Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. Welcome to Merin Talks Your Money, the Personal Finance edition of Merin Talks Money. In these bonus podcasts, we talk about the best strategies for making the most of your money. I'm Merin Sunset Web and this week we are tackling what sounds like a very simple question, if you had one hundred thousand
dollars right now, where would you invest it? Now we know that at the moment, at least the majority of our audience are in the UK, so that's you know, roughly eighty thousand pounds if we want to be specific.
But it's the same kind of thing.
So the point anyway, is not the currency. The point here is to think about where you would put the money. So what we've done is we've got on the Bloomberg Personal Finance and Wealth reporter Susanne Willie, who joins us from New York.
Thank you, Susan.
My pleasure.
And what you do fairly regularly is you look at particular amounts of money ten thousand dollars, one hundred thousand dollars, a million dollars, and you go out and you ask experts what they would do with the money. Is that right?
Is that how it works?
That's how it works? You know, I was looking and this series actually started in twenty sixteen, which means I've been written a shocking number of these things. But you know, we're trying to get people to tell us where now do they see a compelling sector or a strategy that you know one of the dynamics behind the strategy make it particularly interesting right now? And how people can you know, can move into that strategy if they want to.
Okay, so your latest one is on one hundred thousand dollars, and can I let's ask before we go into looking at what these money managers said, how do you choose them?
A chunk of them are people that I already know and respect. If we're going to allow this person to share their views, I want to know that they're legitimate, they've been in the market for a while, that they're not completely talking their own game. So a lot of these are people I know. There are people that we speak to at Bloomberg or Markets team or Cross Assets team, so they're people with good experience. But I try to get a broad range, so I don't just get like strategists.
Chief of investment officers. Sometimes I get portfolio managers, so sometimes I'll get somebody who is at a family office, so different little spots in the wealth management world. I try to have a mix of people to get a wide range of views.
Okay, and here's the key question that I know a lot of people are now thinking.
Max.
We've got quite a big professional audience on this podcast. Although it is by the way aimed the ordinary investor. I know a lot of pros listen to it. Do you take suggestions? If they will email in going geez, I can do better than that.
Yes, I do. I'm always open to finding new people that where to invest ten thousand. We have the same people pretty much every time, three out of four, but the other ones one hundred thousand, the one million. My colleague Charlie Wells in London does a great one on word invest in real estate. I am always looking for new people because I don't want to just present the same people. So there's always a mix of new people.
And I'm very open to getting pictures. Although Amaron, I may really regret saying that, Well.
You won't regret it because what's going to happen. Is it going to come into our email. Excellent, I'm going to regret it, and they're going to come to us and I'm going.
To filter them for you.
That is fabulous, So then they'll be never filtered by me and you so hear that, everybody. If you want to do this, you've got to be brave because I'm filtering you, and then Susanna is filtering you. So you know, have something you stant to say before you even touched on to the people who do have useful things to say and have already got your trust. When I was looking through your most recent article, which by the way, we'll put the link to that in the show notes
for subscribers, what struck me. There's a lot of home buyers here, a lot of the people you talk to a still very heavily invested in the US and in US large cap stocks.
It's really true. I was a bit surprised by some of that. I talked to Shaneade Colton Grant, who is with BNY Mellon, and she was very big on US large caps and was saying that people who are concerned about tech valuations are thinking back to the dot com bubble, but the sector looks different today because of the cash flow that the Mag seven are throwing off. I guess
I had expected a little more more valuation concern. I'd had a different take from Shanead's back in late December when we did the Word to Invest one million story and Jack Ablin, who's the chief investment officer of Cressa Capital, his big picture take was that he thought the SMP was overvalued by twenty five percent and noted that can't be made up by earnings a loan. But he also noted something that is very true obviously, which is that
expensive Marcus can stay expensive. He just wouldn't. He just was saying he wouldn't have put new money into the Mag seven because he actually probably, like your guests the other week, Jeremy Grantham, thinks we could see every play of two thousand and that all we need is some sort of catalyst and we could be down a very unhappy path.
Then already, if you decided to stay only in US lunch cap this year, you're already seeing fairly hefty relative informance right now, as you got my Bloomberg up in front of me, and the S and B five hundred and at one point two four percent as we speak eurostocs thirteen point five percent, even the foot two one hundred up nearly nine percent, and the Dack's up well over sixteen percent.
So this year, if you'd.
Stuck with US large gap so far, I mean, it's can turn around any second, we know markets, right, but so far that home bias isn't looking great for American investors.
It's true, and I personally kind of welcome this to some degree because I'm a big believer in diversification, and one aspect of diversification that hasn't paid off for so long that people have moved away from is diversifying internationally. And I think a lot of people, to some asset managers and their clients want to move away from asset perstation their home biases getting even stronger. And I'm a big believer in international diversification and that's where the value is now.
And of course she could still be right.
I mean, she says, doesn't she when you talk to her, that this is the year that AI needs to prove itself and if it really does prove itself, and it is the case as everyone felt pret deeps that the US is the center of the most exciting bits of AI tech. Then these valuations that we're so worried about you and I may mean nothing.
Yeah, she's not going like raw ra. She has a smart take on it. You know, she definitely wants to see the results that were all watching for. In this most recent one, there was someone who did like small caps, which is another sort of interesting one to me because I'm personally a little like Leary of small caps. I know that they'll benefit from lower interest rates because most of their debt is floating rate debt, But I just wonder where do tariffs come in with small caps?
Yeah?
Look, tariffs are there are a moving, a moving nightmare, aren't they know? We're never really got We still don't really know very much about what's actually going to happen, so it's difficult to invest anywhere where you might feel those intense tariff risk.
So true, and then of course you talk about small caps.
He only talks about US small caps And we have a rewarding in the UK out in the last couple of days from Aberdeen suggesting that UK small cabs are basically the most unloved cheapest asset class pretty much globally.
No one mentions those.
No, No, there was somebody in recent times who recommended like thirty percent in the UK. So there have been okay, you know, like glimmers of diversification.
Okay.
And then so we're moving on to Jerry from Brazilian who suggested we go abroad for value, right, So that's that's interesting. And then he also when he says go aboard, he was talking about not just Europe, briddles as your markets and age Agia specific so anything not US, right.
Yes, yes, I mean there have been people who've talked a lot about value in looking at areas that have been underappreciated and are obviously you know, it's not hard to be cheaper than the US market today, many markets are significantly cheaper. So this is the idea to sort of, he said, think differently, embrace diversification, and look at growth areas and under explored parts of the market. I don't know if you'd call it Europe, em and Asia Pacific completely under explored.
But but maybe under explored for mainstream American investors. I guess perhaps.
And then I'll just go back to Michael of Levity Financial Group. He was the one he said small cap stocks in the US. But interestingly he very much recommended actively managed small cap funds overpassive. From our side, we always think of the US market as somewhere where everyone always goes passive overactive, because there's such a huge and well researched market, and even at small cap level, almost people went passive.
But he's very clear on active, right.
Yeah, he was very clear and active. He thinks there's more maybe due diligence that sort of needs to be baked into it. There are obviously small cap ETFs to focus on more quality, I believe, but yeah, there was not a focus on international in the small cap space for Michael, that's for sure.
And then the other thing that struck me as interesting from the first three people who spoke to is they all suggested some kind of private part of the portfolio. So even with one hundred thousand dollars, which doesn't seem like that huge a portfolio, is still suggesting that there's something private. So oncegested fifteen percent between private equity and bench capital, five percent and private credit, and I think was it.
Michael also suggested private.
Credit, right, yeah, private credit is pretty pretty hot. I mean, this is not meant to be like your one hundred thousand portfolio.
At all.
It's sort of like, if you got one hundred thousand portfolio today in addition to what you have, how would you sort of dole it out? But yeah, I mean there is so much talk or I don't know if you call it hype about private market investments. There's this talk about trying to get in the US, trying to get private market investments into our workplace retirement plans such as our four oh one k's. It's interesting. We've even seen recently some attempts to launch ETFs. Not attempts they
have launched ETFs focus on private credit. It's a tricky area. They're going to be large, smaller companies, and it's sort of hard to see the vetting that is being done behind the scenes to get into these investments. So I love the idea of having non correlated assets, but you have to weigh that against the risks known and unknown that are in some of these pockets of the market.
I don't want to be too negative. I'm just sort of saying that you really have to be cognizant of what you're getting into.
Yeah, and there's also a little argument about the extent to which that non correlation exists. But the podcast all together about another time. Now your fourth person, John from twin Focus. He was very much safety theme, which brings us back to taros and the threat of tarots, which we briefly mentioned earlier. Very hard to see where that's going to go, but if you want to play, it's safe.
He was very much about treasuries, right, He was very.
Much about treasury. As we were talking when treasuries were I don't know, around four point five percent the tenure. They have obviously gone down since then, but at his point when we came out was that you get the treasure, you get the safety, but that also you might be able to get appreciation, which probably has worked out if you bought it right when he put this right when we put this story out, and.
Maybe if we asked him again today right now, he might say something a little different.
I wonder. And he also talked a little bit about gold, which I know you are, Oh we like gold, Yeah, a fair enough.
You know. He made me happy in all sorts of ways because the way he talked about taking profits out of his the growth part of his portfolio and moving it towards value and midcaps as a potential reversion to the means strategy. I'm very big on reversion to the means that that really resonated with me. And then of course he talks about gold. When he talks about gold, he talks about owning a combination of billion coins and a gold ETF, so making of about three to five percent of the portfolio.
I thought that was interesting.
Yeah, that's what he generally. They have very ultra high networth clients. He's with twin Focus, and that's something that they generally advise for their clients. He basically feels gold has a place a permanent place in portfolios.
Interestingly, he doesn't seem to think that crypto has a place a permanent place in portfolios. So, you know, looking through this, I wonder none of these people mentioned in crypto at all. I wonder if they would with Trump's talk about crypto over the weekend. But have any of the people you've interviewed previously, perhaps the people what you've asked when you're looking at million dollar portfolios, have they mentioned crypto?
Yes, they have mentioned crypto. They've mentioned you know, bitcoin in particular, since that's sort of where it's at with the you know, the crypto, the ETF focused on crypto that the I shares etf taking in so much money this year, although some of it has flowed out recently obviously. But people have also talked about bitcoin in terms of
a correlated asset. But that's not really true because you know, if you look at bitcoin and how it responds when the market is a risk off, it's not pretty right, No, it's not.
And we talked about this last week.
We went three podcasts last week and in one of them, John and I talked about people who had a lot of bitcoin and I suddenly found they'd lost rather a lot of value very quickly. And at the same time, we were talking about where you might buy a Golden visa if you wanted to move to a new country, and one of the things that we ended up talking about was how be a really great idea to move to Greece. Oh, now, I look at the final question
that you ask all your participants. You say to them, what's their alternative investment idea that isn't necessarily in an asset class at all? And I see that one of them said he's buying a small place in the southern part of Greece.
Yes he is.
John Panta Kidtis of Twin Focus, who was born in Greece, and he travels back there quite often, and he and his wife for buying a place on what they call the Athens Riviera, and he is very bullish and buying real estate in Athens. He was just saying, if you have one hundred thousand, putting that toward a home in some high end neighborhood in Greece could be a big investment.
When I read that, I slightly misunderstood because I read it very quickly, and I thought, wow, you can buy a nine thousand Greece for one hundred thousand dollars. And so then I went on to have a quick look on some of the real estate sides and found that when he says put one hundred thousand dollars towards a home and some high end neighbors in Greece, he means put one hundred thousand dollars towards a home in a high end neighborhood in Greece as a five percent deposit.
Yes, that is cheap.
No, No, he said, it's He said, you know their prices are skyrocketing, and that you know it's all foreigners buying. Yeah, but he's very bullish.
Was that your favorite of the alternates recommended in that article, because there was another good stuff too, Yeah.
And this particular one it was I liked the idea of buying recreational land where you could sort of create your own little compound and you have your hiking trails. And if you're in the US, people love pickleball. Here you could put a pick a ball cord on. But I loved Greece because I love travel, and I have a secret fantasy of getting some lovely stone home in Tuscany. So I'm always interested in the overseas real estate dreams of some of these people.
I'm going to ask you one more question that which isn't even about this newsletter, this piece you wrote about these four investors. Over the last six months or so, has there been someone who's offered you an investment that is outside the main dream that really resonated with you and thought, yet, that is interesting, it's different. And if I had one hundred thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars or a million dollars right now, that's what I would buy.
I've had some interesting, sort of niche ones, none like the one that your guest the other week, Dan Rusmussen, I think had which was I think Polish stocks. But I have had someone recommend Korean banks, which I thought was interesting. I'm a boring investor, Maren. I personally just go for index funds and try to keep it pretty simple. So while I'm intrigued by a lot of these ideas, personally I keep it pretty simple.
Say you're not coming in with me on a house in Greece.
I didn't say I wouldn't go for real estate and Greece.
Oh okay, fine, all right, well we'll talk about I'll join you.
I'll join you in sort of like the hard assets. You know, we can go and we can buy some gold, yeah, some bullion. I can buy some coins and because I'll have pickle ball in grease and you know, in the spring.
So anyway, all right now, I don't think that you can my Greek house with an ETF. But if you're listening and that you click on the link in the show notes, you will find ETF recommendations for pretty much all the things we've talked about today, and you can see how you can get exposure to the asset classes that.
We are finding interesting.
Thanks for listening to this week's Marin Talks to Your Money. If you like a show, rate review, and subscribe where ever you listen to podcasts. Also, be sure to follow me and John on x or Twitter at marinasw and John Underscore Stepic Seisani on Twitter.
Got a big yes, I am what's your hand on?
I am at wealth Watch?
Okay, brilliant, Thank you.
This episode was produced by Samasadi, Production support and sound designed by Moses and Questions and comments on this show and all our shows always welcome, as are your pictures to be in Susan's articles. Our show email is merin Money at Bloomberg dot net s