Behind the Balance Sheet

James Aitken, macro strategist to the world’s largest and most successful investors, takes Steve on a tour of the keythemes in global finance today. You will learn why James is interested in Japan, his views on the new Fed Chair and why inflationary pressures are here to stay as post Covid, we focus on resilience rather than efficiency. James also shares his thoughts on gold, on AI, and importantl...

Jeremy Grantham is known as a permabear and an expert on bubbles so you should not be surprised that he sees an AI-induced bubble today and thinks the market will fall by 50%. He points out that at peaks you always have high multiples applied to abnormally high profit margins and today is no different. We discuss his experiences at GMO, where they didn’t have a sales person for their first 22 year...

Michael Cembalest chairs the Market and Investment Strategy group at JP Morgan Asset and Wealth Management and effectively oversees $4tn AUM. He is responsible for market and investment insights across the asset management business and has produced the famous Eye on the Market publication for over 20 years now. We discuss AI, which formed the bulk of his most recent annual edition, why he believes...

Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy UK, a behavioural scientist, TED speaker, organiser of the Nudgestock conference and so much more. Most important, he is one of the most original thinkers around. In this wide ranging conversation, he explains what accountants and analysts miss, why he believes family-owned businesses are long term winners, two reasons to own Costco,...

The title “The Sculptor” is a play on a quote “every man can be the sculptor of his own mind”, as Jonathan Tepper is uniquely self-educated. Brought up in the slums of San Blas in Madrid, partly home-schooled, he made it to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Tepper is a relentless learner, endlessly curious and in love with investing – as he sees it, you never stop learning and every day is an opportunit...

Terry Smith is the fund manager the professionals love tohate. A billionaire, he is in the third and most successful phase of a varied career. He trounced the index for years with a simple mantra of buy good companies, don’t overpay, do nothing. He thus built one of the largest funds inthe UK, made himself a fortune and moved to Mauritius. None of this made him popular with his peers and after 5 y...

James Anderson, former Senior Partner of Baillie Gifford and early backer of Elon Musk, now runs the Lingotto Innovation Strategy with Morgan Samet. I interviewed them in front of a live audience at Italian Tech Week, hence this shorter than usual episode. We discussed AI of course, China’s role in a portfolio as a leader in many areas of tech but with associated geopolitical risk, the future of a...

Tom Gayner is the CEO of Markel Group and has run its investment portfolio for 35 years, beating the index by an astonishing 1.5% pa. This makes him one of the most successful capital allocators in the US stockmarket, yet he is under the radar. He explains why he holds 140 stocks, although the top 40 represent 80% of the value; why there are so few imitators of the insurance/equity and business in...

Tim Guinness is the founder and Chairman of Guinness Global Investors. He has been in business 5 decades and has been managing money for 44 years. He has built up two firms, the first he sold and the second now runs $11bn. Age 77, he is still thinking about how to grow the business and secure its future. Perhaps controversially, Tim thinks it’s not difficult for activemanagers to beat the index, e...

Nick Train is a seriously thoughtful growth investor with a highly impressive 40 year track record. He invests in eternal franchises and takes a 20 year view. He says his ideal holding period is forever. He was early to recognise that high quality consumer brands were great investments and accordingly his funds significantly outperformed their benchmarks. More recently, the last five years have be...

Christopher Tsai is a deeply thoughtful growth investor. He became one of the foremost collectors of the works of Ai Weiwei, recognising their implicit value and deeply studying the artist. His concentrated portfolio reflects his attraction to growth stocks with Tesla his largest position. In our conversation, he explains why he believes Tesla has deep moats across multiple verticals; why he think...

David Samra has been in the investment business for over 30years. He specialises in international value and has beaten his index by over 4% pa for over 20 years, in a period when traditional value has been doing poorly. That may be why his fund, which has been closed to new investors for most of the last 14 years, has reached $50bn. In this conversation, David explains his focus on four factors: o...

Dave Iben is the founder and CIO of Kopernik GlobalInvestors, a $6bn global value investment shop which prides itself on independent thought and is comfortable with contrarian positions. Steve invited Dave on the podcast because at a recent NewYork conference, Dave was cheerleading that value was back, and Steve wanted to discuss the rationale for his enthusiasm, given value’s massive underperform...

Gary Channon is one of the UK’s better known valueinvestors. He runs a value fund, a closed-end fund and a private equity vehicle.  He runs a highly concentrated portfolio. The top 5 positions are over 50%, and he holds no more than 15 stocks. I asked him on the podcast because he is really thoughtful about his process – he only buys stocks selling for <50% of intrinsic value, and if he can mon...

Jennifer Wallace is a value investor. She learned her tradefrom a series of luminaries, studying under Bruce Greenwald at Columbia, before going to work for famed value investor Bob Bruce (who used to hang out with Warren Buffett). Today she is the CIO of Summit Street Capital Management, and only invests in high quality companies with modest leverage when they are super cheap. This means she will...

In his youth, George Michelakis, was a top 3 global under-20chess player. No surprise he is pretty good at investing too and runs a $2bn long short equity hedge fund out of London. Since 2006, he has compounded capital at a rate of 5.35x vs 3.43k for the MSCI world, on net exposure of 30-45%. That’s an impressive record but astonishingly, he entered his longest-running short position 10 years ago....

Dan Rasmussen is the founder and CIO of Verdad Advisers, an unconventional quantitative investment boutique. In this conversation, Steve and Dan agree that private equity and credit look highly risky for the next decade. They debate the value of forecasting, where they have very different views. They similarly disagree on forecast horizons, with Dan favouring near term accuracy and Steve thinking...

In this episode with Tom Slater of Baillie Gifford, managerof the £10bn Scottish Mortgage investment trust, we cover a lot of ground. Of course, we discuss his current thoughts on China and the Mag 7, including why he has trimmed Nvidia but still likes Meta and his thoughts on Elon Musk. Tom explainshis investing philosophy, what growth managers do differently from traditional value managers and h...

When it comes to credit, few people have better credentials than Greg Peters, co-CIO of PGIM, with AUM of $700bn. In this fascinating conversation, we discuss the differences between investing in equities and credit, the legacy of the zero interest rate period, why PGIM uses scenario based forecasting in preference to single point estimates, why covenants have gone out of fashion and why that’s da...

Anthony Bolton is best known for Fidelity Special Situationsfund’s 19.5% pa returns, 6% above his benchmark, over a 28 year period. He was not only a highly accomplished investor but was both revered and liked by his colleagues. Pragmatic, unfailingly courteous, courageous, and universally popular, he exhibits none of the arrogance that is sometimes exhibited by successful investors with far infer...

Lionel Barber is the former editor of the Financial Timesand probably the only journalist on the planet to have interviewed Presidents Obama, Trump and Putin. Under his stewardship, the FT  metamorphosed from a newspaper into a digital subscription business, and was sold to the Japanese company Nikkei for 44xearnings. And as editor, Barber fully backed up former guest Dan McCrum in his investigati...

Bill Nygren has been at Harris Associates for over 40 years and considers himself a value investor. Yet his portfolio has owned Netflix, Amazon and Meta recently, while Alphabet is his largest position. Bill explains his unusual but highly effective approach to value investing. Harris has also constructed a unique organisational methodology to handle investing mistakes – I have never encountered a...

Peter Oppenheimer is chief global equity strategist and head of Macro Research at Goldman Sachs in Europe and the author of two books on market cycles. His first book, the Long Good Buy is sub-titled Analysing Cycles in Markets. His follow-up book Any Happy Returns, is sub-titled Structural Changes and Super Cycles in Markets and looks at longer term secular trends and the future outlook for econo...

John Armitage is a giant in the hedge fund world and in the world of investing more broadly. His firm, Egerton Capital,  celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. In this conversation, John explains how he started with $10m, and why you couldn’t do that today. He touches on his portfolio, talks about his approach to investing, explaining why he requires his analysts to follow more than one sector...

John Huber is an investor with a small fund managing his family assets and outside capital in a concentrated portfolio. John has written an excellent blog, Base Hit Investing, for many years, explaining his investing principles. We discuss these in this episode, including what John looks for in an investment, why he emphasises capital allocation even more today, where he sees the sweet spot in rev...