception of increased risk or the stock market volatility goes up, everybody rushes to quote reduce their risk exposure,

and that leads to these kind of cascading events like we saw in the fourth quarter. Well, but we've seen a tremendous move towards passive investment across the investment horizon. Maybe that was accelerated a little bit by some of the things come out of the financial crisis. Is that a trend you expect to continue or do you think there's a day for active advisers. I know, I think

the trend is likely to continue. I saw a study, but I think Mercer that UH indicated that the market could still performance functions of price discovery if even if over seventy percent of the market stock market we're indexed.

And I think the trend is you know, it's it's long standing UM and I think it's there for a good reason, which is that UM, it's very difficult to outperform and be so many people that are trying to outperform are afraid of tracking error going away from the market, especially in the downside that they're effectively closet indexers, so they're they're basically high priced passive investors. And so the movement isn't so much from active to passive, it's from

expensive passive to cheap passive. Well, it seems like that's a no brainer as to what people would want. You know, you talked about how it's always been hard to outperform, and yet you did so for more than a decade's rate with your fund. What's the secret please reveal it right now, you know I think that that, Um, I'll answered slightly different ways. It in two different ways, right, the way in which we invest and people cannot perform

a wide read different strategies. But we're value investors, and so we're looking to buy businesses at a discount or what they're worth. And I'd say that the secret is that the earnings have very little to do with what they're worth. Probably the best example is Amazon, where people for fifteen or eighteen years would say, oh, it's grossly

over priced because they make no money. And my answer to that was My answer to that was always, well, they came public with a four hundred million dollar market value and now they have an eight hundred billion dollar market value and they never sold any stock. Where where'd that value come from? And the answer is that they created a lot of value. They just didn't didn't report

a lot of profits under gap accounting. And one of the one of the things that I try to impress upon people is there's a reason it's called generally accepted accounting principles and not divinely inspired account of principles or accurately conceived the counting. Well, it's interesting as you talk about how the amount of money that they actually are bringing in any given time isn't necessarily what the company

is worth. Interesting to say this at a time when Lift it just started trading, and we have all of the I p O is the big tech tour links that are slated to go public later this year. Do you think that that's a similar situation to Amazon or do you think it's different because they waited for so much longer and they're coming it's sort of a peak market valuation time. You know, I don't. I haven't looked

at Lift carefully enough to have an informed judgment about it. Um. I think all of those companies that you're talking about are are very rapidly growing companies doing something different from what other people had done ten or twenty years ago, and so they generated a lot of excitement because they've grown revenues very rapidly. It's it's less clear to me what the economic model of the business is sustainably longer term. So, but we've had some tremendous volatility, you know, just over

the last four or five months. That meltdown in December, you know, I guess hitting the trough Christmas Eve and then there's a great start to twenty uh nineteen with the SMP up over twelve percent. What is your view of the market right now? Oh, I think the market you know, we're gonna end the quarter up somewhere twelve um. I think the market is very attractively priced relative to alternatives. You know, the bonds, you what two point four percent something.

Let's they trade at forty times a cash flow stream that isn't gonna grow, and stocks trade around sixteen times forward earnings and with a cash flow stream that's gonna grow around six percent, generating a lot of free cash. So I don't think I don't think that the alternatives two stocks are particularly attractive. And I think that stocks, by the way, are are actually cheap well explay. There are a lot of stocks out there that are very cheap and that um that I think are going to

do very very well in the United States. Oh yeah, yeah, names yeah, Well, well, Amazon is still twenty percent off the high and if you look at a w S Amazon Web Services, and you look at the advertising business that they've just recently been growing those two businesses alone

in about three and a half years. If they're valued similarly to what Facebook and Google were valued at when they were in the high growth phase or that um, something like uh Salesforce is currently valued at those two businesses alone will be worth more than Amazon's entire market account. What about the banking sector because we've seen them really beaten up based on the narrowing yield curve and fears of growth. If stocks still look good, then that means

growth isn't that bad? Attract evaluations there? Oh? Yeah, yeah, we love what we love the financials broadly speaking, but we young you know, we own JP Morgan, um, we do Bank America. Are you adding here? We have we have full positions in those. If we didn't have them,

we would be buying them here. Yeah, what are some of the other Is there any sector that just scares you right here that whether from a valuation perspective, you just you can't get your hands around the fundamentals because it seems like again with a twelve percent move here and yes and P has been pretty broad performance here, I think that you abilities and consumer staples are unattractive

in here. They're trading high valuations relative history. That's because they're they're low volatility, they're predictable, and so they perform a risk mitigation function in many people's portfolios. But in terms and and so obviously if we if we have a deflation, if if the world gets a lot worse,

they'll continue to do fine. But I think we're going to settle in here to a one point eight percent to two point one percent growth rate, and and they're not competitive in that in that kind of an environment. There seems to be a real kind of dissonance in the market right now because there are a lot of people saying that US equities are still very attractive, But then you also have bonds that are gaining dramatically, yields dropping and indicating some sort of downturn slow down. Do

you think that those two ideas are incoherent? That basically, you can't have bonds continuing to rally with yields continuing to go lower with stocks still ripping higher. Well, I's put it in a little broader content. X SO bonds had a thirty five year bull market from night one too, roughly with two thousand and thirteen fourteen right, and so

bond bonds are in a bearer market right now. Bond yields bottomed in two thousand and sixteen so at one one thirty eight, I think and uh, and so now we're at two thirty two forty, So yes, they've rallied from where they were last year. But I think that you know, if you look at stocks, stocks are a lot higher than they were in two thousand and sixteen. So I think that stocks and that's the reason for

that is that stocks are more attractive than bonds. And and bonds will protect you on uh, you know if if we have a recession, but um, they're not going to help you. If growth just chugs along at one and a half or two percent, you're gonna gradually lose money in bonds over time. You mentioned the R word recession. What is your view of this inverted yield curve and how much concern should investors have as it relates to potentially recession? Very little? Um, you know, people are you're

not thinking about? I think the yield curve in a in a way that reflects what's going on there. So you've got you've got ten trillion dollars worth of sovereign bonds of negative yields, and you've had this financial repression, whether it be Japan buying half of the j g B s or what DROG did or what the U s FET has done, so that that has suppressed yields globally and uh and actually us the yields in the

in the US I think are reflective of that. And also to emphasize again, the financial crisis change people's perceptions of risk. So here we are at the Game conference. They're all these students here who are looking to go into the business. What advice would you give a budding young professional looking to go into finance right now? Well, I think you know, finances. Actually this is not uh,

something that I think people are happy up to. Finance has been gradually gaining market share in the global economy for a long time, and it changes the where the where the you know, where the action is, so that you know, right now the action is in VC and

startups and things like that. Maybe maybe hedge funds, not in mutual funds, which you're in secular decline, But I'd say that I'd say the most important thing is get in, you know, get a job in finance, and once you're in, then it's easier to move around to something that might be more attractive. But as it management is still an attractive career. Yes, yeah, it's it's it's a good business.

It's a business it's under secular pressure for the reasons I talked about, which is the move to passive uh for example. And uh. And I think there's you know, there's it's it's highly regulated. So that's that's a negative in my in my opinion. But but no, it's it's an attractive business. It's interesting you mentioned regulation, and obviously a significant layer of regulation came upon the financial services industry after the financial crisis. Is that just the new

way of life? Already? Think that the you know, as time moves on, some of those regulations may peel off this industry and will allow maybe improve the profitability of the financial services industry. Um. You know, I think I agree with Jamie Diamond. Uh. And when when Jamie said it's it's not a question of more or less regulation, it's a question of good or bad regulation. So I think we want to get rid of bad regulations and

good regulations we can have more of those. Bill Miller, thank you so much for all the time you've given us. We really appreciate it. Bill Miller is chairman and chief investment officer at Miller Value Partners. With two billion dollars under management. But Bill Miller, legendary investor, he outperformed his leg basin value trust outperformed the SMP five hundred benchmark for fifteen straight years. It can be done. It's difficult, It's always been difficult, but Bill Miller has done it well.

Today we are closing out what is shapes up to be the best quarter performance for the SMP five hundred since two thousand nine. The question a lot of investors have is what's left to help. We're gonna pose that question to our next guest, Kate Moore, Kate's chief equity strategist for black Rock with get this assets on the management's Lisa six trillion with a T. It's just amazing. Uh. Kate joins us here at in New York at the ninth annual Quinnipiac Game Conference here in midtown. K thanks

so much for joining us. So I'll put that question to you. God, we've had such a run here this first quarter. I think the bulls will tell you yeah, but we're just kind of clawing back what we lost in the fourth quarter last year. How do you see it? Glass half full or half empty? Uh? Glass neutral? At the moment. Look, as an equity investor, I think you always have to be a little bit of an optimist and you have to really look for long term opportunities.

But I'll be honest with you, as much of a bull as I've been over the last ten years this cycle, I have to say the run that we have in the fourth first quarter is gonna be really difficult to replicate in the second quarter. So much of the returns, not just in the US equity market, but across all regions have really been driven by multiple expansion and not

so much about an upgrade of fundamentals. So I am very focused as companies are reporting their first quarter earnings for more positive guidance and for sort of a sense that the downward revisions we've had to two thousand nineteen expectations are kind of behind us. We're not gonna get another big multiple snap back like we had um in terms of multiple expansion this year. So so Lift Chairs, I should just mention because we've been talking about this

throughout the day. Lift shares did open up for trading on the Nasdaq. They opened at eighty seven dollars and twenty four cents to share, a huge pop from the seventy two dollars uh that it was initially priced at yesterday when it had its I p O And I just wonder, Kate, this will be viewed as a huge win for the slate of I p O s that are lined up for later in this year. I'm thinking Pinterest, I'm thinking Uber, I'm thinking Palin here all these big

tech darlings. Do you view this as a positive sign or a negative sign for equity markets? I think there's an almost insatiable demand for tech companies. What we need to see is that all the companies that come to market end up becoming profitable and not just good stories or have a good consumer base to begin with. This is a story about sustainability. At this point in the cycle.

We're not in the early stages where at the later stages, you know, once we get you know, these shares treating, it's going to be a show me moment, I say, over the coming quarters. So I'm not going to comment specifically on LIFT, but to say, you know, we are long term roles on technology. We see a lot of these companies coming to market. It's kind of broadening the landscape for that sector. But we really want to see them earn good money and earn it through slower growth periods.

Can you imagine that that's actually something that investors care about making money? I mean, he's sitting in I don't know if Kate was in the New York lunch or there's probably hundreds of investors. I wonder if people were

really pushing back on the profitability. It doesn't seem the lack thereof the lack thereof the lack thereof So okay, you know, one of the things that's been driving the market this year and arguably pushed it down in the fourth quarter last year, or some of the not non earnings things, some of the geo political issues, you know, and one of the things is trade for example. So I mean, I know, we're our folks are over in China right now. How important is that still to the

market to get something done with China, something meaningful. I think it's incredibly important. And here's what I would say. We've had a real repricing of the US China risk, not just the tension around trade, but also the overall relationship between the two countries. You know, in the last three months, certainly that was a downward pressure on the market in the fourth quarter. We don't want the market

to become complacent about this though. Uh. If we get an agreement that's not substantial or that doesn't really dig get some of the deep issues between the two countries, then we're going to be constantly revisiting, um the relationship and trade for many quarters to come. So look, as I think about the next couple of weeks, Uh, we need to see something that is you know, more than surface.

We need to see something that's more sustainable. It seems that both the US and China are looking to sit at the table together for sustained periods of time, So that's encouraging. But if something doesn't manifest, I'd say the left tail on this trade is pretty big, um, and you could see some of the steam come out of the market, all right, So that potentially could be a

wild card. I'm curious about a call that you made recently in a report that you helped call her where you still see a value in having a substantial allocation to government bonds even at yields that are this load. Do you stand by that? Why? Look, this is about overall portfolio construction, like look on an equity strategist, but I come from a macro background, and I understand that at this point in the cycle you need to have

a pretty good balance between risk and reward. And uh, we're recommending still an overweight to equities and to US and emerging market equities in particular, but also to sort of balance out your portfolio by saying, you know, it makes sense to own treasuries at this point in both the business and a market cycle. Where like, what ma Charity, So we've had a pretty big move in the last week and have two weeks so no value is a little less exciting than it had been. So she's saying,

short en up. That's basically yeah, that is exactly what I'm saying, Um, you know that, and that this move actually says, you know, sending different signals to different risk, ASCID markets, etcetera. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't own treasure rays as a balance the to the equity part. Given the dovish tilt by the FED, we've seen a lot of the risky assets performed well, the high old bonds, emerging markets. What is your view on some of that

pushing out on the risk curve a little bit. Given the performance that we've had you know, it's frustrating a little bit because you think about the last decade and we've wanted to get to a period where the market was obsessing less about fed moves, fed language, fed body language and and all sorry yeah, and overall central bank tone. And you know, the frustrating thing here is that we are still incredibly focused on every bit of news we

get from policymakers. There was a former boss of mine that used to say, uh, markets stop panicking when policymakers start panicking. And I think that's what we've had a little bit over the last three to four months. The shift to dovishness has made markets feel more confident. But I would sort of note, you know, we don't we don't expect we're going to be in a contraction in the US economy or the global economy. We're still in

pretty good shape. And I think the balance of risks around the next rate move UH is not being appreciated by the market. That's a nice way of saying the markets pricing and cuts when we don't think that's likely in the near term. Kate, since we are here at the Quinnipiac Game Forum with all of these students here, what advice would you give someone starting out in finance. Yeah, I think the biggest piece of advice I would give is to stay really open minded. Our industry is changing.

The way that we invest today is so different than we did it ten years ago or twenty years ago. Uh, the kinds of information we incorporate into our investment process. Uh, the flexibility you need to have. And so you know, I'm completely blown away by how many students are here and their passion for investing already. UM, but as if they think about their careers, they need to stay really open minded. UM as this industry changes. I've pivoted a couple of times. I'm sure I still will in the

balance of my career. UM. And to be really willing to sort of disrupt your own process. Don't get stuck on analyzing a stock or an asset class in a very specific way. Be really will to take into new information. Kate Moore, we always love having you on. Thank you so much for being with us. Kate Moore is chief was equity strategist for Black Rock with nearly six trillion dollars of assets under management. Boy, the SMP is up

year to date. It seems like you know everybody's making money, but one sector of the market that is just getting cloberts healthcare just news, you know, I guess most recently news that the Trump administration is renewing is it's pushed to eliminate obombacare. To get a sense of kind of what is going on in healthcare and how to view the sector going forward, to welcome Aaron Gibbs. Aaron is a portfolio manager at SMP Advisory Services. She joins us

here in New York at the Quinnipiac Game Conference. Aaron, thanks so much for joy us. So this seems like a secular concern and overhang for this sector. How should investors approach healthcare? So what you really need to do is break it down in between the industries, because a few of the industries are what's really dragging down the

entire sector, specifically all the managed care companies. So your company is like your stevs and um uh senting anything that has a lot of exposure to Medicaid that's been really hurt um. Now, there are some areas like biotech that are really don't have so much to do with the big headlines. It's more about, you know, failing drug trials. So it's it's tough to say that. You know, this is all of healthcare at the sector is just getting

hurt by the headlines. UM. A couple of weeks ago, they were actually being helped by some of the Medicare for All on the Democratic side. So we've got this whiplash constantly going back and forth. Ultimately, that leads to a lot of uncertainty about any managed care providers. I'd say the one safe spot for most of it is big pharma. Uh. They are just slow and steady. Their profits tend to be so large that they're not going to be massively hit by changes in Medicare or you know,

a few million people here they're subscribing. Uh. And so that is one safety area. And another area that we still like are the life sciences, the technology, the analytics. UM. Again, people are still going to be using those products, and that's one area of really high growth that hasn't been hit even half. It's hard. Yeah, I understand the reluctance to bed on policy and politics. It seems like that is a rather fickle type of assessment. But here we

are the health insurance industry. Health insurance stocks have lost about forty billion dollars of market value in the past month based on some of the news that we've been hearing. At what point do you say, all right, this is pricing in a lot of bad stuff. It kind of seems like a buy right now. So not right now, and so particularly looking at any of the health insurers managed care that that entire group um right now, we don't see a bottom just yet. Certainly the valuations were

looking interactive. They're trading well below their three year averages. In fact, the actually the health insurers have the second highest expected earnings growth out of the healthcare sector. So fundamentally, at least the expectations still to date are looking very good. But obviously that can change dramatically if any of these come into play. So I'd say until some of the uncertainty, until some of these headlines start dying down, we can

still see some more downside. I would not say that this is necessarily the point to get in, uh, particularly those companies that have large exposure to Medicaid. It's interesting least a quota that forty billion dollar number. I was actually taken aback about how much some of the sectors within healthcare have actually traded off on this concern that there might be a rollback of Obamacare because with the Democrats now controlling the House, it just didn't seem very likely.

But the markets certainly put some some stock into that. Well, I mean a lot of it was just sort of the decline that we had in the beginning of March, so that was just more of the general market. If you just looked at the past week where this has actually become part of the headlines, it's really just the managed care that has been down in the past five days. So if you break it down between like market, what some markets going on in healthcare, it's it's really just

been the past. It's been the managed care companies, biotech, pharma, a lot of these companies, life sciences. They've actually been holding up pretty well for the past five days. You know, you talked about biotech and how it can be really hit or miss right depending on a lot of these trials. How do you even assess that unless you've got you know, a doctorate in US in in research and medical research.

I mean, and even then, uh so, truthfully, so we we are value investors and I also have a quantitative background. So yes, biotech is actually one area that I tend to avoid because how can I possibly manage or estimate or value rate in the company when they're supposed to lose money for three years and then babe, they hit

it big. So yeah, I actually think this is one area that I I highly recommend that it needs to be a fundamental analyst really with a PhD. Actually have a couple of friends that are in that space that all have PhD and D it's crazy exactly, and so they're the ones that I go to advice when it comes to biotech, not a quant like me. So I'm not going to give any DIK stock picks on bios.

What's interesting, you know, one of the other themes, And I agree that's it seems like a casino on those biotech stocks, you know, kind of a We saw Biogen just with their Alzheimer's drug a couple of weeks ago with the stock yeah and that and that pulled down the entire industry for that week, right, So it's very difficult.

One of the other big themes in healthcare that's just been there as long as I've looked at the sector's m and a um, you know, we see you know, going after big farmer companies buying biotech, buying drugs, buying pipe pipeline. Is that still a theme that you think is prevalent for this healthcare sector going forward. I know a lot of big farmer has stopped, has been pulling back. UM. You know, they they're somewhat saturated than some of the

M and A. They're being more particular. UM. Also a lot of biodects of finding that they're able to raise enough money in private equity in order to I p O eventually until they have a viable product line. So I don't see that as being as big of a trend UM with with the big pharmaceuticals UM. What I do see more is the life sciences UH, the analytics, medical equipment UM, basically taking some of the human element out UH and creating those processes. I see that as

a big area of growth. We're talking with Aaron Gibbs, portfolio manager focused on equities for SMP Investment Advisory Services here at the ninth annual Quinipiac Game Conference and just give you a sense we're ending the quarter on a high note. The NASDAC up about a half a percentage point, SMP closing out. It's best quarterly returned since two thousand and nine. A lot of people wondering how long this

can go on. Aaron, I would love to get your sense on a broader level of whether there is a sense of optimism and whether the technicals seem to indicate that this has staying power. So one of the things we looked at is that when you've had these really great first quarters, what was happening in the year before and the thing and you need to take this into context, and the big thing is that fourth quarter of last

year we were down. So when you're this is really a rebound quarter, it's not about oh, this is such a great economy, we're growing us a fast right, it's just undoing the carnage that happened in the prior quarter. And when we look at the forecast for this year, particularly when we're looking at two and a half profit growth for the SMP five, that's below mediocre. So I mean,

how much you you mentioned a profit growth? I mean there's a concern here that obviously the first quarter earnings we know across will not be good second quarter also, so you might have that earnings recession that people talk about. Yet people a lot of investors are hanging had on improvement in the second half of the year. Are you

in that camp as well? Certainly, I mean we're looking at contraction in the first half, so I mean i'd certainly hope that we'd at least start to see some growth in the second half and at least end up somewhat neutral. But for for the most part, are our expectations are tempered. We're not saying that we're looking for a recession or unnecessarily a down market, um, but given that we're already up twelve and a half percent this year,

I don't maybe we'll end today. I honestly, I'd be happy if we could just go home like flat for the rest of the year. Just lastly, I want to wrap up here with the lift I p O. It does seem like it his position to open at eighty six dollars a share from the actual I p O price of seventy two, so a real nice pop there. It hasn't started trading yet, but that seems to be the indications. Do you view the sort of roster of I p O s that are slated to come to market this year is a good sign for just the

health of the economy, etcetera. Or do you view it as a sign of the market peak in general? If we're having more more companies come to market, I think that's a good thing. I'm personally I do not recommend investors get into LIFT, but overall for general markets purrective, certainly, I think that's very healthy, much better than what we've been seeing in prior years. Aaron Gibbs, thank you so

much for being with us. A pleasure having you. Aaron Gibbs, portfolio manager focused on equities for SAP Investment Advisory Services in New York City. You know what, we have a lot of guests on who talk about the future of finance and what it might look like, the asset management fields, the investment banking business. There's no better way to get a sense of that to look at the people who are going to be running everything UH in the future.

And so we are very pleased to be joined by students of Quinnipiac Business School, as well as the Dean and Professor of Finance at Quinnipiac School of Business, Matthew O'Connor, students, John Wentz Alessandra Abbess, thank you all for joining us. Matthew, I want to start with you about this conference, which is organized by students. If I understand this correctly, what do you think is the most important thing that they get out of it? So well, first of all, thanks

for having us on this morning. We really appreciate it, and I want to welcome everybody to the quinnipi x ninth Annual Game Forum. So there's a couple of things that we think are great about game and what students really get out of it. The first is we're getting them out of the classroom and in front of the very best minds on Wall Street, and that is an incredible learning opportunity for them. So they can compare what they've learned in the classroom and see that it's not

always exactly the same. And they also see that there's a wide range of opinions that are expressed throughout the panels and the sessions. So that's a great learning opportunity for them. But the second thing that's just as important is there's about students here and so they're starting to make their network and build their network to make connections with each other. So we think that's the second most

important thing about the Game conference. Networking. You can never start early nothing networking exactly exactly here it starts a kindergartens exactly. So, Alessander, you are a senior, is that right? Yes? Okay, so he's a senior majoring in finance. Uh. What is your area of interest here today? What do you want to hear? What do you want to see? What do you want to understand? I'm really interested in seeing more UM and hearing more about the global portfolio management UM,

merging markets and domestic markets UM. I am the portfolio manager of the cunoopiak Endowmond offshoot student run portfolio. And uh, is that real money? Yes, that's a real money. It's two point five million dollars. Oh, that is real money. How you doing doing pretty well? Our growth fund is up on the year. And uh, John's gonna talk about a value portfolio. Oh yeah, we also have a value fund that we run. UM. It's larger, it's larger of the two funds. But UM compared to the sm P

it was up versus eleven for the SMP. So you know we're seeing out performance are both funds. So now it's going well and you're enjoying it. Well, one thing done. You're a finance major. Uh, and an accounting minor, And I'm wondering, at a time of such flux in the finance business, whether it's on the asset management side or on the banking side, how does that affect kind of

how you want to position yourself going into into the business. Um, you know, I mean obviously the market today for outgoing students going into this field and to finance, it's it's very competitive. You really have to know what you're talking about. You have to know you know what you're looking at, and you have to be able to speak, you know,

correctly and fluently. And um, I think it's gonna be I think it's gonna be difficult going and actually on that path and finding what I want to do and getting to the point where I want to be at. But you know, other than that, I think if I it just you know, knows to the grind song like I've been doing, and you know, like the like the work that Alessandra and I've been doing, I think that will ultimately reach my goal of you yep, So so

diet O'Connor. You know, it seems like when I you know, back in my day, it was all about Wall Street, all about business school, and now it's tech text, the sexy cool thing that a lot of kids going engineering and all the kind of how are the business schools adapting? So I think they're adapting in a couple of ways. Uh so, absolutely right. Tech is critically important, but now all of our students are getting a much better grounding and in analytics, were introducing things like coding um into

the business school curricum. We're not expecting them to be expert coders, but we want them to be able to to understand that and contribute in their firms. So I think if we we take the traditional business education, it's still critically important, but layer on some of the new things, particularly analytics, particularly coding, bring in discussions about fintech. I think the students are gonna still be great contributors down the road. So, Alessandro, what's been the best performing bet

that you guys have paid in your portfolio? So, the best performing bets so far has been GW Pharmaceuticals. Okay, I actually pitched that last semester. We had a one twenty entry and we did a trim around. I think it was one s. It's it's I'd loved following that company at a real passion for it. I researched it a lot, and it's paid off straightly. So John's sitting in that seat about fifteen minutes ago, was the greatest value investor arguably of all time. Bill. Yeah, so Bill

Miller pick shoes. I guess in fifteen seconds, what was the best name so far in your portfolio this year? UM? Overall, todate. Microsoft has been a big name in our value portfolio year to date. UM. I believe that a lot of the tech stocks that we have in the value section UM are the outperformers. UM. I believe Microsoft. Your attention

to Microsoft being a value stock. Matthew O'Connor, Dean and Professor of Finance at Quinnipiac School of Business, John Wentz and Alessandra Abus, both seniors at the Quinnipiac School of Business, thank you all for joining us. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg P and L podcast. You can subscribe and listen to interviews at Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast platform you prefer. I'm Paul Sweeney, I'm on Twitter at pt Sweeney. I'm Lisa abram Woyit's I'm on Twitter at Lisa abram

Woyits one before the podcast. You can always catch us worldwide on Bloomberg Radio