Excess Returns

This week we speak with Martin Emery from GMO's Systematic Global Macro team. We discuss the current macro environment and what it means for long-term investors. We cover the outlook for inflation, the future of the 60-40 portfolio and the benefits of alternatives in a low return environment. We also talk about some of the unique aspects of their systematic approach including how they look at curr...

Value investors in general tend to have an aversion to using momentum in their investment strategies. But the long-term evidence suggests they should rethink that. In this episode we look at some of the ways to use momentum to enhance a value portfolio.  We hope you enjoy the discussion.  ABOUT THE PODCAST Excess Returns is an investing podcast hosted by Jack Forehand (@practicalquant) a...

Many investors think that options are just a vehicle that affects the portfolios of sophisticated investors. But their impact on the market goes well beyond that. In this episode, we talk to SpotGamma founder Brent Kochuba about the influence that options have on the stock market, and what that means for everyday investors. We discuss the role of options dealer hedging on flows within the market,...

In this episode we talk with Dimensional Fund Advisors Director of Research Savina Rizova. We discuss her amazing story, from growing up in communist Bulgaria to recently being named one of Barron's 100 most influential women in finance. We also take a deep dive into factor investing and how Dimensional views the major factors including value, momentum, profitability and investment, and her resear...

The case for passive investing is a very strong one. With most active managers failing to keep up with the market, the arguments for passive are difficult to refute. But has the rise of passive introduced significant risks to the market? Our guest this week thinks it has. We talk to Simplify Asset Management's Mike Green about the potential dangers of the rise of passive investing and what they me...

With the market in a significant drawdown, there has been a renewed interest from investors in trend following strategies.  Given its ability to limit losses during drawdowns and reduce volatility, that is certainly understandable. But like any investment strategy, it has both its strengths and its weaknesses. In this episode, we cover both of them and take a balanced look at the strategy. We...

In this episode we change things up from our usual topics and focus on financial planning. No matter how much experience and training we have, all of us tend to make mistakes with our finances. We talk with Plancorp CIO Peter Lazaroff about ten of the most common financial planning mistakes he has seen, and how we can avoid making them. We discuss the importance of not interrupting compounding, th...

We have always found it very informative when investors we respect talk about how they manage their personal portfolios. So we decided to start a new segment of the podcast where we talk to some of the smartest investors we know about their personal investment strategy. And we can't think of a better person to start with than Cambria founder Meb Faber. Meb has been very open publicly about how he...

In this episode we speak to Jack Schwager. Jack is the author of the Market Wizards series of books and has been studying the best traders for decades. He has interviewed some of history's most successful traders and investors for the series, including Paul Tudor Jones, Steve Cohen, Joel Greenblatt, Michael Steinhardt and many others. We discuss the biggest lessons investors can learn from these l...

Inflation is probably the number one topic on investors' minds these days. But much of the information out there about it is either wrong or lacks the proper context. We have discussed the topic with many of the guests on Excess Returns and we wanted to put together a compilation of the best insights we have received. We talk with Orcam Financial's Cullen Roche, Epsilon Theory's Ben Hunt, O'Shaugh...

Value investing has produced some of the greatest investors of all time. Whether it be Benjamin Graham's deep value approach or Warren Buffett's quality at a reasonable price strategy, value has a long track record of success. But what if the great value investors of the future won't be human at all? What if machines can be trained to identify the best value stocks? In this episode, we talk to Joh...

Many investors think that the best way to maximum their spending rate in retirement is to invest in the asset classes with the highest long-term returns. And that is true to an extent, but managing drawdowns also plays a very important role in maximizing withdrawal rates. In this episode, we take an in depth look at the management of sequence risk in retirement and the different ways to approach i...

Many crypto investors tend to build their own portfolios and focus on the major coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum. But the crypto space is much more than that. Trying to get diversified exposure to crypto can be challenging, though. In this episode we talk to WisdomTree Global CIO Jeremy Schwartz and Ritholtz Wealth Director of Research Michael Batnick about the New Crypto Index they developed to he...

The Russian Ukraine conflict has been a challenging one for many of us to understand. In this episode, we speak with Ben Hunt of Epsilon Theory to help us understand how the conflict got to where it is today and what it means going forward. We discuss the lead up to the war, why Putin chose to invade and how the war can be won on the military, economic and narrative fronts. We also talk about its...

When we started Excess Returns, we stayed away from having a standard closing question for guests because we couldn’t come up with one that summed up the knowledge of our guests into something simple that your average investor could understand. But a little over a year ago, we came up with a question that we thought worked perfectly.    If our goal was to help investors learn along with...

In this episode, we speak with Gary Antonacci about his Dual Momentum investing approach. We look at both absolute and relative momentum individually, and the pros and cons of the measures that can be used to define them. We then discuss the process of combining them together into a dual momentum strategy. We also cover a wide variety of other momentum investing topics, including using modules to...

While many investors are likely familiar with options, their impact on the stock market is much less understood. When an investor buys an option, it can kick off a series of flows into and out of the underlying stock or index that can have significant impact on the price of the instrument itself over time. And with options activity up dramatically in recent years, these flows have become much more...

Many investors see macro forecasting as a process about making bold binary predictions about the future of the economy and the market. Those predictions can gets lots of press when they are right, but the reality is that risk management and probabilities are much more important to a macro process than big, bold calls. In this episode we talk to Darius Dale of 42 Macro, who has developed a systemat...

The GameStop short squeeze in early 2021 was the talk of the investing world. It had all the parts of a great story. It had some investors making massive profits, while others suffered huge losses. It had anonymous investors on social media as its heroes and hedge fund managers as it villains. It also had a significant social side to it, with many seeing it as an example of individual investors ge...

This week we are joined by David Gardner, founder of the Motley Fool. We discuss his unique Rule Breaker approach to finding long-term growth investments and the criteria that the most successful growth companies of our time have in common. We also cover a wide variety of other topics, including why having a sell discipline is overrated, the lessons from the biggest mistakes he has made and what h...

With the market experiencing its first correction in a while, we thought it would be interesting to look at some behind the scenes data we found interesting about the recent decline. We discuss the varying performance from value, the carnage in the growth space, the importance of discount rates and the impact of the decline on value and growth spreads.  We hope you enjoy the discussion. ...

Investors are constantly searching for the perfect portfolio. Although it may be elusive, there are common principles that can allow all of us to get closer to it. We speak to Stephen Foerster, co-author of the new book "In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest" about some of those principles, and what some of history's...

There is an interesting dichotomy in the growth investing space in that growth stocks as a whole tend to underperform the market over time, but the best performing individual stocks in the market also typically come from the growth space. This puts a premium on the ability to separate the winners from the losers for growth managers. Our guest this week has produced a very strong record of doing ex...

2021 has been a really interesting year for markets. In this episode we talk about the biggest lessons we learned from the year, and from the post pandemic period in general. We discuss the debate as to whether the market is a voting or a weighing machine, the true definition of long-term and the importance of thinking in probabilities, as well as other significant lessons we learned.  We hop...

Our goal when we started the Excess Returns podcast was to hopefully use the platform to help educate investors, and to learn ourselves in the process. Initially, we didn’t have outside guests on the podcast, but it quickly became evident that bringing in voices other than our own would significantly help us in achieving our goal. Starting with our first interview in 2020 with Tobias Carlisle up u...