Jan van Eck on Successful Thematic Investing

amusing to me. But eventually comes into the business, which was about a billion dollars in a u M and here it is, uh some twenty eight years later and they're up to fifty six billion dollars. He's the CEO and basically runs the shop with a team. It is an ensemble practice. They were very early into the world of e t f s and they do a lot of really interesting thematic funds. If you are all interested in international investments, or thematic investments or E s G investments,

then you're going to find this conversation to be quite fascinating. So, with no further ado, my sit down with my friend Jan van ef This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Jan van Eck. He is the CEO and director of Van Eck Associates, where he has worked since. Van Eck manages about fifty six billion dollars in assets, eight percent of which is in E t F S, for which the firm has won numerous awards. Jan van Eck, Welcome to Bloomberg.

Thank you so much. Garry. So you and I know each other um from a few different overlapping entities. Probably inside E t F S is the one that the entire sans Dashtan crew through Jim Wyant right through et F folks. Let's talk a little bit about your background. You work for a think tank, a newspaper, You go to law school, you get a degree from Stanford. What

were you doing wandering the fields for so long? Didn't you just think it was inevitable you're gonna end up in the business that coincidentally has your last name on it. Uh In my own mind, Barry Uh, No, I really had no idea what I wanted to do. I graduated with a degree in economics and from what was your undergraduate Williams College? Right? And so you come out with an econ of degree And doesn't that suggest business and

or finance or not does. But I did the minimum to get my degree an ECON, and I really enjoyed liberal arts. I took as many classes and I did something that, um, I think a lot of people should do and it's not done enough, which is audit classes. I mean, there's so much great stuff at at a college like Williams. So you know art, history, history, photography, philosophy, lots of things. You know, now people have a tendency to do that later in life. You did that when

you were nineteen and twenty. That's free. You know, you're sitting for a course for an hour or two during college, and you know you've already paid the tuition. So the professors love to have more students there at least, you know, in a smaller school. And today you can order classes from Yale or m I T or n y U or any one of a hundred schools online for free. Are you still doing that? Uh? Well, I love to listen to podcasts and and get information. Yeah. Maybe, all right,

we'll see, we'll see if they get together. Answer your question, right, Um, I didn't know what I wanted to do when I graduated, and you know that this great podcast I haven't read the book on the book range right, and and just experiment as much as you can when you're young. So I divide an internship at the Washington Post metrodesk. While I was in law school, I worked for a prosecutor one summer the UH in the Eastern District of New York.

I worked for a corporate law firm during M and A deals, interned in Germany one summer at a bank. I mean, just tried as many different things. But the the thing that triggered my love of business was actually working in Silicon Valley and would you work for Silicon Valley? I actually after Brookings, Um, that was the thing Tank I realized I did not I want to get too PhD in economics. Academia was not freean and so I put my stuff in a car and drove across country

and volunteered on the political campaign. Uh, we don't need to go into it. Um. It was a Senate campaign, and it was a losing Senate campaign. So but I learned a lot um and most importantly, I met some entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who I just loved the attitude of I try something, it doesn't work. I tried something else that went public. I'm doing all these different things.

Just that that creativity I didn't perceive. Even though I grew up in New York City area, you looking at the banks and going up the wrong of management, I did not perceive that level of creativity. So that's when I fell in love with business UM. And then you know, I decided to go back to that region for law school. It's lucky enough to get into Stanford UM. But that's that's which is a fabulous, fabulous school. That's a little

more than luck. That's good undergraduate grades, good recommendations, and a good else at score. Yes, are you a good standardized test taker? I must be, But we'll talk more about that later. So even as a son of a financier, your dad opened and launched Vanac Associates in you never assumed, well, I'll end up in investing in the family business one day. Look, it's a psychological thing. I can't go through about. Tell

you two things. The door was always open so my father and my father always said, do what you want to do, because your happiness is more important than you know whether this business UM is there or not. So how those things add up, I'll let for you know, third parties to decide. But you know, my my father

was very no pressure to come into the business. So one of the questions that I like to ask people who come from a family background in finance is what are some of your earliest memories about money and investing. Do you remember the first stock you ever bought? Or based on what you're saying now, you're not that guy who was running Eliminate stand to buy UM shares in ge when you were nine. You know, it's kind of interesting. I was never a portfolio manager, and I wasn't the

guy to buy shares. But you know, when I look back in high school UM, I would buy Coca Cola from distributors and resell them by the bottle. I worked, probably didn't have to work, so it's just a pure arbitrary service. Like said, there was something about wanting to do stuff to make money that was that was definitely early early on for me. Quite interesting. So Vanek was one of the first asset managers to offer US investors

access to international markets. How did that affect the company and how how much overseas and investment does Vanek currently do today? We're an American firm, based in New York, but we always have had a very international orientation. Not only was the first fund that my father launched in an international equity fund. The idea was to take advantage of the rebound in Germany and Japan after World War Two.

That was the investment thesis at least nineteen fifties. That was going to be Martiall plan and a whole European and Asian rebound right um and uh and cheaper valuations as well. We've heard that before or still again. Um so, so that was really the story, and so our perspective

has always been international. Also, you know he later flipped that fund into a gold fund, and resources investing is very international as well, whether at the time South for CO, Australia, Canada, You're always a majority of our perspective and assets were not not in the US. Quite interesting, you guys have

some really fascinating investment funds. The one you launched a few years ago, I I the Van Eck Vector's Video Gaming and E Sports et F, which I know is won a number of e t F awards Best Thematic ETF Best What was the thinking behind an E sports ETF? Well, uh, you know what we try to do is look from a longer term perspective, we don't want to just chase fads. Right, there's a lot of ETFs on micro themes, and give us an example on micro themes, and I mean that

you know, like lots of things. Healthcare industry, for example, has been sliced and diced into cancer drugs. And this so really narrow or or even like five G like I mean, it's it's it's an interesting thesis. But what happens when six G comes out? Then they'll change the name of the funds. Of course, there's always a solution once the ao M is in the door. But um, yeah, So so I try to take out like a five

or ten year view. And one of the things that's happening now so we've had the smartphone for ten years, is the virtualization of life. Virtualization meaning we exist in a a virtual world of software as opposed to in in meat space and social media. Right before you and I met in real life, I was listening to your podcast. I was you know, you and I have media. Although you're pretty uh pretty constrained, you're pretty low key on on the on the Twitter right, so so so entertainment

world just going through that revolution. First of all, as we get wealth are as a society, more people enjoy

sports entertainment, betting that that's a growth industry. But it's also transforming from the traditional you know, professional football, basketball, hockey into online gaming and the creation of teams competing against each other, and and that's just that could us continue to grow and their dimensions now right, it's not just the playing of the game, there's the watching of the game, and and there's the playing of those things

on YouTube and people watching games and now audience participation Barry is likely to happen right where you're watching a game, and as a spectator you can vote on the teams or advise them. I don't. I don't do that, so so let me ask there's a there's a longer term

future as so, so that blows my mind. My frame of references decades ago, when I was on a trading desk, one of my favorite things to do each Tuesday night was once everybody was done with their blodder and their P and L, which you had a save to a disk and then walk to the head trader's office. That's how long ago it was. The quote server would become a Quake server and all the traders would jack in and we would have this giant multiplayer game of Quake,

which was so immersive. I would look up and uh, oh, I'm in trouble. It's past ten o'clock. I've been doing this since for already, and I found it fascinating. I cannot imagine watching other people play games. This is going to be a giant, burgeoning industry. It is already, and I think the only thing that we don't know the story that hasn't been written as a monetization of all that traffic and crowds, so we we know that people are doing it. You know, way more people watch these

E Sports World Championships than right. I mean some of the kids kids, sorry, expression are making five five million bucks for for winning one of these things all the A lot of the owners of professional sports teams own e sports teams as well, so you know, it's a It's life is a racket, right, so the next next trend and having an et F just allows the rest

of us normal people to participate that trend. The other thing that's really worth noting is Asia is a It's a huge cultural thing in Asia, right, not just in China, but in South Korea and Japan end and it's just it's just big. Culturally, a lot of stuff is being their life is being lived online. That's amazing. Let's talk about something that I'm fascinated with, the Van Eck Vector's green bond e t F. The obvious question, what's a green bond? Well, uh so, green bond is very simple.

It is money raised by a company or a government that is supposed to go to improve operations that have a better effect on the environment. So bond by bond decision. It's not a company decision. So the dirtiest commodity company in the world could issue a green bond if it was improving it's processing to reduce the use of water for examp. So if you're a coal fired electrical plant and you want to raise money to transition to a natural gas would you consider that a green bond. So

it's not. Luckily, it's not us making this the determination. There's a third party that certifies these green bonds, and it's and it's a big source of financing. It's it's it's grown. And these have become pretty popular, haven't they, Or they're starting to ramp up they're starting to. I mean, our funds not not huge. Um. I think what people sometimes says, I want perfection in my alcohol it values based or E s G injustment and perfection doesn't exist.

There are tradeoffs in life. So the issue is okay, I get it, the environments getting better, but I may not like the issue, or it's a China government entity, or it's a polluter that or has some other kind of practices I might not like. So I mean, in the US, we have several environmental funds, and I think you have to stack those values and so we say, okay, if you care about the environment more than the other factors, then this is this is a good allocation for you,

for for E s G investors. The old maxim don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Can very much apply, can it? I think so? Right now it's hard to it's hard to figure out how to optimize everything. So let's talk about something that's not so green. Two of your biggest funds are the gold miners and the junior miners. I've and that's what about twenty billion dollars all told. I noticed back in the day that when there were signs of inflation or signs of deficits.

A lot of fund managers wanted an instant hedge on inflation, and so they would all pile into the junior miners. That behavior kind of changed when the g l D E t F came out. Why does anyone need the execution where managerial risk of a mine and its management team and expenses when you could just buy g LD and and there's your hedge. Am I oversimplifying that, or has has g l D as one of the biggest dtfs out there change the dynamic around the gold miners

and junior miners? Uh? Yes, But let me give you some more historical context. Right, So we've had two big commodity booms in my lifetime, in the nineteen seventies and then in the odds, and they were very, very different for the operating companies because in the nineteen seventies commodities gold went from thirty five dollars eight hundred dollars, oil went up, all that stuff, but the cost of manufacturing all those commodities did not change. So the companies were

like options. I mean, all all the revenue would go up and the costs really not go up. And so I mean the stocks were fabulous. I mean, so when the price of gold fund that we had in that decade would go up like a hundred hundred a year. We're gonna talk about that gold fund later. But the key is when the price of the commodities went up, the company generated a whole lot more earnings. Right. But now in this last cycle and the odds that was

not the case. The costs of manufacturing for a variety of different reasons, Um, the cost would go up as well, the manufacturing costs, So energy was growing, so that was an input to mind that it was a bigger factor. Uh, you have to dig way more dirt per ounce of whatever you're pulling out, whether it's gold or copper or whatever. So there's just a lot of different factors. So the last cycle there wasn't as much return leverage, which is what you're asking about as in the nineties seventies. So

now where are we today. Gold is hitting all time highs except in the US dollar. And I would agree with you, Uh, if you want a hedge against of the current monetary system and you're a little bit nervous about central bankers flying around in capes trying to fix every problem including the coronavirus. Then you probably want you know, several different hedges. You want gold mining shares, you probably want gold bullion, but you also want to look at bitcoin and that Oh yeah, so that is the that's

the alternative asset for the younger generation. I mean, coin base has between thirty and forty million US American American customers. How do you deal with the fact that's something like a third of all bitcoins that have ever been mined have either been lost in the terms of being misplaced or literally hacked in stolen. How do you how does an investor manage that? I or custody is a major

issue there. There are a couple of issues around bitcoin. Uh, Custody I think is being solved because you do have major institutions like Fidelity, uh, the New York Stock Exchange getting involved in offering bitcoin access having solved taken their custody issue away from you as far as you know, some way at what they call whales or people owning a lot of bitcoin or it being lost or whatever.

And then the background of the mining community are point and we've got a lot of slides on our on our website to show it is the diversification of ownership, trading, and mining is so much these days. I don't think it's a practical concern to say that this is one just manipulated market by one entity or something. I'm not saying it's manipulated. I'm saying people seem to be You know, when one out of three dollars or even if it's one out of four dollars in bitcoin seems to have vanished,

that kind of raises a question for me. Maybe it's still early days and a little bit of the wild West, and they'll eventually wrestle that into submission. But I think that's scared some people. All of these assets have their pros and cons right, I just say buy a basket, because if there is a being scared to the system, what's gonna go all we care about what goes up more. We don't know. Bitcoin could go up way more than

gold chairs or bal bullion. So if you can solve the custody issue for yourself, then I then I think I don't care about your concern. Quite interesting, Let's talk a little bit about the company that you joined in ninety two, and I want to focus on the era in the nineties seventies where your dad had an extremely prescient call into gold in a very inflationary era. What more than just being a pundit who said gold's going up, he made a giant bet on that tell us about it.

So my father started the firm in fifty five. He actually started it later in life, and so in the in the sixties, he had just gotten married. Um, he was just over fifty years old and he was getting a degree at night at n y U in economics, and one of his professors was an Austrian economist called Ludwig von Mises. And if you know anything, I mean he's famous, right, but Austrians were never really accepted into academia in the United States. Actually was not a full professor,

he was just sort of an adjunct. But anyway, my father they are sort of hardcore monitorists and they really focus on money, supply, money, you know, and it was basically, look, guns and butter were happening in the nineteen sixties, my supply was exploding and eventually that was going to break into inflation, and the way to make money off of

that was to invest in gold. Now, as you said, I really think it's amazing the risk he took at that point in time because gold had always been fixed against the U. S. Dollar for the entirety of history by the government. Yes, for almost two hundred years of our history, gold had been fixed. He said, this paradigm is going to break. And that's really the philosophy of our firm, which is you can't just look at the four corners of the financial markets. You have to look

at technology trends, political trends, and major economic trends. And and several years later, so he didn't have a lot of patients that that broke. By the way, for folks who may not be familiar with Ludwig van Miss, he's one of the most famous of the Austrians. A number of books and really well known. If you're more interested in more of that, just just go Google than Miss. But I'm fascinated by the gold trade. Your father puts

how much money into gold at that? Well, he's so he had an international equity fund and he went to Sharrel he said, I'm doing this, and he eight plus percent of the fund and buy gold mining shares. Now you couldn't buy gold, So that he was a little bit to your point before he was forced into buying the share no g l D and if you want to buy actual gold, you're buying futures and its leverage

in time future. Then that's right. You were talking seventies, so there really different exactly, So three quarters of a billion dollars more or less into gold or this was this was way before that. Oh my god, the fund was teeny How big was teeny? Oh? I mean it was way less than a hundred millions. Okay. No one wanted international investments in the nineteen sixties. Is kind of like today, right, I mean, you don't want to even

talk about it. So he piles into gold in this small formerly international equity funds, it does nothing for two or three years, to what our clients saying, What are investors saying when you have us in gold and not only is it doing nothing, but thanks to inflation, it's actually worthless each year. Well, yeah, gold was less. I think the companies were, Okay, I haven't you know, looked at the performance over that time period. But the industry

was so small berry, right. The industry exploded in the late seventies because of money market funds when the rate you could get on banks was regulated, So it was a cottage industry. And you know what ended up happening though, because the performance was so tremendous that fund was the best performing mutual fund in the industry in the seventies and that decade, that Decadecade. Yeah, Peter, Peter Lynch everything, Peter who Yeah, exactly cos he should have been gold

and he you know, he went on MERV Griffin. I mean it was action. It was such a big deal back then. It was it was popular culture, right, I mean, interest rates were going into the teens and uh, home watching my dad, griff please going to embarrass us. And

so obviously that had to help the company. Is from the time gold explodes when we no longer on the gold standard is what seventy three, seventy four, early seventies, so almost twenty years later, you come into the company, Ino and the firm's up to a billion dollars in assets. Well it got to two billion, yeah, and you know, right at the peak, so right right, um in eight and then Paul Boker comes in, Uh, and the gold went down to you know, two hundred dollars announce, So

here's only two thousands. Here's the really big question post gold. You're there in ninety two, the firm is now one billion from two billion today, it's fifty times the size. How did you manage to grow the firm over thirty years fifty x? Well, first of all, it's not first person, you know, singular. There were a lot of people. It was a team um, one of whom was my brother who passed away ten years ago, but he was part

of it. But there were a lot of other colleagues as well, and it was building up other mutual funds. And then really before I was what I call e t F guy in two thousand and six, we for ten years we had a hedge fund business and we had to hedge funds. But that we rose about four billion dollars and so I had some good strategies there for a while. Quite fascinating. There's a quote of yours I really like, and I have to start the segment on investing with this quote. The investment world has broken

up into two types of people. Historians and statisticians discuss, well, anyone that's not just doing a market cap exposure fund tends to have some kind of bias, and they look to do asset allocation as well based on that kind of bias. And I think there's been a lot of quant work done and a lot of the investors. Let's take value investing for example, right a study comes out says value is the way to go. I've done, you know, I look at the fundamentals of a company and those

with a cheaper price to book. That's gonna work, right, because it's worked historic, Because it's worked historically, it's giving you some kind of added return over the market return. And then it doesn't work, and it doesn't work, and it hasn't worked for ten years. I like to point out how little we know. Really. I feel like we're in the Caveman era of investing, Barry. I know there's been a lot of innovation, but there's so little we know what is there? Is there an academic theory that

says growth versus value? No, no one can time growth versus value. It's an ongoing debate. Yet those trillions of dollars at very prestigious firms that have this value tilt that have now been underperforming. So anyway, so that's kind of my, uh, you know, my perspective that you just can't use these mathematical tests and and mathematicians that that's insulting. You really have to call them statisticians whatever that means um but basically you can't just use mathematical ratios to

say their force. There is an investment opportunity, and the current one that's floating around today is emerging markets. Value stocks have underperform armed and there, and they're cheap and therefore mean reversion. The statisticians say, oh, that's great value. My perspective on the world is that of historian. The world is changing so much all the time, So let me just take emerging markets. Emerging Market Index is so different today. China dominates that. Asia is eight percent of

that index. There's basically everything else you can ignore. Ten fifteen years ago and Emerging Markets Index had Thailand and Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, remember, like Brazil, Mexico. It's it's just not even the same thing to to take that statistic and say I'm going to do a study and give you an investment recommendation. Look, that's a school of thought. I'm in the what I call historian school of thought, which is there's so much change.

Look at all the change that's happening. If only there was an e t F that was emerging markets ex China. That would be fantastic. It wouldn't be important in the world, right No, but it could would actually see some long term growth, not dominated by one single company we filed for one go or um. That's why I brought that up. I wanted to toss that out. The other thing you and I briefly discussed a long time ago over wine, and I want to continue the conversation. We'll see if

you remember this. There are many ways to measure value, price to book being only one of them, and people kind of forget the days of having a book value with giant factories or thousands of miles of rail tracts or fiber optic cables or whatever. May not really be so applicable to companies like Apple or Google or Facebook.

And you point out they have intellectual property, the algorithm of Google search and how they monetize ads is not exactly the sort of book value that we saw in the days of steel manufacturers and railroads and automobile companies. Right Well, I think, as I was implying before, I think there are these these things that people observe in the markets, and then they kind of go away after a while for whatever reason. Maybe they're arbitraged away or for or whatever. And I do think that in the

new economy. I'm not saying growth will outperform value forever. I'm not saying you should tilt your portfolio that way, but I definitely don't think you have to look at the measures um these days. The the one that we have as a firm that we like is the wide mode philosophy, which is look at the earnings on a forward looking basis. Okay, so it's not just looking at all the statistics on Yahoo, Finance, er Bloomberg, but and that's produced by morning Star Equity Research, and then so

that will estimate the profitability. So even if a company like Facebook is not making money, which it wasn't at a point in time, we know the potential is there, then we include it. And then the second step is to make sure that you're not overpaying for that, because that I think is a real value that doesn't exist in all e T s, which is that value suation discipline of kicking out companies if they just become too expensive. So you're really talking about GARB growth at a reasonable price.

Is that that what you're implying? Yeah, I would say a proprietary version of GARB. They would not like that, but I think that's fair. So let's let's talk about some of the e t f s you've launched. You guys are not known for plain vanilla beta. How do you think about developing a new strategy, How do you put together the philosophy behind a new e t F, and then how do you decide here's how we're going

to market this. Because you guys have been very successful with this, I like to call it's like handcrafted beers. Every one of our e t F we really try to think about the underlying structure of the asset class and the market and how to construct an exchange traded vehicle to take advantage of that. So for fixed income UM, if I could talk about that. For we have several high yield funds. You want to make sure there's enough

liquidity in that. So for our high yield Muni fund, we made sure a slug was in triple bees so that there would be enough liquidity in our view throughout a market cycle for that product. Also, sticking with fixed income, again, this is the van deck philosophy, right, look at the macro trends and market structure in the industry. So what's happened over the last ten years has been the growth of triple bes as a percent of the overall investment

grade market. Right, so the lowest level of rating for investment grade is now fifty percent of all investment grade and triple bes today are greater in issuance than all of investment grade debt ten years ago. So let me let me wrap my head around this. The weakest investment grade bonds are now half of of investment grade portfolios. Correct, So in other words, we've kind of worked a way down the risk scale to get a little more return. Is that the companies are so it's it's natural companies

are optimizing. They're saying, let's and I can keep my borrowing costs down if I just keep stay a little bit above junk and then in a low interest rate environment, I've got all this money at two percent. You know what's not to love. And and the spread between investment grade and high yield or junk has really narrowed over the past because we're a wash and money. So that's a separate thing. But anyway, let's let's address that because

it's a fascinating topic. Whether we're looking at venture capital or private equity or pretty much everything else. There is just an ungodly amount of capital coursing its way through the system. Absolutely, And what does that mean? Uh, Well, like I say, don't worry, be happy. I mean, you can't fight central banks, don't fight. Don't well, and look at China. That's my thing that I think a lot of people don't look at. You have to look at what's going on in China. And the narrative in China

is also right now mildly stimulative. So I can go into that if you like. Well, well, let's talk out that, because you had something I thought was pretty insightful leading into the fourth quarter of when we saw temporary correction and you said, hey, China was looking at a hard landing. They were slowing down, which is why we saw our weakness,

and they figured it out and started stimulating again. How do you offset that here in the first quarter of against the coronavirus, which doesn't seem to be coming to a natural end yet. We we assume they'll eventually wrestle this into submission like they have with other pandemics like a bola or zica or going out stars or swine flu. Or pick one, but this is still very much an unknown and how much is this going to impact their g d P and how much is this going to

impact the rest of the globes economic activity. Look, I think you can look through I think the markets have looked through the coronavirus. So what I like to say is like I wouldn't say we live in China world, but we are in the same life raft together. And to answer your question, if China's economy goes through a super hard landing, every aspect of our financial markets will

get affected. I mean obviously commodities, but commodities flies through effects high yield as well because energy bonds have a lot of issuance. It will affect US equities as well. Right now, I'd say both Chinese equities and US equities are saying this coronavirus will work itself out. Chinese equities are right where they were a month or two ago, so so people buying China stocks don't think so. Again,

I hate to oversimplify. What is the Central Bank in China doing so two years ago they were slamming on the brakes because they were worried about debt, but they have since taken their foot off the break. You know, they're not gassing it, but they are giving enough oxygen to the economy that I don't think we really need to worry about global growth. And that does assume that the coronavirus doesn't go crazy, but that's what the markets

are assuming. So let's move from China but international. You guys have offices in in Australia and in Frankfurt, Germany. Why expand internationally and why those countries. What we found with our e t S is that buyers around the world we're using it. I mean it was amazing, like g DX, like literally people from a hundred different countries were buying and trading U S e t S. It's a really great invention and we were lucky to be part of it. And so one we saw that, of

course we wanted to chase our clients. Um Expanding internationally is not as easy as I thought it might be. But uh, because we had clients in Europe and Australia, we thought, hey, let's provide local opportunities for them. And because our industry is regulated and taxes are different, we basically had to set up shop in those countries. We have been speaking to Jan van Eck vanek associates. You and I know each other for a couple of years. We're not complete and total strangers, And as I was

researching you, I found a couple of interesting things. Our backgrounds are shockingly similar in that we both came out of college. We both didn't know what the hell we wanted to do. We both sort of wandered the earth trying a bunch of things, some startups, some this, some that. My joke has been, well, if you are a Jewish boy from Long Island and you don't know what to do with your life, you go to law school. You don't have a whole lot of choice in the matter.

It's the law. And it sounds like you had a similarly non Long Island experience. Uh yeah, it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do, but law school was the backup. So did did eventually punch that ticket? And the other question, which I didn't get to ask during the broadcast portion um, when I was doing my research into Jan van Eck, how do you transition from being a fourteenth century Flemish painter into

a career on Wall Street? And that's about as esoterica question as I've ever asked that is that is really amazing. Well funny, my grandfather did the research and we're not not related. I mean, that is not an unknown painter in the world. My wife taught design an illustration and fine arts, and so I've been to every museum in the world just about it certainly feels like I've contract every museum. But when when I first started researching, and

I'm like, why is that name so familiar? Oh, that's right, Well you knew. I knew in college when people were taking that class because they were like, yeahn did you know that there was an artis called at granddad? Granddad that that's pretty hilarious. And it's funny because when and a lot of Google searches, he's got much better s c oh than you do. So that's kind of uh,

that's that's kind of interesting. So there are a handful of questions I did not get to that I have to ask you about prior to get into our favorite question, ends of which I have a few bonus ones on that I didn't warn you about. I'm want to surprise you with. Um, let's let's talk a little bit about the E T F world and the question I really didn't get to during broadcast that I wanted to is two thousand and six is pretty early days in the world of ETFs. What motivated the move into e t fs.

It's obviously been wildly successful, but tell us what that ramp up was like and how did you make the decision? Hey, this ETF thing is going to be big one day, I think you know. My my background is more of a business person who works at an asset manager rather than a portfolio manager. And like a lot of car engineers run car companies, are used to uh that that

mindset really matters. So e t s were clearly there, and they were growing, and the question is do you latch on as a person to those new and interesting and growing and maybe better things or do you not? And so we latched on and then also saw wow, if since we were the gold mining fund leaders, if someone does an e t F on gold mining were dead. People love to trade gold, and this is a way better vehicle. And we were thank god we we got there first. Why not put out g l D yourself?

Or when you were looking around the world, how long has g l D been around It's ten years, twelve years or did they, So you know it wasn't around in six it was not. It came afterwards. So god, yeah, the gold bullion very We've made so many mistakes, but you know, one one is not being more aggressive in earlier in thinking that the SEC would approve a gold bullion et fu kindsight biases always. I mean, you know

who who knew? Sometimes you gotta just roll the dice, although one would imagine that's an expensive risk to take saying they'll never approve this, but let's spend two million dollars anyway on warriors, right, And that was we didn't have that money back then. So that's that's that helps too,

I guess, and explaining the past. But by the way, if you there's a fantastic Wall Street Journal story about the history of g l D. It came out a couple of years ago, and the background was the World Gold Council created the e t F because they had too much gold built up in warehouses. It was just a way of, hey, what are we doing with all this yellow crap? We gotta get some of it out.

And it was not very pressingent in philosophy. It just worked out fantastic and even worse we knew those people, of course, because all the gold mining companies are members of the World Gold Council. Yeah, I don't go there. So so, um, let's talk a little bit about the operations of of e t f s. How do the flows in and out of index funds affect the underlying securities. This is something that you have to plan and manage, especially if some of the junior minors are a little

less liquid than the bigger gold miners. How do you deal with that? Well? As as a lot of your lessoners probably know, the function of an e t F is usually that you can take in kind delivery of the securities. So for the vast majority of US equities and other securities, actually we don't have to worry about it.

It's the trading community that has to worry. Say, okay, I anticipate I'm going to get this price for the e t F. I'm going to deliver this bundle of stocks or bonds, and so we don't actually have to

trust it, and that's touch it. That's one of the geniuses where we get involved is index rebalances, and uh, you know that is something where our portfolio managers pay a lot of attention because especially if you have a larger et F and the trading community knows Van Neck has got to buy a hundred million or two hundred million of the stock, it's very important that we game them.

So we may buy it before the index adds it, we might buy it afterwards, and there's an of folatility in the market that that hopefully the trading community is not taking advantage of shareholders, because that's our number one job. Quite quite interesting, our mutual colleague Dave Noddig is a big advocate of direct indexing. Um, what are your thoughts on this? Is this a challenge to thematic investing or e t F SO or is this really just a

niche product? Although there were some companies with you know, Pinnacle has a couple of hundred billion dollars in direct index right, which is another form of s m A. Right, it's it's an index form of s M A And I think, uh so there are slight advantages to that, but one of the you know, I think one of the limitations is you can't really do that for fixed income. Everyone says, oh the spider, you know, sp y everything

is transparent. This is not true. You know, of bonds do not trade on a given day, and so that's the I think that's one of the beauties that fixed income ets they have disadvantages. That one of the advantages that you're getting way better liquidity. Like we have an a your market local currency bond ETF. You weigh rather trade that et F at penny wide than you would the underlying bonds. There's so many more bonds than stocks.

People don't realize the vast number of bonds. The joke is the Wilshire five thousand is what something like that. I think the last time I looked at is something like forty or sixty thousand bonds that trade at least once a year, some crazy number like that. There are tons and tons of bonds out there, every local municipality, every corporate, in all sorts of different years and all sorts of different chaunches. You would much rather trade the

funds than the specific bonds. Absolutely, and that's why that's that's one of the limitations to direct into thing. The thing I like to point out as well, what's happened over our careers right is fixed income is the last holdout for voice broking. So all I couldn't say that again voice being able to pick up the phone and say buy me ten thousand, and the only way to trade it is up the phone. There's no electronic version. Well there's text measaging the same thing, right, So all

equity trading has gone electronic. Not true. When we came out, all options trading is electronic. Basically all commodity of futures trading is electronic. Fixed income it's still a minority of trades. You know, even most generous calculation is of investment grade trades last year were electronic. So that just shows you that there the fixed income you can't just do things. And I think people look at direct indexing and other

things say, oh yeah, the whole world is electronic. Everything is simple because I can see I'm on Yahoo Finance. Not true. Isn't the US treasury bonds aren't there trading electric elect They're electronic. I mean they're They're the deepest, most liquid markets. And you have a very very specific um run of dates. Everybody knows what what each vintages. But beyond treasuries, things really start to get a little squirrel.

They don't think absolutely. So one of the other questions I had to ask you that um is kind of kind of intriguing. Tell us about by the way, this is the worst segue from electronic non electronic trading of bonds to this what is the then eck forest? Ah? So uh not really related to me. Um, it was my own or our firm, I should say. So. I don't want to take any credit. But my uncle Fred uh who never married, gave all his money to charity when he passed away, and he did something super creative.

So he he loved trees, and what he did is bought redwood forest in northern California after it had been clear cut, so there was no commercial value. Way back up a sec So you take a redwood forest. Are we using redwood for commercial uses? Yeah? You were doing that? Oh my god. So or beautiful trees five plus percent of all old growth redwoods. I mean, these things are beautiful. The old thousand year old trees were cut down nine I think it's cut down to build San Francisco and

other things. And they just let no one said stop. I mean John Muir said stopped. But you know it took a while, but all the damage was done. We were like, why don't you stop at fifty or sixty or seven, like, it's just a complete disaster. So anyway that the but trees grow back. So he uh, he was a great value investor. He just bought all this redwood forest for almost nothing, and guess what, twenty years later, you know, the redwoods are growing. So what he did

is basically create a sustainable redwood forest. This is fred Fred Vannack. He was he was a director of our company but otherwise not involved, and he created a sustainable forest. So what he said is, I'm not going to I'm going to give the income to charity. So it was the largest gift to Purdue University ever. But I'm not I'm not gonna know a lot of people just to cut the trees down. I'm gonna do something called selective harvesting, which is basically like weeding a forest. And what happens

if you wed a forest, it actually grows fast. So so that's managed by the Pacific Forest Trust. And then what they did as well is because California has carbon credits, they qualified the forest, the Vedic Forest, for carbon credits, so it was the first property in the US to qualify to get carbon credits, which they sold to Arnold Schwartz nigger and Nancy Pelosi. It's such an interesting story,

but I take absolutely no credit for it. I mean we we helped it a little bit when I told you I we do a deep dive if I'm finding out about the uh. But actually it was mentioned somewhere on your corporate website if I remember, unless it was just my uh shocking that we mentioned, you know. Yeah, So so that's pretty that's pretty intriguing. Um and finale, before we get to our standard questions is what did you learn from your dad about leadership and running an

investment business? You worked with him for how long? How long was the overlap? Well, I mean, you know, we talked, he talked about work at home, so almost so most of your so yeah, most of my life. Um so, and then you know, into my thirties. He luckily had a long life he passed away. Um My dad was an economist, Okay, he was not a businessman, and he

was not really a portfolio manager. So his he he had this view of the world like look at what's going on and then take advantage and then implement, right, So just that perspective and that risk taking is really what I learned from him, is question the structure the world is changing, what's changing? And do you does that give you opportunity or risk in your portfolio? So that's really what I what I learned from him. He was

very he was very much a gentleman. He was very collaborative within the firm, and you know, he knew what he didn't know. Said the first thing. The first person he hired to run the Gold Fund was a geologist. So that's one of our histories is having real people from industry as part of our portfolio management team. Quite quite fascinating. Any major topics I didn't get to before we get to my favorite questions, Well, we'll get this

to some other time. But the fact that the explosion of passive means that ownership of corporate America is in you know, concentrated some very big firms. Let's talk about that because I'm astonished at some of the uh myths and discussions that have arisen around this. Do you look at passive as um a challenge to your core business model or do you look at passive as a lazy person's approach to investing? How how do you think of passive? Well,

I think you know my bias. Yeah, she cheap market exposure. Passive has been fantastic for investors. Right, It's lowered costs, uh thematically, dramatically and um, it's in a way not our business. We tried to do value added or different exposures. What I would say is it's also been a perfect environment for that. You know. You know, one of your questions is what do you wish you had known thirty

years ago? Well, I wish I will tell everybody. I wish I had known that interest rates we're gonna fall my entire career because financial assets have had this huge tail wind really for for you know, since I'm gonna I'm gonna stop you right there, and I have to stop you because the person responsible for that is it forty years eighty two to almost forty year bond bull market and falling interest rates and to this day they're still falling. When was the thirty years one five five something? Crazy?

Um was Paul volle car right, who on occasion am I remembering this correctly? Did your dad have lunch with Paul Vulcan on a regular basis, No, not regular basis? Once once and I was luckily to be invited. So someone thought it was funny probably someone with your type of personality, say, hey, this guy got you know, solved the inflation problem in the US, and you know gold got killed for twenty years afterwards. They should meet each other, because is that my dad made I don't. I don't

know if that's my sense of humor to me. Any opportunity I get to meet a fed chair, I'm going to take that. Yes, you'd like to put interesting. And there was probably a little humor associated with this particular combination. In any case, so arranged that lunch. I don't I don't remember. It was fitt of the vague associate if my dad's I think it was someone who ran a

fixed income shop, like we didn't know. We didn't know that person well anyway, so I tagged along and it was told you at the time, Wow, I uh, probably in my theories, okay, did you? Did you appreciate the gravity? By the way, he's a rock star, star, absolute superstar. I think he deserves much more of the credit for the so called Reagan Revolution than he's gotten because Reagan did a bunch of things that I think were very helpful, but none of which would have happened. And I don't

think you know. In fact, he reminder when Volker's term was up, Reagan replaced him with some guy named Alan Greenspan. So that's another reason to be a little miffed at Ronald Reagan. He fobbed that. Uh, I won't use any cursewords on the air, but I blame the crisis. The Great Financial Crisis had a lot of inputs and a lot of factors that caused it. But towards the top of that list is Alan Greenspan. Both as a monetist and a regulator, he messed up. I'm trying to keep

it g ridded. He messed up in two different ways. But of what, let's avoid that digression. I got to meet told Paul at I think it was an oh eight at Chris Whalen's election party, and I found him to be absolutely charming. Um, he just passed away last year. What was your lunch with him? Like, what was your experience like? And were you aware that you know, you

were having a brush with greatness? Oh yeah, I mean, of course, I mean he this this is sort of like like you said, he had a major effect on everything, on everything, right, the structure of financials and and and everything. So um, yeah, it was. It was great meeting him. You know, he was more disengaged from the financial markets at the time than than my dad was, which I thought it was just odd, uh, disengaged with the day to day Okay, So again, my dad was like a

pencil sharp economist. He was upset with money supply growth. And I think they were talking about Japan at the time. That was a hot topic. And you know, this was the beginnings of Japan. So it's just at the end of the bubble, at the end of the bubble, how to deal with the bubble and you know, before this long period of disinflation or whatever you wanna call it, deflation deflation in Japan. And my dad knew this. I didn't know statistics at the last month, you know, money

supply growth in Japan. And Booker was like, no, it's just in this topic. So money supply is part of this huge list of economic and market indicators that people used to track obsessively because they thought it would help them figure out what's going on with the market, and one by one, because if you think about it, hey, the money supply is expanding, all that will eventually work its way into the stock market and stocks will go higher.

Until that just completely stopped working. It was a coincidential correlation for a long time, or maybe it was an input factor. I don't know. We look at so much. We used to look at so much the odd lot data point, and I know guys who used to do and was all guys who used to track that stuff obsessively in the nineties and it just stopped working. Charles Bitterman ran trim tabs that used to check money flow

in and out of mutual funds. This market has done more or less nothing but go up for over a decade, and at the same time money flows out of funds. Something like a half a trillion dollars have left mutual funds, not left mutual funds to go into et f s, They've left the building, and the market continues to go. Well, that's a separate that's a separate podcast on I don't believe flows affect prices, but for a long time people

it was. It was gospel. Here's my point. It used to be that all money would go through you know, the central bank, into commercial banks. Now there's so much money, so much lending happening outside the banking system. Right, only half of the lending is happening inside our banking system. They've got hedge funds, lending companies probably, but but credit. I'm just talking about credit. So you've got a totally different world. That's why we don't care about that stuff

is because the transmission mechanic is totally different. That's why the central bank has to go and buy bonds and you know, even stocks and ets in different countries to affect the markets because they're not being able to transmit through reserve ratio requirements. Remember all that kind of stuff where are gone? And um, we used to call that the shadow banking sector, and it's not in the shadows

and more it's huge. It's now the banking sector. They're just non bank lenders, which is very different than when it seemed a little subversive and uh, you know, a little illicit. It's not. It's just a different form of credit. Alright. Quite fascinating, all right, So let's get to our favorite questions. Um, I I'm interested to hear about some of your answers, and I have to start out with, um, what was

the first car you ever had? First car? Oh, my god, my brother and I in college share the cheap I don't know, and I know you're a car guy, but it was like an old sumobile that had five hundred thousand miles on it. And they're happy. We're happy to hit you up on you. What do you What are you streaming in terms of video on Netflix or Amazon Prime? What are you downloading in terms of podcasts? And listening

to tell us what you're entertaining yourself with. Well, I'm a little bit of a junkie and podcasts, so I don't really watch a lot of video. So I listened to about seven hours of podcasts. I love a week. Sorry, different day, it would be hard to get happened. Um, I've learned a lot from I'll call it the stars in our industry. Give us some names, well, yours truly, Patrick K'shaughnessy, Ted Saide's you know Capital allocators, Um, and uh a little bit off stream. I love Kara Swish her. Uh,

she's so much fun. I had her. Not only did I have her as a guest where she chewed the scenery, but if you listen to Pivot with her on Scott Galloway, Yeah, so much fun. Yeah. The So I learned a lot. I did my bitcoin learning in twenty seventeen. So I learned a lot from Patrick O'Shaughnessy a lot, learned a lot from pomp and this Australian guy Stefan Lavera. But I would say the podcast episode you know of the my podcasting career was when Scott Galloway predicted the takeover

of Whole Foods by Amazon on Kara Swishers podcast. I'll remember I was just coming finishing a run and I was like, wow, because everyone in business is always looking at the fangs, going how is this going to impact my business? Right? Is Amazon going to come into finance all this kind of stuff? And he just he just nailed it. And then literally it happened, and I'm like, wow,

there are a lot of smart people out there. I think I think he's been a guest four times on the show She He's just been a ton of fun to interview, and um man, you gotta give him credit for being way out there now. His background in branding and marketing really helps him. Um but that was just such a prescient call, so so sharp. Uh, what's the most important thing people don't know about Jan Vanak? It's important, but h my first language wasn't English, what was it?

It was German. Uh, my mom was German and she just came over to the US shortly before they got married. They met in Germany and so she spoke German at home and that's what I learned. And what was funny about it is that the elementary school thought I was not fast because I was learning English at the same time. So they want me to repeat a great My parents said, we're out of here. We're going to the suburbs New York City. Has to he isn't van Eck a Dutch name,

or my dad's side was Dutch? Telling him mom's side was German. Quite interesting And speaking of your dad, who are who were some of your early mentors? And I assume your dad looms large in that. Yeah, you know I talked about my dad. I would say, uh, you know, the one person that we had mentioned is a Stanford Law School professor, Joe Grundfest him. He was an SEC commissioner and he does he's involved in a lot of stuff.

He comments in government governance. Uh, work at Stanford as well. Uh. But you know, in a class I was taking with him and I was his research assistant as well. He basically made fun of active managers. He's like that that is like a dinosaur, and I was. He was probably the first person who said that to me. And I think that's also when I saw the E t F trend triggered that wow, this actually might be the future. So he he would I would put him in that category.

Quite interesting. Um, what investors influence the way you approach investor? There I go back to my my father. I think, you know, Barry have learned so much from so many different people so that I just can't really do a shout out. But um, you know, I love the people that are talking about how the world is changing today, who are forward looking because I think the market structure is changing and so um you know that's that's there's so many people that are good at that I think

be unfair to pull one person out. Fair enough, UM, let's talk a little bit about books. What do you read? What sort of books? What? What are some of the most recent books you've enjoyed? So I'm I don't have a lot of time. You know, in our industry, we consume so much content and it's it's hard to get through books. But I'll mention to um. One is, uh, the over story. And if you've heard about this won

the Pulitzer Prize. Uh, it was written by Richard Powers, and it's basically about trees, where it's it's a fiction book where trees play a major part in it. And um, it's a it's a long book. Uh, but I would I really, I really enjoyed it, and um, it really

made me appreciate forests. If I had to give you one takeaway from a fiction book, which is weird that that forests are are really environments that you know, they go beneath the ground, the trees interact with each other, and it's it's so much more complex than the way I look at a single tree singing in my front yard all alone. That's not the way to look at trees. And so if you're interested in that, can I give

you my second one out of the blue. So, um, I have these enthusiasms, and I tried to reach a read a biography on every American president and I ran out of ran out of energy, out of energy. Didn't run that presidents. But uh, but one of my favorites is Jane Smith's Grant biography. So I gotta believe no one's talked to you about uh Ulysses s Grant on your podcasts, and I wouldn't make that. All right, Well, the two here, right here, two takeaways. It's just Grants, um.

But but i'll tell you why. Number one, you know, Grant helped win the war. I mean, we focus on Lincoln, but if Lincoln, if we had lost the of the North, had lost the Civil War, the United States is a

completely different country. And he was so celebrated. He gets such a bad rap when it comes to history that he was, you know, an alcoholic and this, and that he was very magnanimous as he could be when he was president towards the South and towards um, you know, towards the blacks that you know, he really I think

deserves a lot more credit for those two reasons. The second element of the reason I love this book is, you know, when you go to college and you read about these historians, you get kind of a view of history. And what you don't realize is that the schools of thought right and and that and and this book was a revision as school of thought. Like, you know, people get trashed by historians and then their reputations come back. And I didn't realize that dynamic went on so much

in academia. You know every natural uh, you know natural biology, and we know that's changing all the time and it's not the same as it was thirty years ago. But it's true for history too. Quite interesting. Um. When I said don't don't assume so quickly, I was mostly wrong. Someone recommended a Grand book, but it was the churn out Grand book, not the Smith Grand book. His books are so long, I mean, can you really read that? I don't know. I everything I've read of his has

just been Spectacling's. I've been giving that book five times. You know, well because I talked about Grant, so I should read it. So so if you read presidential biographies, did you read any of the churn at Washington or Jefferson or any uh of the other churn out presidential things or are they just too long? Yeah? Right, Hey, listen, I don't want to talk about how many books I have at home. I'm a Hamilton's fan. I'll just put it out there so you know. But I don't know

if you know that we designed our own ties. So I'm wearing a Hamilton. So that's my I'll defend Hamilton's um before I saw the show again. Not recommended. I get the annotated Hamilton's lyrics. Um. Hamilton's Revolution is his annotated version of the lyrics to the show Lynn Manuel Mirande's lyrics. And it's really quite fascinating how he explains everything, um and annotates how there's so many different interests references.

But given your predilection for biographies, do you UM read anything like McCullough's book on the Right Brothers or anything along those lines and gotten to that. Just so much stuff. Yeah, I've heard he's a he's a great popularizer of American history. Okay Lehman, Yes, Leman Trilogy. Someone else recommends coming back to Broadway, and uh, you know, if you like history and you know finance, you have to see that play. I mean, that's a that's a must. The Leman Trilogy. Yeah,

it was here briefly started in London. You know, it's just theater. So maybe they make a movie. I guess, I don't know, but I really recommend that. If you all right, I'll put I'll put that on on our list. UM, tell us about a time you failed and what you learned from the experience. So, uh, lots of failures, I think of what The one that resonates the most with me is when we were launching different mutual funds before et S, we launched some international fixed income funds that

invested in high yielding European debt. It's not like it was Russian debt, no, but it turned out to be like it. So basically, you know, as a money manager, whenever you can sell a yield, you can get flows. And we were getting a ton of money into this fund. And this was the time where European exchange rates, it's it's sort of the pre euro environment or exchange rates were linked and as George Soros famously predicted and made a lot of money on, that link was going to break.

And that link broke, and so our funds, as did a lot of others. But our funds lost a lot of ny V value. And one of the principles I take away from that learning experiences, it's so important to try to identify the risks of an investment along with the potential return. And you know, in a prospectus you can put down twenty risks, you get any points for you know, identifying a risk in the prospectus, you've got to pull it up in center and say hey, listen,

this is a major risk to this fund. And we've really tried to get better at that. And whenever there's been funds UM that we could have launched, UM, that's been in my mind. And and there are a lot of funds we haven't launched because of that experience. What do you do for fun? What do you do when you're not in the office. I love to travel. I learned so much from traveling. UM and and thanks to my wife it likes to travel as well. It was on our honeymoon and we went to Hong Kong and

I saw what was going on in China. It was never in the paper. Then you can learn so much from contextualizing through travel. UM. So there's there's a lot of you know, the Van Neck Forest. Frankly, my wife dragged me out there. It wasn't I was dying to go look at a bunch of trees. But you know, learned so much from that experience and gotten more involved tennis. And then the last thing tennis for so uh. One

of my sons plays tennis for Brown. He starts on the varsity team and you know, you're sitting in these cold tennis courts in Long Island on the middle of February and I'm standing talking to the dads and all of them had played college tennis, and I was like, you know whatever, I was such an hack athlete and everything. And I was like, okay, but I know he's genetically related to me. I can't be that bad. So I picked up tennis about ten years ago and enjoy playing that.

And then I like to host dinners. I mean, I know you do that too, Love to brainstorm with, you know, bring people together when I can. So I tried to do that, you know, three or four times. Ether there's so much intellectual capital here in New York. How do you not take advantage of You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Nobel Laurie at a billionaire. Someone was really insightful and they got to eat all And

the world is changing. That's what's cool, right, I mean, that's what you just can't go out and read a book because some of these changes haven't been you know, documented. I found out a lot with China. That why I traveled there fifty times is like you couldn't read about what was going on in China. You had to see it. And and I know other people do these idea dinners where it's an attempt to sell something. We set hours up and I know you do the same. Where there's

no agenda. It's just let's get eight really interesting people in a room and have a conversation to see where it goes. There's no sales pitches. Nobody asked anybody to do anything. It's just, hey, let's talk about what's going on in the world. Absolutely, it's quite quite fascinating. So within our industry, what are you most optimistic about and what are you most pessimistic about? Uh? Optimistic. I have to be optimistic. As I said before, there's so many

unsolved problems. I think an understanding how financial markets work, and I know you're you're doing research in that area. So I'm optimistic about all the innovations that are to come. I think the pessimistic thing about our industry we what do you and I do We manage money? For people who have money? Why they have money because they've saved or someone gave them money right or they started the

business that ended up being very successful. Americans and we talked about this in our industry, but half of Americans don't save, They don't they don't know how to save, they don't know how to open a brokerage account. We just led an investment in a company called financial Jim, which is just oriented around that, like getting physically fit, and it's just like the gym, like you don't want to go, You think you want to go, and your

needs resolution, then you don't go. And they are just real life people who have found ways of engaging and they've got unlimited demand because a lot of people need financial advice. I'm intrigued by the Robin Hood concept of rounding up whatever you spend on a credit card and sending it to a savings or brokerage account. And you wouldn't think that rounding up is a lot of money, but it can be. I have a jar of loose change.

It's probably nine hundred dollars and weighs a hundred pounds that I just come home and throw the change on the mind. There are a lot of apps out there, there's a lot of tools, but a lot of people don't even they don't think about that need and and the consequence is stress. If you don't have money, you have stress in your life. And that's like we've all

lived through periods of stress and and that. And that's so when I think about our our industry collectively, I hope that business people can help solve you know, solve that problem a little bit quite intriguing. And our final two questions, what advice would you give to a recent college graduate who was just beginning their career and interested in either finance or asset management. It's it's it's what

we talked about before. Try a lot of different things, you know, David Rubinstein said, I saw him last week, said what you do before your thirty doesn't matter. Um, And you know, so many UM people I know who are younger in college are so concerned about their career track. And I get that. But you really have to know what you like to do, uh and and can succeed in.

So that is that is the that's the big thing is try and try different things, because I don't know how you can figure out whether you like something if you haven't tried it. You're you're from the same camp as I, which is, I don't know what the hell I wanted to do when I was nineteen or twenty five, or by thirty, I started to having an inkling. I get the sense you traveled a similar path, and I'm

worried the kids don't do that enough these days. And our final question, what do you know about the world of investing today that you wish you knew thirty years ago, thirty years ago, let's call it, uh yeah, ninety two, thirty years ago. Wow. Uh don't have a great answer to that. I guess I wish I knew interest rates were gonna come down the whole time. I think there is right. Was there was there any sign in ninety two that this was a c change in the world

of inflation and yield? Or did it? Was it? Just remember the like eighty nine when when did when did Vulker? Oh I'm sorry, sight was when he caused the double dip eight and eighty two, the double dip recession. He broke the back of inflation. So you were barely a dozen years into that, right, Um? Yeah, So I wish i'd known that. You know, I really that that when you have lower interest rates, that helps stock market valuations

and obviously helps fixed income. And I think we're now in a spot where what is the next twenty year was going to bring us? I want to know what was happening in the next ten years, Barry, that is the trillion dollar question, and I'll tell you afterwards. We have been speaking with Jan van Eck, CEO of Vent Associates. If you enjoy this conversation well, be sure to look up an Intra down an Inch on Apple iTunes, where you could see any of our prior three plus conversations.

You'll find that on iTunes, Spotify, Google of a Cast, Stitcher where your final podcasts are sold. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions. Be sure and go to Apple iTunes and give us a review. Send us an email at m ib podcast at Bloomberg dot net. You can check out my daily column on Bloomberg dot com. Sign up from my daily reads at Ridhalts dot com. I would be remiss if I did not thank the cract staff

who helps put these conversations together each week. Sam Schivrov is our producer, slash booker, Mark Sineskalgee is our audio engineer. Michael Batnick is my head of research. I'm Barry Ridhalts. You've been listening to Masters and Business on Bloomberg Radio.