Don’t Hate the Player: DJT, Bets, Funds - podcast episode cover

Don’t Hate the Player: DJT, Bets, Funds

Jul 19, 202431 min
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Episode description

Katie and Matt discuss Trump Media’s stock sale, people who are too good at sports betting and stock trading, and single-stock private funds. 

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Transcript

Speaker 1

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.

Speaker 2

Hello and welcome to The Money Stuff Podcast, your weekly podcast where we talk about stuff related to money. I'm Matt Levine and I write The Money Stuff com for Bloomberg Opinion.

Speaker 1

And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.

Speaker 2

What's going on, Katie?

Speaker 1

All right? We are going to talk about DJT and your Phil. We're going to talk about sports gambling, and we're also going to talk about Ron Barron and Elon Mosk. Alright, it's been a while though, sure. Hey, so we tell you to email us every week. We're specifically looking for questions.

Speaker 2

So we want to do more of a mail bag so that Katy and I can sing mail bag. Yeah, And to do that, we need questions. So send us to your questions.

Speaker 1

All we need is a prompt.

Speaker 2

All we need is a prompt. We don't want to make up questions.

Speaker 1

No, don't make us make up questions.

Speaker 2

Send us your best questions at money Pod at Bloomberg dot net. And then if you send us a good question, we'll answer it on air. And if you send us only bad questions, we'll be forced answer those on air.

Speaker 1

We can work with that.

Speaker 2

Dj T, Trump Media and Technology DJT.

Speaker 1

They should sell stock. They can't sell stock yet, as you write, because they're not yet a year old. But there's a way for them to get more shares out there into the handle.

Speaker 2

They can sell stock. What they can't do, yeah, is an ATM just the silly finance start for an at the market offering. If you're a meme stock, this is like as me me as a memestock cats, right, Like it has like a business that I sometimes say it's like a moderately successful substock. They make like, you know,

a million dollars a quarter in advertising revenues. Not bad, it's not bad for like one man operation, but like it's got a bunch of employees, a seven billion dollar equity market cap, which seems high for like a million dollar quarter revenue operation that, by the way, lose a lot of money because like they have to pay a

lot of people to generate that million dollars revenue. And so probably some people there think that it's a business, right, and like it's going to be like the future of media, right, They're going to get into television and they're going to be the biggest social media platform there is. They're not now, but maybe one day they will be. But my impression

is that it largely trades like a meme stock. It trades as a bet on the newsworthiness of Donald Trump, and so it has this valuation that is largely not driven by business fundamentals. And I've written about that sort of thing a lot over the years, and my feeling is like, if you have a valuation that's not just fundamentals, you should sell as much stock as you can because then you have money, and you've transformed your irrational public valuation into an actual pot of money that you can

use to build a business. And they seem to agree. So they're like, we're going to sell stock. And the way you sell that stock has to be to retail investors, right. You have to go out and sell it in the market to retail investors. You can't do a standard book builds offering where like you hire a big investment bank and they call big mutual funds and hedge funds and they say, would you like to buy stock? Because like, yeah, like what does that pitchbuck look like? Right? What does

the what does the investor deck look like. So they want to do an out of the market offering, they can't because they haven't been public for long enough basically because they're a Deespac company. And so they are doing this weird quasi ATM offering where like they've hired Yorkville Advisors, which is like a smallish fund in New Jersey.

Speaker 1

That mountain side mountain side New Jersey.

Speaker 2

You this podcast expert on New.

Speaker 1

Jersey to where I grew up, So.

Speaker 2

It is your horse spin to mountain side. Probably not I hire this mountain side fund to Basically, like, these guys will buy their stock whenever they want to, and then they'll turn around and sell it into the market and look like like a two point seventy five percent fee, and it's like a sort of quasi ATM offering.

Speaker 1

And so they then sell it over the course of three days, well.

Speaker 2

I think it's like one or three days. Yeah, the deal is for two and a half billion dollars, but it's not like that's happening today. It's like two and a half billion dollars over the course of up to three years. And so on any day in that three year period, the company can call the York Villa and say, hey, we want to do like twenty million today. They say a number of shares were I to do like a million shares today? And York Villa will sell it those

shares over like three days. Yeah, give them the money.

Speaker 1

Reading it kind of made me think of them as just basically very slow market makers. I know that's super reductive and simplistic, but that's how I talked about it in my head to myself.

Speaker 2

They're like a broker in an atm ufering. You hire a bank or a broker and you tell them to sell stock over the day.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and they sell the stock.

Speaker 2

And they charge you a fee. And this is the same thing, only like they're not technically a broker. They're not technically doing it as a broker. They're doing it as a principal. They're buying the stock for their own account and then they're selling it into the market. The thing that makes them any principle rather than just the broker is that if they sell stock for thirty five dollars or whatever, they don't pay DJT the price they got.

They pay DJT the company Trump Media. DJT is the ticker they pay DJT the volume weighted average price over the period they sell it. Actually the more complicated than that, but they pay them like a price that is objectively determined. It's not like if we sell stock for you thirty five dollars, we'll pay you thirty five dollars. It's like

we'll sell stock or we won't. And so the natural thing to do is if you're paying the view op over some period, you sell the stock over that period, and then you've eliminated the risk, right, Like, you sell it the view op and you pay the view up. But like there's no obligation for them to sell, no obligation to them to sell during the pricing period. And so because of that, everyone can say, this is not a deal in which DJT is selling stock to the market.

This is just the deal in which DJT is selling stock to Yorkville. And what Yorkville does with the stock is its own business. Now clearly, because they're paying like the volume weighted average price over like period of time, their incentive is to sell the stock over that period of time. And like there are like various indications that they're not going to hold onto the stock, right, Like they're a thirty million dollar assets under management fund buying

two point five billion dollars of Trump stock. Right, there's like a limit that they can't buy more than four point nine nine percent of the stock. Two point five billion is like a quarter of the stock. So they're not going to hold onto the stock, but they're going to sell the stock, but they don't have to. There's

no arrangement for them to sell the stock. The other thing I would say is, like the way the pricing works is that each day they look at the volume weighted average price and they take the lowest of those view ops and that is the price that they pay. And so that it creates incentives. Right, if you sell the stock like one third each day, then like the lowest day is the price you pay it and the

other two days are like gravy for you. So you know, their incentive is to have one day be really bad so that they can pay DJT a low price for the stock and like sell it for a high price.

Speaker 1

And with a meme stock, that's probably gonna happen. You're gonna have one rocky day, You're.

Speaker 2

Gonna have volatility. Right, Essentially, what Yorkville is getting is a series of short term options that they're getting kind of for free, right, because of the stock is like forty dollars one day, thirty five dollars the next day, and forty dollars the following day. Then like they sell stock at like an average price of like thirty eight, but they pay like thirty five to DJT because that's the lowest of the three of view.

Speaker 1

Ops to just tie a bow on this. So they're a broker in ATM, but it's totally on djt's terms. No, Well, DJT is selling them the stock.

Speaker 2

So a broker in an ATM, yeah, like a bank. The way it works is that the company calls them every day and says, hey, we want to sell twenty million dollars off their stock or whatever, and the broker sells that stock for the company and then pays the company the money it received minus a fee. Right, yeah, and this is different, Like this is the DJT calls Yorkville and says, hey, you want to sell some stock, and Yorksville says, okay, we'll give you the money in

three days. But they don't have to sell the stock, and they're acting as principal and they're getting a lot of like little options on DJT stock. Right, So basically, if the stock is volatile, they make more money. That's not true of a broker in an ATM, right, Yeah, broker in a the ATM, if the stock is volatile, then like they're just selling it on behalf of the company here. Because they are a principal, they are making probably a lot more money than a broker in an

at would. Also, they're not a broker, because that's sort of important for legal reasons. If they're doing it as a broker, then this is an ATM and it doesn't really work. And by the way, this is not an uncommon thing where a company wants to sell stock to investors in the market and like there's some impediment and so they do this sort of thing where they instead sell the stock in some structured way to some investor

who specializes in intermediating these traits. Some of those people get in trouble for doing a sort of like the SEC says, you know, you're doing a brokerd offering and you're not supposed to do that, or you're supposed to be registered as a dealer. So there's some possibility of getting in trouble here when companies do this. Yeah, I think Borkville has a track record of doing it and not getting in trouble, so it seems okay, But it's a complicated kind of trade.

Speaker 1

Yeah, as you can tell, I'm trying to work through this. So Bailey Lipschultz wrote the article on Yorkville for Bloomberg News, and I was chatting with him about it, and I have to say, I've never thought about this before, And I was like, is this like a booming business? Like, who else does this?

Speaker 2

Specs? Well, Yorkfool is a ton of these respective.

Speaker 1

Yeah, well, he was saying, Yorkville is kind of one of one when it comes to this.

Speaker 2

They are one of one in this particular flavor of it. Yeah, but like when bed Bath and Beyond was sliding into bankruptcy, they did not this a different kind of trade, but I kind of looked the same. It was kind of like also a deal where like a investor agreed to buy stock from a company and sell it out into the market, but they weren't required to sell it out into the market, And so it was like, they're like

flavors of this. You know. There was for a whilely business of what are called death spiral convertibles are not this, but they're not unrelated to this, right, So, yeah, Yorkville is one of one in this particular line of business, and this seems to be a better way of doing it than some of the other ways. But yeah, like this sort of thing of like selling stock to an intermediary to like sell out to the market is the thing that people do.

Speaker 1

So I mean, does this business go away for Yorkville once DJT is more than a year old.

Speaker 2

Maybe, But there's always more companies.

Speaker 1

That need it, that's true. I'm just wondering. Yorkville has done a ton of these, but it's a moment in time.

Speaker 2

Yeah, that's probably right. It's a moment in time for each company. But there's always like companies that need weird financing, right, and so like this is the being in the financing weird companies kind of business, the one that I like in weird companies. Yeah, I don't know, just.

Speaker 1

Move on, I think so. So sports gambling, So, sports gambling, you can't be too good at it if you run.

Speaker 2

It sports scampling website. What you want is problem gamblers, right, I'm sorry to laugh at that, but like what you want is people who bet a lot of money. And are very bad at Now there are regulatory problems with that, because if you mostly get problem gamblers, like eventually you're gonna get shut down, or like regulators are gonna step in,

are going to limit you in some way. Right, what you don't want as a sports gambling website is people who are really good at gambling and keep making money

off of you. And so there's a Wall Street Journal article this week about basically some people who have built reasonably good sports gambling systems and actually make money doing it, find that the big sports gambling sites limit their accounts so they can't bet very much money because they were making too much money, and the gambling sites don't like that, and so they make them smaller amounts, and they complain

and like regulators and politicians say that's not fair. But of course the sport's caadpling sites, they control the entire apparatus, right, they're both the market maker for the bats, and also if they provide the website and they take the client information, so they know who's good and who's bad, and they're like, we don't want to bet against the people who are good. We ran a bet against the people who are bad. So they cut people down or they limit their bet sizes.

Speaker 1

Seems like you got a lot of emails about this.

Speaker 2

I don't follow sports gambling that closely, but I'm interested in like market structure, and I read a lot about equity market structure, and in equity market structure in America, people are also very into this question of like, I don't want to bet against people who are good, I want to bet against people wo are bad. And so what that means in practice and like US equity markets, is that big market makers pay retail brokerages to trade

with their order flow. Because the idea is, if you're a market maker, basically like some person on the other side of the trade is either informed or not right. Either their their order is informative, it's not right. And if you are constantly trading like smart hedge funds or with giant asset managers, then every time you sell them stock, that stock is going to go up. Right, So every time you sell them stock, you like lose little bit

of money. If you're constantly trading with retail traders, their orders are not informative. They're not going to buy you know, a million shares. They don't like have inside information and so every time you sell them stock, the stock doesn't go up, and so you don't lose money. So you'd rather trade with the retail traders, and so you can pay robin Hood or Fidelity or whatever to get their retail orders, and then you get a better pool of orders than you would with just trading in the public

market with like potentially institutions. And you know, so I wrote about that. I was like, you know, like these market makers in traditional finance and and you know equities also try to segment their order flow to trade with the bad people rather than the good people. But what I said was, like, what I don't know of is any cases where people who are just good at bets or keep making good bets get cut off by their broker, right. Accept, there's an example that I'm aware of because like they've

talked about it publicly three Hours Capital. You know the crypto hedgeweb.

Speaker 1

Oh yeah, I haven't heard that name in a long time.

Speaker 2

So those guys before they became a crypto hedge one, they were like currency at a bank and then they started a currency trading hedge fund that eventually morphed into a crypto.

Speaker 1

Fund and then it was an existential event when it went down, but in any.

Speaker 2

Case, like great for crypto, but like sorry, the super bad for crypto, big crypto story. But before that, they were like a little FX story. And what they did was they went to every bank and they signed up for the bank's FX trading platform, where basically the bank would like say, we'll trade currencies with you, and we'll post prices and you can, you know, click and trade at those prices and we'll take the other side of

the trade. And three Hours would sign up for every bank's platform, and they just look at all the websites and they'd see like sometimes one bank would post a lower price than another bank, so they could buy from one bank and sell to another bank and make a guaranteed risk free profit. And they did that and the banks got mad because that's just like taking money from them, and so they kicked three Hours off their platform and they said, we don't want to trade it with you anymore.

So I mentioned that when I wrote about it, and someone else emailed me to be like when he was an FX options trader, he had access to a bunch of different banks single deal or platforms, and he also armed the banks against each other. And he said I can confirm that they really don't like that, and a salesperson from each chewed me out and threatened to yank my access.

Speaker 1

I don't really understand what that's bad.

Speaker 2

It's bad because the banks lose money. It's not like illegal people do it, but like the banks feel like it's rude, so they don't. It's the same as with sports campling. It's the point is not that it's bad. The point is that if you have a client relationship and the client keeps making money off of you at your expense, you can just stop having that client relationship. And that's what the sports sides too.

Speaker 1

That seems more rude to me, but in any say, really, yeah, you're just arbitraging.

Speaker 2

You know, why should I let you keep arbitraging me?

Speaker 1

I guess that's a good question.

Speaker 2

If I keep betting with you and I keep losing money, I'm gonna stop betting with you.

Speaker 1

Don't hate the player or hate the game.

Speaker 2

I'm not hating you. I'm just not playing the game with you anymore.

Speaker 1

Fine, I mean right.

Speaker 2

It's a little weird that they actually call them up and yelled them instead of just stopping trading with them like, yeah, stop trading.

Speaker 1

I will say that I don't call me number one please.

Speaker 2

But I also got an email from another reader saying that he worked at a market maker, like one of the big, you know, electronic trading firms that do trade with retail orders, and he said, we built monitoring to isolate and identify professional traders out of the stream of retail orders, and so like they did identify people who were doing arbitrages on burker dealers, basically, like people who are good at trading stock options, not because they were

like geniuses, but because they could like are different broker dealers against each other, And so he said, we called up their broker and said, you have to kick them off because they're making too much money off of us. And the burger apparently did this. It's like a thing that sort of happens in equities and equity options, like

in retail market making. Like it is apparently possible to get kicked off your retail brokerage for being too good at trading retail options, just as it is in sportscambling exactly.

Speaker 1

And then you take a look at the Wall Street Journal store and you put an excerpt of this in your newsletter. But the example they used is Dave Holmes sports partner in Chicago, so that he started to win more using a math based wagering strategy. He ultimately got kicked off. But I would love to know what that strategy is because you think of where we sit as journalists and we can't day trade, and if I wasn't a financial journalist, I would be a fiend. But I

think we can sports scamble. I think I can scratch this itch.

Speaker 2

So but I understanding is that a lot of the winning strategies are much like the three hours guys. It's like you sign up for a bunch of different sports pending platforms and you see where the odds are different, and you like buy the cheap ods and sell the expensive odds so that you end up neutral and you just have a guarantee profit because you're basically harming the sports books against each other. There are other ways, like, right, you can be really good at knowing who'll hit.

Speaker 1

A home run round study.

Speaker 2

Yeah, learn football, But I think like the people who like really do that like kind of work for the sports market makers. So yeah, I think that typically the arbitrage method is the one that people reliably make money on I want to say that he didn't get kicked off. This is the other thing that's interesting about it. It's not that when you win too much money they kick

you off your platform. It's that when you win too much money, they lower your bat size so you can still win, usually win like twenty bucks instead of twenty thousand bucks. And part of the reason for that is if they kicked you off, there'd be more of a backlash, right, And so the limits are a little bit more opaque, and so you have a little bit less trouble with like politicians and regulators. But another part of it is

they do want your bets. Right. It's not bad to have on your platform someone who's really good at betting, because that's informative to you. Or if you know someone always wins, then when they make a bet, you can bet along with them, which means basically adjusting the odds so that like you're informed by their beats. And this is true in like market making too, right, Like if you're a banking you of a client who's like, you know, whenever they buy stock, the stock goes up, Like that's

useful information for you. You can probably make some money on that, right, even if like you're the one selling the stock and so you lose money on each trader on them, Like having good information is useful. Similar with this scambling sites, like you want to keep the people

who are winning betters because they're giving you information. I've written a little bit over the years about insider gambling in sports m M because like in the US, like the rules of insider trading for stocks are like kind of clear, the rules of insider betting on sporting events are like less clear, and like it's more controversial, and every so often, you know, someone who knows about, you know, a football player's injury will bet on a game, and

then it's like, oh, is that illegal or right? And someone once told me that it used to be when sports gambling was more of a sort of mob controlled activity.

You could get in trouble for insider gambling, you know, with the mob, but also there was a certain amount that was tolerated because like what they would do is like they would set a line set, like an opening line on a sporting event, and then like the people with inside information would come in and put bets or like the informed gamblers, like the good gamblers, but Also the people i'd inside information would come in and make bets, and then the bookies would get information from that and

they would adjust their lines so they'd be able to make more money off the general public. So it's a little of that here where like if you're really good, better, the sports betting sites can use that to make money, but they don't want to just also pay you at millions of dollars because you keep winning your bets, so they'll pay you at twenty dollars.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and the mob's involved, Well, the.

Speaker 2

Mob is not involved probably in the legal sports campling sites for sure.

Speaker 1

That's a good disclaimer. Just thinking back to Dave Holmes, if they cut him down to twenty cents, like he should just increase his volume and make them pay.

Speaker 2

First of all, first of all, that's a very bad job, right if like you're constantly making twenty cent bets, like it's you know, you're like return on your time goes now. But secondly, like assuming your math based strategy generates you know, one hundred bets a day, like you can't make a million bets a day, right, it is true?

Speaker 1

Yeah, well anyway, God bless him, take it up and volume. So Ron Barren loves Elon Musk, one of Elon Musk's biggest backer. When you think about you know who invests in various Tesla properties and Ron Barron, of course you think of him as a mutual fund manager. And now he's putting together these funds that are just for Elon Musk's private companies for individuals.

Speaker 2

Yeah, be fun to have, like Elon Musk mutual fund.

Speaker 1

Few weeks ago, I said, I want to launch a closed end fund of just Elon Musk. He's doing that for one, yeah, for SpaceX and for XA, separate.

Speaker 2

Funds for one for each.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

There's enormous retail demand for Elon Musk, right, And you can get a certain amount of Elon Musk by buying Tesla, but you can't get Twitter, slash X or XAI or SpaceX or the Boring Company or Neulink or all these other things that he does. And a lot of people want that. A lot of people want SpaceX, right, And there's like you know, there's there's I think we've talked about people like I want to say on the golf course, so I own some space ax.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

And so there's a booming business and giving it to them, right, if you're like institutional and through like a friend of Elon Musk, and you can put a slug of SpaceX into a vehicle and sell shares of that vehicle, like, people will pay you a lot of money for it.

Speaker 1

I don't know if they would describe themselves as friends, but Ron Barron and Elon Musk have a good relationship. But they met originally in twenty ten, and I mean Baron has just been buying Tesla stock forever. It feels like, I think this is really interesting. I mean for a lot of reasons. But also we've definitely talked about on this program beyond just Elon Musk, there's just a lot

of demand among retail investors for private companies. It feels like a lot of the exciting companies right now are private companies, SpaceX probably being one of the best examples of that. And this is a way to do it. Is it the most efficient I mean compared to some of the other vehicles that we've talked about, thinking about Destiny for example, exactly. So there you have.

Speaker 2

It, right, scarce supply of these private companies. There's a lot of desire to invest in them. There are some legal restrictions, but not that many. Right, A lot of the investor class now are in credit and investors and can buy private funds, and so there is a real demand

for this stuff. But I think is interesting is like the fact that there's a real demand for this stuff and like a limited supply mostly means that people who have that supply can make a lot of money, right, And so we've talked about the Destiny Tech one hundred fund where it traded an enormous premium to the net ascid value because like they had like this limited supply of cool private tech stocks and so they could sell that at you know, ten times acid value, or like,

you know, there are a number of other like SpaceX or whatever vehicles where it's like the manager of that vehicle, the person who has actual SpaceX shares, can charge like two and twenty style fees to just own one stock. The story about Ron Barn's SpaceX funds is that they're not doing that, right. They're charging like a mutual fundye kind of fee structure where it's not an incentive fee

and like relatively cheap. And so what he doing, which I think is more interesting, He's not like gouging it for money. He is using it as essentially advertisement for active management. Yeah, because like the point is like, if you run a mutual fund company, it's like a secularly rough time to run a mutual fund company, right, because index funds and ETFs are really taking away market share from actively managed stock mutual funds.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

And if you're running an actively managed stock mutual fund and you're like, no, I'm really good at picking stocks, so you should invest with me and pay me, you know, one hundred basis point fees instead of paying Blackrock, you know, one basis point fees, that's like not a message that people are very receptive to you now, because like there's been a real popularization of the idea that index funds

are better. There's a lot of data on like the persistence of mutual fund performance where it's like the people who are good at picking stocks, like, aren that good at picking stocks? Right, And there's not a lot of persistence from here to year of people who are good at picking stocks. And so just saying like I'm a good stock picker and you should invest with me because I'll pick the right stocks for you is not a good message anymore. But if you're like I will pick

the right thoughts for you. And SpaceX like that's not in the index fund, right, I can't get SpaceX on the index fund. And so if you're a stock picker who has some mixture of private assets, like that is a more appealing message.

Speaker 1

Yeah. So two points there on the fees to be specific. So these funds charged this is according to his story from Miles Weiss. According to a person familiar with the matter, the funds charge an annual management fee of around one percent lock up investor capital for about eight years. Rival single purpose funds typically charge management fees of one to two percent annually, with that performance fee of as much as twenty percent. And in an interview, Ron Barn said

exactly what you said. We're doing this because we want people to know about our mutual funds. I want my business to last for one hundred years. And I mean that ties into the ETF story that I love that you mentioned. But I will say that stock picking and ETFs is coming now. There's going to say coming back, but it's not coming back. It's becoming more of a moment.

Speaker 2

Yeah. But I think that the old model of like running a stock picking mutual fund and judging one hundred basis points.

Speaker 1

Is like oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2

If you are running a sort of like actively managed mutual fund complex and you want your business to last for one hundred years, you were thinking something about private markets, right, and like a lot of that is like these traditional asset managers are buying private credit managers so that they can get into that more lucrative, more not inexible business.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

But this thing where it's like ah, SpaceX stocks, I can do something with that. That's another way to do that, but like something in.

Speaker 1

Privates, yeah, you know.

Speaker 2

Or the alternative is like enormous scale out automation. You can be a mutual fund manager if you're running gigantic index funds and you can afford to do that at two basis points. But like I like to pick my stocks, is like a harder business to stay in for the long run.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I don't know. Again, I find the idea of a highly concentrated portfolio of just these are my stocks that I like, here's like a dozen to two dozen of them, and I'm going to beat the market that way. I find that very compelling and you can see that the market. Yeah, if you beat the market that's a big if.

Speaker 2

Look that is still a bits that works, right, I mean Bill Ackman is out raising.

Speaker 1

I was wondering how long.

Speaker 2

Twenty five billion dollar funds to pick twelve stocks? But that's not really true, but it's partially true. I think the academic sort of consensus, the like regulatory consensus, there's like even a real move to the indexing and a real move to suspicion of active stock picking.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and like and for good reason, yeah.

Speaker 2

And a lot of suspicion that like, if you are a long only equity mutual fund manager getting paid no incentive fees, there's a lot of suspicion that you're generating very much alpha there, right, And if you're not generating alpha.

Speaker 1

Then like there's a good chance you're probably like a closet indexer and you're not actually doing too much different from the benchmark.

Speaker 2

Yeah, and you're charging a lot bigger fees than an index fund, right, right, even if you're not consciously a closet indexer, right, even if you're like consciously like trying to pick the best stocks. Like the track record of active equity mutual fund management, like, people have a suspicion about it, now, and so like having something that is objectively differentiated from like I'm buying stocks is just what

this moment calls for. And it feels like that's secularly true, and it feels like it's not like five years people back to like wanting a twenty five stock equity mutual fund. It feels like that was a model from the last century.

Speaker 1

I think I'm taking the other side. I think I am.

Speaker 2

Well, you're watching the cool ETFs.

Speaker 1

For example, in ETF launch that I was really excited to see Alistair Hibbert from black Rock. He's like their star hedge fund manager. He was once paid more than Larry Fink. He just launched in ETF. The whole idea is like, here are my best picks. It's twenty to twenty five stocks. We're gonna hold him for a while, and it's in an ETF wrapper. That's really cool. Yeah yeah, yeah, so Ron Barren should launch an ETF. But then you can't, have,

of course SpaceX in it. Though there are a lot of people trying to figure out how to put private assets in an ETF. I don't know how you do that, but yeah, yeah, I don't think I could do that. I don't know. I don't know how you would do it, but listen. We've got some of our best and our brightest on it.

Speaker 2

So I'm excited for that.

Speaker 1

Yeah, is there anything else I should say?

Speaker 2

Today? In Money Stuff birthday announcements, we have Bob Greyfeld, loyal listener.

Speaker 1

And father, huge Matt Levine fan. This is this is a great present the shout out. Even better would be him meeting you. You haven't actually met. You've spoken on the phone, though.

Speaker 2

That's true, and now he's gotten the shout out on the podcast.

Speaker 1

This is huge.

Speaker 2

And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.

Speaker 1

I'm Matt Levia and I'm Katie Greifeld.

Speaker 2

You can find my work by subscribing to the Money stuffnewsletter on Bloomberg dot com.

Speaker 1

And you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day between ten to eleven am Eastern. You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review. It helps more people find the show.

Speaker 2

The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anna Maserakus and Moses Onen.

Speaker 1

Our theme music was composed by Blake.

Speaker 2

Maples, Brandon Francis Nianimmess, Our executive producer, and Stage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff podcast. We'll be back next week. Before Stuff

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