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Welcome to Maren Talks Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets explain the markets. I'm Maren zum zet Web. This week we've beat with Sean Pesh, portfolio manager and founder at rand Moore Fund Management. Pest has been in the investment industry since nineteen ninety seven, working at a variety of institutions. He established ran More Fund Management,
his own company, in two thousand and eight. It's worth noting he has a fairly stellar record of outperformance, outperforming the index since inception and over pretty much every time period since, except for the last twelve months, which we'll discuss as we go. Sean, welcome, thanks for joining us.
Thanks Miren, lovely to be here.
Now listen, you have achieved fairly spectacular, as I said, outperformance over the last decade plus, despite being a value fund manager in a period when being a value fund manager has been an absolutely terrible thing to be. This has been a time for growth. Yeah, somehow you've succeeded as a value manager. So let's talk a little bit about how on earth you've done that.
I guess if we'd had this interview back in the middle of the pandemic, when everybody was sitting at home buying Apple iPhones and ordering stuff on Amazon will be a different conversation. But we just try and invest in decent companies that are generating cash with management on our side and not paying too much for them. And it has, as you rightly say, been a challenging time for value managers, and I guess, I guess there are three reasons for that.
The first is, if you go back to nineteen seventy four, when these indices first started, value outperformed growth with a couple of hiccups along the way, pretty much in a straight line up to the end of two thousand and seven.
And then you had the global financial crisis, and what happened after that was quantitative easing, and that meant interest rates collapsed and until late twenty one or so, and so during that period, if you plot the if you overlay those two average interest rates and value versus growth, you'll see that value underperformed in during quantitative easing. That's
the first reason. The second reason is you had these fast growing companies Microsoft, Amazon, those kind of guys at the same time as you had low interest rates, and so that meant their growth rates were discounted at lower rates, and they became hugely huge companies in the markets. And the third reason is at that very time that you had these massive companies with huge market caps, passive investing
just exploded. When I started the business, I think it was a trillion in dollars in passive investing is awfter something nearly twelve, And so you had this wall of money just moving into these companies, propelling them ever further. Now what's changed. Quantitative easing is over. Okay, we saw that reference to that in the FED statement last week. The second thing is these companies are getting hard. It's harder for them to grow. Microsoft grew revenue ten grew
earning specially ten percent last quarter. Costco grew revenue one percent last quarter the other day. You've seen Nike falling the other day. So you know, it's just getting harder and harder for these giant companies to carry on out performing in the way they have. And so we think that's a really good time to focus and turn the attention to value investing. You've got to be you've got to go where the puck is going to be. This is what way in Gretzky said, not where the puck's been.
The puck has been in quality and growth. The puck is going to value. We firmly believe that.
But nonetheless you haven't been in those companies. I want. The thing that really strikes me when I look at your fact sheet is the very very small level of exposure you have to the US. So if we look at the MSCI world, that's seventy three percent US, right, and an awful lot of that, of course is the megasavan is the huge technology stocks in the US, but you don't have that. You're about seventeen percent in the US.
And if I spin my eye over to your sector exposure information technology three percent, that's against bround twenty five percent in the MSCI. So you are very very far away from the index, which is great, by the way, and nothing we love more than a fund that doesn't touch the index. If we wanted the index, we just buy the index, right, So we love a fund that's far away from it. But you know, you're you've really differentiated yourself, then.
We have, and and I guess you know there are a couple of points, So how we managed to generate those returns well? The first is that we will typically go where people are less interested because that's where we find the value. So, you know, we made good money in Japan in recent years. We were quite early in moving into Japan. When the world was focused in Japan with Warren Buffett and all of that, you know, we
were actually selling and redeploying those assets into China. And so even last month, you know, we had more in China than the US Hong Kong listed stocks. So what we so, I guess there's two ways to make money. The one is you can buy a company that you think is a fabulous business and hold it forever, and that company will compound its earnings. What we prefer to do is find an undervalued business, invest at the right time, ideally the right time, and when the value is fully realized,
we will then sell that and compound the capital. Okay, because sometimes you can be stuck in these businesses. You think it's a great business, and look at Nike, look at st Order, look at you know, Diageo or Unilever in recent years, and things come unstuck. And so we prefer to compound the capital and we move the capital around. So we really don't shy away from from moving our assets around the world based on where we find value,
and we're not scared of our turnover either. You know, if I look at some of my some of the best money managers in the world, the likes who've survived and got fantastic crack records over multi decades, not just in in recent years. You know, the likes of Paul Tudor Jones and Bruce Kovner and David Tepper and those guys. I've never ever seen a single quote from them about low turnover being an answer.
That's intering because as a big part of the industry that believe exactly that your buffet style you buy great companies and you keep them in definitely, and you let them compound until you're super rich. But of course I'm the answer to that. Your answer might be, well, companies change. A great company doesn't stay a great company, and you have to be prepared to move out of it as soon as you see signs that it's not great anymore.
Absolutely, And Warren Buffett said, my favorite holding periods wherever you didn't say, I'm my only holding periods wherever, and he sold half his apple every day. You know he's selling bank of America. He's sold many positions along the way, So I think people confuse that, I mean take it to the extreme. Some of the early good businesses that everybody knew about and loved were railroads and you know those steel manufacturing et cetera. Where would you be today
if you'd own those forever. So, you know, we think the right business at the right time, and we very you know, things change. So we are not in that camp where you think you can find a great business and hold it forever, because we don't know what the future is. And as I said, you can use look at Nike. You know, Nike had the lunch to themselves. Now you've got competitors with on Running and Hokka and
Sketches and those kind of guys. So the environment is always changing and you have to be alert to that. And so we're not in the sit in the zide and do nothing camp.
Well, let's step back a little bit because you mentioned Japan earlier, and I know a lot of our listeners are very interested investing in Japan, have been for a while, and John and I were like you very on it when it was very cheap. You know, this is value etc. I'm going to Tokyo next week, by the way, I'll report back. But in the meantime, you say you're no longer really invested in Japan, do you not consider that to be a value opportunity anymore?
Oh? No, we are definitely still in Japan, and we a little overweight there. What I'm saying is we've taken profits on many of our positions and redeployed those. So no, we still like Japan. In fact, I know we bought some Mazda the other day. That again, you've got to look at the second level thinking that hard Marks talks about. You know, a lot of the Japanese companies fell in
a heap when the yen rallied and the exporters, et cetera. Well, you get businesses that have used the week in and that's how they've generated revenue and profit growth, and some businesses that are growing. And you know, you look at the company like Mazda, I mean it's US sales of its current range is up thirty percent in the last months, you know, and that's been like that for a little while, with huge amounts of cash on the balance sheet. So
there's still lots of value to be unlocked. In Japan, some of our companies had just we felt had run the course and reached fair value, and so we redeployed it to compound their capital.
Okay, let's move on to China, then, where you did deploy some of that capital. There's one of the ongoing conversations John and I always have about something maybe cheap, but is it investable? Can you invest some webs of China, like China where you don't necessarily have the same kind of regulatory security that you might have somewhere else. And John and might have this conversation around Russia and I said, yes you can, and he said no you can't, and
he was right. And on China, I say yes you can, he says, no, you can't. And this week at least, I'm right.
I love the dynamic between you guys. Yeah, and I mean, unfortunately included in our track record, we lost just over ten percent in Russia, but we recovered in twenty twenty two, you know, And that's our process. And those stocks are still in the portfolio, but written down to zero. So sometimes we get it wrong. In fact, portfolio managers, you often get it wrong. And so we China, we thought,
and it's an interesting point. I think there was a there was a conference in feb two thy or twenty twenty four at a Goldman Sachs conference, and they surveyed the participants and forty percent said China was uninvestable. Now, when people tell us some market's uninvestable, you know, that peaks our interest because there's got to be some diamonds in the dust. And what's interesting is, you know, government
interference and regulation and all of that. And then you stand back and think about it and you go, well, when natural gas prices rallied Ireland and the UK and posed windfall taxes on you know, oil companies here just the other day, President Macron is in favor of of taxes on large French companies. You've got the US Department of Justice and you know, attacking the US tech companies. You've got the Fair Trade commit Trade Commission FTC attacking
or trying to prevent mergers and takeovers. So I think I think this government interference and regulation all the rest is overplayed. It's around the world. It's not just in China. And so that's our point to that. And in fact, what you don't have in many of these Asian markets, you don't have greedy management teams taking huge, you know, swaths of share options and diluting shareholders, and you don't have the short term thinking that you have in many
of the Western markets. So one needs to balance the pros and the cons And when you get companies I mean, I'll give you an example. In early September, we I mean we owned Ali, Baba and Bider. You see those in the top ten last month's fact sheet. But in early September were buying ping An and ping An here at five times earnings, with an eight percent dividend yield, and trading below tangible book value for pretty much the first time ever. You know, that's how deeply out of
favor it was. And we were buying it at thirty three and you know we're selling it the other day at fifty five. You make sixty percent in a month. Now, we would quite happily hold it. We didn't want it only hold ping An for a month. But when when you've had this kind of move, you've been over awarded in a short space of time, we are happy to move on.
Okay, And the other market that until very recently we kept being told was uninvestable, I kept being told, particularly by American investors in the odd unreconciled remainer, that the UK was an uninvestable market. We don't hear that so much anymore. We're hearing much more positivity around the UK. You invested here.
We are and you know we meaningfully overweight. I think we're at six percent versus just less than four. Not that we worry, as I said, we worry too much about the benchmark. And you know we we bottom up investors, so we less worried about the top down and interest rates and you know, those kind of put political goings on. I suppose that's the other thing is that China's had quite a stable It's one of the few places in
the world that hasn't had an election this year. But some of the companies there meren which might be of interest. And again my compliance office or shot of me if I don't say this is obviously not advice. But where we do have some positions is in the and what's deeply out of favor are the UK asset managers.
Why do you think that's out of favor? Why do you think you look at that and you see the value and other people do not.
Well, I think if you've owned Aberdeen all the way for years and you've seen one corporate acquisition after another just go wrong. You are biased and trying to avoid biases is a key part of what we do. And so if you come in fresh and you know you haven't got that historic baggage, that helps you to look at things with a fresh pair of eyes. And so we'll do that. But we don't bet the ranch. We
are not in the high conviction camp. You know, we are fully aware that stuff comes out of nowhere, but we think we're getting paid to wait.
Now, the other back to traveling. Another stock that I see that you are now holding is Ryan Air.
Yes, yes, yes, well Ryanair. I mean that's you know, I remember when I first got over here from South Africa in early two thousand and two thousand and one. I mean, here was this business. It was highly highly rated and we thought, goodness me, can you believe it? But look at what Michael Earliery and his team have done. And you know the interesting thing for us is we don't meet management. But you didn't have to meet management.
You just have to look at the return on equity that here Michael O'Leary and his team have generated in the toughest of industries. That he's built this business from pretty much nothing to transporting something like two hundred and twenty five million passengers a year. It's just been phenomenal and that they didn't need, you know, lifelines from governments during the pandemic Etcter survived. So phenomenal management team in a great business. And I guess if the economy is tough,
you know, people will trade down to Ryan Air. You might not be going on first class on some other airline but betrayed going on holiday on RHINEIR. So people want to go on holiday. Great great management team, strong balance sheet, reasonably priced, buying back shares because they've got excess capital. And the other thing which is interesting is there's capacity constraints because you know, Boeing and Airbus are struggling to get aircraft out the door.
You say you don't meet management. Now, I find this very interesting and I think I understand why you do it. But I speak to an awful lot of fund managers who's usp is how many management teams they took to, and they tell me endlessly about well, this is what I do. I visit sixty companies a year. Or one hundred companies a year, and I look the management in the eye. I have conversations with them, and I can see if they're honest, and I can well, I'm not
getting inside information. I can pick up bits and bobs of levels of confidence that other people can't see. And that is my value you as a fund manager. That's how they sell themselves, how a lot of the industry sells itself right, And you're just saying, Nah, I'm gonna bother with that. I'm again to set my office and play with spreadsheets.
Yeah, Maria, next time one of those fund managers tells you that, please ask them to send a scatter plot with the wire access showing our performance and the x acts is showing the number of meetings. And let's see if there's a direy correlation, because I suspect there probably isn't, just as there isn't a direct correlation between large teams and our performance. It sounds so good and it sounds so obvious. Oh, we meet management, I mean in many
cases they're meeting investor relations. You know, we want management teams to be out there running the business, not speaking to fund managers all the time. Now that said you know, we read conference call transcripts. We read a lot of them. So it's not like we ignore what management say. We like to look and say, okay, well what are these What is management saying it quarterly reports, reporting portback periods or semi annual report back periods. But I don't want to.
I don't want to meet management and then think oh they're a good guy and be more and more patient. We can evaluate management based on the numbers. We can see when did this management team take over, what we're return on assets and what we're operating margins? Then what was market share and what is it now? Have they added value? Have they detracted value? Have they done decent deals? Or have they destroyed value? You know, you and you look at that and you go, yeah, I mean it helps,
it helps me. That's how we evaluate management. So if a company is doing a stupid deal and paying way over the odds for an acquisition, you know, look at Unilever acquiring Dollar Shave Club for a billion dollars was a loss making business. You know, you just go, this is going to destroy return on assets, is using company cash to go and overpay for an acquisition, and this indicates a management are you know, or not of the
caliber we'd like. So that's how we evaluate management, the numbers and we leave the niceties to everybody else.
And I suppose it helps you avoid being caught up in stories and that you know, really investing is just about stories, right, stories you believe, stories you don't believe. And the extent to which a charismatic CEO can tell a good story. I mean, that's that's the story of tech.
For example, when the story lines up with the numbers, fantastic. But so often what will happen is, you know, you look at the numbers and you'll go, okay, things are tough, and you read the conference called transcript and you go, my goodness, am I reading this my quarter out? Is this the same period? You know? Is this the same company? So they often, you know, they can be quite a spin.
And I mean even to the extent that that management teams know that that analysts and AI are trawling through conference called transcripts looking for those little you know, trying to work out of is the call positive or negative? Extracting positive phrases and negative phrases, so they gear things accordingly. If you attach yourself to a narrative to a story. Okay, how do you know when you're wrong? So if you'd said I want to buy wind because it's part of
the energy transition, it's going to play an important part. Great, it's still going to play an important part. But you've lost seventy percent of you brought some of the go go windstocks, you know, the Vestus and those types of companies way back when, or the Solar. I mean, look at what a disaster solely is. So it's hard to identify when you're wrong. If you just focus on the story, the numbers will tell you when you're wrong. Margins are falling,
revenue is falling, it's too overpriced, et cetera. You know, look at these obesity drugs at the moment, what's the story. The story is, we've got an obese population and there are only a couple of them that have been approved, and they're going to make a hundred billion of you know, in the next couple of years. In terms of like that,
that basically is blue sky. Well, well, let's see, but there's one hundred and seventy competitors all trying to develop obesity drugs, and sooner or later that lunch will get eaten by the new competitors. And so if you're paying forty times earnings for the likes of Nova and ORDERSK, you know, it's going to be hard to make a return, we think, or.
At some point everyone's going to be thin. The things work right, then that'll be that right. And then of course there are not one facts like that. The diet book industry collapses, maybe the gym business collapses.
Well let's see. But you know, the problem is paying too much for stories is not a good thing, and it is hazardous to your health. And so we go to whatever steps we can to avoid over pain for strap.
There's a lot of stories around around in the world of energy transition. You just mentioned that you've stayed stayed out of wind, stayed out of solar. How are you playing the transition or are you just sticking with oil?
Well we've got a little bit of oil. But I mean, you know, one of the one of the stories is will go by the utilities because we're going to have to They're going to have to generate all the power that that is that these AI data centers are going to use. Until you look at the balance sheets of these utilities and see how much debt they've got from having you know, installed solar and wind farms at high prices, and you go, well, I don't know if I'm going
to go there. I mean, we do have we do have a small position in Kazat and Prom Kazakhstan uranium minus. I guess there's a bit of energy there. But but we're not doing that because we think that AI demand is going to drive energy usage. You know, again that's a theme and we're not really we're not thematic investors because it comes back to that story. We're rather the stock. Each stock has to has to make it on its own merits.
Okay, let's talk a little bit about South America where again looking at your waiting as relative to the ending. So it's a big fat zero in the MSCI world and it's eleven percent in your portfolio. What does that mean or is that just Petro bast.
Well, we're not just Petro Brass, and we've got ins. We've got you know, bank at Columbia. It's a good bank at an attractive price. Petro Brass. You know, people were ignoring Petro Brass everybody after that. Again it was a concern. You know, there's always an opportunity if there that if you if you can the difference between perception and reality. The concern was, oh, Lula's coming back and he's going to do a lot of bad stuff and
for skate shares or whatever. It was shortly after you'd had the goings on in Russia and people were running from emerging markets. But yet enshrined in their articles is that they'll pay out over twenty five percent of cash
flow as dividends. And so here are you buying a lower one of the lowest cost producers that had paid off used their cash in recent years to pay off their vast amounts of debt which that incurred from from building up their fields in you know, from twenty fourteen the next ten years or so, and that's paying huge amounts of dividends and and so I mean, I think in the first year we got many forty percent of our money back from dividends. And so you know, who
knows where oil is going to go. I guess if you'd said to me a year ago that we're going to have China stimulus and you know, lots of tension and war in the Middle East and the Ukraine war on the go, what's oil price going to be I probably wouldn't. I'd guess a lot higher than the current price. So you know, one's got to always recognize that these cheap solar panels are displacing some of this oil demand
and so that's uncertain. So if you're not sure where it's going to go, well then you want to go with the lowest cost producer, and petro Brass is one of those. And you're paying you know, very low single digit multiple for that, so with with dividends, so we'll we'll buy that.
We're talking about so many different companies, so many different sectors, so many different countries. You're quite a small fund and I think you're quite a small team. How on earth are you covering the entire world?
We don't waste mony time meeting manage.
Well, okay, fine, do management.
No, but I guess it's a bit like it's a bit like saying, well, hang on you if you're the coach of the English cricket team, Harneth, you know all the cricketers in England.
Excellent question as well. I don't know the answer to that one either.
No, you've just got to know what you're looking for and and of course, you know, you've got to know what you're looking for, have set up your screens, and then you wait until the fish swim into your pond, and then you know those companies. And so that's what we do. You know, we're not out there worrying about benchmarks and worrying that we haven't got meta rights and metas big in the index and we need, you know, form of view. If meta doesn't take our boxes, we
don't look at better end off. So that's how we do it. We just focus on the fish that swim into our pond and know those fish.
Yeah, and you don't have to worry about the index. I wrote a column recently about about active versus passive. When I say a column, I mean another column, and I've written so many of them over the years, and this one was about some data that someone said me showing that funds that are genuinely active I have an active share of seventy five plus and that shows that they're very diverse from the index, outperform on average over pretty much every time scale, and your active share is
about ninety nine. So on that basis.
Alone, Well, look, I read that article and I thoroughly enjoyed it. And there's one there's one topic I'd love you to explore in detail. Maybe you haven't, I've missed it. But there's this notion of active fee, which is how much you pay for your active share. And I think that's the answer because if we you know, if our OCF is just over one percent, but we got ninety
nine percent active share, well that's one thing. But if you've got a fun next door which has got an OCF of seventy five BIPs, but they've got fifty percent active share, well actually you're paying them more for the active component to their portfolio than you are for us. And and so active fee, I think is an important number that a lot of people miss. Half the funds don't put their active share on their fact sheets, you know, and don't update it on a number of things. So
I think it's a hard number to come after. But this notion of you know, at the end of the day, it's all about your returns, isn't it, you know? And I mean I had a conversation with somebody recently and they said, all you're twenty five BIPs. Your twenty five basis points out the running I said, do you know that that is a five percent move on a five percent position the whole year. I mean that is a rounding error. So if that's what's moving your the needle,
then you know, let's focus on something else. But there is this, I think, this excess focus on costs because and this excess focus on benchmarks, because people seem to have forgotten, you know, we only that benchmarks also fall. I mean, since I've been running ran more the the S and P five hundred, I think is up double digits nine of the fifteen years and only down double digits one and that was twenty twenty two, and three months later you had AI, you know, removing that bad memory.
So people have forgotten that benchmarks also fall. And performing in line with the benchmarks is not the be all and end all. It's it's am I getting wealthier in real terms is the key question? And if I happen to beat the benchmark, fantastic. If I don't, but I'm still getting wealthier in real terms, Well isn't that more important, you know than going down twenty percent when in the benchmarks full you know, twenty five and thinking you've got a good, good result. I mean, one of the things
that you know as we're a boutique. We've got some three hundred and eighty million, eighty five million dollars under management. And when you're a small fund, obviously the costs are a higher component, but it also means that you can you know, you're a speedboat not a container ship, and you're not going to get stuck in the sewers canal
and so you can move. But you know, with small funds, I think there needs to be a little bit of latitude for the small funds who you know, to be able to have a slightly higher OCF to to accommodate the fact that they are you know, this will going to keep the lights on.
Yeah, I mean, I do think this is a very interesting point. It's really tough to start a new funder these days in Abertique because a lot of the wealth managers and people who might have given you seed capll previously are not going to do it if that if the cost come in over one percent, because that doesn't work for them. So you've got that, and then you've got the increasingly intense regulatory over lay to opening a new fund. So there does seem to be quite a
competitive mote these days. Do you think that if you were starting right now, you would find it more difficult to get going.
Definitely, I mean definitely. It's you know, it takes you a few years to get a rating or whatever rating. Some financial advisors won't look at you until you have a rating. You know, there is the whole scale element, so you'd have to absorb in the management company would have to absorb a lot of the costs themselves. And you've got to be doing something different, you know. I mean,
how many quality growth companies are there? I look at our value peer there's only fifty one value funds according to this morning start at I'm looking at that have been around since we started, whereas if you look at you know, IA Global, there's one hundred and sixty seven. So it's you've got to be doing something different if you wanted to start today, and you've got to have some passioned capital, that's for certain.
Is there anything that would persuade you to go out and buy n video?
Do you know? I'm going to tell you something. A cram myself to sleep at night knowing that in twenty fourteen it was one of our largest positions. Wow, how about that? And so we spotted it a way back when when nobody else wanted it because they had licensed some technology to Intel and Intel was a big portion of their revenue, and everybody said, oh, they're not going to be able to renew that and all the rest,
and you could buy Innvidia on ten times earnings. Of course, I had no idea that it was it was going to, you know, reach the levels that it has done. But it does highlight that and we made money out of it, but we moved on, and so you know that's that is going to happen, and people say, well, you know it, wouldn't it be wonderful if you were buy and hold investor, you could have held on to Nvidia and be three times a size of the fund. But there are a
couple of other stocks. I'm glad we didn't hold onto you. So you know, you take it as it comes. You're going to get some right and you're going to get some wrong. But the good thing is our process identified it. So no Novidia, no, I mean, and you know, Meren you what And this is a problem with many of the tech companies and I'm actually writing a piece on
this at the moment. Is I think they're far more expensive than people think they are, because what happens is in these technology companies, you've got your stock based compensation, they give you performance unit stock units or whatever and to the staff, so call it share options, and so in accounting terms and the income statement, that's included as a cost. But these companies love to focus on free
cash flow because in free cash flow that is added back. Okay, the problem is what are the companies doing with the cash flow. They're buying back shares, but the buyback of shares is after the free cash flow number, and so these companies are buying back shares, but who they're buying the shares back from when they're not buying in the open market. Effectively, they're buying them back from employees who
exercising the options. So you have removed the cost, you know, in terms of how profitable these businesses are from the free cash flow. But then they're using all the cash to buy back the shares. And I think I'm right in saying that. Well, one of the tech companies, I mean, I think it's a video. Two thirds of the shares that they're bought back last quarter were you know, options that have been exercised. So these companies are way more
expensive than you think. They're not returning cash to shareholders. They're giving cash to employees.
Effectively, they're not they're not returning cash to shareholders. They're bumping up their wage bill. But it doesn't quite come out like that.
Yeah, Meta, the last time I looked there, you know, they'd spent almost all their free cash for Biomax shares and the share can't had not fallen. So you know, this is the thing. So what you actually wanted to do, you've got to look at that. And so that just means these companies are more expensive. And so you know every day Jensen Wong is selling one hundred and twenty thousand shares. Now that's a rounding eraror according to his holding. But you know, here you've got a company with Nvidio.
Every single one of their large customers is trying to eat their lunch. You know, the tech bubble. And not to say that we're in a tech bubble at the moment, but but you didn't have with Cisco and you know, custom their customers being at and T and Verizon and the guys, they weren't trying to develop their own router and switch. But yet in the video. All the customers are trying to develop AI, their own AI, chips, Apple, Meta, Amazon,
the whole lot. And so why on earth do I want to pay thirty five times sales when I'm up against my biggest customers who are cash flash and cash generative, trying to eat my lunch.
Yeah, particularly when you can build a portfolio very significantly lower valuations that you have higher expectations for.
My son was reading the Little Book of Value Investing the other day and I said, Tom, what are your key takeaways? And he said, the future is unfocostable. Don't pay too much for it. And I said, well, that's exactly it. The future is unforecastable. Don't pay too much for it. You know, don't be too convinced that you know what's around the corner, because history keeps reminding us we don't. And so the only way you can protect against that is not is by not paying too much for it.
Sean, I know that I have to ask. I have to ask what everybody is thinking, How old is your son?
My son is twenty okay.
All right, And I'm glad he's not a teenager because that makes me feel a lot better about my own teenagers. Gosh, they're not reading investment books of an evening. They're absolutely not. Now listen, we have one last question. You've got ten years. I'm gonna give you a choice of two things, gold or bitcoin.
It is definitely gonna be gold. I am not in the bitcoin camp. I'm afraid, Merron, and I'm disappointed. I'm sorry we don't have more gold mine at where we don't have any gold miners in the portfolio. But there have not been great businesses, you know, they very difficult businesses. But if I had to go for if it's either or it's gold all the way.
Okay, And what would make you change your mind on bitcoin?
Nothing?
Absolutely nothing, nothing.
I'm with Charlie Mungo all the way on bitcoin. And it's a family radio, so I bit not repeat what he said, but.
Okay, all right, we'll repeat that when we get to the end. Family Radio. I wish thanks for listening to this week's Maren Talks Money. If you like us show, rate review and whatever, you listen to podcasts and keep sending your questions and your comments to marrin Money at Bloomberg dot net. You can also follow me and John on Twitter or x I'm at Marinas W and John is John Underscore Steppek. This episode was hosted by me Marrin's Unset Web. It was produced by Somesidi and Isabella Ward.
Production support and sound designed by Murders and Them and special thanks to Sean Tsh