Bonus Interview: Robyn Grew, Man Group CEO

0:00Hey, Unhedged listeners. As you know, it's a real confusing time in financial markets right now. And, you know, we financial journalists rely on smart insights from the best people in the financial industry. And to that end, our own Katie Martin just had a discussion over at the London FT Weekend Festival with Robin Gru, chief executive of Man Group. We're dropping it in this feed for you to listen so you can hear from some of the best in finance. Enjoy. OK, someone has just given me a thumbs up, so I guess we are off. This is an extremely incongruous situation. I'm sitting in a kitchen. My name is Katie Martin.

0:38I'm the markets editor at the Financial Times. I write the Longview column at the weekends, and I also do the Unhedged podcast. I am very, very happy to be joined by Robin Grew, who is the chief executive of Man Group, which runs a whole bunch of hedge funds. And we're here to talk about where markets are going. Do you know the answer? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm very good at knowing where markets are going. I learned early on not to forecast these things. No, never ever make predictions. I've made this mistake myself. But what we're hoping to do is talk about why markets are so challenging to read at the moment and what portfolio managers might be able to do about it.

1:18So to kick off, Robin, you've had a very varied career, right? Markets are not your bread and butter as such. But nonetheless, anyone can tell you, market's been a nightmare for the past couple of years, right? They go up when everyone thinks they're going to go down. They go down when everyone thinks they're going to go up. Why have they been so challenging ever since COVID hit? I guess, listen, let's be clear. 2010s, the 14 years there or thereabouts, we were in this extraordinary position where if you were an asset owner, I mean, like an asset owner of pretty much any asset. Risk adjusted, if you wanted, you'd need to have slightly maybe less tech stocks than you might bonds.

2:00But if you were an asset owner, you held on to it, you made money. The markets went up. You had zero volatility, really. You had no dispersion, really. You had zero inflation. And I think everybody got... Everyone whinged at the time and said it was really difficult. But what you're saying is it was really easy. It was much easier if you were a beta player at that point. And I think that that's some of what happened. So when we had this inflationary piece, the thing that kind of got out of the bag, and the Fed went, uh-oh, we're going to do something about this. And they did something about it, and they did it aggressively and quickly.

2:34So inflation got above target, and then it got way above target. And the Fed kept saying, it's okay, don't panic, this is going to be fine. Until it wasn't. Until it wasn't. And then they hiked rates. And they hiked those rates in a way that was hard for markets to keep up. And what essentially happened was people went, there's something that's changed now. We're in this, oh, my goodness, we've got rates and inflation. We've got this shock of the rates inflation. What does that normally lead to? That normally ends up in a cash flow and earnings situation, right? So you go from this hurricane of rates into this top-down hurricane of rates and inflationary shock into a bottom-up sort of tornado of sort of earnings and cash flow, except that kind of didn't happen.

3:22And on top of that, if you then lay it on some of the geopolitical pieces, so you then have a war that's waging, which is terrible in and of itself, but affects energy pricing and affects supply chains. And then you look at what happened in China, and you look at the equity pricing, what happened with COVID controls that came out of China. and then you think about the fact that there may be people in this audience i'm not going to make assertions that that might remember days when interest rates were at 17 and you were paying your mortgage on a 17 basis but there are a lot of people in the workforce and a lot of people in this audience also who don't remember that time at all yeah and so on and so forth so you have all of these different pieces of the puzzle which meant that when this change happened it was really hard for people within the market and to read the market and then quite frankly even with reading the market with all of the data with all of the economic theory and technical theory that you and I have grown up with didn't kind of play out perhaps chuck it in the bin yeah basically chuck it in the bin a bit so um for my sins one of the things I do as a financial journalist as a markets journalist is I read a lot of research that comes from from banks and and from investment houses.

4:39And pretty much everybody said this year was going to be a train wreck in stock markets, just like last year was a train wreck in stock markets. Everything was going down. Everyone was negative on the US. Everyone was negative on Japan. Everyone was negative on everything. What's happened? You know, US has done great. Thanks very much. Global stocks have done great. So why is that? And how much of it is a kind of bit of a mirage? Listen, I think it would be wrong for me to sit here and say all of those great minds who are market specialists were just insane right they got it completely wrong i think they were very compelling and perhaps maybe still are some compelling reasons to be bearish in this market um tighter financial conditions generally abound right so it's harder to borrow it's harder to borrow lending's coming in you're seeing this the corporate real estate market figures a little bit frightening banks falling over in the states Those little banks in the region was falling over.

5:39China's recovery has underwhelmed. You would expect things to be a little techier than they are. And I think we have to remember that the seven super tech stocks that are basically propping up the S &P 500 at the moment are doing just that. If you peel them away, the remaining performance instead isn't feeling quite so good. So the Fed is sitting there looking like it's sort of navigated this into this rather extraordinary place of a soft landing, that thing where actually they've controlled inflation, right? But they haven't had to do it in such a devastating way that you're seeing labour markets really on their knees.

6:23We're starting to see the job numbers sounding about right, which means that are we at the last, have we got to the top of the rates hikes? I mean, that's a whole debate for another day. Isn't it? Yeah. And every time you think that, OK, that's the end now, that the Fed has stopped, even the Bank of England might stop soon, the European Central Bank has stopped or it's getting towards that point. Every time you think you're getting there, there's a speech from another senior central banker somewhere who says, oh, wait now, this thing is not back in its box. But I just want to come back to your point about those seven tech stocks that are powering global markets at the moment.

7:01You know, from the portfolio managers that you speak to, are they buying this or do they just think it's ridiculous or are they somewhere in between? I think there's a bit in between. I think they, like you and I and others, are feeling a bit bruised that all of the technical analysis that would indicate otherwise hasn't really come about. So I think there's a sense of we, and I'll happily say this, we also at Manth felt like this should be going in one direction. And it hasn't. And so the skill for an asset manager has to be at this point to adapt. I think if you are entrenched, that's where you're in trouble.

7:42There is no doubt that what is driving that tech piece is the fundamental belief that AI is the biggest thing, the biggest tech development that we have experienced potentially ever. And so how is that going to transform the way that we all do business? So those tech stocks have got something of a secret sauce. Now, you know, is it going to change everything? I think that's the interesting piece. As we talk about technology, and I sit here as a firm where a third of the people who work at Man Group are tech people, right? And then on top of that, I have quants. And on top of that, I have data scientists and the like.

8:21So we are heavily tech driven. Yeah. But there is something quite extraordinary about AI and chat GPT. And there's something that's quite interesting about how it's pervading every conversation. You'd be sitting at your hairdressers, as I was saying earlier, and my hairdresser is saying, well, how are you going to deal with it when you've got a robot cutting your hair? And I'm like, that isn't going to happen. But what is interesting is the transformation that this tool has in it to do stuff better, faster. So you talked about you reading all of that information that banks produce. So you're saying I could get a computer to read all of the sell-side research?

9:02I'm saying that it already can. I can already give you that computer. We already have that computer. The difficulty is making sure that what you're asking the computer to do, what you're asking the parameters of the search are, what you're asking the parameters of the data set are, you're interrogating, that's the skill. But if you look at US stocks, for example, they're up by sort of double digits comfortably so far this year. If you take those seven big tech stocks out of the equation, it's really not very exciting. There's just a part of you that says, I just don't feel comfortable with this.

9:38But, you know, do we have to just got to learn to live with it, right? I think that's right. And I think there's a point here about when you are trying to control, as our central banks are trying to control, this inflationary piece. And by the way, the UK and Europe is lagging a bit behind the US. We always talk about the Fed and we always talk about the US because it kind of leads everything. It's interesting because within our English accents, I'm talking about the Fed. But the truth is that Europe and the UK lags behind and perhaps has some more interesting entrenched inflationary issues that it's trying to navigate.

10:15So let's not think that if the Fed stops, Europe will or the UK will for a start. But when we think about having a soft landing, when we talk about this soft landing as opposed to the hard landing, a soft landing doesn't mean you have tons of growth still. It means you have muted growth. It means you have a muted jobs market, right? It's that sort of special moment, which if you can pull it off, politicians feel great about, central banks feel great about, people feel great about. The thing about inflation, historically at least, and I'm going to regret saying this, I'm sure, is that it's one of those things, unless you put it out like a fire, there are still some embers going.

11:03Right. It takes a bluster of wind and you're in the same place as you were. So stamping out inflation is hard and it normally is painful. And whether the central banks have the appetite for it and whether governments have the appetite for it, that's a harder one to guess. Let's be clear, in the next, what is it, 18 months or a year, half the world's population, am I saying this right, Half the world's population's countries are coming up for election, not least of which the UK and the US. I mean, we are looking at huge political change, and that drives behaviours with banks and with appetites and the emotional will to want to take very tough decisions.

11:47So if there is a soft landing, I think that muted growth is kind of OK. it would tend to mean you have better bond performance than you do equities. But remember, we also had that horrible shock. I mean, one of the shocks out of 2022 and in 2023 was the synchronicity or the synchronous behaviour of bonds. Yeah, bonds and stocks aren't supposed to go down together. They're not supposed to do that. Not like that. They're not supposed to go up together and not supposed to go down together. So we are going to see something in the dispersion, hopefully in the markets, that is something we can navigate and we should navigate.

12:23This is where active asset management should come to provide institutional investors and retail investors ultimately with solutions to tricky, disperse, volatile markets. Yeah. So what are you calling it now? You mentioned at the top of the conversation, there was this long period where bond yields were just kind of falling and falling and falling and equities were doing pretty well. So you're doing quite well out of your bond portfolio. You're doing pretty well out of your equities portfolio. Now everything's kind of gone through a tumble dryer. After that great moderation period, now that you've taken charge of mangroove, great timing.

13:03Tell me, how many is this? Yes, okay. Somebody add up the maths on how long I've been in charge. Okay, keep going. So are you, do you think we're just looking at a really long period now where inflation is a kind of ember that's not going to be easy to put out for a really long time and the growth is going to be a bit soggy and how would you expect your portfolio managers to navigate around that? I think it's a good question and a complex answer, perhaps. And as I said, it's sometimes better to observe than it is to forecast. So I say that at the top of what I'm just about to say. I think that there seems to me to be a point where we are going to be living with some inflation and we are going to be living with some interest rates.

13:46And I think that what you would expect in that environment is to see some volatility. And so what I think we should be doing is looking at diversified strategies and portfolios. Mangret doesn't sit on one strategy. We have multiple business engines. We have macro-con. We have equity-con. We have CTAs. We have discretionary business. We have a private markets business. So I'm expecting each of those engines to be, one, doing what it does on the tin a little bit, right? So we offer different strategies. I think the thing that we can do is we can sit down with institutional clients and with sovereign wealth and with pension funds and annuities.

14:32And this is a time when you look at portfolios and you look at portfolio construction and you say what's needed. Yeah. One of the things that we've talked about as well is the denomination effect that's happened in the market. Yeah, let's unpack that a little bit. Okay, here we go. Two, three, four. So when we had LDI and when we've seen a bill of liquidity being stretched in the markets. There was that happy moment in UK markets, wasn't there? Almost a year ago. Almost a year ago. That was fun. That was fun. And so all of a sudden, what you found was people who had an allocation or institutions that had allocations into private equity and relatively passive behaviours suddenly had to liquidate.

15:17Yeah, they needed money fast. They needed money fast or fast. And ultimately what that meant was they sold, right? They had to. Asset manager, I'm here to provide liquidity. That's a good thing. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. It's what we're here to do. But what it meant was as the value of those positions went down, the denomination effect is by nature, the exposure and the allocation to their private's portfolio became larger. Yeah, yeah. And as we all know, what you don't want to be is in a position where you start to sell things you don't want to sell. Which is in real life how it works.

15:55Which is in real life how it works unless you start to really actively manage your portfolio. So we talked about the fact that we had this extraordinary period, 10 years, 14 years, so of you're an asset holder, any asset holder, you're doing fine. Not so much anymore. With dispersion, with volatility, you've actually got to think about this. this is where beta isn't necessarily going to be your friend we're just just tracking benchmarks doesn't work and we actively have to manage your exposure and your the risk you have across your portfolio there's been a lot of doom and gloom about private equity right there's there's certainly is it finished is it all over for private equity i don't think so i think there is a place for private equity i think there's certainly a place for certain parts of private equity do i think that it's harder to raise funds at the moment.

16:44Certainly some of the houses seem to be finding it tougher and harder to get that business in, partly because there's a lot of leverage involved in private equity. And that means it comes with costs because back to interest rates, right? But there are certainly opportunities with private equity that I think are quite interesting and exciting. Let's go to that corporate real estate piece, right? If middle market lending is in a place where all of a sudden, what we're talking about, we're talking trillions, right? of which I think it's 1.4 trillion by 2027 are coming up for refinancing the corporate real estate market.

17:18Something around 270 billion by the end of this year. A chunk of that potentially sits on those regional banks we were talking about, balance sheets. How is that going to work? This isn't bad stuff. It's just stuff that requires the financial markets and asset managers and other financial service providers to get involved and find that value. That's something that we're good at. Skilled asset managers are good at being able to be flexible and dynamic, see those opportunities in traditional assets, but also in private assets. What knits that together, the corporate real estate issues, let's call them?

18:01Challenges, stemming from the fact that a lot of them are linked to regional banks in the US that are having some difficulties. and the episode in UK markets about a year ago where everything went wrong all at once because government bonds tanked in price. This new environment that we have, where we have inflation and where we have really high interest rates, just leaves you a lot less room for error and a lot less room for manoeuvre. And that means that shocks happen, right? So you've spoken about this kind of liquidity management bit where it's important or whether you are a kind of day-to-day investor to have just cash on hand to pay the bill when your roof caves in.

18:43Exactly. But is there any way of figuring out where the next blow-up is coming from? I think it's tough. I mean, maybe I'll look into a crystal ball and be able to challenge it. What I do think you can start to do is think about concepts that are important. Yeah. So rather than... As we're doing right now, when you think about managing your own personal finances, Most of us have some version of the boiler just died. Yeah. Or the car just broke or, you know, I need to do X, Y and Z. That contingency piece is in there. You can't necessarily predict it. But what we all know is that it's really handy to have that flexibility.

19:23So if liquidity isn't built into your portfolio, you are going to restrict your ability to solve an issue or even to take advantage of an opportunity to switch out and be more dynamic. That's where having a diversified portfolio, we're having a mixture of asset classes by having different strategies. We're understanding your risk profile with looking across different regions, with knowing whether you're into emerging markets or whether you think actually China's, with Bloomberg today, is China peaked. These are the things that are about being flexible and dynamic. And in some ways, people have forgotten that that's the world we were in 10 to 15 years ago.

20:03yeah it's just now we have some different global pieces of the puzzle that are playing out so do we think ai and chat gpt is going to be transformative probably and to what do we think that climate matters i'll tell you it matters to it certainly matters to next gen it matters to my well it would matter to my if he were sensible son uh you know but you know my the 20 year olds and under and perhaps the 30 year olds and under they care enormously about where their money's being put to work yeah potentially less so potentially i'm not saying absolutely than the person who's trying to draw their pension today or in five years time yeah and is is climate change mitigation necessarily inflationary as well depends i mean look at what's happening with manufacturing so you'd expect this is another one of those drivers where you would expect manufacturing to be off right you'd expect it to be in recession in some format given what's going on and yet there are whole parts of the manufacturing world at the moment driven by legislative I'm glad I said that legislative changes not least of which think think America think Biden think the IRA think think environmental and semiconductor let's do it that way throwing what was it 370 billion taxpayer dollars at climate change and semiconductors and the production of these things all of a sudden those parts of manufacturing there are 80 percent year on year that's extraordinary right so is it inflationary or is it opportunity is transition part of this if you are seeing companies that are actively involved in transition is that a good thing do we think the governments are going to pull back from climate change i don't know but i can tell you that being prepared for that and having content and having discussions around it are really really important yeah because as much as i as a product provider i'm here working with our client base our clients are working with their ultimately their pensioners and savers on what they want.

22:11And by the way, sometimes their states and their sovereign wealth and their governments. And so I didn't answer that question in the sense of, do I know where it's going to blow up? I don't. But what I can tell you is, you need to be more nimble and dynamic and you need to be operating in diversified portfolios and with asset managers who are going to be working alongside you to understand your risk profile and then find solutions that fit you rather than just saying, and here is a product, buy that. Yes, that is a different process. And I was wondering, we've spoken about this new environment, this new way of thinking about what economies are doing and why markets are going one way where you think you're going to go the other way.

22:52In your new position as CEO, how do you provide some leadership through that? Is it a case of giving people the space to be wrong about stuff? yeah absolutely um you know that success and failure it the fail fast whatever those words are that are out in in the world i think it's absolutely that and by the way that's harder than it sounds because when we all work in an environment where um we have a lot of alpha people and they like being right a lot yes and they find it hard being wrong um and and so actually creating cultural environments where failure is part of the success is incredibly important.

23:37And it's quite brave. I think to fail you have to be courageous. And you have to be able to be self-reflective. And you have to know that there is a safety net in which you can fail. But you cannot be innovative if you can't let people fail. yeah and so absolutely it's one of my key tenants in there cultures that are collaborative cultures that allow people to fail cultures that are innovative i i sit around and i i hope my executive team isn't going to get across with me by saying this but i don't think they will the the next best idea that man group is unlikely to come from me she said it's unlikely to come potentially from my executive committee it is going to come from somebody within the organization making sure I hear them and it gets to us so that we can action it that's critical and is there a sort of sense of almost like forcing people to listen to the other side of the argument because you know there's this thing in markets where it's kind of cool to be bearish and it's kind of cool to say you know it's really uncool to say yeah I think markets just kind of going to float higher for the next couple of years it's going to be fine it's much cooler to be able to say, you know, I think there's a big disaster coming of some description or other.

25:00How do you make sure that conversation actually happens and that the bulls are forced to listen to the bears and vice versa? I cheat a little bit because I have mangrove. And as I say, we don't have one fund. So I have a group of people across two quant engines, a special private markets engine, a solutions engine, a fund of funds engine. The debate is rich. How about I put it that way? There's an intellectual debate and rigour and fun in that. That's where there's a point where you talk about, I can talk about the cultures of different parts of my business. We have an overarching culture, that collaboration, that collegiality, that fail piece, that investment in technology, dynamic clients are the centre of what we have to do.

25:40But when I think about my quant teams and I think about my discretionary teams, a very good colleague of mine once said, you see, the thing is, Robin, that discretionary lot, they were the lot at the back of the bus. and the quant lot, they were the ones in the front of the bus. Yeah. So they're both sort of, I say this affectionately. I know you do. Nerds. But they're different types of nerds. Different types of nerds, though. Yeah, yeah. And then you have people like me, and I'm a completely different type of nerd again. So the strength of difference, the strength of coming from different perspectives, incredibly important.

26:17The discretionary teams, they don't say, I don't want anything to do with technology. they love us giving them the technology that makes them smarter and better. Those banking reports. That ability to say, hang on a second, don't treat a bank stock the same as an insurance stock. You're holding on for too long. Let us show you how you can improve performance. Every day of the week, they grab a hold of that stuff. But fundamentally, they're doing something that is different from quant. There are quant models that we use where we're asset agnostic. It doesn't matter which particular bond or which particular equity you might have.

26:53It's within a sector. You're not going to get that within a fundamental equity investor sitting in a discretionary team. No, a stock picker somewhere doesn't speak that language. Stock picker doesn't do that. So put them in a room together, that's more fun. Yeah, yeah. Because it just is incredibly challenging when the economy sort of refuses to do what you think it should be doing. Yeah, so when governments put way more stimulus in than they say they're going to. Or where you see that there is a political issue in the way, or a geopolitical issue, that's driving the behaviours in some formats.

27:29Which means it doesn't do what a market economist thinks it should do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's what makes, quite frankly, that's what we're here to do. that is why we are here to be as throw as many smart people and as much content at the problem to find as best answers as we can and not to feel so wedded to them that we can never change yeah that dynamic flexibility and the fact that quite frankly we learn from our clients too we don't sit there and on a very high straw which i'm perilously close to falling off we're both quite short people it's quite a long way down from where i'm at at the moment and and when i sit there and proclaim here is the answer yeah this is a collaboration getting great minds together there is nothing really more i i think more important than we don't forget our roles in this we never walk in to our organizations i never walk into my firm and i'm and we never walk in i don't have anybody I think who's ever said this at any other way at Man Group we know that we are the custodians of people's savings and pensions it's other people's money it's other people's money and we are there that's a bit scary though isn't it it's it's a huge responsibility and you know and maybe that's why I don't sleep but that that sense of if we lose the day we lose connection with that we won't be as good the day that we lose connection with the fact that what we're supposed to do every day is work our very hardest and apply everything we have to solving that problem so the hundred dollars or the hundred pounds that somebody gave me at the beginning of this gets returned with a hundred plus something that's my job yeah and we we don't lose we don't lose a connection with that because if we do then it's just numbers it's just silly numbers yeah yeah but do you feel like the new era that we have in front of us you know it's easy to look back at markets in the past and think that they were very challenging, but it was a much easier environment and it was much more kind of speculative, right?

29:40The past couple of years where I've done the FT Weekend Festival, I've been talking about crypto, largely telling people I thought it was a terrible idea, but still, it was something that people wanted to know about as a potential investment destination. The froth, a lot of that froth, a lot of the froth has come out of private equity, a lot of the froth has come out of crypto. You know, you still have some parts of the stock market that have sort of frothy elements. But we do seem to be in a much more sort of sensible environment. Money has a cost. It's not just any old company can rock up to the bond markets now and borrow for nothing.

30:14How does that change how portfolio managers think? You know, you have to expect that, sure, this company that I've invested in, it could actually go bust, or it could default on this bond that I've bought. It's much more about back to really understanding what you're invested in. Or if it's a quant piece, that you're understanding that sectorial exposure. And I think it is that. I think we are seeing more and more data. I think this is a data-rich space. Some might say there's more data than lots of people can deal with. And so sifting through that is where some of the tools that we're talking about become extraordinarily valuable.

30:54I think that when we talk about ChatGPT, the question that comes to me is, are you worried about quant? Is it going to take over quant investing? Yeah. I don't think that's the case at all. I have at least half the firm who can't get hold of enough of AI and machine learning, where the concept of partner coding, effectively, where you can throw something at ChatGPT, and it has its first go-round, be your worst nightmare. Write this article and then I'll edit it, right? That's never going to happen. So the reality of having the ability to go out into data sets and get through them and to them quicker, faster, better, but we also are well aware of the risks of that.

31:46So if you ask ChatGP too many questions, it will try and give you answers. you sort of be careful about what you do there, right? You've got to know what you're asking, and you then have to take responsibility for what it returns to you. Otherwise, it just becomes a law of the lowest common denominator of chat GPT, summarizing chat GPT. But there is enormous opportunity, therefore, to take data sets and interrogate them quickly. That's valuable. There's a lot of data, and not all of it is useful. Not all data is created equal. No. So does it put more and more focus on organisations like mine to be smarter, better?

32:33To understand the companies better. Yes. And to understand the markets better and to understand the impacts. But you say that, and I look at it, you know, that's where you get to things being theoretical and not being rules, right? But you're absolutely right. It's about that sense of being committed. And so, you know, if I talk to people, if your fund managers are not investing in tech, if they're not investing in the tools that are going to make them successful and competitive and give them those edges, I think that's a problem. We spend a lot of money on tech and have done. And by the way, we don't just spend it on the fancy stuff, that quant stuff, the modeling stuff, the data stuff.

33:15we spend it on the stuff that ensures that we don't degrade alpha that we don't we don't give away it returns that's right yeah and that's all the way through your organization so it is about making sure your lawyers are coding and they do and it's remarkable to see a lawyer code i'm one of those and it's never thought that would happen in my lifetime um but it is it's as important in your ops your middle office areas your risk areas that they are as equipped as any other part of your firm so this is moving and it's moving quickly yeah my personal view is you've got to drive to be at the front of that you cannot sit still yeah yeah but just going back to kind of asset class performance if you you know think about the people in this little kitchen tent you know who've got their kind of savings I know you're not here to kind of give investment advice but it sounds like the thing that everyone has to expect whether you are a professional investor or whether you're a have-a-go investor or whether you're just like a normal human who's got a pension account is that you have to expect that it's going to be a much more rocky road now than it was previously.

34:22Absolutely. I mean that's sort of psychologically a bit difficult isn't it just to think because when you look at the screen and you see well my pension pot that was worth x last time I looked at the screen is now worth like 20 % less than that this is quite painful and by the way to get back up to that it's not another 20 % that you need to go up it's an awful a lot more. So, you know, how do ordinary people deal with that? How do they remain committed to financial markets? Or should they remain committed to financial markets? It's a great question. Should they be committed to financial markets?

34:52I think that financial markets have an extraordinary barometer on what is going on in the world. We've talked about today, not just about bonds and equities, we've talked about real estate. We've talked about the different things manufacturing. These are incredibly important parts of our economy and the way to look at them and get to them is through financial products. How do you keep your nerve when equities go down? You keep your nerve. I think the retail piece about you sell low, buy high is be with people who look after you and advise you and make sure that you are holding them accountable.

35:30Understand what your pension is doing. Understand where it's invested. Understand how much of it's in cash. understand whether you'd be better in a long-term bond or whether in a cd if you're in the u.s think about it and think about it post-tax yeah right because that's the other element of this that these are every single part of the economy is being impacted like this you're starting to see we saw headline was three days ago about you know again a lender in the uk cutting mortgage rates again right so what does that mean for house prices generally most people house prices in the UK you just hold on right you just hold on so what am I suggesting I'm one I'm not giving any investment advice but what I am saying is if you care about markets you care about your your investments know them know what they mean hold people accountable talk to people and understand whether if something goes down actually it's okay for the minute have you got a diversified portfolio Are you very concentrated?

36:32How are they looking after your money? What's getting put to work? And are you happy with that? Yeah. But the glorious thing about what markets have done over the past few months is that actually you can afford to do not much. You can buy a nice government bond for like 4.5 % yield. You don't need to faff around with like meme stocks and crypto and AI stocks or anything else. That's exactly right. Yeah. And I'm not going to get drawn on crypto. But that's exactly right. The problem with it is the minute is that same liquidity piece. So how much are you managing your own portfolio for that moment when or if you need liquidity?

37:12So is it about it all being good or all being bad? No. It's about, I have that diversification word I keep on saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But diversification, I think, is key. Understanding your liquidity needs. That's kind of key too on a personal level. Please wish Robin luck when she probably takes on the job on Monday. And thank you for her time. Thank you. Thanks, Katie. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you very much.