Superinvestors and the Art of Worldly Wisdom

At first blush, Keith McCullough may come off as just another brash and cocksure trader. Dig a bit deeper, though, and you'll find a calculating iconoclast driven by a deep desire to both continually improve as an investor and, ultimately, change Wall Street for the better. After starting in a job running buy and sell tickets, Keith worked his way up to running a portfolio and eventually to foundi...

There are very few truly unique thinkers in the world and almost none of them regularly train their gaze on Wall Street. Peter Atwater is one of those rare few. Whenever a major news story hits the tape, it's Peter's opinion I look to to begin to understand what it means for markets and the world because of the grounded and clear-headed insight he brings to the table. Three years ago, on this show...

You could say that natural resources run in Leigh Goering's blood. The son of two oil and gas engineers, Leigh has spent nearly his entire life studying markets and investments related to commodities. Over the past 30 years, he has become one of the most brilliant and passionate analysts and money managers in the industry. In this conversation, Leigh shares the details of his macro and micro resea...

Mike Green has been in the right place at the right time for his entire investment career and not just by way of good fortune. Mike has an uncanny knack for finding value in the markets. After jumping into the small cap value game in 1999 and taking advantage of one of the best runs for value as a factor in history he moved on to explore opportunities in hedging via derivatives in 2006, just prior...

It's been three years since I made the trek up to Seattle to interview celebrated short seller Bill Fleckenstein on the topics of, "Central Bankers, Financial Bubbles and White Burgundy." With a global pandemic now threatening to burst these bubbles, forcing central bankers into even more extreme monetary policies, I thought it was an opportune time to reconnect with Bill and get his thoughts on h...

Christopher Cole is one of the foremost thinkers and practitioners in the world of volatility trading. After beginning his career in Hollywood as a cinematographer, Chris took an interest in options trading. Eventually, this led to a job at Merrill Lynch where he was able to explore the subject of risk further and in a professional capacity. After personally profiting through employing his volatil...

Rob Arnott is one of the most accomplished and respected quantitative analysts in the world. He has written over 100 academic papers on everything from tactical asset allocation to value investing. In this episode, Rob discusses his evolution as an investor, from tailoring his college major in the late-1970's to best position him for a career in quantitative investing to the founding of his firm,...

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who has done more to educate and inform individual investors about the fundamentals of effective investing than Meb Faber. Over the past decade and longer, through books like Global Asset Allocation, Meb has taken key concepts, which Wall Street has suggested for years are too complex for individuals to understand let alone implement, and made them easily a...

When it comes to global macro investing, Louis-Vincent Gave is one of the most interesting thinkers in the world. His firm, GaveKal, puts out some of the most compelling research on Wall Street and beyond and, as CEO, Louis' unique investment process is at the heart of it. In this episode, he discusses his family tradition in both the French military and in the capital markets, how he developed hi...

Michael Oliver has been studying markets for over four decades but it was the 1987 stock market crash that became his "aha!" moment and converted him to what he calls "momentum structural analysis." It was his early work in the area that prepared him for that massive decline in stock prices and the success of its forecasting ability that gave him the confidence to pursue it full time. Many technic...

Diego Parrilla has been eerily prescient in calling major turning points in a variety of markets over the past several years. Back in 2014, he published The Energy World Is Flat in which he detailed the coming crash in the price of crude oil and the various dynamics that would ensure such an outcome. Oil prices subsequently fell more than 70% over the next couple of years. In August of 2017, he pu...

Erik Townsend is unique in the investing world for his deep expertise in two seemingly disparate fields: security technology and macro investing. This rare perspective gives him extraordinary insight into the intersection of the two and how they are likely to affect global markets in the future. In his new book, Beyond Blockchain, Erik discusses these trends in great detail, covering the history o...

Have we entered a new era of sustainably high corporate profit margins or will they revert over time to more normal historical levels? This is the single most important question equity investors should be asking today and nobody has done more work on this topic than Jonathan Tepper. Formerly, an equity analyst at one of the most successful hedge funds on the planet, then a prop trader at one of th...

Fred Hickey has been writing The High Tech Strategist, a monthly investment newsletter, for over 30 years. Over that time, he has developed an intensive research process focused on the tech sector that gives him extensive familiarity with dozens of individual companies within it along with unique insight into the broader economy. In this episode, Fred discusses what his research routines look like...

Jerry Parker began his career as an unfulfilled accountant looking for something more inspiring to do with his life. After getting rejected for several traditional jobs on Wall Street he responded to an ad looking for a handful of people eager to learn how to trade. It would soon turn out those early rejections were an incredible blessing in disguise because if he had been accepted to any one of t...

W. Ben Hunt, Ph. D. looks at the financial markets through a truly unique lens. With an extensive background in political science, game theory and history, Ben came to the financial markets relatively late in life. But it's precisely this wandering path to the world of investing that gives him rare insight into what drives asset prices and how these forces change over time. In this conversation we...

Grant Williams cut his teeth in the world of finance during one of the greatest speculative manias in history. As a prop trader at one of the largest firms in Tokyo, he had a front row seat to the epic Japanese twin bubbles in equities and real estate in the late-1980's which endowed him with a healthy skepticism towards herd behavior in the financial markets. Eventually, he would go on to a serve...

Eric Cinnamond has been called, “the godfather of small cap absolute return investing.” From 1998 to 2016 he ran an equity investment strategy that handily beat the 8% average annual return of the Russell 2000 Index. But what’s even more impressive is he did this while holding an average cash allocation of about 40% so his equity performance was roughly double that of the index. In this episode we...

Simon Mikhailovich emigrated from the Soviet Union at the age of 19 with his family and just $100 in a suitcase. After putting himself through college he began a career in finance. Eventually, he found himself at the leading edge of the development of the financial derivatives that would be at the center of the great financial crisis. Upon successfully navigating those rough investing waters, he t...

Roger McNamee is one of the most successful technology investors of all time. While running the T. Rowe Price Science & Technology Fund, and generating a 17% compound average growth rate in the process, Roger made the unheard of move of committing capital, as a mutual fund manager, to venture investments in Electronic Arts and Sybase. From there, he started the industry's first crossover fund...

Among professional investors, Kiril Sokoloff is well known for his ability to identify major trends early on in their development cycle. For this reason his views are some of the most sought out in the world of finance. Since 1983 he has been sharing his thoughts about markets and more at the firm he founded, 13D Research, via its weekly report, What I Learned This Week. In this episode, we discus...

Tobias Carlisle runs Carbon Beach Asset Management and is the author of several books including Deep Value, Concentrated Investing and his latest, The Acquirer's Multiple. In this episode we discuss both the similarities and the differences between the successful value investing methodologies employed by investing greats like Warren Buffett and Carl Icahn. Toby also shares his views on the "death...

Peter Atwater was pioneer in securitization and has served in important leadership roles at some of the largest financial institutions on the planet. Today, he writes and speaks extensively about how changes in confidence affect our preferences, decisions and actions. In this episode we discuss how he discovered socionomics, what about it appealed to him and how it shapes his views on the markets...

Erik Townsend is a retired software entrepreneur turned hedge fund manager and host of the Macro Voices podcast. In this conversation Erik shares some of his formative experiences like breaking into MIT as a teenager to eventually selling his software firm near the height of dotcom mania. He explains why it "sucked" being a young retiree on a yacht in the Caribbean and how he's much happier today...

To regular listeners, Mark Yusko needs no introduction. It was just a few months ago he appeared on the podcast to discuss Gut Instinct (And Why His Says We're Headed For A Crash). This time Mark shares his thoughts on the wild popularity of passive investing, the outright disdain for hedge fund investing and his potential 10-year bet with Warren Buffett. For notes and links related to this episod...