Free Money with Sloane and Ashby

How have pension funds handled the last few months? We’re told markets are in turmoil. But they’re also just an inch away at all-time highs. Retail investors are racking up triple-digit returns, and seem to be making an attempt at necromancy with the bankrupt husk of Hertz, the rental car market’s onetime global leader. So we called Marcie Frost. She oversees a team of 2,800 professionals as CEO o...

Black lives matter. And not just in the abstract. When given the proper space and support, Black investors can materially improve portfolio returns. But that almost never happens. In aggregate, only about 1% of the $70 Trillion managed by professional investors is overseen by minority-owned firms. On this episode of Free Money, we were fortunate to speak with Daryn Dodson, a Managing Director at I...

Good things are happening even as we endure a global crisis. A Mumbai-based startup has successfully reversed the aging process in rats , a previously unthinkable breakthrough. A new era in American spaceflight begins tomorrow , when two astronauts travel to the International Space Station onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket. It will be the first crewed launch from the US since the shuttle program en...

Unless we recognize “Something has died, and something new is coming after it,” it could take until 2040 before humanity emerges from the aftermath of this pandemic. That comes from Tom Baruch , a prolific “clean tech” venture capitalist who has led investments resulting in 18 IPOs and 8 M&A transactions and now operates from his family office, Baruch Future Ventures. He was our token optimist...

There is “a time bomb waiting to go off” in some American states. That’s according to Ben Oppenheim, PhD, a computational epidemiologist at Metabiota and our guest on this episode of Free Money. We spoke on the first of May, one day after the United States endured its highest death toll so far in this pandemic. And the outlook isn’t great. The places with growing case counts “have older population...

It’s the end of the year. What have we spent all of this time talking about? Mostly what it means that pension funds, sovereign funds, endowments, and other asset owner institutions collectively manage roughly a third of all the money on earth. They tend to be globally diversified and invest with long time horizons, which aligns them with the public interest because they cannot succeed unless huma...

Many institutional allocators are troubled by the self-evident lack of diversity in investment management.  It’s easy to suggest that one fix that: cultivate more diverse talent! Build a more welcoming environment for new funds! But how exactly would one accomplish that?  Many pensions made worthy attempts with emerging manager programs, which were meant to support asset managers that di...

Does misogyny cost money?  Yes, but not enough. Ken Fisher - who runs the eponymous Fisher Investments - has a long history of inappropriate invective. One particular instance earlier this month at an investment conference triggered an outcry and then outflows of about $3 Billion. That response took remarkably quick action from the asset owner community. On this podcast, Ashby wondered aloud...

Capital markets are an inherently queer place. Securities produce financial returns by manifesting intrinsic value. Or as some might say, “living their best life.” As America’s leading loft-based finance transsexual, the inherent gayness of creating shareholder returns this way has long been old news to me. But while Ashby and I were discussing queer issues on this latest episode of the Free Money...

Fox News host David Webb accused American liberals of “ turning climate change into their religion ” last week. An interesting thought. Pascal’s Wager came to mind while Ashby and I were exploring it on the podcast. It’s a 17th century philosophical argument about the existence of god advanced by the French polymath Blaise Pascal. The gist: humans bet with their lives that god either does or does...

If financial risk doesn’t confuse you, you’re not paying attention. That’s advisable. Market minutia gets treated like breaking news around the world, and people listen even though it’s “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” as the late Jack Bogle told me in 2017 (and Shakespeare wrote a few hundred years earlier). But the mad moron has a megaphone. Traders listen a...