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What's the Alternative? | Episode 31 | The Art of Long Short Investing: Exploring Hedge Funds with Michael Marone
17 Plays2 hours ago
In this episode of What’s the Alternative? host Shana Orczyk Sissel sits down with Michael Marone, Co-Founder & Co-Chief Investment Officer at Crescent Rock Capital, a global equity long-short hedge fund manager.
They dive deep into the realities of running a long-short strategy in today’s market—how to think about shorting in a world structurally tilted against short sellers, why “boring” ideas often make the best shorts, and how shifts in market structure, AI, small caps, and deglobalization are reshaping the opportunity set for active managers and allocators.
Whether you’re an advisor, allocator, or sophisticated individual investor, this conversation offers a practical framework for evaluating hedge funds, understanding risk, and positioning portfolios in a changing world.
Key Takeaways:
- Why effective shorting often comes from “boring,” fundamentally sound companies facing marginal deterioration—not flashy frauds or meme names.
- How changes in market structure, including the rise of passive investing, have created both headwinds and unique opportunities for active long-short managers.
- Why small caps may be one of the ripest areas for active management, and how to think about quality, liquidity, and selectivity in that space.
- How to assess whether “AI is a bubble” by comparing today’s leaders to the dot-com era, and what deglobalization really means for global equity opportunities.
If you’re an advisor or investor looking to better understand hedge funds, long-short equity, and how alternatives fit into modern portfolios, this episode is for you.
Like, subscribe, and turn on notifications to stay up to date on future episodes of What’s the Alternative?
Connect with us!
- Michael Marone on LinkedIn
- Crescent Rock Capital Management
- Shana Orczyk Sissel on LinkedIn
- Banríon Capital Management
Investing involves risk of loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
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Transcript
Challenges and Strategies in Short-Selling
00:00:00
Speaker
boring ideas really work in shorts. But since everything is stacked against you in shorts, when you're looking for those quote home run type shorts, those frauds, those accounting irregularities, that type of thing, what you find is one, the very crowded names,
00:00:15
Speaker
There's not a lot of great short ideas out there. There's not a lot of companies that actually fit that parameter. Our markets are not that they flush a lot of that out over time. Now, there aren't a lot of those type of names, and they tend to be very crowded, and they tend to be very binary.
00:00:30
Speaker
And to be successful on the short side, it is more important to control your losers than making winners. his importance As important as a long side, more so in short side since it's been stacked against you, but since you theoretically have the cap laws controlled.
Introduction to Michael Marone and Hedge Fund Insights
00:00:50
Speaker
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of What's the Alternative? The show where we dive deep into the nuances of alternative investments with the experts in the field. today we have Michael Marone as our guest. He is the co-founder and co-chief investment officer at Crescent Rock Capital Management.
00:01:15
Speaker
Prior being a co-founder at Crescent Rock, he was a partner at Pennant Capital Management. It's actually where he met Boris, who is the other co-founder of Crescent Rock. Crescent Rock is one of the newer partners to the Bonnerian Capital Management alternative platform. And proud to say one of our first pure hedge funds.
00:01:38
Speaker
An exciting opportunity to learn more about the hedge fund space, and long, short, and what it means to manage portfolios in a manner that's a little bit different than what the advisors that we work with are used
Hedge Fund vs Traditional Fund Strategies
00:01:52
Speaker
to. So I would like to welcome Michael to the show.
00:01:56
Speaker
Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for being on the show. as I mentioned, it's a pleasure to have you. Cursive Rock is our first official hedge fund, pure hedge fund-like strategy on the platform. We've had hedge fund-like ETFs and mutual funds, but never are a hedge fund. and I think that's interesting. And one of the things we will talk about for our viewers is about how the constraints of the 40 Act really do
00:02:27
Speaker
result in a different experience than say working outside of the constraints of the
Market Impact on Long-Short Equity Portfolios
00:02:33
Speaker
40 Act. But we'll just start with the current market environment because there's plenty to talk about there. And in a long, short equity portfolio like what the ones managed at Crescent Rock,
00:02:45
Speaker
ah the The macro environment and the opportunity set is being significantly impacted by all kinds of things going on. So can you talk to us today a little bit about market structure, the impact of macro news on stocks in the short term, and how that leads to volatility and dispersion of returns and how that kind of drives your process?
Passive Investing's Influence on Market Structure
00:03:12
Speaker
Sure. Let's start with market structure a bit because it the market structure from when I started in the business is quite different. I mean, I started in the hedge fund business in the late 90s.
00:03:23
Speaker
I think the biggest change from market structure standpoint to today has been the rise of passive investing, index funds, ETFs, custom baskets from the prime brokers and the like. And it has changed how bottoms up stock pickers like ourselves do invest. So for example, back in the nineties, if you were in value or if you were a value investor,
00:03:48
Speaker
yeah you You could rely on this concept that good cash flow in and of itself was ah good catalyst. um That's changed quite a bit today. There have been other well-known value investors that have stayed, and I think they're onto something.
00:04:04
Speaker
that given the market structure and given the fact that particularly among smaller capitalization companies, there has seemed to have been a lot of the coverage from the sell side has dropped there.
00:04:15
Speaker
So a lot of discovery of how these smaller value stocks perform has changed quite a bit. And so you've moved from an environment where cash flow generation in and of itself is not sufficient.
00:04:28
Speaker
And so these companies need to engage more actively in stock buybacks, large dividends, kind of create their own catalysts. And that is large part change from today.
00:04:40
Speaker
I also think a big change from from back then to today is that at h this this there's a lot of talk about a a bubble today. There was sort of bubble in the late ninety And it'd be interesting to see, and I think the fact that you have so much more passive in index funds today, that I think that could perpetuate a bubble ah persisting for longer and then much harder to probably deflate it than it used to be historically when active management, i think, was a larger part of being the marginal buyer seller of stocks.
00:05:13
Speaker
So that is definitely a change in market structure. That's having any know ramifications depending on what your strategy is within long-term rate.
Active Management in Small Cap Investments
00:05:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting. So I have two things I want to ask you about. The first is pertaining to some of the things you were talking about, small cap and small cap value and opportunities there.
00:05:33
Speaker
When I worked at Fidelity SAI, we actually did a deep dive study into opportunities and where active management can really pay off. And we've even seen that recently, even though the dynamics in the small cap world seems to have changed substantially in the last say five years. The one thing that has held true is that active management does matter.
00:05:55
Speaker
And so I think that I'd like to get your thought process on why that is persisting. And then secondarily, I want to dive into your comments about the bubble because that is a hotly debated area. ah That is something that people continue every day on CNBC, Bloomberg. They ask each other, are we in a bubble as it pertains to AI and things of that nature? And I have my own opinions on that. i I started in the business right around 99-2000 bubble.
00:06:29
Speaker
um I wasn't necessarily managing money but like you, but I was actively paying attention to markets at that time. And they felt really different, like really different. um And the companies that were you know really benefiting from trends and and enthusiasm weren't real companies at all. And there was all kinds of IPO activity. And there was the analysts that covered those stocks were rock stars. Like you knew who they were.
00:07:02
Speaker
Mary Meeker is a great example, right? who You knew these people. Like I don't think it's even remotely the same day. Yeah. I don't even think it's remotely the same. So what are your thoughts on that discussion
Liquidity and Challenges in Small Cap Investing
00:07:15
Speaker
and that debate? So let's start with small caps and then go to the bubble debate. Sure. Well, small caps are interesting. I have some specific thoughts on small caps, so maybe more broadly, the active management piece.
00:07:26
Speaker
I certainly think since we launched, we launched Crescent Rock in the fourth quarter of 2018. So in that sort of seven years, we have had what feels like a couple of market cycles, right? So we had, when we first started, we were talking about real rates being around, could just coming off zero bound. and Then we got into COVID and then monetary and fiscal response that was overwhelming. And then we've got into it a right height cycle inflation. So there have been a lot of cycles in the last five years, which I think has led to, you literally have to be active as an active manager to navigate those market environments.
00:08:05
Speaker
If you look at the decade between the green financial crisis and COVID, decade plus, so that 12 year period, it was actually much different. There was a real argument to be made with it this act of really doing a lot there because you had an unusually long cycle where one factor or style persisted.
00:08:25
Speaker
Uh, value lagged tremendously and it was smooth and quality compounders that just sort of carried a day. And it felt like if you were latched onto that active management, didn't really have a place, but that was a really unusual part of the cycle.
00:08:41
Speaker
And I think what we've seen, at least since 2018, when we've launched is a more typical market where every three or four years you have some shifting dynamic. in type of style, whether it's large cap, small cap value growth.
00:08:56
Speaker
And as a result, active management, I think has a a bigger place to play in that type of environment. In terms of small caps themselves, it's interesting. So the narrative, one of the narratives today is that small caps have underperformed the last few years.
00:09:14
Speaker
and we're going to revert to to the me. And obviously for the month of January so far, that is play out small caps or hand lay out. But I think when you look beneath the surface, it's not that that simple.
00:09:27
Speaker
make the same argument for what was going on in value from say 2010 to 2020. You know, there's these, are the reversion to the mean is a a standard argument and that usually does work. And there was thought process in that sort of 10 year period that, you know, value traditionally outperforms growth and small caps traditionally outperform.
00:09:49
Speaker
large caps, that is all true. And so that's a strong mean reversion that people like to play. And year after year in that decade, value lagged and lagged and
Future Performance of Small Caps
00:09:59
Speaker
lagged. And question is, why is that? And if you look beneath the surface, there are other things that are going on that make a difference. So for example, in value, a large portion of value are financial stocks.
00:10:10
Speaker
Well, financial stocks making up a large portion of an overall value set went through a structural change in that timeframe coming out of the great financial crisis. We had a backlash of regulatory response that pretty much degraded quite meaningfully the return on equities that banks earn.
00:10:31
Speaker
And so that meant a big drag for value stocks writ broadly because financials underperforming. And then we got into later in that 10 year period where we started, global economy started moving variating to a zero balance rates, real rates that were basically normal, pushed down the yield curve, pushed down the steepness the yield curve, also bad for banks. And so while value typically reverts, you have something really structural going on underneath the surface. So let's fast forward to today and the concept of small gaps.
00:11:03
Speaker
Small caps generally do perform at large caps, but even after three years of underperforming, other than pockets here or there, are or small caps going to have their day over the next 12 months? I'm kind of suspect because it's the same dynamic. If you look underneath the surface, let's use the Russell 2000 as a broad garage. If you look beneath the surface of small caps, what you find is about 40% of those companies Do not earn a profit.
00:11:30
Speaker
Did not have cash. So they are effectively long duration assets. Even if they're an industrial company, they're long duration asset. They need access to capital markets. I'm hard-trish to argue that access to capital is going to get any better than it has been in the last three years. we've been Credit spreads are exceptionally tight.
00:11:51
Speaker
Private credit is readily available. Banks, while they were slow a few years ago coming out of COVID lending, lending growth year over year is about 5%, 6%. Now you can argue that banks should go through deregulatory deregulation process now, and that's true. And that will free up a lot of capital for them to tie it.
00:12:08
Speaker
That's also true. But at the same time, the appetite and needs of the larger players in the AI feed are basically gobbling up most of that capital available.
00:12:20
Speaker
So that part of small caps needing access to capital probably is not getting
Indexing in Small vs Large Caps
00:12:25
Speaker
better. And at the same time, when you have 40% of those indices,
00:12:30
Speaker
basically are long duration assets. You're really dependent on what's going on with real rates in the tenure rate. And given the deficit spending going forward as far as the eye can see, and the fact that we're close to the end of the rate cycle, there's a good chance we're going to upward threshold on the yield curve.
00:12:47
Speaker
And a large portion of those long duration small caps are going to really struggle. So I'm not so sure we're at the point where we're going to mean revert on small caps when you look beneath the surface. That doesn't mean there aren't specific opportunities.
00:13:00
Speaker
But broadly speaking, I'm not so sure small caps are ready to have their day in the sun again. Yeah, i covered small cap value when I was at Fidelity SAI.
00:13:13
Speaker
I also believe the IPO environment has some impact on this. You have the rising star falling knife scenario, but if you don't have IPOs coming out earlier in the maturity of companies, there's a lot less rising stars and a lot more falling knives. And the Russell 2000 is probably the worst of the small cap indices for this phenomenon.
00:13:36
Speaker
The S&P 600 is a real quality filtered index for small caps, whereas the Russell 2000 has all the junk in it, like all the junk, the penny stocks, everything.
00:13:48
Speaker
And so active management really matters there because you want to avoid as much of that as possible, as just evidenced by the fact that it's 2000 stocks versus 600 stocks. You're looking at really the universe of opportunity if you're an active manager that has any sort of quality screen and is looking for, as you said, cash flows and things of that nature.
00:14:09
Speaker
Your universe is really 600 names, not 2000 names. And so that I think matters a lot. And i again, I think the IPO market issue, things that come out in IPO now are so much more mature. They like skip the small cap market cap index altogether.
00:14:27
Speaker
All of those things, I think, influence, small caps. and So I think your points are good ones, but also brings to to bear the fact that active management in in that space is particularly important because it's way more important to avoid the disastrous falling knives than to own the winners, as which is almost certainly the opposite as you get into the mega caps.
00:14:54
Speaker
ah You got to own the winners. and It doesn't matter if you own some falling, some less successful companies. If you don't own the winners, you are dead in the water. And i don't think that phenomenon exists as much in small caps. I think it's entirely
Is AI in a Bubble?
00:15:09
Speaker
the opposite of that.
00:15:11
Speaker
And then that is true, but it goes harkens back to the first hour we started this conversation and what market structure, even amongst those, let's call them better quality, smaller caps.
00:15:22
Speaker
The fact remains that the amount of money chasing the smaller capitalizations through passive, through ETFs, through index funds. is not what it used to be. And a lot of the sell side coverage on those names is not what it used to be. Just from a business decision for the banks to cover it. And it as a result of that, even amongst that more quality, smaller cap, you do need to ferret out the ones that can stand out by creating their own, more of a self-help, creating their own catalyst.
00:15:56
Speaker
ah It's the only way to stand out because you don't get that discovery of these names like you used to. Yeah. I also think in ah in that vein, I'm going very quickly kind of inform our audience of something that maybe they never thought about, which is how indexing works and why this is important in the small cap space.
00:16:17
Speaker
So indexing, when you're indexing the S&P 500 is fairly easy. You just buy the 500 names in the S&P 500. They're fairly large in market cap. They're very liquid.
00:16:30
Speaker
And it's easy to buy all 500 names to replicate the index. When you get down into a smaller cap, that's not the case. So you're optimizing. and so It's an indexing, but it's not the same.
00:16:42
Speaker
So if you are investing in a Russell 2000 index ETF or a mutual fund, let's say a Vanguard or whatever, you're not getting all 2000 names in the Russell 2000. And that's because there's a whole bucket of names in the Russell 2000 that have zero liquidity.
00:17:00
Speaker
So it's somewhat optimized. And when I worked at Orion, we we managed direct indexing portfolios and we did all this optimization. And even we ah were owning all 500 names in the S&P 500 or the Russell, all 1,000 names in the Russell 1,000. We were absolutely optimizing. And that's particularly true in direct indexing because there's a tax system.
00:17:20
Speaker
management aspect to it. And you can't tax manage something if you don't have the ability to do tax-less harvesting. So you can't own you can't own everything. And you have the the wash sale problem. So you got to be as conscious of those things.
00:17:34
Speaker
But ultimately, indexing is not what a lot of people think. In fact, with the exception of, say, the S&P 500, Most indexes are an optimized version of the the stated index, which is really just a basket of non-traded stocks that some company decides should be an index. The investable aspect of it is almost always optimized. And the less liquid and the less traded the security, the more optimized the index. So...
00:18:03
Speaker
In bonds, it's even worse than in small caps and so on and so forth. So I just want our audience to be aware of that as we talk about these things, because it does matter. Now, to to segue into the second part of my initial question, as it pertains to the bubble, we talked about that.
00:18:20
Speaker
um There's a lot of talk about AI being a bubble. And when I think back what it felt like in that 99, 2000, 2001 time period, like I said, you had um all these analysts who were like literally household names. Like everybody knew Mary Meeker.
00:18:38
Speaker
Everybody knew the Janus crew that ran that Janus mutual fund. The portfolio managers were literal rock stars, like people. and It reminds kind of like Cathie Wood. Everybody who like five years ago, didn't matter. Your cab driver, your kid's teacher knew who Cathie Wood was because she just had that. It was like that with all of those managers.
00:19:01
Speaker
They were essentially massive household celebrities. And I think that that, along with the fact that most of the companies that were IPO-ing were IPO-ing because they could, not because they should.
00:19:13
Speaker
um And they they weren't making money. And I just feel like the discussion of a bubble today has more to do with expectations and not necessarily are these companies gonna go bust because most of them are actually generating revenue. Whether or not they're profitable is a different story. But back then,
00:19:32
Speaker
there were companies that weren't even generating revenue. It was just a wish and a dream and somebody would just throw money at you. and And so I'm curious, as you think about these discussions and you evaluate them, know you talked about how you feel like this passive indexing is kind of exacerbating the bubble phenomenon. Is it that you believe that it's a bubble or like a slow like leak?
00:19:59
Speaker
Sure. You know, you have a bubble and then there's like your tire has a bubble in it. And that's awful because when it bursts, your tire is just going or you have like a slow leak. And I feel like this is more slow leak.
00:20:10
Speaker
Yes. And to be clear, I think that that dynamic market structure will result in that what you're describing. I don't think we're there yet though. Like if you were to ask me, are we in an AI bubble? My answer is no, not
Historical Market Bubbles and Analyst Roles
00:20:25
Speaker
yet. Do I think we'll overspend on AI compute?
00:20:30
Speaker
Absolutely. But we're not there yet. And we're not close to there yet in my opinion. Look, there are certain things that look very similar to 99, 2000, right? Valuations on an absolute basis are high.
00:20:41
Speaker
There's no real equity risk premium in the market. There's concentration at the top of the indices. There are market darlings, maybe not the personalities, but the companies. And so that's all very similar. And there's a tremendous amount of capital expenditure going on with what's called some transformational technology. All that's the same.
00:21:01
Speaker
But you you pointed out some differences as well. Those differences are real. One, those companies that are crowded at the top of the indices are real companies. real balance sheets, real cash flow, real businesses, real quality businesses, by and large.
00:21:15
Speaker
So that's a vast difference to what we had back then. Secondly, valuations today, most that group and Rick Crowley are not what they were back then, not yet. um And as far as the the capital spending that's going on, back then, lot of capital spending was fiberized telecom to fire.
00:21:32
Speaker
And we were putting into the ground a lot of, quote, dark fiber, unlit fiber, which is a fancy way of saying overcapacity. No one is complaining yet today that we do not have, that we have over capacity compute.
00:21:44
Speaker
Now the returns on that capital might not look great. And that was a problem that Oracle had in the fourth quarter when it leaked out what they were making their, some of their cloud offerings. But that's different than saying that we're at a point now where we have over capacity compute. We don't. So it is different than the dark fiber phenomenon that was going in. We were literally putting capital in the ground.
00:22:06
Speaker
that was not being utilized. That's not what at the moment is going on. To your point, it's what's going in the line two, three years from now. Will we get overextended? Possibly.
00:22:16
Speaker
Is OpenAI i a potential problem? Absolutely, because they have wended their way into all sorts of facets of the market, and if they do not make it, they're going to pull everything down around with them because they are not quote too big to fail, but they're certainly big enough to cause a lot of problems for everyone else.
00:22:37
Speaker
But I don't think we're there yet. I don't think we're in a bubble. We have the potential to it because a lot of these large companies view that AI is an existential. threat if they're left behind.
00:22:49
Speaker
it's They will spend. They have access to capital. ah They have access to their own balance sheets and their own cash flow. And so they will spend it. And I have no doubt that we will overspend and maybe get subpar returns.
00:23:04
Speaker
But I just don't think we're there yet. You mentioned something about valuations being elevated. And i like to remind people there's actual valuations though.
00:23:15
Speaker
but When we look back at 99, here's the thing. We always look at comparing PEs. And one of the interesting thing about PEs is if you don't have one, you don't get in part of the calculation, right? right So the number of companies that are in the 500 that are actually...
00:23:33
Speaker
earning have earnings um as much higher than the ones back in the day. So it's hard to do a comparison evaluation of an index on a PE basis when more than half of the names back then didn't have earnings. So they weren't even in the calculation. If you don't have earnings, it says NA next to you. and yeah no You can't average not you can't average ah a nothing. bur It's not even zero. you can't even it's a no number.
00:24:02
Speaker
um You can't even default to price the sales for some of those companies. Right. the Exactly. So it's a different dynamic. Yeah. So when we talk about, oh, the valuation, yeah, yeah but the valuation is based on the average or the median of the peer group. And if there's literally no number, they just get left out. They're not even in the sample.
00:24:22
Speaker
And you're talking about 500 companies that actually have PEs versus maybe, and I'm just making this number up in case anybody wants to test me on it. Like, 100, right? So 100 companies that were making money and had earnings and revenue and sales versus all 500. And that I think is a different dynamic that I think is worth noting every time we have this conversation about valuation. That's a false equivalence. Yeah. I think the...
00:24:50
Speaker
i think the Building blocks are in place for overspending yeah and ultimately some level of excess capacity and maybe some optimal returns maybe excess capacity, but it's early days.
Globalization's Impact on Market Evaluation
00:25:05
Speaker
And so I don't see that derailing anytime soon. Certainly not like we saw in 2000.
00:25:12
Speaker
So Crescent Rock is a global manager. So your opportunity set goes beyond the borders of the United States of America. As you think about the global economy today, and I'm actually going to make some connections between 99 and 2000 because we're talking about it. And I think that this is relevant. 99, 2000 was a period of time where the economy was becoming more global, right? So we were shifting to a global economy, which had a different impact on the way you might view and evaluate
00:25:48
Speaker
named overseas than today where we have the deglobalization going on, like the exact opposite environment where countries are being more domestically focused.
00:25:58
Speaker
There's less global cooperation. We have Trump tariffs, threats of buying Greenland, like all kinds of weird stuff going on, which was couldn't be more diametrically opposed to what was going on in 99, 2000. So 26 years ago, 27, 28, 29, 30 years ago, there was a huge push to the globalization of the economy. Let's work together. Let's have this whole economy benefit from everybody's participation, whereas now exact opposite. So how does that impact the way you evaluate the global opportunity set?
00:26:35
Speaker
Yeah, well, one thing I would say is if you think globalization is good and de-globalization is, backtracking from that is bad, from an active manager's point of view, particularly one that does volks and shorts,
00:26:50
Speaker
A period of change and disruption is the best environment, no matter which, no matter what the absolute direction is in terms of good or bad. So when you have the ability to go long and short, um you have the ability to take advantage of change from either side of your portfolio. So that doesn't really make a big difference, but the opportunity they set is is different. And when you do go global, even within developed markets,
00:27:19
Speaker
There are other market structure issues you need to consider even more so than here. So from an opportunity set standpoint, you certainly have the economies that are you know fully synchronous, right? And so Europe, Europe is in a mess. Europe is in a very poor energy position and a very poor welfare state position.
00:27:39
Speaker
And you would say, boy, even from taking laws in Europe must be incredibly hard. Well, just to point out to our audience, the Euro didn't exist in 99 and 2000. Right. And I think there's a whole generation of people that don't understand that like the Euro happened during that time, like the whole move to Euros, that changes the dynamic in and of itself.
00:28:00
Speaker
Correct. But there there are still opportunities. So it's one, the market's priced for it. You have certainly different valuations you have to do. And Europe, despite going in one direction themselves, they have something that they're going back in another direction, which is when we'll see how this plays out. But Germany going off of pure fiscal austerity is something that looks like, at least for them, profligate in terms of fiscal spending. Now we'll have to see, does that make its way outside of the defense sector where valuations are very cheap?
00:28:27
Speaker
um Or den where does it just go into the welfare state? There never means to be seen, but there could be some there could be some opportunities there. Then you go to Japan. Japan, after a couple generations, multiple decades of being sort of a value trap, you just started getting sort of green sheets in the last few years of a move to encourage are getting rid of excess capital using the, you know the buildup of cash positions on those, those domestic companies, they're getting it back to shareholders and activism is finally getting a bit of a to hold Japan.
00:29:02
Speaker
So there are like different opportunity sets when you're in different asynchronous environments between the U S and let's say there's, there's two big developed economies. That being said we talked about small caps. Once you go ah a far from the U.S., it becomes even a little trickier to deal with small cap and the lower end of mid cap realm because everything's driven with macroeids phenomenon.
00:29:28
Speaker
But certainly in Japan and even Europe, not just macroeconomics, but money flows has has a big impact in more so than here in the U S. And so what goes on the macro economy can make it very hard for smaller cap companies to really break through in those geographies. And so I think it's more important when you're looking in those geographies amongst the smaller caps.
00:29:54
Speaker
and even the mid-caps, it is really important to be identifying catalysts to help drive value. the The chance of a value trap in those economies, i think, is higher than it's here in the US. s So not as only the opportunity set differing, you have to approach it and think about how you're going to make your returns a little differently than you do in the
Role of Short Selling in Market Stability
00:30:15
Speaker
US. It's even harder in small cap arena there than it is here.
00:30:19
Speaker
Yeah, I'm loving this conversation because as we're having it, I'm being brought back to what the world looked like back then and how incredibly different it was. You mentioned Japan. Remember when Japan was like the laughing stock because it like,
00:30:33
Speaker
it was like the 80s and then the entire 90s and most of the early 2000s, Japan was like one of the worst markets to be in because it had deflation for like decades and hasn't actually gotten back to where it was when it peaked in the 80s, right? But only recently. So it's been like 30, 40 years it took for it to regain from the peak ah in the 80s to today. So there was literally decades.
00:31:02
Speaker
of which that market did not revisit its highs from the 80s. And i I think that's really interesting because for most of my career, Japan has been like the place you don't go. And now it's it's different. um and and There's film at the Euro thing. It's amazing to me as we as we're talking, how much has changed and how different the dynamics of the market are. But I don't know that anybody really thinks about these things.
00:31:33
Speaker
You know, people go on TV and they get two or three minute sound bites and that yeah I'm one of those people and doesn't give you a chance to dive into some of these things and really have the thoughtful conversations by any stretch.
00:31:47
Speaker
So one of my favorite books is a book called Blaming Some of the People All of the Time. And I'm not sure if you're familiar, but um it's a a book, Joel Greenblatt, is that the right? Oh, shorting.
00:32:05
Speaker
And so hard it is to be a short. um There's another book. It's not quite as entertaining to read because it's super heavy and technicals, which is called Don't Blame the Shorts.
00:32:16
Speaker
But one of the things that always struck me throughout my career once I started working with managers that shorted in varying degrees, whether they be long short or short biased or whatever, um is how difficult shorting is. It is so much harder to get your shorts right and to stay short.
00:32:35
Speaker
I have a a really good friend back in the day who happened to marry. Her husband was the CEO and founder of a major technology company. And I i won't.
00:32:46
Speaker
I won't say what company it was, but I remember sitting at like their pool one summer and him just going off on all the all the guys that shorted his stock, how much he hated all of them. And and sitting in meetings with long-only managers when you would press them on a company they might own that had a heavy short interest, how they would literally just knock the shorts as being bottom feeders and evil or whatever. But they have a really important mechanism in the market. Shorts are incredibly important for creating bottoms, especially in times of stress.
00:33:22
Speaker
um So I'm curious, as you think about what it's like being a long short manager and the nature that you're a long short manager, which is different than, say, a ETF or mutual one that has complete transparency and limitations to the
Effective Short Ideas and Risk Control
00:33:37
Speaker
short. A lot of times the shorts are rules-based and they these managers aren't actually making fundamental bottoms-up selection of the shorts.
00:33:45
Speaker
Talk a little bit about what that is like and the difficulty of it and how you have um been able to kind of succeed in an area that is...
00:33:58
Speaker
fundamentally hard. The market goes up way more than it goes down. Yeah. Yeah. So you're absolutely right. I mean, everything is structurally working against you when you short.
00:34:10
Speaker
up Companies have every incentive to move in a different, they might get their stock moving in the opposite direction for compensation purposes, obviously, and job preservation purposes.
00:34:21
Speaker
The South side it is just chronically incented to be bullish, And you're right, the market clearly generally lifts with growing economies. And so you do have everything sort of stacked against you right out of the gate.
00:34:38
Speaker
um There's a lot of different ways to short. One thing I've learned that we're doing it over the last 25 plus years is is that you do have to adapt. um In terms of how you approach it. Now, we've been quite successful on the short side. We run actually consistently good outfit on the short side.
00:34:58
Speaker
ah Even more consistent than we do on the long side, which always surprises me. um But when people talk to us about our short ideas, they're often very surprised about how it gets done.
00:35:12
Speaker
There's this concept in this view of the short seller being some sort of swashbuckling approach to finding frauds and accounting irregularities and making 50, 70, 90% short.
00:35:28
Speaker
That does happen, that that is out there. That's the sort of the picture of um the shorts. That being said, um that's not how really most of it's done. It's certainly not how we do it.
00:35:41
Speaker
um Our shorting is very pedestrian. People, when we go through our short ideas with people, like, that's kind of a really boring idea. And actually boring ideas really work in shorts.
00:35:54
Speaker
But since everything is stacked against you in shorts, when you're looking for those quote, home run type shorts, those frauds, those accounting irregularities, that type of thing, what you find is one, they're very crowded names.
00:36:07
Speaker
um there's not a lot of great short ideas out there. There's a not a lot of companies that actually fit that parameter as our markets are. They should not let they flush a lot of that out over time. Now, there aren't a lot of those types of names, and they tend to be very crowded, and they tend to be very binary.
00:36:22
Speaker
And to be successful on the short side, even more so on the long side, it is important, it is more important to control your losers than making winners. um his importance As important is long side, it's more so on the short side since everything's stacked against you.
00:36:37
Speaker
And since you theoretically have that no cap laws being
Net Exposure Strategies in Long-Short Portfolios
00:36:40
Speaker
shown. um So as a result of that, those high quote profile leads They're crowded, they tend to be binary. When you get them wrong, you really get them wrong.
00:36:50
Speaker
They're prone to short squeezes. They're prone to the meme stock mania that started in sort of January of 21, which was a sea change in how do you had to approach a shorting. So we find that singles and doubles on the short side, quote, boring pedestrian ideas, is really the way to make sort of an all weather type short portfolio.
00:37:10
Speaker
And so the best shorts head for us, tend to be decent companies, even sometimes really good companies that at the margin for some competitive or secular reason are getting worse.
00:37:25
Speaker
And that usually is enough to to make you know a good short return on the stock while avoiding a lot of the pitfalls and risks You know, they're not highly short of names, so the management's not out there pushing against you. The sell side's not pushing against you.
00:37:41
Speaker
You're not, you know, with borrow rates not expensive. The borrowers are not getting tight. You're not risking getting called in on a borrow. If you're wrong, you're not getting squeezed. So it's much easier to control your losses.
00:37:53
Speaker
If you can control your losses on the short side, they'll generally do pretty well over time. So when you think about your portfolio, are you pretty consistent in your net exposures? And for the audience, what that means is your longs minus your shorts. You get like a net exposure, net long, net short.
00:38:12
Speaker
Are you pretty consistent? Or if somebody were to look at your portfolio, would they be able to tell your view on current market environments by your net exposure? um Yeah, it's interesting. So for the bulk of the seven years, I would say, or Um, does stay in a, in a band.
00:38:31
Speaker
Uh, ranges from say 20 net to sort of 35 net. It's sort of the band would typically it. But at, and why is that? Because a lot of time in the marketplace, there's not a real quote regime shift going on with monetary policy or fiscal policy. A lot of time is spent at the belly of the market cycle where there's not a lot necessarily going on except in noise from a macro perspective.
00:38:59
Speaker
Like I said, the last seven years has been a little bit more shifting than the prior 10, closer to normal. but But we do deviate outside those realms when there's a significant change. And so we will be higher or lower at what we view as real change points. Right after COVID, after monetary and fiscal response, you might get a more dramatic change.
00:39:20
Speaker
In this type of environment where you're in a rate easing cycle, most recently, you might get us more outsized net to the to the upside. In a tightening cycle, you might get us more compressed down to low side. We never go net short in our portfolio.
00:39:36
Speaker
I think the lowest net we've probably had has been about 10. The highest net we've had has been about 60. But 80% of the time you would find this in that we've averaged since inception 27%.
00:39:49
Speaker
in the seven years. And I would say the bulk of that time spent between 20 and 35 dollar and beta adjustment. And I want to point out to our audience because this is something um I sent over to you earlier and you're like, I don't know that I can speak to that, but I can. And I want our audience to kind of know this.
00:40:08
Speaker
Why you would work with a firm like Crescent Rock and not a long short ETF for mutual fund is exactly what we're talking about here. The limitations of the 40 Act really make it so that a long short ETF or mutual fund is always going to be net long way more than any hedge fund could be because hedge funds don't have the constraint of how much they can short in leverage, whereas 40 Act funds do. so And keeping that in mind, when you're looking to evaluate long short managers and whether you're comparing them hedge fund strategies that are private placements or not registered versus a registered product or um looking at things in kind of a vacuum or all in a combined universe,
00:40:58
Speaker
Unlike traditional um investment styles that are long only, like equity or fixed income, it it does matter in filtering system, um these net positions, because the nuance here comes from the actual underlying investment philosophy and how much a manager might be long or short. So a firm like Crescent Rock tends to be, as you said, in that 30, 35, 25% net long.
Evaluating Long-Short Managers
00:41:28
Speaker
Fuck But comparing 35% net long manager to one that is chronically 70% net long or 60% net long, is it's not ah it's not a fair comparison. It's apples to oranges.
00:41:42
Speaker
And so understanding and evaluating things based on apples apples becomes important. Maybe you can speak to why somebody should be considering an array of net exposures and considering why those net exposures matter and then how one might address like a performance evaluation of someone based on how they view net exposures.
00:42:11
Speaker
Because I think our audience would find that useful as this audience tends to be one that it starts with that registered product, liquid, and then moves into the hedge fund world and then It's so different.
00:42:25
Speaker
It's really difficult to wrap your head around and get comfortable with it if you don't fundamentally understand why being able to be net long 35% could have benefits if a registered fund could never get there.
00:42:41
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point. And it it really is sort of a spectrum, I guess, on the ultimate client's needs and desires. If you think about... just an individual stock in over a 12 month period.
00:42:55
Speaker
You know, where the returns from that stock come from. They mostly come from what's happening in the overall market. Secondarily, they come from style and sector. Is it a value stock? Is it a tech stock?
00:43:09
Speaker
And then lastly, it comes down to the individual stock itself. So those are sort of the three ways in any relatively short period of time that drives a stock.
00:43:20
Speaker
So when you're starting to short, now there's two ways to short. There's a very important dynamic going on here that you need to understand when you're evaluating short funds. Is that there's some level of acknowledgement when you're running a long book and a short book.
00:43:37
Speaker
There's some acknowledgement that you're naturally trying to take that quote, market driven return out of the equation to some or at least tamp it down. And why would you do that?
00:43:48
Speaker
Well, amongst the three vectors that you can to evaluate where stocks can perform from the market tends to be the most difficult to assess. And so running a long short strategy, almost by design is some acknowledgement that that being the hardest part to assess, you may want to tamp down the volatility around your returns that are driven by the market itself.
00:44:13
Speaker
And so that's sort of the starting point for, i would call a long short portfolio that is geared to be hedging. Now, that's not the same as a long short portfolio that is not necessarily trying to hedge.
00:44:28
Speaker
I could construct a long short portfolio where I'm not even necessarily hedging. I'm actually layering my bets. So for example, I can have a long position and a short position that in a market environment, they should kind of hedge each other.
00:44:45
Speaker
But I can also construct a portfolio where my long position works and in the same environment, my short position works. And in that environment, that means if you get something wrong, you're getting it wrong on both sides of your thought. And so even though you're carrying a relatively lower net, all you've actually done is created a leverage and you create it.
00:45:06
Speaker
four lot of volatility. So there's two very different ways to approach low short equity. We do the forework. We're often trying to dampen down that market related driven return and not layer leverage or leverage our bets per se.
Investment Philosophy and Risk Assessment
00:45:25
Speaker
So you it's not enough to just understand net exposure. You have to understand the investment philosophy approach. in terms of am I trying to magnify my returns or am I trying to hedge at some level?
00:45:43
Speaker
but you also have to understand your gross. You can run long-shore portfolio like our ourselves where we're on average 100 long and 70 shorts or 170 gross.
00:45:57
Speaker
That is a lot different than somebody running... 150 long and 140 short. Now they're 10% net, but they're almost 300% gross.
00:46:09
Speaker
They're going not necessarily have lower volatility around than than we do. So there's there's you have to look at the net leverage and the gross leverage to really get a sense of what sort of risk is being taken there, which gets to your second point, which is what part of the returns, what don't they tell you?
00:46:29
Speaker
Well, returns do not tell you the risk undertaken to generate that by any stretch. They don't tell you how we got to that level of return. Did you take a low level of risk or did you take a high level of risk to get there?
00:46:43
Speaker
um That's important to understand. Secondly, what the returns also don't tell you is Are they durable? So I'll go with this example I flagged a couple of times. Let's take that 2010 to 2020 period.
00:46:59
Speaker
You may have a very astute, excellent, growth-oriented manner. That's what they do. That's what they understand. That's what they excel in. And they found you you looked at their track record in a period in which the wind was always at their back.
00:47:13
Speaker
Well, is that is their approach and their philosophy durable when the market cycle changes and they go back to a more traditional value output before grow? So the returns don't tell you that unless you understand their philosophy and their approach to getting there.
00:47:29
Speaker
i So there's a lot more to understand than just the returns. And I think the amount, actually things that I think a lot of people find surprising, more so with hedge funds than say mutual fund.
00:47:43
Speaker
um is that when we peel back an annual return and look underneath the surface for most hedge funds, I think some bonds investors would be surprised to see that even if you have a relatively, quote, diversified hedge fund,
00:47:57
Speaker
They're generally not as diversified as a mutual fund. And as a result of that, their returns are a little more concentrated than just a handful of names. Yeah. So in any given year.
00:48:08
Speaker
And so that's what creates some of the lumpiness over short bursts of time in a hedge fund. which is maybe those returns congregate in the fourth quarter, maybe they slip to the next 12 months in the first quarter.
00:48:20
Speaker
um And so there's not necessarily smoothness because the inherent concentration of most hedge funds results in, I can match the market return, let's say.
00:48:32
Speaker
But if you look beneath the surface, I probably got there with a lot fewer k names. It's high, and that means's probably a lot more volatility around. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. As we come up on our time together, i and left wanting to ask you since the vast majority of our audience probably has never sat down and met with kind of a pure play hedge fund like you like you guys are, what questions do you think are really important for the and an advisor to ask in those meetings that you don't think even the institutions ask enough?
00:49:10
Speaker
What questions do you wish you got asked that you think would help better portray who is worth investing in and not worth investing in your viewpoint?
00:49:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, given inherent concentration and a little more the volatility around individual returns, like I was just describing for the vast majority, of let's say long, short, hedge managers and honestly, versus a lot of our peers out there, they run a lot more concentrated than we do. So this is important for them.
00:49:48
Speaker
You really do have to under, at some level, you need to make a commitment that I'm probably to really get the benefit of this manager. I'm probably going to be investing with them for a couple of years. It's it's not, i'm going to invest in six months or 12 months.
00:50:02
Speaker
And so when you, when you start moving into a wonderful capital with them to really, you know, get the return out of them that I can over a
Setting Realistic Return Expectations
00:50:11
Speaker
few years period, a minimum, a few years, you do have to understand, like I was saying, where are the returns coming from and how much of it is just related to a, a style bent that,
00:50:26
Speaker
They're kind of riding, no matter how talented they are, they're riding a wave. How are they going to handle a change? Can they really, do they have a philosophical a approach to investing that allows them to still be able to manage well if The market dynamic changes. And I'm not talking just about the market being up or down. I'm talking about as to what's working will work. Small accounts versus large, have value versus growth.
00:50:54
Speaker
There are these shifts. And as I talked about, they can last for years. You could have been a very talented value investor for 20 years and then had a 10 year wasteland. between 2010 and 2020, because just the wind wasn't at your back anymore and market structure changed a bit. So I think investors should do a better, you know should be focused on that aspect of sort of the durability of the strategy in different market environments and not necessarily about the market being up or down.
00:51:25
Speaker
The other thing that's changed dramatically from when I first started in this business Particularly, and this this applies maybe more to to long, short, fundamental investors than, say, other hedge fund strategies.
00:51:37
Speaker
But when we would have conversations with potential investors, there was a lot more emphasis and attention paid to what ideas you're invested in, what longs you're invested in, what short-term investors, a much more broad discussion and deep discussion about What actual is the opportunity set you're investing?
00:52:03
Speaker
Today, most of our conversations at our meetings, despite the fact that we're fundamental, despite the fact that we tend to be bottoms up, is around topics of interest rates macro geo-plasticity. I get why?
00:52:15
Speaker
But that's started and has persisted even before dramatic shifts in the market environment. And I think what gets lost in that is
00:52:28
Speaker
That's where I think there becomes a disconnect between sort of the intent and the expectation of the investor and what's being delivered to them. Because it's much easier to intuitively understand, okay, I've talked 10 or 15 stock ideas with this manager.
00:52:42
Speaker
I kind of know what they're invested in and how they think. So I could kind of have probably a sense if I'm an institutional investor looking at the market, probably how they did. It's much harder to, and there's much more surprises crop up when all you focused on was their big picture and you're not quite understanding what they're actually doing on a granular basis.
00:53:04
Speaker
There's much more room for surprise. and That's not beneficial for the investor or the manager. Surprise is usually a big, just a really not fun situation for anybody.
00:53:15
Speaker
I always say, and I reiterate this as much as possible, especially with our analysts here Bonnery and when we are doing our research reports and such. And this is something that was hammered home with me in a massive way when I was an institutional allocator.
00:53:32
Speaker
which is that our number one goal in every meeting and every manager assessment was to understand and set return expectations. Because our goal was that we did not necessarily want to or want to need to, every time something happened in the market, have to call the manager for an explanation on their performance.
00:53:54
Speaker
We should have done enough work in the beginning to intuitively understand what market environments a manager would succeed and fail. And therefore, if a manager's performance at any given time we were doing an evaluation, I should be able to be like, well, yeah, that makes sense because this is what they focus on. This is how they choose and select stocks.
00:54:14
Speaker
And i would expect that in this environment, that this strategy would perform in this manner. And It also ensures that when you hire a manager, you're going in eyes wide open and that you're not firing them for performance that is completely it anticipated. You should have anticipated that kind of performance when you evaluate a manager. I think it's a lot easier to do in the framework that a lot of institutions work in, which is when
00:54:49
Speaker
you're building a portfolio of a lot of managers in the same like grouping. So like, I'm hiring five value managers. I'm hiring five growth managers. Instead of just one off and just mish-mashing things together. Because when you do that, you have to understand how each value manager is different and what drives each manager's returns. And there's an expectation that they're not all going to work the same way at the same time. That's the whole point.
00:55:17
Speaker
So you have to understand that nuance. And that's why on the institutional side, i always say, in all the years I worked as an institutional allocator, I never fired someone because of performance, except for one time.
00:55:29
Speaker
And the one time we fired a manager because of performance was because of they actually outperformed. And the reason that was problematic is they were a value manager that had shifted in a way to get that outperformance that no longer aligned with the value manager attributes that we hired them for.
00:55:51
Speaker
And so because they changed in such a dramatic way that it was out of alignment with the predictability of the returns that we hired them for, we had to fire them.
00:56:04
Speaker
But I never, in all of my years, fired someone for underperformance. Because if I had to fire somebody for underperforming outside of my expectations, then I probably didn't do my job, which is to understand when somebody would underperform. So I hammered this home with my analysts, and i hope our audience walks away with this, because you basically said what I...
00:56:25
Speaker
what believe philosophically is the most important thing when evaluating managers is you should be able at the end of your evaluation period when you make that decision to know intuitively this is an environment a manager would do well in and this is a manager that the environment a manager should do poorly in and the only time a discussion should come up or a flag would come up because we would green, red, yellow flag every quarter is when that outcome does not match your expectations.
00:57:00
Speaker
Because that would either mean you did something wrong or they've done something different. And those two things both matter.
Evaluating Hedge Fund Managers and Avoiding Surprises
00:57:08
Speaker
And ultimately, i view our job at Bonnerian and our analysts. And I think exactly what you're saying is i view our job is to make sure that I properly understand performance expectations because then there are no surprises. And if it's hard to evaluate and understand performance ah expectations, then it becomes a Decision on conviction of the team talent, which you're kind of laying your neck out.
00:57:37
Speaker
And to your point, very few managers, even if they can't articulate or doesn't have something that they are locking into that is actually pretty repeatable and predictable.
00:57:55
Speaker
Whether or not they know that maybe their momentum at a reasonable price or that they, you know, They may not think of it that way. They might be like, well, I'm just a good stopper. But there's a factor that they tend to bias towards. And you can figure that out through regression analysis and all kinds of other stuff.
00:58:15
Speaker
But ultimately, it's your job before you make that decision, whether it be as an institution for your institutional portfolio or as an advisor for your clients, your job is to walk away before you make a decision with a really clear understanding of a manager's performance um expectations. And if you can't, then it's probably not the right manager. You probably still have more work to do. Because ultimately, you should never have to always call the manager for an explanation at the end of every quarter for their performance. You should intuitively understand, well, yeah, that makes sense. And the only times a conversation occurs is if, for whatever reason, it doesn't make sense. So to your point about positions, I like to go into meetings evaluating all the names in the portfolio with some idea or understanding of what the underlying philosophy is from a fundamental but standpoint and pick one or two names that just me, not knowing the names, like the manager would, don't seem to fit.
00:59:12
Speaker
and explain to me how they fit. And correct they either will or they won't, or they'll tell me, oh, I sold it or whatever. But ultimately that's how I would go into those meetings is like, I'd look at the portfolio of a hundred names and be like,
00:59:25
Speaker
Okay, so this manager focuses on intrinsic value, ah value, some of the parts analysis. And as I'm looking at this portfolio, there's like three names that don't fit that criteria. So I need to understand what I'm missing because I don't know these names like they do. And they'll either be able to explain it or they won't.
00:59:45
Speaker
And i think those are the that's kind of the point you're making. You wish you got more questions like that than like what's the macro environment doing? Because... I ultimately think a lot of people go into meetings asking those questions because they care and not necessarily because it has any impact on evaluation of the portfolio. They just want to get as many opinions as possible so that they can make personal decisions. And that can be useful, but it's, it becomes a point that a lot of fundamental managers are like, look, it matters, but it doesn't.
01:00:15
Speaker
Um, and I'm not trying to imply that it doesn't matter. the question is how does it get brought down to the positions you're investing in? Because it's in everyone's interest for, as you say, there not to be surprises. Right.
01:00:30
Speaker
And so you have to talk about all of it. Yeah. I really, truly appreciate your time today, Michael. it was a pleasure having this conversation because this is definitely different than some of the conversations we've had over the years with with folks that come on the show. And I think that is a result of the fact that we've never had someone in your space, which is exciting because for the last 10, 15 years, i think a lot of people have stayed away from what I like to call the diversifying alternatives, which are hedge fund strategies like your own.
01:01:03
Speaker
Because ultimately, Who wants to invest long short when the market's going up 30% every year, right? um But the market's more nuanced now. And I think it's time to revisit the conversation on why long short and what I like to call diversifying alternatives need to get a second look.
01:01:22
Speaker
And I think this is a good conversation that can help our audience understand how to start those conversations. So thank you again for your time. to our audience, if you have more questions or are more interest in learning about strategies like Crescent Rock and learning more and really diving into strategies that maybe you haven't evaluated before, please let us know.
01:01:44
Speaker
We'd love to hear from you. And I know Michael would be more than happy to have a conversation when that. This is What's the Alternative? i am Shana Orzek, Sissel, founder and CEO of Foundry and Capital Management.
01:01:56
Speaker
Remember to like this episode and subscribe. And please leave a comment and let us know your thoughts on this episode and other ideas of things that you'd like to hear about and learn more. Thanks for having me.
01:02:18
Speaker
The opinions expressed on the What's the Alternative podcast are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific specific advice or recommendations for any individual or in any specific security. This is only intended to provide education about the financial industry.
Investment Risks and Disclaimers
01:02:38
Speaker
To determine which investments may be appropriate for you, consult your financial advisor prior to investing.
01:02:45
Speaker
Any past performance discussed during this podcast is no guarantee of future results. The guests featured on this program are participants on Bonrien Capital Management's platform.
01:02:58
Speaker
As such, Bonrien may receive payment for their participation as a platform partner. Any indices referenced for comparison are unmanaged and cannot be invested into directly.
01:03:09
Speaker
As always, please remember investing involves risk and possible loss of principal capital. Please seek advice from in it licensed investment professional. Investments are not FDINC insured, nor are they deposits of or guarantees by a bank or any other entity, so they may lose value.
01:03:30
Speaker
Investors should carefully consider investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other important information is contained in the Fund Prospectus and Summary Prospectuses, which can be obtained from a financial professional and should be read carefully before investing.
01:03:48
Speaker
Statements attributed to an individual represent the opinions of that individual as of the date of the published podcast and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Bondrian Capital Management or its affiliates.
01:04:01
Speaker
This information is intended to provide educational value, highlight issues, and should not be considered advice, an endorsement, or a recommendation. All Bonnaroo and Capital Trademarks mentioned are owned by Bonnaroo and Capital Management Inc., an affiliated company, or its funds. All other company and product names mentioned are the property of their respective companies.