Talk Your Book: A Better Money Market Fund

0:00Today's Animal Spirits Talk Your Book is brought to you by FM Investments. Go to USTreasuryETF.com to learn more about their whole suite of products. But today, we are talking about our bill, brand new ultra short U.S. tips fund. USTreasureETFs.com to learn more. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions.

0:38Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

0:46Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, we got a lot of angry-ish emails in 2022, 2023 from people who said, Hey, listen, I was worried about inflation. I put my money in tips. What happened? Explain it to me. because all they see is inflation-protected security. And that's all you need to hear because, so is it false advertising or what was it? Bad branding. A little bit. So what happened is a lot of people invested in longer duration tips because a lot of those ETFs are longer duration. And when rates go up, guess what happens? Those things act like bonds, not inflation protection.

1:22They didn't fall nearly as much as bonds, but they fell way more than people expected with the inflation environment that we lived in. Yeah. So today we talk about a product that gives you ability to really invest in CPI. It's ultra short treasuries, treasury inflation, geez, ultra short tips. Let's just, sorry about that. And this is a long line of themes that we've been discussing here, like things that investors can get access to that previously would have been impossible to access inside of an ETF wrapper. It really is the greatest unlock, the greatest innovation in, I don't know, financial history is a long time, but who said there's been two great inventions in financial markets over the last 50 years, the ATM machine and the ETF?

2:10Am I making that up? Somebody said that. It might have been Munger. Really? It's not about right. Yeah, something like that. Could have been sailing. Yeah, you're right. So now you have the ability to just strip away all the other bond stuff and kind of invest in CPI, which is if you want that TIPS inflation exposure hedge, this is it. Right? You're taking the bond piece away. Because if you're investing in T-bills or short-term treasuries, you're not getting – you don't have as much interest rate risk. And that's what this is. It's taking away the interest rate component. Very interesting. So we talked to Alex Morix, who's the CEO at FM Investments.

2:45We've talked to him a number of times about the bond market. Easily one of the most interesting people who talks about fixed income that we have. And then we talked to Mark Spindell, who is a senior advisor and an expert in the tip space. So here's our talk with Alex and Mark.

3:02Mark and Alex, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Great to be here. All right. So we're talking tips today. In 2022, a horrendous year for bonds, but a year when inflation skyrocketed and the thing that bond investors or some bond investors were counting on for protection, the inflation component got overwhelmed by the duration component. So before we get into where tips can fit into the portfolio and what you guys are doing, let's rewind the clock. Why didn't tips work in 2022? I think you nailed it, Michael, which people ignored the fact that real yields can go up too.

3:42And as they were investing, particularly in the retail space, in even modest duration funds, that yield rise cannibalized any uptick you had in your inflation accrual. Nothing more, nothing less. But I think when we thought about where tips failed, it was really just typical bond risk. And even two to three-year bonds, because real yields rose so much, the Fed tightening ultimately quite aggressively, just cannibalized everything. Right. So you had, TIPS acted like bonds, right? Yeah. They are bonds. Yes. That's a really good point. Most folks hear TIPS and they're like, oh, I know what those are.

4:20But I don't know that they really do. So it's probably worth just spending 15, 20 seconds on what is a TIPS issuance, right? So first of all, it's a treasury bond, full faith and credit of the United States government. It's issued, it's auctioned, usual process just like that. The difference is it has this superpower that every month, the government is going to increase the par value of the bond by what CPI is. And that's the important part. It's not that they're giving you more interest or anything else, actually increasing the value of the bond when it hits maturity. And that's something that bonds don't do.

4:56Not even on maturity. Your principle is just growing every month by the CPI. And so when you put a coupon on it, it's on a bigger principle. But again, back to Michael's point, when yields go up, we know the principle declines, the value of the bond declines. And even though your principle is growing, if yields go up enough, it doesn't make up for the principle growth. I wonder if this is like a branding problem where investors heard inflation protected securities and didn't hear like the bond component. You know, maybe I think, you know, there is a problem marking these things to market that, you know, the inflation that hit was once in a generational storm.

5:35But I think, you know, there is a way to get that inflation protection without taking the real rate risk. And this wasn't just a tips problem, right? People have thought of real estate as a typical inflation hedge. The value of the asset declined. Commodities typically do well in inflation environments. 2022 was a very bad year for commodity markets. So again, all sorts of inflation hedges have other factors in the TIPS case, to your point. The branding ignored the fact that these are bonds, Ben's question. And as we were thinking about the problems in 2022 of inflation hedges, we wanted to get the CPI part, the part that expands the principle, and strip out everything else.

6:17And you can only do that with a very short-duration TIPS fund. Institutions have been able to access that. They can buy the individual securities. We wanted to wrap something in an easy ETF that anyone could access. I think it's also important, before we get into your solution, to understand what the yield situation was like. Because I remember early on in my career, a fixed income person told me, listen, when real yields get to 2 % or 3%, then you want to really double down on tips. But coming out of the 2020 pandemic, real yields were very low. So weren't the yields part of the problem, too?

6:51The starting point? that people were investing in? Absolutely. And it wasn't just the pandemic. When you came out of the financial crisis and the Fed had pushed real rates below zero, that coupon was de minimis. We'll go back and look at how tips performed even with a low coupon. But in this case, you were not earning a lot on the interest part either. Again, in the factor weighting, that wasn't the big problem. It was that real yields went up so much when the Fed tightened. but first time, long time, you're actually earning some positive yield from the real coupon. So I think you sort of touch on an important point nowadays.

7:30Alex, when we were in Chicago, you teased the idea that this product was coming. I'm guessing this idea, as Mark just alluded to, was born in 2022. So fast forwarding to today, what is the product? What are we investing in? Yeah, so our bill, R-B-I-L, just like we've talked here a few times before about T-Bill, sits in that stablemate of how do you access these treasury products? We talked about it. We'd been thinking about inflation products for a long time, but it took us teaming up with Mark and team, super smart folks who really know how this works, to get to something that we think is simple enough to be well invested in.

8:09And it's pretty simple. As opposed to buying one bond, I get to tell you we're going to buy four bonds, sometimes five, maybe six once in a generation. But as opposed to doing what, Ben, you pointed out, that sort of longer duration risk, we buy only tips that are going to mature within a year. And that essentially strips out that interest rate duration risk that injured investors, even in the super short tips products that were on the market, they had a duration of two or three that didn't really matter until all of a sudden rates went up as dramatically and as quickly as they did, when all of a sudden it mattered a great deal.

8:42And so this does, as we're talking about here, how do you access the tips market without any of that interest rate or a much diminished impact of that interest rate component. So the hope is that all that's left is the inflation protection, right? Like you obviously get some sort of yield there, and the yield will be determined by the interest rate market and what the Fed sets, I guess, based on short-term rates. But you're hoping to just leave, this is the inflation hedge component. It's not even hope. I mean, the sort of baked into the contract with the US government is this principal appreciation.

9:13And I think, Ben, you said it well. It's just stripping everything else out. There is a modest coupon. This is the kind of product that one could reliably compare to T-bills. The problem with T-bills is if inflation goes up, the T-bill doesn't adjust very quickly. Maybe ultimately your coupon will go up when the Fed, excuse me, when the Treasury issues a sort of new weekly bill. But we found in the past they're very slow. By owning these very short-dated tips, none of which are newly issued. So we have to go out and find a four-year-old bond or a nine-year-old bond or even a 29-year-old bond that's got this very short duration, sort of loses that real rate risk, Michael, that we talked about.

9:54And all that's left is the principal appreciation as inflation goes up. And I think it was the sort of product of 2022, that first-time, long-time generational spike in inflation that has left investors even two and three years later, for all sorts of reasons, extremely anxious about inflation. Whether it's tariffs, whether it's debt, whether it's egg prices, whether it's just the lingering scar that they never had to worry about for 30, 40 years, inflation anxiety has really not been higher in any of our lifetimes. So for people that are investing in this, they're not just getting CPI because if that's the case, this would be a zero real return.

10:34What exactly are they getting and what determines the path of what they get? They're getting that modest coupon and they're getting CPI appreciation. And certainly over the last decade, as we've kind of gone back and kind of looked at the history of this kind of short duration tips product, they've actually outperformed T-bills. So they're getting everything that a nominal money market investment, T-bills, money market funds would give them with a little bit of coupon in a bond that actually trades a little cheap. So just because of the complications that people have had buying tips, sort of investing in these older securities, we're actually able to acquire the bonds a little bit more cheaply than one could buy a T-bill.

11:16All of which combines to a sort of high performing money market fund. And we've heard from people in the last couple of years who said, I'm done with this product as an asset class tips. Like, fool me once, shame on me. So this is the answer for those people, right? Like the people who invested in longer duration tips and got killed in 2022, this is what they're looking for. Exactly. To use your phrase, they have a sort of identity and branding crisis, and we're here to fix it. This is when people buy tips. Because in all fairness, in 2021, if you were prescient and you went out and you bought your major inflation hedges, gold collapsed on you.

11:52As Mark said, commodities didn't do very well. Equities had their own highly volatile path. And 22 wasn't a great year for them or commodities. Tips actually, short duration tips, ultra short tips like this, did very well, thank you. They were just that 45 degree angle up and to the right. When folks bought longer dated tips, even anything more than a year, they lost money. They lost real principle. You know, Ben, I think you said something that I might push back on a little bit, which is I think people do want to preserve purchasing power. You know, there's nothing exciting about this. It's sort of dull white paint.

12:24But it's the one investment portfolio that we could design that absolutely will preserve your purchasing power. And a lot of people own cash. You know, there's$7 to$8 trillion of money market funds. There's$18 trillion of bank deposits, all of which suffers if your purchasing power declines, if CPI rises. So do you view this as a better money market fund? Absolutely. Or is, yeah, okay. So if you think about a client, an advisor yourself, you want to do something in a year from now. And you want to hold on to that cash. Do you want to have the same amount of dollars? Or do you want to be able to buy the same amount of things in the future?

13:03And most folks, the answer they say is the first, but they really mean the second. They want to make sure they can buy a house, buy a car, pay for something that has inflation baked into it every day. Because the companies that sell those products are trying to pass on inflationary pressures all the time. Money sitting in a bank account not earning much or anything, certainly earning below inflation, pays that price. And we've done the math out that it shows a really interesting stat. When you look at the inflation surge from 21 onwards, it took about 20 months. So say just a little under two years for the nominal T-bill rates to start to come up and actually return to you what you'd expect in line with inflation or greater.

13:42The question, though, isn't how long did it take? That's a question of Fed slowness and policy and other things that happened here in Washington. It's how much purchasing power did I lose while I waited for them to come to the rescue by bringing up rates? And the answer is about 14%. It's 14 % of your money that, poof, lost the ability to buy things that you're never going to get back. There's no catch up. If there was an aha moment for us, it was that 14 percentage points of purchasing power. CPI rose 14 % before the coupon on your nominal T-bills began to rise. Tips never had that problem. When you put it that way.

14:19The tips keep up with that market. They don't always get you 100 % the first day, but they do have that catch-up feature because the CPI gets reset over time. So you're getting your money back. And that's sort of the powerful thing is if you bought a long-dated tip, if you just went out and bought a five-year or 10-year tip and you put it in your portfolio and you forgot about it, in five or 10 years, it'll do exactly what it says on the tin. The problem is you're going to have phantom income. They're complicated. As folks said, they're fed up with dealing with these things. You're going to have to pay tax on that phantom income.

14:49Could you explain that for people that might be unfamiliar with that phrase? The IRS treats this inflation accrual, this inflation appreciation, as ordinary income, even though you haven't actually received a coupon like you would in a nominal bond. So you owe tax at the end of the year on this inflation uptick. That's cumbersome for people. They might have to sell some bonds. If they're a retail sort of non-institutional investor, how do they go about selling those treasuries? Do they have a treasury direct account? I mean, all sorts of awkward aspects to realizing the cash they need to meet their obligation with the IRS.

15:30It's complicated. And I think wrapping this in an ETF-easy kind of way, which F &M have demonstrated through their benchmark series, just makes it a sort of easier way to enjoy that inflation appreciation. We're going to deliver that dividend every month to people. That phantom income, so if you have 100, your bond's trading at par at 100 and inflation is 5%, it goes from 100 to 105, that par value, but you're not actually receiving anything. Correct. Much better said. But you owe tax on that$5. So you mentioned that there is a minor, still a little bit of yield you're getting. Help explain to us how the interplay between nominal bonds and nominal T-bills, I guess, and how that impacts these shorter-term tips.

16:14What's the relationship between nominal bonds and treasury-protected security like this? It's roughly one's expectation for what inflation will be. So the difference between the yield on a nominal bond and the yield on a TIPS should be compensated for the inflation expectation. If inflation is higher than that, you would think that the TIPS would outperform because they're growing. If we enter a disinflation or an unexpected deflationary world, then the nominal bonds should do better. We said the pandemic was a period where obviously these kinds of very short duration tips outperformed. That nominal T-bill weighted 14 percentage points.

16:54We actually went back before the pandemic. And again, inflation was expected to be very low, but it came out a little bit higher than that. Not high, but just higher than people expected. You had that even with a very low real coupon. So the difference between nominal bonds and inflation indexed bonds is roughly one's expectation for inflation. And we track that very closely. So the bond market is not always right. Well said. Well, you said it. I don't know if I'm ready to go that far. But to your point, Ben, these are complicated. And this makes it easier. It's why ETFs were such a great invention for TIPS in general.

17:35It took this sort of complicated, hard-to-buy thing with bizarre tax treatments and made it simple. The problem was they gave you a lot of interest rate risk, which is duration, right, by another phrase, that folks didn't realize they were getting until it was too late when they'd already lost money. And that's what we wanted to fix in our bill, because we did want to give someone the simple what it says on the tin. I've got cash. I want to make sure that purchasing power is protected. Give me some nominal return plus inflation protection. And that's what we did. That's what our bill does. And it's weird that it took a long time of thinking about inflation to figure out something that is admittedly so simple and dull.

18:15But I think it's that point that inflation is a complicated topic. And most of the solutions for inflation are either buy equities and don't look, right? Buy gold and don't care. Or if you're a super sophisticated institution, they have swaptions and all of these other things. And a lot of other inflation products that folks have purchased have been disappointed because those more sophisticated elements tend to fail when you most need them. And a large institution has ways of hedging and dealing with other things. But individual investors, advisors don't have those capabilities or don't have time to manage to that.

18:50So we wanted something that you could buy and hold and not worry about. And prior to the experience of 2022, I just don't think inflation was on anyone's radar screen. If anything, we were worried about disinflation. The Fed had to put out a new framework, called into question some of their sort of political sort of independence. The debt issuance that we've talked about has been sky high. Now we're fighting tariffs, which are clearly going to put some upward pressure on food prices, on energy prices. So a perfect storm of actual inflation and all sorts of events. I think the product did quite well, as I said, prior to the pandemic.

19:27There was certainly a market, a couple$200,$250 billion of these very short-dated tips. But who was thinking they needed inflation protection? It was the opposite. You needed deflation protection. And you sort of hoped the Fed would be able to deliver on its congressional mandate of keeping the price level intact when they were fighting against a sort of disinflationary environment. Zooming out, just to take a think about what's going on in the bond market, it's funny how quickly the narrative changes. in the beginning of January, there was, uh-oh, the economy is reaccelerating. And now there is massive uncertainty over tariffs and their economic impact.

20:05And so there's like this push pull of tariffs are going to be inflationary versus, well, growth is slowing. And so right now it seems like growth is slowing as winning because bond interest rates are going lower. But it sounds like with our bill, you don't really need to concern yourself with the path of interest rates or inflation because you know what you're getting. You definitely know what you're getting. And it is, I would say, the least risky investment one could make because it's very short duration and it preserves your purchasing power. I think in terms, so there's a timelessness to it for sure.

20:34You know, I think the kind of safe harbor aspect of our bill is something we're sort of really focused on that people just haven't had access to. Are we expecting that people's entire portfolios are going to change? No, I think having some purchasing power that these very short dated tips can provide will allow people to continue to turn their attention to all sorts of other more interesting, ultimately high-performing sort of assets, equities, real estate, and so on. But I don't think we're divorced from the roller coaster in equity markets and interest rates. We're highly attuned to Ben's question about what inflation expectations are and how they're changing, why they're changing, what the course of the economy, the level of term, and kind of sort of other interest rates will be, mortgage rates, for example.

21:21And there's certainly when a risk-off environment such as we're in these days happens, we think it just sort of accents the need for some kind of safe harbor. We've all said that everyone said the T word, but me. So if it's all right to dive into tariffs for a second. I think there's been a lot of misconception and a lot of things floating around. But the sort of simpletons guide that I need to do this is, is when you hear tariff, you need to think inflation. When you hear tariffs are delayed or coming soon, you have to think more inflation. And when someone tells you, oh, tariffs won't cause inflation, you have to think Japan or deep recession.

21:56Because there is a way to reconcile all of those. And that last outcome is not an outcome we're really shooting for. But we know all of the action of tariffs in the short run are going to be inflationary, whether it's because the tariff happened or worse, as we're seeing now, the fear that a tariff may happen or there's no certainty that it's going to happen. So we're going to hoard goods and services today, causing their price short terms to go up, which makes this a self-fulfilling prophecy. All of it really comes back to the same concept. If you've heard this conversation and you've had one of those thoughts recently, our bill is the kind of solution that you were looking for that you didn't have until now.

22:33Because your other options had duration or had other risks to them that were difficult to understand, hedge, if not impossible, to eliminate. and our bill does that. And we were talking in Chicago and teasing the notion of this. What took us so long to get it to market was, how could we do it simply and repeatably so Mark and I can talk to you guys today and tell you it's actually going to do this thing without us having to say, oh, we've got to come back in three months and say, sorry, we were wrong. It's actually - What were some of the complexities? It sounds pretty straightforward, but obviously I'm oversimplifying it.

23:06What caused the, not delay, what took so long? Yeah, so on the one hand, And there are a lot of very interesting, it's sort of like when we talk about T-bill or U2 or U10. There's many more academically interesting ways that folks have tackled this problem. It's how can you achieve some of those outcomes in as simple a way as possible? And most of the folks who spent their time thinking about tips, dealing with inflation, just are trained and they're attuned by nature to go to those more complicated situations. So it's how do you actually get back to basics? and then ask, OK, well, getting back to basics, why has no one done this before?

23:41Like, has this just been so simple that it's going to fail? And the answer is, no, it's not. It's just been part of the market that's complicated and tracks folks who think about longer-term issues than short-term inflation protection. So we had to go through that process. We went looking for an index to ask the question, who's out there? There was only one, in fixed income, believe it or not, there was only one index that even tracked these bonds, and it didn't track them fully. So we had to work with Bloomberg to create a version that actually was investable and meaningful and repeatable for investors.