Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Business Brew. I am your host, Bill Brewster. This episode features Wes Gray, also known as the Alpha Architect or the ETF architect. However, you may know him. For those that don't know, I think you're going to learn a lot about ETFs. Wes has a number of ETFs that he manages. The most interesting one that I can think of as far as like a current event ETF is kind of the box BOXX is the ticker.
It's potentially an interesting thing to consider as a cash management vehicle in lieu of treasuries. I would encourage you to open up the prospectus and maybe take a look at that. He also has a value ETF and a momentum ETF that we talk about and he's got an ETF business. So if you are someone that runs long, I guess the perfect connection is probably someone that is long only lower turnover and I would just describe it as more Buffett style.
I don't know if that's exactly the right way to say it, but that's the way that I'm going to say it. So anyway, consider reaching out to Wes and we'll see. But I hope you enjoy the episode. I certainly enjoyed talking to Wes. He's a great guy. He served our country. It's nice to see him succeed, and I think he's succeeding by helping other people succeed, which is win win and highly
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is financial advice. Please consult an investment advisor before making investment decisions. Everything in the show is for entertainment purposes and educational purposes. And do your own due diligence. All right, ladies and gentlemen, excited to be joined by Wes Gray, the Alpha architect. Wes, how you doing? I'm good honored to be here. Oh, well, thank you. I'm honored to have you. Happy to have a program that warrants a guest like yours. Yeah.
Yeah. Put a lot of time in I I'm sure I you get some knuckleheads like me to communicate a few things every so often. Well, you're far from a knucklehead. I first I guess I first found you with with the book you co-authored with Toby and then I've read most of your stuff. So I I appreciate what you put out there and I I think the ETF business that you've created is pretty interesting. So I'd like to have a discussion with you about it, if you're willing of. Course. Dig in.
All right. You know, I guess the first thing that I'd like to talk about because you know it's, it seems timely, is this box ETF that you have. And I'm, I'm not sure that enough people know about it as a potential strategy for cash management. So do you mind talking a little bit about what you do and and why how this product came about? Yeah, it's so unfortunately it's
a long story. I'll try to condense, but it's probably about seven years in the making and it's an accumulation of every skill set we've been building for about 15. And and then just it all came together to create like what's arguably are probably the best idea we'll ever come up with, frankly. Because it's just, you know, sometimes you only have so many good ideas in life and then you get a really good idea. You're like, holy cow, I'm never being that one.
Like, I feel like that's box, right. And so Long story short, I'm sure most of your audience aren't former option market makers or prop traders. So I'll try to explain this as simple as possible.
But essentially within the options market, there is a direct to consumer lending market through what they call box spreads where just the math of put call parity you can isolate either to borrow or lend directly with other option dealers or other option market participants or really any market participant right and back back before the 87 crash, people would do box spreads, you know like Susquehanna would go talk to whoever James Street or Citadel, whoever their names
were back then. But the problem is it wasn't, it wasn't, it was just over the counter and you always had counterparty risk, right. So. So finally they got the box spread trade cleared through OCC, which now you have like a centralized counterparty. That means like, hey, now I can just go to the market and borrow
and lend through the box spread. And I don't care who's on the other side of that trade because there's a clearinghouse that can manage all the counterparty risk, right, just like they do in stocks with DTCC and like in futures and other marketplaces, right. So, So that's like the deep history on it now. So how the hell do you actually do it? Well, so it's if you're basically replicating A treasury bill at whatever duration, sorry
duration you choose. So for example, if you're going to do a three month box, what you need to do is you're you're going to have four option positions. Two of those options are going to replicate a synthetic long stock position that's going to consist of long a call and short a put at the same strike price. And if I don't know if you remember like your payoff profiles with options, but if you long a call and short a put you basically. Yeah, it's just a synthetic. Lock synthetic lock?
Exactly. And then that's one part of a box. The second part of a box is the synthetic short, where now you're going to buy a put and sell a call. Sell a call. But at a different strike price. And that difference in the strike price is the amount of cash flow that this trade will deliver whenever those options are going to settle like let's say three months. So for example, I'm synthetic, long synthetic short. Obviously that mechanically
eliminates all market risk. And what it's going to do is let's say you did the long synthetic at 1000 and you did the short synthetic position at 2000. What's going to happen is that trade will deliver guaranteed. At least it's guaranteed as the option clearing corporation can guarantee it, which is pretty good that you're going to get
$1000. And of course, if you know that there's a payment that guarantees $1000 three months from now that's backed by a, you know, AA rated agency, you know it's not going to sell for zero, It's going to sell for something probably close to T-bills, right, because it has very low risk and you're guaranteed A payoff. So it might sell for whatever 900 bucks or 950 or whatever the
interest rates are, right. And so and and that's the lending side of it. You can also short a box and you can implicitly borrow from the option markets, right. So this is just a huge funding market that's pretty well established in like hedge fund prop trading and market making world because it's a way for them to go around the bank. So you don't have to go borrow from your broker or you know or
or lend money to your broker. You could just go directly to another counterpart in the marketplace and trade with each other to borrow and lend capital. So, so that's what box spreads are. And then what we thought about is like, well no one's ever done this before in an ETF. But boy, would it be nice if I could get the box spread somehow in an ETF. Because one, it generally has a preferable return profile relative to just straight up treasury bills.
But more importantly, it might have a preferable tax profile because we can leverage a lot of our knowledge with ETF like in kind rebounds what have you to essentially create something that presumably might be, you know more tax efficient. And that's basically what we did. It just it took a long time because every single time we tried to do something, you know, people would ask us, well, what are you talking about? You know, how does that even work? So it's just and no one's ever
done this before. So every time we get to another counterparty or what have you, it's just difficult. Like even right now, you know facts that Bloomberg and Morningstar don't have the holdings data correct with the box. And you know, it's just is what it is like sometimes when you're a little bit too innovative, all the other counterparties, their systems aren't really designed
to to really think about this. You know, it's a continuous putting fire out problem, but it's just the cost of, you know, being out on the tip you spear I guess. But anyways, it's. So, OK, so wait, so if I if I'm synthetically long, what S&P at 1000 it? Could be on any aspect of the. Way. Yeah. I'm just thinking S&P because it's easy. And then I'm going out and I'm shorting it at 2000 in three months.
What you're saying is that trade should theoretically cost like 900 and some odd dollars to throw on whatever. It's going to be whatever. Minus that like 1/4 of the T bill to yield basically. Pretty much it's going to, it's going to be priced via market forces and no arbitrage or whatever the interest rate is for, for no risk borrowing at that duration. You got it. And then, OK. And then what about the ETF structure enables it to be tax advantage?
Well, so I can't remember what year it was and this is super detailed weeds, but basically innovator, the guys that came out with all the new ETFs that you know do like to find outcome things, I don't know if sure, not sure if you're familiar with those, but they actually went to the. I'm not, I'm an ETF noob. I. Wish I oh, OK. Got you. But I figure you're the good. Yeah, Yeah.
So why not talk to you. Yeah, that's why I was asking you because I'll, I'll make sure I'll give context because sometimes I just assume something that's common knowledge and then people are like what are you talking about. So, so just interrupt me if I'm saying something that that doesn't make any sense. So I will do that from I think it's called innovator capital or exact like LLC name, but I call
them innovator. They came up with the whole defined outcome ETFs where basically you use options to create different payoff profiles that certain investors might find favorable, right, like hey you're going to get the S&P on the upside, but you know we're going to up to like 20% return, but we're going to cap the downside at -10%. And obviously all they're doing is like trading different option spreads around you know S&P 500 or different assets and this is
a very. Common pitched a lot in like just like, you know high net worth pitches, right? It's. Been it's in structured product insurance world, this has been around forever, right? And the huge advantage of insurance, which maybe, may or may not be aware of is they also have a unique tax structuring right? Like, 'cause they, they turn something into an annuity and basically it can compound essentially tax free. And then when you're 59 1/2, you can take it out and then you pay your taxes.
So it's basically a, you know, a compounding vehicle and and they sell these structured products that do all these different, like defined outcome things, right? And so I think that guy's named Bruce Bond, can't remember the founder of Innovator. I think that's his name. Someone could Fact Check me, but he basically had a genius idea. He's like, why are we doing this in a ETF, right? ETFs are all about low cost transparency and tax efficiency and insurance is basically the opposite.
So let's disrupt these boneheads in the ETF wrapper, right. And so one of the things they also did really well is they went to the SEC and they said hey, can we get in kind treatment on options because it's going to be way more tax efficient and way more cost efficient for the ETFs to operate. If we're allowed to do the same thing we do with equities to to minimize tax drag, we should be able to do that with options, right.
And they and they sent this very beautiful no action letter protest to the SEC and they agreed to it. Why is that important? Well, what that means is now you know under you got it all compliant and all this stuff. But now just like in equities, if I have a low basis security and I want to rebalance out of it because I don't want Microsoft, I want Exxon, you know, I can do that trading through baskets without having to distribute a capital gain.
Well, now you can also do that with options, right. And so now a lot of strategies that traditionally have like huge tax drag because you're generating all these different transactions and capital gains. We could use the same technology which is not near as developed as it is in on the ETF or sorry
the equity side of the house. But it's now plausible and we and we could use that combined with like box spreads and what have you to basically deliver just like you do in equities a much more tax efficient way to capture you know what's essentially kind of like AT bill type retard effectively and. So let's say I'm a listener that's that's sitting on some concentrated position in Tesla or Apple or something like that.
How would I go about contributing that and and either diversifying or turning it into another vehicle while avoiding some some gains? So here's the problem. Well, first problem is, I know way too much about this. So we're going to geek out here on this because we deal with this question all the time in real life. So essentially, if you have a single stock massive position, which is, call it, zero basis, you're somewhat limited. There's one solution called an exchange fund.
Not to be confused with an exchange traded fund, but those typically require a seven-year lock up contribution to like a limited partnership. Tons of fees, tons of bells and whistles attached and it's it's could be a good solution, but it's very complex, very expensive and not exactly easy to deal with. That's solution one.
The other solution is more and more people are coming out with long short tax loss harvesting for example like Quantino is a is a firm I really like I think AQR is doing that and what they could do there is they basically run like a market neutral strategy. And then you know because it's long short because you're using leverage a lot of times with a little bit of capital, you know you can end up generating a whole bunch of capital losses, right.
You're you're, you're building a lot of unrealized gains on the other hand in a diversified portfolio mix. But you can generate a lot of losses, which then as you generate those losses you can then start to pare down your long only position. You just hope they're long term, right? You want to match your. Losses, right, Yeah, I mean at some level yes.
But in the end it doesn't really matter because even a short term loss you can mark against a long term cap gain if if you got the problem so that those are two probably the most traditional or you just donate it, that's another solution. Like at least yeah, I'm not going to pay the government, I'd rather give it to, you know Joe or Susie's foundation. You can always do that as well to get rid of the problem.
And then the other solution which is ETF related, which is actually something we specialize on the infrastructure side is you can do what they call a 351 exchange. However, within 351, which is a section of the IRS code 351, they're, you know, they're the IRS is not. And Treasury's not that crazy. And there's a specific line for funding of a Rick, which is a regulated investment company, which is what an ETF or mutual fund is going to qualify as,
right. And so it in a standard 351 deal, if you weren't trying to fund a Rick, you could take your zero basis Tesla, dump it into this new C Corp and not pay tax
on that transaction. But of course you know, but I'm sure because someone tried to exploit this at some point, they're like Nope. For Ricks in particular, if you want to if you want to tax free exchange into a Rick IE like an ETF or a mutual fund, you you can only get the tax free treatment if you if you contribute diversified property IE. You can't dump only Tesla in however. That's smart of. Them, but let me define what that means, because it's. Yeah. What's diversified?
Exactly. Because like anything that was in details, so diversified for 351 purposes is the following. No single security can be over 25% of the NAV contribution. So you could put a big chunk, you could do technically 24.99 of something. But then there's another limitation which is that basically the weight of your top five securities can't be more than 50%, right.
So if you have a portfolio that's got a bunch of chunky winners with low bases and some like randos in there or like other ETFs or diversify property, you can certainly get a lot more diversification than than what like A5 stock, 10 stock portfolio looks like. And you if you dump it in ETF you could then you know through the in kind mechanism rebalance tax free into more actual diversify portfolios. But that's the technical limitation if you want that approach. Can you defer the taxes?
Like let's let's say I wanted to flip Microsoft into QVA. Can I do that? Through it. Through just as long as I'm not contributing a ton of Microsoft. And nothing else. So let's say the following situation were to happen. You have 24.99% Microsoft. I'm just making this up 24.99% Microsoft, 15% Apple and 10% Tesla and then a whole bunch of random crap, right?
You could, you could say, hey, I'm going to set up a new ETF for you at 351 and I'm going to contribute these three positions and then these whatever 20 other positions that are under 5%, we're going to get that converted tax free. And then to the extent in your investment objective, it makes sense to like get rid of Microsoft and go into Q Val, like obviously you can't just do things Willy nilly, it'd have to be. You do it within the ETF that
you set. Up and then within the ETF, if you wanted to do that because it was aligned with your investment objector, whatever, you just say, hey Wes, can you please get rid of all this crap and go buy Q Val? That would be fairly straightforward to facilitate in a tax free manner. So you know, because that's. Then you have an ETF of ETFs, like a fund of funds, but not. Yeah, you could do that. I mean, ET the the trick?
There's two tricks with ETF. ETF is an open secret, the ultimate tax free compounding vehicle of all time. Like if Warren Buffett could restart his life, I guarantee he was started with an ETF structure because it's basically replicating what he did, but with way more just it's just a lot cleaner. The other problem people have, you know, in the end, once people learn about the power of the ETF compounding tax benefit, they're like, crap, how do I do that? But then they have a second
problem. Well, the issue is that I'm rich and I have a bunch of low basis assets, but I how am I going to get to the ETF? Like I'm stuck in all this crap that I've owned for 20 or 30 years. And I would love to do an ETF, but I can't get there without paying tax and I'd like to keep deferring. So that's where this 351 solution comes in, that's that's a tool of how do you get current low basis assets into the ETF structure tax free, which has limitations.
But now once I'm in the ETF structure, it's easy in some sense to like keep the compounding game going on, you know, until obviously you sell your ETF or you die or whatever. But it's so that's the trick is how do you get assets tax free into an ETF And then once they're in there, now we're home free. You know, within limitations of course, but if you're trained equities or tactical, it's pretty easy to not distribute capital gains.
What do you think? The minimum asset value that you would need to have in an ETF is to have it make sense. Well, basically for brain dead like not reinventing the will ETFs, it's like it's basically around 200K all in cost. We got actually a little bit lower than that. So if you think about it, you know and so if you look out to the market for what does it cost me to buy deferral, now it's usually insurance as your next best alternative.
And you know if you go by like a variable annuity on you know it might be anywhere from 25 to 50 basis points or higher turn on your scale, let's just say to do an ETF the cost is 200 KA year. Well if you know if you have 50 mil that's a 40 basis point carry cost. If you have 100 mil, that's a 20 bit carry cost. If you have 10 mil, that's a 2%
carry cost. So what I usually tell people, if you're in it for tax only, which nobody should ever be in ATF only for tax reasons, you know, usually 50 mil is probably like a a minimum, right, Because that's a 40 bit carry cost that's actually pretty reasonable for like a deferred tax compounding wrapper, especially if you have any sort of activity. And then anything above that, it just gets better and better and better and better. But of course not everyone just does the ETF 100% for tax
reasons. It's also you know, you got like a ticker on exchange or anyone that thinks you're cool could be an owner, right. I mean there's a lot of other reasons from like a business perspective, liquidity perspective beyond just tax, why you would do that. And actually I've, I forgot one other way. I actually live in Puerto Rico do tax stuff down here. There's another way you could also diversify single stock
there. There's this thing called Act 60, which used to be called Act 2022 in Puerto Rico. Where is it? If you have a billion dollar security, let's say you have a billion dollars of Microsoft, a $0.00 basis. If you were to move to Puerto Rico and live here for 10 years and establish like basically I can't remember what the technical tax term is, 100% of your bases would be converted into like your Puerto Rico
residency. And so you'd only have to pay 5% tax at the 10 year anniversary to the Puerto Rican government, which ain't bad. So you can't get rid of all of it. But it's almost a step up -5%. So that's the only other way I know. How do you like Puerto Rico? What's that? How do you like living there? I. Love it, man. I never leave here if I don't have to. I spend 90% of my days down
here. Yeah, only when they, you know, got to drag me out for dog and pony shows or shake hands, kiss babies events, They'll all leave this place. But I love it, man. I think it's great. That's cool, but I got a buddy down there shout out to my man Francisco. Yeah, there we go.
It's a great place. Not for everybody, but I highly recommend it if if you kind of got a little adventure spirit, you know can speak a little Spanish and just like yeah, like being adventurous and checking out new things, it's high recommend. So when do you move? I moved about three years ago. I moved during COVID times. I was finally able to, you know, that there was about a year, there were social networks were broken. And so my kids didn't hang out with their buddies.
My wife didn't hang out with her friends. And I was like, huh, this is a silver lining. You know, this is an opportunity to make a change. And yeah, so just and then also like the work from home became less of an issue because people were like, oh, that's actually a good idea. To which we were like, well, no kidding, it's a good idea. We've been doing our whole lives. And so it just, it was like a lucky opportunity where I was able to pivot and I just we just
jumped at the opportunity. And there was, there was also a time when our business was just in a massive convexity change because we were we were hitting like the 10 year overnight success problem where it's like 10 years eating ramen noodles and they were like, Oh my God, we're getting rich. Guys like this actually worked and and now and then, but now I had to get my tax structuring in place and so it's just all the stars aligned in this situation. That's awesome, man.
Good for you. So how did you start in the industry? Let's talk about the last the 10 years planting the seeds. Yeah. So hey man, I so I started in the business like seriously trying to be an investor like in 99 at the height of the tech bubble. And then obviously I thought I was a genius because I was a Warren Buffett, Ben Graham Bible
Thumper back then. And I just, you know, I don't know if you probably remember that, but like if you threw a stick at a small cap value security, you made 30% a year for 5-6 years in a row there and it's hard to not think you're genius in that sort of environment.
And so you know, I actually, I think I launched some fund with like 1,000,000 bucks or something maybe is is probably in 2002 or 2001 like when I was a senior in college and I went right into the PhD program and then you know, venture I was like, all right, I got to get out of finance and join the Marines, that's another story. But when I came back in 2008, I then also launched a hedge fund in September 2008, which obviously was a total disaster and then you know, kept going
on, kept grinding. And then my third business attempt in 2010 was the current business. And that one basically started because I used to, you know, I used to write a blog Like we still write A blog. It was just way worse and and not as good back in the day. But I got literally got cold called by a billionaire who was read my blog and it read my dissertation. And and that was after 2008 when everyone got like kind of fleeced and hedge funds and he basically just said, hey man,
like I like your stuff. I want to talk, we're transition our family office out of hedge funds and LP's because we need to control our wealth, go quant, get the cost down, blah, blah, blah. And so they were way ahead of the whole curve on where the world was going anyways. And so basically, we started the current form of the business up and then we did a couple years of consulting due diligence for just on other managers and helping them build their systems
out. And then in 2012, just because this is what I'd asked for, I was like, hey man, like, can you seat us like the first time I've ever met a billionaire, He's like, yeah, I can, but let's just work together for a little bit. And then, so then we got like A50 mil seed in in 2012, basically 4 quantitative value, that strategy. And then kind of the rest is history and it's then just grinded it out and it, you know,
then we learned about the ETF. We started off in managed accounts and then we learned about the ETF. I was at some rich person conference, some lady was telling me about. I was like, wait a second that sounds like the biggest tax shelter I've ever heard of in my life And I did more research into and I was like holy cow, this like this ETF wrapper. Why would anyone even run a managed account. And and I told it back to the the the billionaire guys and they're like, well, yeah, duh,
let's do that. And so we basically converted our SMA business way back in the day into the ETF business, 'cause it's just, you know, it's a more, a better way to manage capital in equities and that was probably around 2014 and then just grinding it out ever since. Yeah, it's not. Yeah. It's not that exciting. It's just, you know. No, it is exciting, man. This is so, you know, I call this show. I call it the business brew. It's not.
It's supposed to be like the. I always thought about it like brew. Like you put a bunch of stuff in a pot of coffee and then the, you know, you end up with the coffee cup. I think a lot of times people look at the end result and they don't realize what went into it right, and they don't realize the grind that it took to get there and how long. And I mean you you launched Q Val what like right in the teeth of a value head? Yeah. Yeah. We we launched. That's not exactly.
From a timing standpoint? Yes. And we have been like in 2017 we had a billion dollars under management and our average fee was like 80 bips. And then all of a sudden the factors really blew out and we dropped fees and the whole ETF wheels were in motion for the future. And so we went from like kings of the castle to like damn near bankrupt and like re fighting again to get the top of the hill.
And then COVID happened. So then I got another as you know value got destroyed in there and unfortunately I had like one of my my main business partners commit suicide around then. So we I've been many times like at the top of the hill, right, the rock bottom probably three or four times. And then this time we've got so much escape velocity. I mean I don't, I don't even know how we we could get taken down at this point to be frank.
But it, you know, there's been many many, you know, desperate times of of highs and lows on this journey and honestly I I don't know it. Looking back if I recommend entrepreneurship to most people it's just too risky man. Like and you got to be damn near crazy and and nuts which you know I used to be in the Marine Corps so I had good training to, you know to deal with pain and anguish and emotional issues. And so it worked out. But it's like they threw every.
How did it help you? Well, I think, I think just, you know, one of the things about the service, you know, and I, you know, I was like, obviously in combat and everything, a fortune during a time where a lot of people get killed and died. And like, you start realizing like, wow, like, you know, life's special and it's fleeting and you could be dead in an instant.
And so once you live through kind of those experiences where it's like as raw as it could possibly get and you come back to the civilian world, you're like, Dick, this shit's easy, man. Like like whatever. And and so when you just go through like the Marine Corps and you go through that sort of training, that sort of like experiences, everything is just, you don't stress out a much.
Well, some people do. Some people it affects them and it actually makes them worse because they're just, they're too destructed. But some people, it's just it it just makes them harder. Like I want to say not necessarily it's a good thing because I know, like guys like me, we're kind of probably warped, honestly. But it's good in the sense that you're just so hard shit just, you know, goes over you. Just don't sweat it and you can grind through anything without even thinking about it.
And so that that just mentality is very useful in situations where like you thought you were stud and now you're total dud, but you just, you keep grinding no matter what and you just don't give up. That's just a good mentality in asset management where it's a freaking roller coaster times 10. So it was. It was useful for me for sure. Might be easier for you, but as an entrepreneur, you still got a family, right? So you're taking, you're taking your spouse to the mountain top
and down. So. So still got to manage that, yeah. So the way I always tell that cause 'cause now all I do is talk to entrepreneurs all day on our infrastructure side. And my number one advice is this is a team effort, right? If you have a wife and you have a family or vice versa, you're the person launching ATF, you have a husband, a fan, whatever it is, it's a team game and you can't get margin called by your
family. And I've seen that happen many times where like the entrepreneurs got the mentality to grind for 5-10 years, but eventually your significant other and your children are like, dude, like we need to eat, bro, you need to go get a real job, we're out of this. And so, So it's really important that you think through that you you have like you make sure the family margin call is covered.
And so in my situation, I had the cheesiest gig on the planet called being a finance professor, where I basically got paid a lot of money to not work that much and just my work was doing research, which is perfect because I'm doing research on stuff. I would research anyways if I was going to be a practitioner to develop new investment
strategies. And so I'm making all this money and getting paid, but I don't have the issue of, like I got to work 100 hours at my job and then on the weekends when I'm trying to hang out with my kids, I'm trying to build this business. Does it? Honestly, that's just not realistic. It's too risky. So yeah, so I was recommending either either marry well, so your spouse can like float the boat or be born rich, which is also a great way to do it.
But, you know, you got to be in the lucky sperm club or find a job where we're somehow like your job is kind of related to a lot of what you might want to do as entrepreneur.
So you know for example if I'm like a business development like raising capital person for Joe Schmuckatelli asset manager, you know that's a great skill to have because in the background I might be geeking out on strategies and like things and I'm like all right if I go be an entrepreneur this is way easier because the biggest skill set you end up needing is like how to market distribute your product.
Because even if you have a great idea but no AUM, nobody cares and and you know they're they're you just want to make sure that and it's not easy by the way but but you got to cover the the family margin call because it's just unfair to your constituency whatever that might be. You know it they get a vote in
it too. So we want to make sure you stay or just get VC, That's what VC and PE is for as well where where if you raise capital someone else is kind of like funding that risk on your behalf. So at least you know you can get a decent salary and pay your bills and eat food because no one is going to be effective. If they're always stressed out and and worried about paying for food you're not going to be a good entrepreneur in that situation. So yeah, but, you know, just.
What are the common traits of people that you've seen that have made it? So you have to be kind of ornery and bullheaded obviously. Like you can't give up.
You have to believe no matter what people say, like basically be overconfident effectively is probably the easiest way to to say it. That's a necessary condition that that may not be the nice way to put it but you got to be very overconfident slash passionate whatever you want to call that and then also have long horizon and make sure your cat your funding is correct like you can't be getting like margin
called. So you know at least a five year maybe if you're going to be an asset management business I'd say a 10 year horizon yeah that's the whole point of 10 year overnight success. So yeah, just grind it out. Overconfident passion, long term horizon and just just willingness to basic just grind it out and do the boring shit
over and over again. And just have faith that as long as your process is good and as long as you know you're adding value in whatever you're trying to do, eventually people will recognize that and it'll happen. But you just it's not going to happen overnight. But it's really simple. I mean just and then you need luck. We can't control luck, so you can't really calculate that
everybody needs luck, right? It's like I I ran in that situation where, you know, we climb the mountain and then we went to the bottom of the mountain and then we kind of got luck. So we're unlucky when we got booted off the mountain, but then we caught a break and that's what allows us to climb back up the mountain. But you know if I only got bad luck breaks, you're never going
to be successful, right? It's it's like trend following like a negative vowel asset, like it's just you're just going to go to 0 if you if you don't quit at some point. Because if you just have bad luck at every single turn, no amount of good entrepreneurship or grinding it out or or grit or whatever you want to call it is going to matter. You just you got to have a tailwind at some point. I like it. Yeah. That's neat man. Good for you.
I've been looking at Q Val if assets, chase performance. I can understand between box and that and maybe some of the other things going on why you have hit escape velocity, but nevertheless there's still some stink on value. I have questioned it myself, although not not in a huge way, but I think people that listen to value after hours would say I'm less valuey then then certainly Toby one. Do you mind talking about your definition of value?
Because this has come up on value after hours a number of times and they've told me like 3 different times, but I don't fully understand where you how you rank value within category. And then two. I know you went on an exploratory you know, why will value not work? Last year I saw a couple of those tweets. You mind sharing some of your conclusions about whether or not the arguments against value have any merit.
Yeah, sure. So so it's very important to your point to define what is value because you know it's has a million definitions, it's in the eyes of the beholder or some some level. So in our particular context of how we implement value now is like Toby, Toby and I are very aligned on 99% of this thing and I love him because he's so hardcore and just holds the line which is amazing. I obviously believe in some other tools and other religions but but I'm also a big hold the line.
Spartan on on value like he is but he's he's like the poster boy for that. So God bless him but our version of value and approach is 1 systematic because I used to be a stock picker like didn't work. I I realized very quickly that I'm you know I suffer from behavioral problems like everybody else and no amount of anything can ever solve that problem. I'm just too much human system solve that. So whatever the hell we're going to do it's going to be done with the computer period.
Second step. I'm also big believer in the fear aspect of describing why value works over long. What I mean by that. I believe that value is this idea of buying stuff that everybody hates. It's Ben Graham style value. It's not Warren Buffett's. Like where are all the dirt balls? The terrible stories that just wasted barren turds of the market that are really, really cheap.
I want to focus there because I believe on average expectations would change from being fearful and maybe maybe not being greed but just not being so scared of these damn things, right. You're going to get meaner versions expectations and that's when value will start to make money, right? Because it's all about you only make money if you can out guess the current expectation and the price.
So I think fundamentally that that's my style value just buy a lot of cheap stuff with a computer and then kind of 1 little area where Toby and I think have a little bit of difference of opinion is within the dirt ball cheap stocks. I like to focus on quality with the idea that OK I'm buying dirt ball cheap stocks everyone hates and obviously there's something issue or some issue with their business otherwise they wouldn't be in the 10% cheapest stocks like duh, the markets not that
stupid. So that what that means is if I want to capture meaner version, I need to make sure that these things can at least last for three to five years, right? Because because if I buy a dirt ball, cheap stock, that's really cheap. But fundamentally this thing is a dumpster fire and they might go to negative earnings, they're never going to have the opportunity to get a meaner version and they could go bankrupt. Or they could be like the falling knife problem.
So intuitively I just like to add quality fundamental overlays amongst the cheapest stocks. I think Toby is more preferential for just straight up dirt balls, which actually I don't mind either, it's just at the margin I like to add the quality overlay. So for me it's it's this simple. I like to buy the cheapest comma highest quality stocks. Cheapest is priority, but within those the highest quality. And I'm doing that with a computer and that's basic Q.
Valve How do you define quality? So I mean we just use an assortment of things, right, like we have like a little 10 point checklist now. But it it's things like hey like is your year over year earnings, operating margins improving, are you buying back stock, are you paying down debt? Like just kind of good old fashioned Ben Graham ideas, just
fun. Like if you go to work, if you were to go look at like security analysis and just go flip the random pages and grab ten of those, stuff like that, right. Like are you making money, are you financially stable? Are you getting operation improvements? Is is, are you doing net repurchases? You know, 'cause usually that's a good sign amongst cheap stocks because you know presumably the sea level guys are are being smart about that. Just, you know, common sense
quality. And you know, we have our methods and we we use a bunch of like negative screening mechanisms on the top of the funnel as well. But whatever. If you don't want to do a super fancy version like we do, if you just said, hey, I'm going to buy the 10% cheapest stocks on PE ratio and make sure they don't have too much debt like an old big gram screen. Also a great idea like God bless you, I'm in. So that's for me is value, it's just the greed or it's the fear.
Trade with this idea that eventually, you know, fundamentals will mean revert perceptions, sentiment mean reverts. And that's when you make all that money, right? So. How do you avoid catching like cyclicals, like peaking cyclicals? Yep. Or do you so that that's frankly that's part of the trade right. And the the issue with long only value investing long short is very different because now you got a risk management problem,
right? Like I can't be long energy in short tech just vaguely because there's a good chance I'll go bankrupt before anything works right? So in a long short context, which is very different than a long only you have to sector neutralize, you have to do all this crap because you're in the get. You're in the risk management game because you're basically
running a levered portfolio. In a long only context, the, the issue is sentiment and hate and discontent is highly correlated with sectors and industries, right. And I was using example of like 99 like you know, OK, so we're going to force ourselves to own 50% tech and the cheapest tech stock is a 50 times price to earnings ratio. That's not going to work here, right.
So, so you have to unfortunately take on tracking error because value like the whole thing we're talking about is highly, highly correlated with sectors. You're going to find the vast majority of dirt ball cheap hated securities in sectors generally it's highly correlated, right. And and so that's just the the fact of the matter. Now, on the cyclical thing, that's part of the trade because it's all. That's the reason they're so
cheap, right? Like the whole point of value investing, at least how I like it is. I'm going for expectation mismatches where this firm is. Energy is the greatest example ever. The last few years, these firms are making more money than, God, nobody cares. They'd rather pay 50 times revenue for whatever. NVIDIA. I guess I would not. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, you know, I mean, that's the pitch, right? It's like, well, these energy guys, yeah, they're making all the money, but we're ESG.
We're going to all do everything with wind tunnels or wind farms. Now, I don't even know what the pitch is. It's ridiculous to me. But all these things they have this, like, overhang of, oh, it's cyclical. They're going to be dead. Meanwhile, all they're doing is
printing free cash flow. Like to me, if you buy that at the right price, even if it mean reverts like it, even if it does what they say, as long as it doesn't, you know, fall as bad as what people had priced in, you still could make money, right? So. So even if let's just pretend half of energy goes to windfarms, Exxon is still printing dollar bills and they might even own the wind farms now too, right? And so yes, maybe their earnings like slow down or they're
cyclical. But if you bought it at it's such a cheap price where the hate and discontent suggested the Exxon is going out of business, you can still make money, right? So it's yes, it matters and we've looked at everything you could ever imagine like we're like hey let's do averages, let's do Cape ratio type earning look backs. None of that shit matters. What matters is what's in the operating income the last 12 months that is proxying for this mispricing element on average
over time and the cyclicality? Well. You and Toby are very, very close. As you said. You and Toby are very, very close. As you said, yeah, exactly. Right. He's EV to EBIT. That's basically. The same exactly. And and I do believe in some sort of diversification like I would never recommend, like, OK, the cheapest stocks, 100% of them are in like the oil patch, Let's do 100% that 'cause that's just if that's the only investment you have.
It's just too much idiosyncratic risk, I'd agree with that. But if you want to capture the value premium, you have to allow a lot of flexibility, you know, so we have like I think 2025% bounds where where you could be way off whatever the S&P is, but you're never going to be like 50% in one in one industry, Obviously, that's just, that's even too crazy for me. Now you could argue you could go pure all in no matter what, unconstrained, but you'd only do that if you also owned, you
know, some SP 500 or other crap. If it's like your only investment, that would be kind of crazy. And even like Warren Buffett and concentrated stock pickers don't do that. Yeah. So, well, you just introduced massive path dependency to something that otherwise doesn't need to. Exist exactly. And there are industry risk too. Like, like they could just turn off an industry. The government could just say, Nope, you're not playing
anymore. And yeah, all those cheap stocks are now really cheap because they're worthless. So, you know, so you want to have obviously some diversification to avoid like crazy tales like that. And there's a lot of different opinions on this. We're just, we're like, Toby, we're going to go as pure as humanly possible, within reason, and then just go for it. We're not here to benchmark. Hug. See, I I've said a couple times that I might just index on this
program. I have not spoken precisely enough. My real answer is I have come to, I feel like an idiot saying this out loud, but it's true. I've come to really appreciate the tax benefits of ETS because it really sucks when you're really right on something and then you got to stroke a check to the government or you got to own something that's like not cheap anymore. And you're looking at foregone opportunity.
And it's like, you know, all right, if this is one of the few businesses that can grow to the sky, this can work. But if it's one of the 95% of normal businesses, I got to get out. And if I got to get out, I got to pay taxes and that, like, that sucks. I'm telling you, I spend 99% of my time figuring out tax structuring, 1% on the strategy. Why? Because the tax is like a 50% carried interest around your neck. That like that dwarfs so many
other variables. I don't understand why people don't think about tax so much more than they spend on investment it it. Well, because because most people, or at least a lot of people in the industry don't have the same incentive that you do to tell the same story. So that story is not what people are hearing or thinking about as as often. I think that's.
True, it's in it's very not transparent like there's not like, I mean Morningstar tries to do after tax, but it's it's something that's just it's not discussed nearly enough. But yeah, I've seen ETF like it doesn't matter what you put in it, but if you have any level of activity, the ability to compound tax deferred for 20 or 30 years versus having to pay
taxes every year. And the optimization problems like well, I have to own this overvalued turd because that's better than paying the tax on it. Like the ETF just eliminates that whole problem, which is beautiful. It's now it's like you have a massive 4 O 1K where you could just invest optimally like what makes sense to compound capital. So it's, yeah, but the downside is, you know, and we obviously know a lot 'cause this is we have a huge business, is launching an ETF is not exactly
easy or cheap. You know, it's 200 GSA year, you light on fire minimum. So you got to have like pretty serious capital to even consider that you already got to be rich.
Well, how do you get rich? Well, you get lucky and you probably didn't pay taxes and you compound it at a high rate for a long time, you know, But but people that are trying to do it, your next best alternative is probably just by other people's ETFs that are close enough to what your investment philosophy is. That's not going to drive you
too, too wild. Yeah, well, and to your point, if you do buy other people's ETFs, then they've already lived through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. Some of that may be worth outsourcing. Yes, exactly. Right. Like it's not all it's easy to look at the at the gravy train at the end and be like I want that. You got to be willing to live through the cost. Yes, for sure. But that said, just because I'm biased because obviously I have ETFs.
Like if you do have the passion, if you do have desire and you would do this for free and just because you love the game so much, I get it. There's people out there like that, like I'd probably do that if somebody gunned in my head said, hey, you know, you're not getting paid shit anymore to run out for architect and do your business and do everything you do. I'd probably still do probably
95% what I'm doing right now. I'd be mad, I'd probably whine and complain a little bit, but I'd be like, yeah, whatever. I like doing that anyway. So then that's when you know you're kind of programmed to. This is probably the right idea. It's just kind of what you wanted to do. You're born for this type of thing. Can we talk about another church that you seem to pray to, which is momentum? Well, listen, can we can we pick up Part 2 of? This let's do it.
Well, thank you for taking the time here. I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, no worries. At this time of year, we always host a lot of people because it's, you know, 80° in perfect weather in Puerto Rico. So we magically find ourselves with like hosting barbecues every night and drives my wife insane. But you know is what it is cost of doing business if you live in Puerto Rico. Nice to live somewhere that people on a vacation. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
All right. So I wanted to ask you about your other church that you pray to. I know that you've you've found, you know, statistical outperformance historically in value. The other the other book that you wrote was about momentum and I'm curious for your thoughts on momentum or what you found with
momentum strategies? Yeah. So but as a native value investor, you know you're kind of taught that all that matters is some fundamental to price and you shouldn't just focus on price or technicals or any of the Mr. market aspects. But then the problem is when you start reading enough research and you hold you know you're you're trying to be an evidence based investor not a feelings
based investor. It becomes pretty clear pretty quick then momentum is something you should strongly consider and so it you know it took me a while to wrap my head around it but momentum is this idea that just buying winners so stocks that have been doing well relative to all the other stocks continue to do well in the future. That basic concept is arguably one of the best strategies that you can do arguably even better than value.
That doesn't mean you should not do value because they they happen to kind of yin and Yang at different times but that that's essentially momentum And and again for me to get there it it took a while because I was fundamentally still am a value mentality type person but now I'm a believer in both. How, how persistent is that momentum? I mean, do you, do you pretty much just say, OK, well if I'm going to buy into that as soon as the moving averages crossover
I'm out or something like that? It's less persistent in the sense that if you do a generic value strategy like to just say, hey, we're going to go buy the 10% cheapest PE stocks or something like this, you know it. It doesn't matter too much whether if you rebalance that every month or every year, you're still going to capture the fact, right? It's obviously better if you did it monthly rebalance, but then you got to consider taxes, fees
and all this other stuff. But it still works with momentum strategies. If you don't refresh them quickly, they're worthless. So like for example an annual rebalance momentum strategy, it's all but a waste of your time where whereas it only works if you have faster frequency and that kind of makes sense because it's more of like a sentiment. You know you're basically front running people that are chasing shiny rocks all the time and shiny rock chasers change their
minds a lot. And so it's really important to that strategy to just it has to be a much more actively traded strategy. We're doing it monthly now, but even quarterly it's still not bad. Interesting. I I mean it makes sense. The other thing that I think is, is sort of nice about it is momentum can move factors, right. It kind of morphs with whatever is working.
That's how I think about it. Yes, we do live momentum strategies and in I think whatever it was 2000, 2020 one we were like a Kathy Wood clone and then you know after that momentum blew up obviously because we do momentum strategy you quickly shift and then we were an energy fund in 2000, you know late 2122. And so Momentum, the best way to think of it's like a Chameleon, like it's just where the Chameleon colors change depending on where the, where
the mojo on the market is and it just adapts, it's very adaptive strategy, it can be anything to anybody. Yeah, yeah. Well, as you said, it's whatever the shiny rock is of the day, right? Exactly. Whatever has momentum, that's what you buy. It's it's really a pretty brain dead strategy. That's not very intuitive, but it just works, I think. Or the long haul.
Huh. Well, I really appreciated, you know the work that you put out and I I appreciate you expanding my mind a little bit about I read the DIY investor, I had all all your books were like right there on the bookshelf together. So I think I found you in like 2019 and I appreciate what you done. Yeah. I'm I'm sorry that I've contributed to your brainwashing in the financial markets, but hopefully some of the knowledge is. Useful indeed.
Hey, I wanted to circle back to something that you said about Buffett and an ETF. And and why, why do you think Buffett would have been in an ETF structure? And the reason that I asked that is I'm kind of curious if if the moment of like it seems to me that ETFs can attract money when they're working and I am not sure if that would be a positive and like Buffett strategy is kind of what I totally get it from a tax perspective, but I was just curious.
Yeah. So yeah, the the main reason I mention that is just if anyone follows Buffett, you kind of realize his genius is not really picking stocks. His genius is lowering frictional costs and avoiding taxes. That's what it has allowed him to compound not just a high rates but high high rates after fees and after taxes. And you know obviously the ETF is basically the ultimate way to do to achieve both of those. Now to your point, which is actually very good one, ETFs are
not permanent capital. You know to the extent you're, you know, you're on board with Buffett's strategy. You give him more money, he deploys it to the extent you think he's an idiot, you take capital away from him. However, that said, like the nucleus of the core strategy itself and to the extent you didn't give him too much money, so he would have too much scalability and not be able to play with the the things he likes, which is actually his
current problem. I don't think it would actually matter. It's just the end investor could screw themselves. But Buffett himself is just going to be managing a pool of capital and investing whatever pool of capital he's been given the best of his ability. And if people want to ride the train, great, take a ride the train. If they don't want to ride the train or they want to get out at the worst times, you know, obviously you cannot control that.
It's not like permanent capital stuck in the fund and that's their own problem, but it. But I still think it would still be a pretty useful vehicle for, you know, for someone like him for sure, especially to the extent he's trading and things that are relatively liquid and scalable. Now it might be too much because he has, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars and there's too much transparency in an ETF.
So at that scale, if he's being super concentrated and you know, he's trying to buy like huge stakes as a percentage of the business. That's obviously not going to work in an ETF structure because there's all kinds of limitations and issues with the 40 Act, but but taxes frictional cost in early day Warren Buffett, I think he would definitely at least strongly consider that rapper.
As far as people like considering that rapper, one of one of the things that I had asked you about when we were getting ready for this, I said, you know, I'm curious for your more interesting ETS idea, ideas or whatever. Like what are some ETFs that people should think about or may not know about is probably the better way to say what I'm
trying to say. And one of them is, is you brought up, you said the interesting deals are less about the substance of the ETF, but how they became an ETF. And you cited CCMG. And I was curious if you wouldn't mind just briefly describing what that is and if somebody that's listening, if this kind of conversation resonates, you want to talk a little bit about your business on how you're helping people launch ETFs.
Yeah, So, so CCMG is one of the the most recent conversions we've done where you can always launch just a normal ETF, just you start up an ETF and yeah, yeah, hit the ground running. But there's also an ability to seed an ETF tax free with current assets, typically low basis assets and we've done that on mutual funds, limited partnerships or hedge funds and separately managed accounts typically through like an RIA.
And so the CCMG deal was was a monster SMA deal where there is you know thousands of individual separately managed accounts, there were syndicated all together with low basis securities that all contributed simultaneously to seed in ETF. In that case, it was almost $800 million. But we've also done mutual fund deals that were almost a billion dollars and we've done several LP deals that weren't that big, but we did one that was over $100 million.
The main idea is that, you know, a lot of people look at the ETF wrapper, they're like, man, that's so awesome, The tax efficiency, the fees, the transparency, like that's clearly the future in many respects. But it you know I have a bunch of low basis stuff right now and I don't want to sell that pay a bunch of tax just to get into
the better wrapper. And So what we've kind of focused on our ETF structure is how do we solve that problem, how do we transition you from A to B where A is the inefficient way to manage capital, B is the efficient way to manage capital.
How do we do that without having a tax bill and and and so that that's something that's super interesting for if you do have listeners out there that are, you know, investment advisors, hedge fund managers or even just ultra high net worth and you want to try to, you'd like to manage your money in ETF because who won it. But you know, how can we do this without killing you on the way into the ETF wrapper?
Yeah, I I am thinking of somebody right now and I as soon as we're off this, I will at least ping him and maybe actually write just an intro and say, hey, I think you guys should chat because especially if you can convert mutual funds that seems to be a way to take what I perceived to be sort of a dying business and flip it into more of a growth strategy. Yeah, 100%. And obviously the devil's in the details these things, there's way too many lawyers involved.
So it's frictional, it's painful, tons of brain damage. But if you're thinking about this is like a 510 year thing and not like the next six months deal, OK, so we have someone off cost and brain damage but it sets us up for a long term success that that should be a no brainer for most people. But you do have a lot of legacy and status quo bias or even
great ideas. You're like we'll just deal the next month and then you say that for the next next month or the next 10 years and then you find yourself dead and out of business. That's something you obviously want to avoid. But I also empathize with that because it is a pain to deal with transitions and you know, explore new business model and deal with ETFs and what have
you. Yeah. But it would be an interesting idea to sort of buy like dying mutual funds and then convert them to ETFs to the extent that it was just the mutual fund wrapper that was causing some of the decay, definitely in assets under management. And there's a business out there it's that'd be complicated. But you know to the extent that you can go in there and get the key, the key like anything is price paid, right.
Like if you can go in there and buy the assets as they are which is basically a dying legacy thing that's going to be bankrupt anyways at some point and you could pay that value and then turn around flip it converting ETF and and clean things up. The. But the problem is usually an M&A like the mutual fund people when you when you're like, hey I'm going to buy your stuff because your business sucks. They're like, well, great, what do you want to pay? And you're like, well, not a
lot. And they're like, you know, OK And then they're like, well, that's weird. Well, OK, maybe we will do it. And then you got The problem is you need to explain to them because you need a lot of people on board to convert to an ETF. And then the minute you explained, like, hey, here's what we're going to do to unlock all this value, here's how we're going to do it.
They're like, oh, well, instead of paying me what you wanted to pay me, you're going to have to pay me more now because you just told me how you're going to Add all this value. And you're like, well, I'm going to Add all that value, not you. And they're like, well, yeah, but just pay me for it anyways. So. So those deals, it's all about the art of the deal and like you know, finding a win win to make it work. And in my experience, it's just easier said than done. So yeah.
Well, that's that's what you do on podcast. You just say things that are easy, right? Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, but it is an entrepreneurial opportunity, right? If something's hard, that usually means there's like a return on capital tied to it. And if you can solve that,
that's how you make money. So if you have any entrepreneurs listening or people that are out there, I mean, there's definitely a value creation situation on conversion from legacy to ETF wrappers, which we kind of sit as the shovel maker, but someone needs to be the deal maker. And you could definitely make a ton of money if you could get everyone to sit at the table and agree on something, yeah. Sure. How do you find yourself as the shovel maker? Like how'd that?
Happen we do all the So basically what happened is we never in a million years would have thought we'd be a shovel salesman for ETF infrastructure services. And it's sometimes life just happens And we we were always kind of like dudes hanging out in the garage trying to survive in the ETF business for over a decade. And we built all this infrastructure, did everything ourselves. And then, you know, you wake up four or five years ago and now everybody on the planet is like,
man, how do we start an ATF? But jeez, that's really hard. And like tons of costs and super expensive and annoying. Wouldn't wouldn't it be nice if we could just go rent Wes's infrastructure? Because they already saw this? And then we finally just had to get our head around opening up our infrastructure to other people as opposed to just using
it for our own ETFs. And then once we figured that out was just, it's kind of like I'm sure it's probably what Amazon thought when like we built all these servers, we built all this infrastructure to facilitate our storefront and everyone's like, man, it would be nice if we could use your guys back in tech, you know? And sure enough AWS was born.
It was kind of like what happened to us if we had like a an AWS basically buried in the backyard, essentially a gold mine that we didn't know we had until we just thought thought differently about it. So it's just a change in mentality about what's our, what's our value proposition in the ETF business. Yeah, maybe it's not making ETFs, maybe it's helping other people and selling them a beautiful, low cost, high quality shovel.
We might be really, we might be better at that than actually creating our own ETFs and trying to sell them to the world. That's that's difficult. We don't have a monopoly on that, for sure. Well, I thought about you this weekend. I had something that didn't go quite so hot. And for those that don't understand what's going on, we we ended part one and started Part 2 and we had a weekend in between. So that's where this comment comes from.
And I thought about you talking about your experience in the military. And I said, you know what? If guys are going through that whatever I'm going through isn't so bad. And you know, I just, I want to let you know that somebody that sit, sat here and watch like you, you write the books and I wasn't as close as many were. But it's really cool to see you succeed. And it's nice to hear you excited that it sounds like your business has hit escape velocity.
And you seem like one of those guys that's out there doing the right thing for the right reasons. And you know, I'm happy that it happened to you because I well, I'm happy that you made it happen and I'm happy that it seems like you guys hit escape velocity. It's it's very cool. Yeah, no, appreciate it. Yeah, it's, you know, it's all about having a good team and good people around. You send a good culture and we obviously want to give it forward too.
So like you know, if you're an entrepreneur or anybody, just I'll talk to anybody. I don't care if you're a billionaire, you're broke as shit because I've been in in that prior or I've been in, I've been in that position as well. Just feel free to reach out. And you know, we're always happy to help people try to achieve success and win in the game that's which is extremely hard, so.
How can people find you? On the Alpha architect side just alphaarchitect.com on infrastructure side etfarchitect.com and just you know hit us on contact us depend on what aspect of our business you're interested in and we'll be in touch it's just it's that easy or on Twitter I'm at you know at alpha architect on Twitter also a commonplace you can hit us directly all. Right.
Cool, man. Well, thank you for carving out the time for two straight day or two straight work days, and I appreciate it. And we'll be in touch. Yeah you got appreciate the time and honor be here all. Right cool.