#13 – Jim Haskel: Bridgewater, Diversification, Outlook

26 Mar 2024 · 1 h 5 min

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Podcast Summary

Insightful Investor Episode 13 – Jim Haskel: Bridgewater, Diversification, Outlook

Podcast Overview Podcast Title: Insightful Investor Host: Alex Shahidi, Co-CIO of Evoke Advisors Episode Title: #13 – Jim Haskel: Bridgewater, Diversification, Outlook Guest: Jim Haskel, Senior Portfolio Strategist at Bridgewater Associates Description: The episode focuses on Jim Haskel's extensive experience at Bridgewater, insights into diversification, and outlook on current market dynamics.

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Key Themes and Discussions

  1. Introduction to Jim Haskel
  2. Jim Haskel has over 21 years of experience at Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund.
  3. He serves as Senior Portfolio Strategist and Head of Client Services.
  4. Haskel shares insights that stem from his early fascination with international affairs and economics, leading to his career in finance.
  1. Background and Journey
  2. Early Interests: Jim was initially focused on international affairs during his formative years in the late 1960s and 1970s, influenced by geopolitical tensions.
  3. Career Start: After college, he pursued a role in public policy at the American Enterprise Institute, which led him into economics and finance.
  4. Transition to Finance: Worked at Goldman Sachs before joining Bridgewater, where he gained extensive exposure to emerging markets and macroeconomic strategies.
  1. Unique Culture at Bridgewater
  2. Bridgewater fosters a culture of truth-seeking, emphasizing open dialogue and challenging ideas.
  3. Jim highlights the firm’s focus on absolute performance and systematic investment strategies.
  1. Bridgewater Daily Observations (BDO)
  2. Jim is the editor of the Bridgewater Daily Observations, a long-standing research publication offering market insights.
  3. The BDO started as a way to communicate market observations to clients and has evolved to include various multimedia formats, including podcasts.
  1. Insights on Financial Industry
  2. Jim expresses a keen interest in understanding the advisory space and the diverse approaches to capital management.
  3. He emphasizes the importance of humility and open-mindedness when engaging with clients and learning from their experiences.
  1. Current Market Outlook
  2. Inflation: Jim suggests that inflation may remain stickier than previously anticipated, with interest rates potentially not decreasing as much as the market expects.
  3. Geopolitical Risks: He identifies significant geopolitical tensions (e.g., in the Middle East and with Russia), which could influence market dynamics.
  4. Regional Differences: Observations on varying economic conditions across regions, including Japan and Europe, noting potential investment opportunities and risks.
  1. Investment Insights
  2. Separation of Beta and Alpha:
  3. Beta refers to market exposure (passive investing) and is cheap to access.
  4. Alpha refers to active management attempts to outperform the market (which is more expensive).
  5. Understanding the interplay between beta and alpha is crucial for portfolio construction.
  • Diversification:
  • Emphasizes the importance of diversifying between asset classes and return streams to mitigate risk.
  • Highlights the challenge of diversifying effectively in light of recent market trends that favor concentrated positions.
  1. Risks and Strategies
  2. Identifies the risks associated with high levels of debt and potential market corrections.
  3. Stresses the importance of maintaining a diversified portfolio, including cash and commodities like gold.
  1. Final Thoughts on Investing
  2. Jim concludes that successful investing requires discipline, understanding market cycles, and recognizing the risks of extrapolating past performance into future predictions.
  3. Encourages a focus on identifying return streams that provide stability and positive returns over time, especially during market downturns.

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Key Takeaways

  • Market Dynamics: Significant geopolitical risks and changing economic conditions warrant a careful approach to portfolio diversification.
  • Long-term Perspective: Investors should maintain a long-term view and avoid emotional reactions to market volatility.
  • Continuous Learning: Staying curious and humble in the face of evolving market conditions is crucial for long-term investing success.

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Resources

  • For more insights, visit [Insightful Investor](https://insightfulinvestor.org/) to access past episodes and resources.

Disclaimer: The podcast is for informational purposes and should not be seen as financial advice. Always consult with a financial advisor before making investment decisions. ```

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Transcript

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0:06Welcome to the Insightful Investor Podcast, a weekly series that seeks to share industry investment and market insights. We define insights as concepts that are counterintuitive, widely misunderstood, or underappreciated. In other words, unique ideas that you probably won't hear elsewhere. I'm Alex Shahidi, the host of the podcast and co-CIO of Evoke Advisors, one of the nation's leading investment advisory firms. Learn more about our show at insightfulinvestor.org.

0:43Today's guest is Jim Haskell. Jim is a 21-year veteran of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. Jim is a senior portfolio strategist, head of client service, and also the editor of the Bridgewater Daily Observations, which we'll talk about today, and most importantly, a longtime friend. Jim, welcome. Thank you, Alex. It's great to be here, and I'm so glad we could finally do this. I've been today's conversation will be really interesting. You and I have known each other for nearly two decades, and we've actually collaborated on a few podcasts, most notably the one we did about two years ago where you and I co-hosted an interview with Ray Dalio and Jeremy Grantham, which was a lot of fun.

1:31Sure was. Yeah, that was a classic for sure. You've also had me as a guest on the Bridgewater podcast a few times, interviewing one of your co-CIOs. And I'm excited to have you join me today as a guest on my podcast. Well, thank you. I'm excited to be here. And congratulations on launching this podcast. I think it's a great podcast. I think it's going to be really value added to get, you know, I think one of the things that is probably least understood is how to be a good investor. And I think you're doing a real service to the broader public. So congrats on that. I appreciate that. We're just getting started.

2:11We've got a long way to go, but it's nice to be off to a decent start. One thing that I think is important to mention up front is, as many of the listeners know, the main goal of this podcast is to share insights about three distinct areas. The first is insights about the financial industry. The second are insights about portfolio construction and investing in general. And finally, insights about the market and perspectives of potentially what the future holds. And what I think really great today is you have perspectives in all three areas that you can share based on your experience and your role at Bridgewater.

2:50So in some ways, you're the rare triple threat. So I'm looking forward to that conversation. Okay, so let's begin. And I just wanted to ask you a few questions about your background. You're fascinated by investing and the economy. What would you say sparked that interest originally? Well, it's such an interesting, I always think about this because, you know, you trace back your life. And I was one of those students growing up. I was born in the late 1960s, kind of formative years in the 70s and 80s. And always, you know, during that period, that was like the height of geopolitical tension. There was the the Cold War was raging.

3:30You had kind of I remember gas lines in the 70s during the Carter administration during, you know, this is the aftermath or actually there was the the first Middle East crisis. And then the second one, the second one, I really remember. And I specifically remember going to fill up gas, you know, where you had to have an even or odd number, depending on what your day was. And I sort of I remember how much that impacted, like just how interesting that was to me. So I was very interested in international affairs, how countries got along with each other, leadership and things like that. That was like my main area of focus.

4:11And in fact, I totally applied myself in school at that time to those subjects and really didn't care about anything else. Right. And that so so anyway, I had to learn how to be a holistic, great student. But that was always kind of where I really put my time in. And coming out of college, one thing I wanted to do, I didn't have any interest in going into Wall Street. You know, some of my friends were going to Wall Street, that kind of thing. I wanted to go and do public policy. And one of my heroes was Jean Kirkpatrick, who was the ambassador to the United Nations from the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the Reagan administration.

4:47and she wrote great books and I had studied her and so on. And she worked at the American Enterprise Institute at that time. So I'm not kidding when I say, Alex, that I basically went down there and knocked on the door and wanted to work because I had learned that you could get a research assistant position. And to make a long story short, there were no positions open on her team, but there was this guy named John Macon who was an economist who I had never heard of. and economics. I had taken economics courses in college, but I didn't really, you know, I didn't really apply myself, meaning I didn't, it wasn't a focus of mine, even though I thought it was interesting.

5:24And, but anyway, I took the job to get into AEI. It was the greatest decision I ever made for so many reasons. I mean, it's like being in a elite graduate school without any students, you know, and you could do great research. And I started to really get into economics and I had a great relationship with John. And then, you know, as, as careers, you know, present themselves opportunity, the chair of the board of, uh, of the American Enterprise Institute was the, was the, the, the, the head of Paxton and his name was Bruce Cobner. And he was one of the world's, you know, great macro traders. And at a time when, um, you know, you were just starting to see the George Soroses and the Bruce's and so on.

6:04And, um, and, and, And Bruce and John got along really, really well. And ultimately, Bruce hired John to become the chief economist at Caxton, which was a major hedge fund at that time. And John hired me. And I went back and forth with John to Washington, New York, working at AEI and Caxton for four years. And that's when I really started to love markets, economics, the intersection. And I was, you know, as a research assistant, I was getting involved with everything, right? Anything that Bruce wanted John to do, I was involved with. And so I was learning a ton during that time. And I really kind of grew to know that that's the kind of the direction I wanted to go.

6:44I didn't know quite how or where. And ultimately, I went back to graduate school at the Kennedy School because I wanted to do public policy. I wanted to go to graduate school for public policy, but really my focus was to take that understanding and then go into this burgeoning field called emerging markets. And that's how ultimately I got to Goldman Sachs. I almost went to your neighborhood in the country, out in California, because Capital Group, I learned about them late and I got an offer from them, but they wanted me to do the US economy and I wanted to do emerging markets because I thought there, I could mix the various things that I had really learned, right?

7:23I knew a lot about international affairs. I knew a lot about international economics at that point, or at least as a young person would. And so that was the thing I went to. And it's the first thing I did at Goldman Sachs. And the other thing that happened, Alex, was that I came in to Goldman in 1996, and it was the burgeoning asset management division. And we were in the emerging markets steam, right? Debt and currency. Now, if you remember back for your listeners and so on, that was the period right before, it was after the tequila crisis in Mexico. And then in 1997, in the subsequent years, we got the Asian crisis, you know, that really spread around Asia.

8:07And I was finding myself on the road, you know, learning again, like 20 years of experience in one year as I went from Korea to Indonesia. I had to be helicoptered off the hotel building in Indonesia because that's when the violence broke out, which was the road between downtown where my hotel was and the airport. And all around Asia, learning like debt dynamics and why spreads were widening and so on. And then after that, of course, we had in 1998, we had LTCM collapse. And part of the reason for that was Russia collapsed. And so you had the T-bill crisis in Russia imploding, and Russia ultimately, you know, nearing default.

8:50And then after that, in the next year, you had Brazil and Argentina. I think it was that year where they both devalued. So all this stuff, and then the tech bubble ultimately came down. So you have all this stuff, all the while while managing money on this team, this small team with great partners. And I just thought, wow, this is amazing, amazing stuff. So I won't go on for too long, but that's how I got interested in it. And that was like my first formative years in the business. And it's definitely one of those fields where you're not going to get bored because things are constantly evolving.

9:22You're never going to master the craft because it's constantly changing. And if you're intellectually curious, it seems like a great industry to spend your career. Exactly. I mean, I think we've talked about this in the past, like, and I, and I even in talking to my son now, who's kind of interested in finance, there's so many different parts of finance. But I think one of the great things about the buy side is that, you know, you, there are two, two things, right? One is you're taking risk and holding risk, right? But it's, it's more like you're learning how does the world work? How does the world work in so many different facets?

10:00It's should I be adjusting my risk where I'm taking that risk to get the highest return, but also controlling the downside. And I love that. I love carrying the risk and I love adjusting that. And I love the idea that, you know, you can have as much create as much value by taking a day where all you do is read as you do like with meetings or anything else, like meeting people, just read, read, read and learn, learn, learn. And through that, you're trying to gain wisdom and understanding and insight to be able to add value. I just love that part of the business. Well, you spent seven years at Goldman and then transitioned to Bridgewater, where you've been the last 21 years.

10:39Would you talk about the path that you traveled across those two organizations? You know, I mentioned the fact that I started at Goldman Sachs in the emerging markets. And actually, I think, like, obviously, we took some hits during that time because it was really hard to make money during that time. But when you actually look at the performance as we came out of that, it was pretty good. But there wasn't a lot of demand for emerging market assets, you know, at the end of that period. And so I then transferred over into a group called the Investment Strategy Group. It was actually a new group that still exists today at Goldman Sachs.

11:14And it was essentially a group that would create strategy for the private clients of the firm and also small institutional clients as well. And that was really a great experience for me because I broadened out beyond emerging markets and and, you know, thought about assets that I hadn't been thinking about in the more narrower slice of emerging markets. And I thought that was a great thing. I really I remember some great stories. I remember talking to Ted Turner as he was as he was sort of coming out of, you know, CNN and and and turn and all that that stock. I remember talking to Jeff Bezos in a in a room in Seattle at the old Amazon headquarters where there was like a game table we were meeting around and like he would be playing with the toys.

12:01So I had some incredible experiences and learned a lot. But I did think at that point that if I really wanted to be an investor, be part of an elite investment institution, that that probably wasn't where I wanted to be, even though I had great admiration for Goldman Sachs. So that's how I got to Bridgewater. Well, they're both obviously hugely successful, large organizations, highly respected. I'm curious how you think the two differ in terms of their areas where they're exceptional, maybe the areas they're not as good at. One of the things I really liked about Bridgewater is that I feel like in the money management business particularly, markets don't respect anything but truth basically.

12:48You know, there is no sort of you can't you can't fool them. Right. And and the culture at Bridgewater, which was really, you know, Ray's creation, Ray Dalio, is is very much oriented to absolute truth at all costs. And while our culture has evolved slightly that those basic tenets are definitely here today. So speaking up about what you're seeing is rewarded. and um i really like that it was a perfect dna fit for me and i think really really important and as far as the subject matter it's just like we are we are a you know the engine of of bridgewater um has always been pure alpha and um you know all weather's been a huge strategy of ours a balanced beta which you know well uh alex but pure alpha is our alpha engine and um and that's really a macro fund.

13:40It's everything I like. It's the emerging, it's the developed, it's across the asset classes. And I just find the content incredibly interesting. And so it is different than Goldman in that sense. The culture is very, very different, but it really worked for me. It really did. That's great. You're also the editor of the Bridgewater Daily Observations, BDO, as it goes by in short. For a lot of listeners that may not be familiar with it, would you describe the history and the goal of the BDO and how it's evolved over time? It's fascinating. I'm so proud to be the editor today. If you go back to the 1970s, Bridgewater started in 1975 and Ray started in a two-bedroom apartment.

14:30Bridgewater didn't manage any money for clients at that time. Ray was coming out of the commodities business, brokerage business. But he really had a good notion of thinking in a cyclical way. How do cycles work and how do you apply that? And he had a very loyal following. And one of the ways he wanted to connect with them every day is through the Bridgewater, what he created a product called the Bridgewater Daily Observations. And if you go back at that time, people would pay for the Bridgewater Daily Observations explicitly. They would pay, And that was one of the revenue streams for Bridgewater at that time.

15:09And it really goes to Bridgewater's sort of roots because we've always been basically an institutional money manager. And that's because a lot of hedge funds, for example, when they started, were not institutional money managers, mostly for high net worth. But we were always institutional. And I think it comes out of that research that we were doing even before we managed money. And so that's when the Bridgewater Daily Observations started. And the whole goal is to have, you know, one to three pages, maybe four and so on. If we're going beyond that, we're too long. And it's just on an observations on what's going on in the markets today, looking over the shoulder of a world-class investor.

15:49That's the goal. And doing it with an independent mindset, right? And so it's been very successful. And as we started to manage money first in the mid 1980s, but really starting in the early 1990s, that was one of the things that came along with being a client of Bridgewater, which is that every day you could, you know, we could communicate with our clients through this medium. And that was, you know, really successful. And it was sort of a lot of people said it was a go to read, you know, because it really was differentiating. If you fast forward to sort of the 2010s, I had been for most of my career here, I've been a portfolio strategist, as you talked about.

16:35And what a portfolio strategist does is because we have a systematic investment process. Basically, we're codifying our fundamental ideas and then we're creating algorithms around that because we find big advantages of doing that. We don't have to constantly reinvent the wheel and we can just work on getting our thinking to be better and therefore adjusting our systems. So strategists would straddle between research and our biggest clients and sort of explain what we're doing in the portfolio to them, but also hear what their issues are and their problems and bring that back. And that was a great two-way partnership that really helped us and strategists were in the center of that.

17:15So I would contribute to some Bridgewater Daily Observations, but I also was an avid consumer of them. And as I was moving along, remember, this was the age in which all of a sudden people were starting to change from PDFs that they were distributing, which is how we did the Bridgewater Daily Observations. We used to fax it way back, but then we would use PDFs and email it. And the reason, the advantage of doing HTML is that you could take them like you do if view, it's go to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. And now you're in your platform and you could click on other things as well.

17:49And from a organizational point of view, we could see what people were interested in. And that was helpful to know where their minds were and so on. So I started to get involved with talking about that. And then of course, the other big thing that was happening was podcasts were happening and that started to grow and we weren't doing any of that. So I kind of started to get involved with the daily observations by offering to beta test some of this, particularly the podcast. And it was a fits and starts at the beginning. But one of the things that was going on is one of the senior managers in our investment engine sort of noticed this and kind of wanted a stronger oversight and management of the Bridgewater Daily Observations, which would include the evolution of podcasts in it.

18:35And so at the end of 2020, I made the move to become the editor of the Bridgewater Daily Observations. And now today, I run client service, but I still retain that responsibility because I love it so much that I don't want to fully give it up. But I have a team that's great. Without them, we couldn't do anything with this. And when I first met Bridgewater almost 20 years ago, I learned of the BDOs. And I started reading it, and I thought, you know, this is, I called it research gold. I've read every single one over the last 20 years. Actually, originally, you used to archive all the old BDOs going back, I think it was maybe 10 or 15 years before.

19:19I went back, and I downloaded all of them. I printed them all, and I had a stack that was probably three or four inches thick. I said, you know, I want to read all these because I want to collect all the insight from the past. And what's interesting about doing that is you know what happened in the future, so you can go back and read what you said before it happened and see what the ability to predict was and your framework and the way you thought about things. So I've been a huge fan for a long time. Why don't we transition to the financial industry? One of the insights that I try to uncover is just our industry as a whole.

19:56A lot of people outside our industry may not be as familiar with it. And as long as I've known you, you've expressed interest on the advisory side. So I'll come in and I'll have an empty notebook and I'm looking to fill it up with great insights that I learned from Bridgewater. I come into your office and one of the first things you'd ask me is, tell me about your business. Tell me about how you work with clients. Tell me about how you construct portfolios. What gives you that interest? Because it is pretty rare. That doesn't happen very often. Well, first of all, I think it's important when you're establishing, you know, if you're going to give advice of any type, the first thing you need to do is understand where is the other person coming from, right?

20:40How are they thinking and not be arrogant to think that they may have an approach that's better than you. because money management and advising people on money management is about how you approach these capital markets. How do you think about the best way to save, to generate a return in excess of what you have today? And so it always helps me to understand across the table how someone's approaching that. It helps me on many levels. It helps me to understand, do they have really great ideas? Do they have ideas that are similar to mine or not similar to mind, are they accepting? Do they really want to learn?

21:18And in your case, by the way, Alex, you made it a mission to learn as much as you possibly can and to trade notes on that. I mean, you've written books on this. So that's like the ideal, in my view, investor, right? And so anyway, that's the reason for it. And that leads to great conversations. And I think once you do that, you really can have an impact on each other. And literally, that's why I do it. The only thing I would say is I do that across the board. And I think it's an important thing to do, a framework to basically carry forward in any sort of meeting you have with an investor. And I'm sure the conversations you and I have had, you've had with other consultants, other advisors.

22:02I'm curious what you think about the advisory business in general, The good, the bad, the ugly, and are there some gaps that you feel should be closed over time? The thing about the investment community is it's so broad and you don't know where you're going to find the bright light. I remember there, I don't want to name particular names, but we had a client who was, you know, let me put it this way. You could go to the fanciest offices in New York and be completely unimpressed, okay? And you can go out to the cornfields in Iowa or in South Dakota and be blown away. Because, again, you know, especially in this age, the ability to be a great investor is about will, intelligence, will, and then utilize and commitment.

22:54It doesn't matter where you are. You just have to read. You have to talk to people. You have to question your own thinking. And it really, often it's an advantage. Ray located Bridgewater in Connecticut ultimately for a lot of reasons. But one of the things he would say is that being in the woods, which is where we were before, we're a different part of Westport, Connecticut now than we were before. But we used to be in this nature preserve, and I know you remember it well. And you really couldn't help but think independently when you're there. It's not like you're going to meet somebody from another firm at lunch.

23:31No, lunch was always on campus and there's always conversations going on. And I really like that. And I think that can be true in a lot of different places. And I found that to be true in a lot of different places. So the the in my view, the quality of investment thinking was so different. The distribution was so wide in terms of that. And I don't I'm not sure if we'll ever close a gap. I think I think it's always going to be that way. In fact, even more with technology being what it is now and so on, you really can locate anywhere. I think it all comes down to thinking, commitment, humility, and open-mindedness.

24:11And who's to say where that comes? But I deeply admire those firms that are on the right side of that distribution. In my sense, and I don't know if you agree, is that the middle part of that distribution is very crowded and there's a lot of herd behavior and herd mentality. And I think somebody who comes in, looks at the way everybody else does things and automatically assumes that's the best way to do it without independently thinking about it, reexamining it, and maybe coming up with a different approach. Is that your experience? Yes, I think so. I mean, let's look at some of the big innovations.

24:49Like if you look at Vanguard, right, Vanguard, I mean, what a great innovation, like just the notion that for most investors who who don't have an edge on the markets, right, that the best way to approach the markets is putting together an asset allocation of very low cost, what we call beta, which is just index investing. Right. And you can construct the index like you guys do and in various different ways to make it the best index you can. But at the end of the day, you're just rebalancing to that and you're trying to minimize cost and you're not trying to beat the market because your ability to beat the market for most people is you got to have real skill to do that.

25:26So here you're trying to get the most of what the market can give you. Now, what's interesting is so many people then copied that right through indexes or, you know, just index investing or through ETFs or whatever. And that's good at some level, right? But today what's so interesting is so much of the world is beta today, right? What is the implication for the markets? Because if like you're not in a world in which the marginal dollar is necessarily after a connection to fundamentals, but just because it's the index, right? And if those indexes aren't changing, then, I mean, in terms of like proactively being changed, then that has real implications for the connection between fundamentals and between pricing.

26:19For example, I've noticed even just in the last few months, the correlation of global bond markets has skyrocketed higher, even though the conditions are starting to diverge, for example, between the U.S. and growth in the U.S. and let's say Europe, which is definitely much, much weaker. And yet the correlation of those bond markets has risen during that time. That's really interesting, you know. And ultimately, you've got to think about that. You got to think about through those implications in order to be prepared for what's next, in my view. That makes a lot of sense. If we transition to investing insights, you, in your tenure at Bridgewater, you've partnered, obviously, with Bridgewater's CIOs, senior researchers with all that great research and analysis.

27:10and you've communicated that to clients and investors, particularly on the portfolio construction side, which is the area that I like to focus on, which I think Bridgewater is best in class. You've also interviewed brilliant minds within Bridgewater and also you bring in external guests in your podcast. I think if you take all of that, all those learnings over the years, what would you say are some of the greatest investing insights that you've learned that you'd like to share? There's a couple I would note. One is when you're an investor, really thinking about the separation of two different types of fundamentally different return streams that are in portfolios.

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27:53One is, I mentioned before when I was talking about Vanguard, is the nature of beta. Beta is passive investing. It's asset class exposure. It's very cheap to access, but investors should understand that if people are going to depart from cash to take on risk, which is what happens when you take on asset classes, you should be paid a risk premium over time. Okay. Then it's a question of how you construct your different betas together to get the most return that you can for the risk you're taking. And then separating that and realizing that that's one type of risk in your portfolio. And then if you're actively managing something, like even if it comes in a packaged product, like let's say it's an equity product that charges a certain amount of fees or whatever, you're going to have the beta side.

28:41And then there's going to be a component of that risk that the manager is going to use to actively try and beat the market, whatever market you're trading against. And that's a totally different type of risk. It's almost 180 degrees opposite, it, where beta is cheap to access, alpha is expensive to access. And actually, that alpha most of the time won't be worth it, but it will be worth it. You will want to pay higher fees if the alpha is both good and uncorrelated to the underlying asset class, right? So you're just betting basically against that index, long or short or underweight or overweight if you're in a long-only space.

29:21And that's fundamentally different. There's no positive expected return in alpha. It's probably actually negative because there's fees and transaction costs. So you really have to believe in manager skill. And then that brings up the question of like, well, what goes into manager skill, right? And that's a whole thing that's an expert thing. I mean, you're involved with that in your business, right? Because if you're going to take on alpha, you want to do it. You want to do it, you know, really confident that that manager is going to beat the market most of the time. So the separation of beta and alpha and how to think about them and how to size each one, I mean, Ray, in my view, invented that and popularized it in the institutional investment landscape.

30:05To me, that's one of the greatest ways that investors can think. And a lot of great investors, by the way, Alex, will say, I don't think that way. I just think I love this investment or what have you. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that if you're thinking about structuring a portfolio into the future to try and get the most consistent returns as possible, consistent with the risk you want to take, to me, it's a very helpful framework to understand what kind of risk you're taking and then within those risks to try and get as much diversification as you can. So that's one big thing that influenced me.

30:44That was one of the big things that got me to Bridgewater. I thought it was an amazingly important and insightful construct. It's one that I wanted to employ myself. It's one that I wanted to talk about with investors. It's really ingrained in my DNA. Let me ask you a couple quick questions about that. So basically what you're saying is you have to go back to the source of the returns. Where do the returns come from to better understand how to construct a portfolio more efficiently and diversify well so that you're not overly allocating to any single return source, which you could get completely wrong.

31:21Exactly right. And if you don't disconnect the beta, just the market exposure, right, from the alpha, which is the manager's skill, you sort of, if you're munging the two, you're not understanding the source of your risk and return to the degree you have to, to construct a portfolio that's going to be resilient across environments, in my view. Now, what's interesting about this, Alex, is that even if you look, let's say, at the last decade or so, right, absent the COVID, you know, drawdown, you know, which is, I think, for obvious reasons, but then draw up was also for, you know, pretty look at that and say, really, like, is it really that important to understand, you know, why not just basically invest for the long run and so on?

32:11And I think what investors have to understand is that investing is about a long-term approach, right? And really like taking an approach and staying disciplined to that approach. Any single era, any single period of time has certain characteristics. And typically the worst mistake I make, if I'm not careful, and I know investment, investors make more broadly is they extrapolate the past into the future without truly understanding what has made the past and therefore whether those factors have changed and whether they should employ them going forward. And I think that's why so many people get stuck where, you know, they stick with an asset allocation too long.

32:55Today, for example, the U.S. stocks have outperformed tremendously. And the valuations are very different in the US than they are in other countries. So that's the market discounting a kind of a US exceptionalism forever. And as an investor, you should ask yourself, hmm, is that likely to happen? Those are the kinds of things that, and I will say one more thing is that because US equities have outperformed and the U.S. bond market's big, the concentration of U.S. dollar assets in institutional portfolios is so high right now that if anything tips the other way, a lot of investors are going to be caught.

33:38And also, a lot of those investors have illiquid concentrations, or if not concentrations, at least allocations. And it's going to be trouble if it goes the other way. And so it's important to think always independently in what could go wrong here and how do I diversify away from that. And I suppose a big part of that is having a zoomed out perspective, looking backwards and looking forwards, and being knowledgeable about market history, understanding these cycles through time. And as you mentioned, most people are extrapolating the recent past into the distant future. And as a result, tend to overweight things at the most expensive point and underweight them at the cheapest point and kind of repeat these mistakes over and over again.

34:24Exactly. And, you know, it goes back, you mentioned market history. Like I mentioned when I first started, like my initial interest had nothing to do with finance or markets. It was mostly around international affairs and history and so on. But once I got into it now, like incorporating market history, you start to see just how important markets are to history itself. Like, you know, if you go and you look, I mentioned that I was, was, had to be helicoptered off the roof of the Regency Hotel in Indonesia. And OK, so what was happening? Like the markets overwhelmed at that time a dictatorial regime, the Suharto regime in Indonesia.

35:07And I don't think that regime knew what hit it. Right. And all of a sudden people were sort of all their wealth was gone and or, you know, severely depleted. And in some cases there There was shortages and so on, and that led people to the streets, and that affected the stability of the regime, and ultimately the regime was overthrown. When you understand market history and the economics that make that market history, and you bring that together with geopolitics and politics in general, you start to see what the root causes of some of these things are. The other mistake that I've seen is, besides just the lack of understanding of long-term market history is even if you have all that history in your data set, it's not really enough data.

35:53There's just a limited amount of data to try to forecast what the future holds. How do you think about that? Well, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, you know, let me give you an example. When we looked at interest rate cycles, you know, usually we would, it was almost a point of strength. We would show charts that go back all the way, 100 years and so on, right? But for a long time, you know, cycles, economic cycles and interest rate cycles, it was the interest rate that rationed credit, which then drove the cycle, both upwards and lower. So when interest rates came lower, there was more easy to borrow and that got the economy going and people borrow and so on.

36:31And when there was too much borrowing, interest rates then went up because the economy got stretched and inflationary pressure started to show itself. Interest rates went up and that rationed the amount of credit and the economy would come down and you could really like play that over and over and over again. And you just had to know where you were in the cycle, how it intersected with certain asset classes. And you, you know, that's how you could be a successful investor. Now going back a hundred years though, is not enough because what happens when interest rates hit zero, which is exactly what happened in the global financial crisis, right?

37:03We almost, it almost happened when the tech bubble came down. Remember, we hit 1 % and then it was sort of pulling on a string. And that was more than 20 years ago. But when the global financial crisis happened, we went to zero and even negative interest rates. And so the interest rate didn't matter anymore. And that's when we went, you know, we sort of classified these things into different monetary policy types of regimes. You had to think through, well, if the central bank isn't going to do interest rate, they can't use interest rates, the next thing they could do is essentially print money.

37:37And MP2 was sort of the printing money to drive a wealth effect. And we saw elements of this back during the Great Depression, after the US came off the gold center and so on. But really, you had to go way back beyond that to really get sampled of what this was like. And so all investors, not just us, were working on less of a data set, less sample when they're looking at what are the effects of this. And so that was, you know, that's the importance of that. Of course, when we went to MP3, when that played itself out and COVID hit, this time, not only were they printing money, but they were putting it into the pockets of households, you know.

38:20And so there was this direct treasury, Fed and so on, cooperation that had an altogether different effect and still having an effect in terms of household balance sheets and so on. And really having to understand that, and it would be really helpful if you go back way more time across time and across countries to get samples of that. It's very difficult to do. And one of the great advantages that Bridgewater has is you've studied what you call the economic machine for decades and developed an expertise in understanding the cause-effect linkages. And so when things happen that you haven't seen for a long time or maybe aren't even in the historical data set, you have a pretty good advantage in terms of understanding what the potential impact is because you have a very deep understanding of how that machine generally works.

39:10Yes, I think that's true. It's also like it's a real advantage for us as a starting point. It can also be a disadvantage from us if we're too reliant on sort of conventional norm, especially in atypical periods like we've been in, right? And I would say one of the reasons why our performance has lagged relative to our own history recently is because, you know, we probably we are understanding was there, but not we weren't converting it quickly enough. Right. And doubting that maybe it would play out differently than we thought. So, for example, I'll give you an example, Alex. I mean, who would have thought that when you get central banks between 2021 and 2022, raising interest rates or even inflation adjusted interest rates or what we call real interest rates by over 500 basis points, that I think it would be natural to conclude that that rippling through the system would cause a recession, cause asset prices to fall and so on.

40:07And it didn't. It did not. And that was huge learnings for us. Yes, we understand those linkages. And yes, that was a drag. But there was other offsetting factors that were even bigger. Things like, for example, what it meant to household savings rates that were extrapolating of the future. They were flush. And, you know, they were dis-saving longer than we thought and for reasons that we could understand ultimately. So it is an advantage as a starting point, but you can never, ever get, you know, keep your hunger and lose your worry about what you're getting wrong. And that has been sort of relearned time and time again as an investor here at Bridgewater, but just in general.

40:52And that goes back to our earlier conversation about what keeps us in this industry for decades is this thirst for knowledge and trying to master your craft and recognizing you're never going to get there, but you can constantly improve. And the market has a remarkable way of humbling you. You know, when you just feel like you've got to figure it out, it slaps you across the face and teaches you another lesson. And that's what keeps us going. Absolutely right. Right. It's always a challenge. It's like you never you never you never master it totally because there's always something new coming. And I mean, today, you know, here we have extensive research in AIML like that could change the face of of how we invest.

41:33It could mean that some of the things that we use in our investment systems will change and we'll do it a different way. I mean, we have to be open to this. You cannot you can't get stuck in your in your ways. And so, yeah, I mean, we're seeing incredible, incredible change. And then, of course, you know, we've never seen an election like this in our lifetimes. And, you know, the geopolitical risk that we see across the world, I mean, the heart of geopolitical risk could be right here in the in the US. I mean, so there's so many different types of risks, so many different types of technologies.

42:08It's an incredibly interesting time to be an investor, for sure. That is for certain. Bridgewater is highly regarded for its market insights. And unfortunately for the vast majority of people, most of that is not publicly available. You try to keep it close to the vest and with your clients. But are you able to share some of Bridgewater's high level market outlook at this point? Yeah, I mean, you know, I mentioned that, you know, one of the mistakes we made was that we thought that that inflation that really broke out in 2021 and 22, something we nailed correctly, right, was going to be more persistent and that the interest rate rises to combat it would then create a recession.

42:54That did not happen. And so we sort of took our lumps along those lines. And where I see where we are today is I do think there's reason to believe that inflation is going to be stickier. And I think we're starting to see the evidence come out. And you've even started to see interest rates as we record this that have been backing up over the last number of days. And I think that that's one element, right? But I think the big thing is that the differentials between conditions in different regions of the world is really notable, okay? There are different valuations. There are different conditions.

43:29There's also reform efforts going on from a regulatory point of view. Like if I look at Japan and Korea, for example, Japan is already the equity market is starting to really get a lift. And I think that's in part because of their monetary policy shifts, but also in part because from the bottom up, they're starting to figure out that they need to really start to prioritize shareholder value. And so we're getting change in Japan, which is exciting to see. We're seeing that in Korea. I look at fundamental differentials between Europe and the U.S. and I see a much weaker economy. And I mentioned before that the asset prices would suggest, even though it's a weaker economy, we're likely to get weaker policy.

44:10When I say weaker, more accommodative policy in Europe, and that should lift assets. And in the US, we have a much richer valuation picture. The market is extrapolating exceptionalism. And by the way, there is good reason. We have incredible tech companies, but the markets are very concentrated that way. And so there comes a point, I think, where you really can have big differential views, and we're starting to have those. And so that is the way I see the markets right now. Inflation should be a little stickier. Growth seems stable. And the Fed not likely to be able to cut rates in the way the market is discounting.

44:53And if they don't cut rates the way the market's discounting, that's an effective tightening, and that has an impact on assets. And then we see these differential opportunities as well. And I think that's really where we are at the moment. You talked about inflation a few times. If we zoom out a little bit, inflation and interest rates have been falling for decades. Is your sense that we've actually hit an inflection point and the days of near zero or zero interest rates and low and stable inflation are behind us? I would have said so because many of the underpinnings, you know, even we see this in the U.S.

45:31labor force. There's just there's been more movement to raise wages. We've seen it more broadly than that. Union power has grown a little bit. I wouldn't call it strong, but it's grown stronger. trade is still pretty globalized, but you see the geopolitical tensions, certainly trade relationships changing among key economic centers, China, for example, the US. So I think those were some of the underpinnings of that very low inflation, because you could always source to the lowest common producer. You could do it with a sense of stability and safety, right? But I don't think that exists in the same way anymore.

46:11So that's one thing we're watching. But then I look across the world, I see China and China is the second largest economy in the world. And so it's a very, very important economy. It may not, its financial markets may not be as advanced as some of the other world's financial markets, but it's economic, it's trade relationships and so on certainly are. and you know they're having a very difficult time it's it's it's uh it's more of like a balance sheet type of recession that we saw in japan ultimately in the 1990s uh and and beyond that i think china's facing with the overinvestment that they had in the debt that they took on and we see that in the property sector most acutely and that is very deflationary and unless the chinese government is very aggressively fighting that um it's it's very deflationary and it can spread because of the size of the economy around the world as more of a disinflationary force.

47:06So I think it's going to be the netting out of those two things that's going to dictate where inflation goes from here. But if we had to guess right now, and I wouldn't hold this as a high conviction, but if we had to guess right now, we would say that the forces that are leading to stickier inflation, not exorbitant, but stickier inflation are probably winning at the moment. And what would you say are some of the major risks at play today, besides the ones you mentioned already? There's something that go through my mind. Of course, we talk about the geopolitical risk, and we see that playing out.

47:43We see it in Russia, Ukraine, we see it in the Middle East, the Middle East, you know, with this direct connection, if we saw the northern front in Lebanon really explode, and Iran get involved, and now we have a major Gulf situation, that that is very worrisome. beyond where it is even now. So that's one big thing. If Russia is not countered, that would also be another consideration where I think risk premiums could rise, especially in Europe. I think this notion of US exceptionalism is understandable. A glut of global savings has come into the US. It's been a highly productive economy, deep capital markets.

48:26I worry about the concentration. You know, we, the current account deficit in the United States, that we've now built with a strong dollar and sort of importing more than we've export is like 75 % of the global, roughly 75 % of the global current account deficits. All right. So we are huge. And the market concentration of U S assets and global portfolios is very, very big. And I worry about the destabilization. If something upsets that, and I look around and I say, well, you know, politically, we aren't doing great at the moment. Now, we are our economics, our capital markets have survived many different risks over times.

49:04And I'm hoping that will be the case here. But I think we have to also be very sober that our divide right now in the U.S. is as wide as I think I've ever seen it, certainly in my lifetime. And it's it's pretty acute, right? There's not a lot of room for compromise. And often people are voting in our institutions. now, they're voting in Congress and so on, not so much because they think something's good or bad public policy, but because the other side's in favor of it. That's pretty dangerous stuff. So I'm hoping that, you know, as a market, that the political market sort of equilibrates a bit because that would take down the risk that we're seeing.

49:41But I think when you put those things together, that is something to be watched for sure. And, you know, I think those are the ones I see that are most obvious at the moment. I said the only other thing that I would say, Alex, is that we've had this huge transfer of wealth or between the private sector to the public sector. I should say wealth. I should say the huge transfer of debt from the private sector to the public sector. So it's still there. Right. I think it's better from an economic point of view that it's being held in the public sector because the public sector can at least try and maneuver it away through some opportunistic printing and stuff.

50:20But we're getting to levels now that are really a concern. And, you know, people listen to me when I say this and they always say, yeah, you've been saying that for years. And I have been. So this is one of the frustrations of being an investor. I can't tell you the timing. I can just tell you that the underlying fundamentals of that are worrisome. And eventually all things come home to roost. And if your total indebtedness and your deficits are out of control, then ultimately that's got to be paid. And if it can't be paid, it's got to be defaulted on. And when you're holding it in the public sector, the way to default that is through your currency.

50:55And again, this goes back into the idea that the dollar has been quite strong and US dollar denominated assets are heavily held around the world. And if you get a reversal of this, it will hit everything. It'll hit the currency. It'll hit these assets and so on. So that's a worry of mine too. And when I think about all these risks, to me, in terms of what do you do about it as an investor, it seems like you want to be more diversified rather than less diversified. And one of the challenges of being more diversified today is you have to deal with geopolitical risks. You know, if you want to diversify by country, you have to think about geopolitical risks.

51:34You have to think about debt levels and potential default risk when you're trying to diversify on the fixed income side. How do you think about, you know, that tension between needing to diversify and challenges associated with doing so? Yes, it's very challenging. You know, I listened to one of your previous hosts who was one of my ex-colleagues, Paul Podolsky. And, you know, he would normally have said that emerging markets are a good place also to diversify, but he wouldn't say that today. I think it just calls for more diversification. I think there are certain things you can look to. You know, bond yields now are at normal levels, and that means bonds can be used as a diversification asset, if nothing else.

52:12And so they're useful, in my view, as are inflation-linked bonds as well. And while I won't go into the intricacies of them or the disappointments of them when we had inflation, especially long duration bonds, just trust me when I say that that asset needs to be looked at as a valuable piece of a portfolio because it has or can have inflation sensitivity. There's commodities and then there's equities. And even within the equity market, it's how you're buying your equities. If you're just trying to get diversification, it seems to me that one should diversify away from a market cap global index right now to have more countries represented and so on just because of the valuation differences.

52:54To me, that's appropriate diversification. So I think you have to look within asset classes. I think you have to look across asset classes. I think we're held by the fact that interest rates have normalized from where they were since the global financial crisis up until the inflation broke out in 2021, 22. I think that's been a help. And so you got to use that. And yes, I totally agree with you that, you know, diversification is really warranted right now. And as is sort of diversification between liquid and illiquid assets to, you know, you have to be careful about that because if you get a break, you can't just sell illiquid assets.

53:34And usually then if investors have to raise liquidity, it comes through the liquid assets. So you got to think through those risks and make sure you're diversifying between those two types of assets as well, I think. The other challenge with the whole notion of being more diversified is if you look backwards, I'd say diversification has been in a bear market, if there's such a thing. If you just look at the last few years, diversification didn't really do much because you've had the, you know, what is the Fed's going to do been driving markets. You had the tightening, everything fell. You had the easing, everything rallied.

54:09You have the potential Fed pivot, things rally, more tightening, they fall all in tandem. And so that's the last few years. And then even if you go back 10 years, you basically had US stocks have done really well, and most other asset classes have barely beat cash. So the less diversified you were, particularly in US stocks, the better you did. And so I'm like you, I preach diversification because I think it's really needed. But when you look backwards for a fairly long period of time, and the data doesn't support it. So how do you think about all that? I think that it is one of the big issues, right?

54:44Which is, again, I remember we were talking earlier about one of the great mistakes that investors can make is extrapolating the past into the future. And this is one of those, as my mentor Ray would say, right? And I think it's true, right? It hasn't worked, so therefore it won't work. That's not right. It's never been that way. Things don't always stay as they were. There are understandable reasons in retrospect as to why equity markets and particularly US equity markets have been dominant. But to extrapolate that into the future in perpetuity, I think it's going to be proven to be wrong. But then there's the question of the constraints about if you were just freely investing, trying to preserve wealth over time and grow it, your timeframe is long and you can afford to be patient.

55:28If you have constraints where you have to invest and win this year, this quarter, what have you, you don't have that luxury. And so you respond to the pressures and that's really a problem, right? So I think it's an issue. And the other thing I would say is that I find it hard to believe, like if you stage this out, I find it hard to believe that if US equities, for example, as the asset class, right, If US equities really go through a difficult time, and especially if that is a market dislocation, as opposed to like a grinding bear market over a number of years, I find it hard to believe that other markets are going to totally prosper.

56:11I think they might do better, but they also may suffer absolute losses. You have such a dominant market. There's so many different interlinkages. So my personal view on this is that, yes, you want to diversify, and you also want to diversify into cash when cash is is giving you uh five plus percent uh and you also probably want to diversify into gold and i while i don't know enough about crypto maybe even that too like you know uh with a piece of of risk right but when i say cash and gold the the cash would be because you're getting you're yielding you know five plus percent in t-bills today and if we're right about the fact that the Fed may not lower rates as much as market thinks it will, then you're still going to get paid something close to that for a while.

56:59And then the gold is if this debt problem I mentioned before becomes such a, or precious metals like it becomes such an issue, that's always been an alternative storehold of wealth that can't be printed by any government. So So I find that is a more robust portfolio. Having said that, I would say, and we've discussed this, and your partner, Damien, and I have discussed this as well, it's also a risk of being underinvested. It's a risk of not taking enough risk, right? And I would say, if anything, as an investor in my own personal investing, I'm a little bit guilty of that, that really, sometimes you have to take that depreciation, take it with a personal risk, and just see it through the long term, and count on the fact that you're going to get the risk premiums over time relative to cash and get your emotion out of it, get any other considerations.

57:49So it works both ways, but those are just thoughts I would have on the current environment and how to think about that question. And that's one of the great challenges of investing is you have emotions, you have fear of losing, you have the fear of missing out. And all of that has to be navigated on top of all the things that we described in terms of everything that's happening. It's pretty fascinating. Yeah. I mean, I would say that I've been so fortunate. I have been around in my career some of the most legendary investors in the world. I look back, starting with Bruce Kovner at Caxton, some of the traders I encountered that may not be household names who are really great traders at Goldman Sachs.

58:31Of course, there's Ray, but there's also Greg Jensen and Bob Prince and Karen Carnel Tambor and others here at Bridgewater and I love being around them and doing it. I think the reason that I could be a good thinker in the markets but not a great investor is that to be a great investor, you have to be completely dispassionate. And I've never been able to totally get over that. And the reason I say dispassionate is because it's very unusual that the world just is discounted one way and then it completely changes and stays that way or gets more. We've certainly seen it. We saw in the Great Depression and so on.

59:09We saw it a little bit in COVID when we got a bolt from the blue. I mean, these things can happen, right? But most of the time, the best way to manage money is take advantage of your opportunities in a gradual way and stay very, very disciplined. And I can see it, but I often can't do it myself. I think a lot of people are guilty of the same thing. So, Jim, why don't we close with one interesting investment insight, if you could narrow it down to one that you think you'd like to share with investors that they may not have thought of or heard of? I think that one of the most interesting things that investors don't, you know, we talk about diversification, right?

59:51But I think if you have a, I think what they, but I don't think it's appreciated enough, okay? I do not think it's appreciated enough. And I also think it can be hard to find. But let me go to an extreme on this. If you can find a return stream, and I think that's the way I think about structuring a portfolio is like return streams. It's just a set of return streams. If you can find a return stream that is positive over time and you have reason to believe it will continue to be positive over time and has a zero or even better yet, an inverse correlation, meaning it literally acts the opposite way to everything else in your portfolio, the value you should put on that is huge.

1:00:35It's huge, right? And it's just about thinking about when other things in the portfolio are going up, right? This can go a different direction, but if it's positive over time, when other things go down and this thing's going up, it is so valuable because the biggest problem in investing is when you lose a lot of money. when you lose it. Imagine you had a hundred dollars and you and you lose 50 of it. So you've lost 50 percent to get back to 100. You have to make 100 percent. OK, so it takes you a long time to get back to where you even just started. But if you you know, you're going to take losses in them as an investor.

1:01:12But if you can take less losses when you lose so that you can get back higher and you're when you're winning, that's the key to to to great investing. And that comes back to identifying zero correlated or very lowly correlated or even better yet inversely correlated return streams that are positive returning over time. That is so important. And I think one of the things I've really learned at Bridgewater that I'd never really realized before. The thing that I think very interesting about what you just said is there's also a difference between paper and practice. So on paper, the math works out brilliantly the way you described.

1:01:51In practice, the hard part about implementing that approach is investors, not only do they have to add to the things that are doing poorly, but they have to not sell. And the challenge as an investor is we are trained to look at all the line items in our portfolio and the things that are doing poorly, our eyes go to, and how do we fix this? And rather than having the inverse thinking of, I got to buy low and sell high. And that is just so hard because these cycles can last a long period of time. Absolutely. And I think it goes back to like having a plan and following your plan in a very disciplined way.

1:02:28It's very difficult to do. And it's, you know, even people that get it, they may not be able to continue to follow it if they're the ones that it's their portfolio, or they may not be able to convince others to do it if they're managing money for others. And it's just a constant challenge. It really is. But the best investors do that. That's for sure. Jim I appreciate you taking the time I always enjoy our conversations and I'm glad that we were able to have another one today Well Alex it was great being with you and you just had to promise me you're going to come on my podcast Do I get that promise?

1:03:02Yeah absolutely Thank you Jim Alright thank you so much Thanks for listening We hope you enjoyed this episode Please visit our website at insightfulinvestor.org to access past shows and learn more about our podcast If you have questions, feel free to email us at info at insightfulinvestor.org. And if you enjoyed the discussion, please subscribe to this podcast to ensure you don't miss future episodes. And don't forget to forward today's conversation to others you think would enjoy listening. This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice.

1:03:43All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Evoque Advisors, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations, nor reference past or potential profits. And listeners are reminded that securities trading, commodity trading, and alternative investments are complex and carry a risk of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors.

1:04:16Listeners should be aware that guests featured on The Insightful Investor may have current or past associations with Evoke advisors or the host, including as an investment manager of a private fund opportunity by Evoke, or access through an affiliated Evoke fund, or as a client. Participation as a guest on the podcast should not be perceived as an endorsement or testimonial with respect to Evoke Advisors, the podcast host, or their services. Similarly, the inclusion of a guest on the podcast does not imply that Evoke Advisors or the host endorses the guest or any company with which they may be affiliated or employed.

From the publisher

Jim is a Senior Portfolio Strategist and Head of Client Service at Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund. He is also Editor of the Bridgewater Daily Observations, which launched about 40 years ago. Jim discusses his experience at Bridgewater and shares insights about diversification and his market outlook.

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