The Thoughtful Contrarian featuring Ben Inker

Greg Dowling (00:05):

Welcome to the FEG Insight Bridge. This is Greg Dowling, Head of Research and CIO at FEG. This show spans global markets and institutional investments through conversations with some of the world's leading investment, economic and philanthropic minds to provide insight on how institutional investors can survive and even thrive in the world of markets and finance. It is a New Year! Will it be a new market? Or will 2025 be another year driven by large cap US growth stocks? Today we are thrilled to have Ben Inker of GMO. Ben is a Partner, Co-Head of GMO's Asset Allocation team and member of their Board of Directors. Known for his sharp analytical skills and unique perspectives on market trends, Ben has a reputation for thinking differently and questioning conventional wisdom. In this episode we'll explore a broad range of his views from U.S. market fundamentals, factors such as small and value, non-U.S. diversification, and hear some overall asset allocation views. Finally, we will also hear about his career journey and lessons learned along the way. Get ready for an enlightening conversation that promises to broaden your understanding and challenge your assumptions. Ben, welcome to the FEG Insight Bridge.

Ben Inker (01:24):

Well, thanks very much Greg. I'm very happy to be here.

Greg Dowling (01:27):

Alright, well we're going to start a little bit about your career. You've spent the entire time at GMO. So what's it like to be at the same place for so long?

Ben Inker (01:36):

It's kind of a hard question to answer because I don't know what it's like not to be. This is the place I really grew up and it's home and GMO is family and in all of the good and bad ways that family is family. I don't know what it's like for everybody else with their career, but it's really been a fun trip to be at GMO for as long as I have.

Greg Dowling (02:00):

Is there some irony in that, right, in that if I understand your career story they really didn't want you?

Ben Inker (02:06):

No. They didn't. I was sort of forced upon GMO. At the time I was an undergraduate. My thesis advisor was Dave Swenson who managed Yale's Endowment. GMO was a very large manager for Yale. One of the partners at GMO called up David to ask if there was anyone at the Yale School of Management who they thought would be a good fit and David said no, we didn't know anyone at the school of management, but he had this undergrad that he thought they should talk to. And they said, well thanks but no thanks. We're not really interested in hiring someone with no work experience. He said, well, just bring him up, talk to him, see what you think. So I came up, they spoke to me. I favorably impressed no one. So I went back down and Jeremy Grantham called up Dave and needed to be polite, right, because they were a really big client and said thanks but we really don't want to hire someone without any work experience.

Ben Inker (03:05):

And so David said, all right, well talk to him one more time because I think after he goes to business school you'll want to hire him. So I came back up, I went back down. I was not in the conversation between David and Jeremy, but my impression was Jeremy said, well he does seem like a bright kid, but we are really worried if we hire someone with no work experience and it doesn't work out like now he has other options, he has job offers and if it doesn't work out in a year, what is he going to do? David kind of cut his legs out from under him by saying, oh well that's not an issue. I tell you what, if you hire him for a year and you don't like him, after a year, I'll get him another job. If I can't get him another job, I'll give him a job at the investments office and make sure he gets into business school. So don't worry about that. Big client. don't want to offend the client's like oh okay, I guess we'll give him a job. And so David was entirely responsible. I cannot take any credit for having gotten the job because I don't think there was anyone at GMO who wanted to hire me.

Greg Dowling (04:09):

Now how long has it been at GMO from that point to today?

Ben Inker (04:14):

32 years.

Greg Dowling (04:15):

32 years. Wow. That is amazing. And in those 32 years, GMO has changed, right? And on a daily active basis there is no G M or O that really is there. I know Jeremy's still involved but not on a day-to-day basis. How is that, how do firms have to evolve when the founders move on?

Ben Inker (04:39):

Again, I can't speak for other firms, but I think at GMO one of the things about a firm is its culture, its philosophy, its ethos has to be rebuilt kind of every day and every year. GMO is a place where there are quite a number of us who have been here for a long time and what we are trying to do is help bring along the good things about GMO and its history and help slowly change some of the things that have been less good. You know, the people who are attracted to coming here are attracted by some of the important things that we really feel we stand for. Really thinking as long-term investors really worrying about solving problems for clients. And so even though Jeremy is still here because he runs his foundation out of our office here and I still have lunch with him every month or so, yes, GMO has changed, but I think at the core we're really trying to live up to the important things from Jeremy and, and Dick and Ike brought back in the late seventies.

Greg Dowling (05:57):

GMO definitely has a brand, a philosophy and that probably gets, it sort of changes as markets change, but sort of the core principles I feel like are pretty much bedrock throughout, which is helpful versus other firms maybe that don't have, like what do they do? You kind of know what you're going to get with GMO. It might change like again over time and evolve, but that's probably pretty helpful I should say. We are recording this at the very end of 2024, so we're going to release this in 2025 and we're going to talk about like your views for next year. But before we turn that page, what is a life or investment lesson that Jeremy has given you? And I'm going to add one more to this, that Swenson has given you?

Ben Inker (06:35):

Let's see. So Jeremy, I mean man, you work with a guy for 30 years, you're going to learn a lot from him. I would say one life lesson that I learned from him early on, Jeremy Grantham is a lot of things. One of the things he is an incredibly compelling speaker. You know, when I got to GMO, public speaking was a scary thing. And you know, I had kind of the traditional nightmare about public speaking that the worst thing that can possibly happen to you is you're standing up there and you suddenly forget what it is you're supposed to say, right? That is the nightmare. And then you'd look down and you're not wearing any clothes or what have you. But at the 1992 GMO client conference, I got to see Jeremy speak to an audience for the first time. He was giving this really wonderful talk and then somewhere in the middle he just stops and he looks around and he says, you know, I'm sorry, I forgot what I was talking about. Can anybody remind me? And someone in the audience reminded him and he went on and he gave the rest of the speech and it was the best speech I had ever seen a human being give. And it contained the nightmare moment. And it occurred to me, oh wait a minute public speaking is not what I thought it was. So that was a useful life lesson. Unfortunately, I think one of the things it has done relative to some other colleagues of mine is somehow it took away my fear of public speaking. So I don't prep as much or as well as perhaps I could, but losing that fear was very helpful. I stay from the investment standpoint, the lesson he taught me, the one I make sure when we have a new member of the asset allocation team, I say, Hey, this is the thing you need to understand. When you're looking at an asset, it is not enough to be looking at what its returns have been. The really important thing is to decompose those returns into the underlying drivers because if you understand the underlying drivers, you can understand which pieces of this return are likely to persist, which ones might reverse which ones were kind of random. And it's funny, I took a lot of finance in college from really extraordinary teachers. I was incredibly lucky. David Swenson was my thesis advisor. I took classes from Jim Tobin and Bob Schiller and I got a lot of good training in finance. But as an undergraduate they never taught us to really break down the returns. And whenever we're looking at an asset and if ever we're looking at a new asset or a new strategy that we haven't seen before, that kind of analysis is the bedrock. I remember the day Jeremy came and I was doing some work on small caps for him and he said, okay, that's great, but where did those returns come from? You have to break it down. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Oh okay.

Greg Dowling (09:55):

That's great. And I totally agree on your first point about communication. So I've had the opportunity to teach for maybe 10 years at our business school here. And you know it's funny that you teach some very, very smart people, but if you're in the investment industry and maybe you're a coder and you don't have to communicate, but most times you have to communicate either orally or written. And so if you have a great idea but you can't convince somebody or communicate with them, it's probably moot. So, I think that's a very kind of a overlooked skill in our industry that we teach people how to use Python or R or an Excel spreadsheet, but we don't tell him how to talk. And so that's, I think that's a great point. How about David Swenson real quick? You spent some time with David, you basically owe your career to him. What did David teach you?

Ben Inker (10:42):

Again, it's a lot because I took two courses from him. He was my thesis advisor, he was a mentor to me for decades. I would say the most important thing I learned from him in taking the first course I took from him, which was the course affectionately named Stocks for Jocks. It was a big lecture course about investing in finance that was viewed as a pretty easy class. But the thing is he made investing seem like so much fun, just this really interesting problem. And I'm someone who has always been really interested in problem solving and puzzles and he kind of presented investing as this fun, fascinating puzzle. And the idea of kind his vision of managing the endowment was finding these people and firms to partner with to really try to solve these puzzles. And it just seemed like so much fun. I'm like, that's what I want to do.

Greg Dowling (11:53):

It's kind of the love of the game, that infectious drive like hey, this is something that's noble that you want to do and it's a great puzzle. So we're going to flip it a little bit and talk a little bit about some of the markets, what's going on now? And as we transition there, we've been lucky enough to have Jeremy on this podcast a couple years ago and it was entitled A Journey Through Bubble Land because I think that's what GMO's probably gotten the most accolades over the years is Jeremy and the firm calling several bubbles. But you've also been criticized as being like permabears, right? Like the stop clock that is right twice a day. So looking back at your methodology, over the years, what have you gotten right? What have you gotten wrong and maybe what's changed in the markets that has had you adapt your models?

Ben Inker (12:41):

Things we have gotten right, certainly we have been able to recognize on a number of occasions where the markets kind of stopped making sense and the fact that a market that has stopped making sense is a pretty risky place to be. We have done a pretty good job after those market breaks, whether it was 2000, 2008 or 2022 of getting back in. Obviously, the thing we have gotten wrong again and again is getting out of the markets too early, right? We did, I am taking credit blame for some stuff that happened before I got to GMO. We got out of Japan in ‘87 and that was painfully too early, right in the nineties. We were slowly getting out of the U.S. market too early. We did it pretty well in 2008. We held on till kind of sometime in 2007 and then kind of in the bull market since the GFC, the biggest mistake has been to be too underweight the U.S. for too long. And the blessing and curse of being contrarian by nature is you don't fall for the investing fads. But you can be too apt to kind of assume the market has something importantly wrong before it does. And the frustrating thing for me, and this is stuff I feel like I got wrong personally, I've written a lot of things over the years. Some of them have proved to be pretty right. The one that thankfully few people besides me remember that I got profoundly wrong in 2002. I wrote a paper about why profits as a percent of GDP were the most mean-reverting series in economics. And I said, look, the reason why is because capitalism, if the return on capital is high, what you see is a bunch of capital moves in and that competes down the return on capital. And when the return on capital is low, nobody wants to invest. And that brings it back. And then I said something which had the germ of truth, but then I completely destroyed. I said the only way you can really get out of that pattern is if you see a sustained increase in monopoly power. And then I went on to say the profoundly wrong thing, which was, and I don't think that is likely to happen in a sustained way because monopolies have kind of negative impacts on economies and society. People don't like them. And so governments act against them and corporations aren't people. So one, turns out I'm wrong. The Supreme Court says corporations are people and corporations don't vote so they wind up losing out. So in terms of things we have gotten wrong, kind of at the asset allocation end is not recognizing the importance of the rise of kind of industry concentration and monopoly power across the global economy, but really most acutely in the U.S. economy and how important that impact could be for aggregate corporate profits. Part of the frustration I have with myself about getting that wrong is on a stock level we're pretty good at that, right? The basic idea behind GMO's obsession with quality starting from the seventies is that these companies who have market power and have demonstrated an ability to earn an above normal return on capital man, these companies are pretty special. And that benefit persists for a surprisingly long time. So, on an individual stock basis we were always on the lookout for companies that were showing the evidence of having monopoly power. And it kind of never occurred to me that it, they could get so big and this could be so pervasive that rather than this being a good thing for an individual company, this could sort of change the game for a period of time for an overall market.

Greg Dowling (17:10):

Interesting. Profit margins tended to be pretty mean reverting and they haven't really been, especially in the tech sector, a lot of what you've written about over the last couple of years has been on this kind of market concentration of those few that have kind of maintained that profit margin, that growth, you can call them FAANG or Mag 7 or whatever you want to call them, there's been a small group of U.S. Tech stocks that have kind of led the way. Can you give us a historical perspective? Isn’t there always a bit of concentration in markets?

Ben Inker (17:40):

Yes, and I'm going to talk about that in a couple of ways. One is in a lot of stock markets there is much more concentration than there is in the U.S. right now. If you think about a small European country, which is relatively open, right? If you are Denmark and you happen to have Novo Nordisk or 20 years ago if you were Finland and you happen to have Nokia, so you've got a bunch of smaller companies that are more domestic and then you have a big multinational. You can have very concentrated markets. But the reality is there are very few people who ever think about, Ooh yeah, you know, I really want to own that finished market. Let me just buy the finished market. In the case of the U.S. there have been times when the US. market was more concentrated and less concentrated. The thing about today that is as far as we can tell unique at least in the period that the S&P composite has existed. One, these companies are really, really big. They have very high weights and they're also quite volatile. So you know, Nvidia, apple, Microsoft, they're big, they're about 7% or so of the S&P back in ‘62 I think AT&T may have been 10 or 11% of the S&P. So it was bigger than anything is now. But AT&T, you know, they were the phone company, they were the economy. There was not a whole lot of idiosyncratic risk associated with AT&T. And today we've got these big dominant companies, and they are really volatile. So the idiosyncratic risk associated with Nvidia today in the S&P 500 is as near as we can tell the highest individual stock risk that has ever existed in any company or the history of the S&P composite and the Mag 7 are big, it's a lot of weight, much higher than it has been on average for, the top seven or top 10. Again, we've seen times in the past where there was some pretty good concentration. But the risk associated with those aggregate stocks is qualitatively different and it makes life weird for investment managers. If you were concerned about absolute risk and absolute return and you looked at these stocks, you would say well actually these stocks are giving me a lot of risk. I would not want to own as much of these stocks as is in the S&P 500. On the other hand, if your job is to beat the S&P 500, not owning one of these stocks gives you a ton of tracking error. So, it is really important for you as an investment manager for you as an investor to be very clear about what problem you are trying to solve. Because today there is one set of problems I can think of where I would absolutely want to own less of these things, substantially less of these things. And there is another where that is about as risky an activity as there is at the moment.

Greg Dowling (20:54):

That is the problem. Yeah, I wonder, and you guys have talked about this as well, if this isn't a confluence of a couple of things, right? In that we have this new technology that is coming up, there are, you could argue some pretty good moats around this high profit margins. There are some reasons for why they've done well. We can argue that they are priced too expensively, but these aren't bad companies, they're just probably expensive companies at least from a historical basis. But is this being exaggerated by the wave of passive investing? Like everybody just goes into ETFs and you know, various types of index funds, levered index funds. Is that creating some of this problem?

Ben Inker (21:37):

I don't have the counterfactual so I can't look at what these things would be without indexing and the rise of indexing. It's far from obvious to me that passive is the driver here. Fundamentally, these companies have done something extraordinary. They have grown in a way that large companies have had real trouble growing historically. And while some of these stocks may be overvalued, and again I'm holding aside Tesla because Tesla's a different animal than the rest of them. But these companies, maybe they're overvalued. If they are, it's because their future is going to be less sparkling than their past. But a very common pattern in the stock market is investors assuming the recent past is a good guide to the indefinite future. So you don't need indexing for these companies to have gotten where they are. And if passive has been a driver, it's probably in a somewhat more subtle way. So the thing about passive is they buy the same percentage of every company, whether they are buying Apple or GM. If the iShares S&P ETF is whatever, 4% of the aggregate of everything they buy 4% of GM, they buy 4% of Apple. Why should that have a bigger impact on Apple? Well here's why that might have a bigger impact on Apple. It has nothing to do with the index itself or the passive funds, but it may have something to do with the people they're buying the shares from. Passive doesn't trade much really unless the index changes. It almost doesn't change trade at all if there's flows in they have to buy. And so they have to entice someone to sell their shares. And the classic academic finance would say, okay, people own these shares, they are kind of prepared to sell an infinite number of the shares as the price goes up slightly because they believe this has gone from fair value to slightly above fair value and they don't want to own it above fair value. The reality is that's not the way investors think or work. But the people who own GM in general don't own GM because they think, oh my god, GM is amazing world beating company. They say well this company's really pretty cheap and I think I'm going to get a pretty good return because they're whatever trading at five times earnings and people like to buy trucks and they do a pretty good job of building trucks and I don't need to imagine amazing things to get a pretty good return out of an okay company trading at five times earnings. But if that price goes up a little bit, it's like well okay, it's not quite as cool. I am more willing to sell, I am a value investor. And value investors tend to be more price sensitive. When we're dealing with Apple or Nvidia, if the price of Nvidia goes up a few percent and you are a holder of Nvidia, you're less likely to say, oh well I liked Nvidia, when it was trading at 36 times earnings but at 37 or 38, whoa that's too much. So passive may have this tendency to increase the valuation spread between companies, stocks that are held by more price sensitive investors and stocks that are held by less price sensitive investors. So passive might have had an impact but we got bubbles before we got passive. We got companies that were trading at very high valuations because they had done something extraordinary long before passive. Passive may have exacerbated this a little bit, but this is not qualitatively different from what we have seen markets do. And particularly in the event when you think about these companies, it's not just that they have done very well, it's have done really well for quite a long time and it becomes hard to envision a company that has done nothing but win losing.

Greg Dowling (25:44):

Yeah, I hear you. There's no counterfactual. So we can maybe assume that there's some amplification of what may have already occurred but we don't know. And so it's just sort of a of a guess. But as we think about these current valuations in the U.S. in particular and we think about these large tech companies, I started my career in sort of the tech bubble and gosh there's a lot of garbage like pets.com and other companies, there were others that weren't, that were just overvalued like a Cisco, right? So that's a real company, still is a real company. It just got overvalued. It seems like that's the issue with most of the Mag 7. These are just, these are great companies, they're just perhaps overpriced. And so what does an investor do? Because you pointed out the risk, right? There's risk on either side, right? There's risk that you own overvalued stocks. There is risk that if you don't, you have huge tracking error and things can go on longer than you think. So how do you blend that together? Is quality part of that equation? How do you stay fully invested and participate but maybe reduce your risk?

Ben Inker (26:48):

Well, I was in New York doing some client meetings earlier this week and I was talking to a CIO, she said something fascinating which I really loved. And I told her I would steal. So, this is me stealing it, which is look, if you know there is a risk, you can try to hedge it. If you know there is uncertainty, you just have to diversify. And what I'd say about the world today is there is a lot of uncertainty and so you need to diversify. Now that is a painful thing, right? The only thing to have owned in the public markets over the last decade is U.S. Large cap growth, right? And anything you owned otherwise feels like, well that was a stupid idea. But I would say today even abstracting away from the Mag 7 and the fact that they're trading pretty expensive or U.S. Growth and the fact that it's trading really very expensive relative to history, this is a world that really does feel pretty uncertain. I don't know what the world is going to look like in three years, in five years. Now what I would say is maybe even beyond diversifying, maybe I want to be a little bit careful about owning stocks whose valuations kind of imply that I do know what the world is going to look like in five years. So, my contrarian bent is, man, if the AI complex is saying dude we know five years from now it's all AI. Like well maybe I want to shade away from that. But I think you do need to diversify. And the nice thing today is if a slightly worrying thing is the U.S. is trading really very expensive versus history and at an all time highs relative to the rest of the world, the rest of the world is pretty decently priced. It is not priced as if the future is going to be amazing. So, I would say if you're going to be fully invested, be diversified today and look for those areas as potential places to lean a little bit more heavily in heavily where this uncertainty, this potential change, may well accrue to their benefit.

Greg Dowling (29:15):

Now I mentioned quality is quality screen cheap or not cheap? I mean because you probably have some tech in quality that would usually be a source of, okay want to kind of have a higher quality portfolio. Would that work?

Ben Inker (29:30):

Yeah, so I was going to recommend one bias to have in your portfolio forever. It would be quality. And the reason why is not because I am utterly confident quality stocks are always going to outperform. But I am really confident that these companies have lower fundamental economic risk. So, they're not guaranteed never to be worse companies than they are today. But in really bad economic times these are companies that are much less likely to go bankrupt. They are likely to fundamentally outperform in a really bad economic circumstance. And the reason why there's an equity risk premium in the first place is because equities do so badly in really bad economic times and that's the worst time to lose money. So, I like having a quality bias wherever I can. And the strange thing is they are the group in the market that should underperform in the long run and they don't.

Ben Inker (30:27):

And that's, you know, you can say yeah well is that because of the rise of the Mag 7? No, quality has outperformed in U.S. Large caps for a very long time. It's outperformed within small caps, it's outperformed outside of the U.S. it outperforms in high yield bonds. I mean one of the strangest things and uh, you know I've been talking to people about this for over 20 years is within high yield, right? Triple Cs are much, much riskier than double Bs are right? These are companies that default in a good year, 5% of them default in a bad year, 35% of them default. If you look at the double Bs in a good year, half a percent of them default in a bad year. One and a half percent of them default. So they're both high yield but one of them is much riskier than the other. Those triple Cs should outperform. They really should and they don't. The best performing cohort within high yield for a very long time has been double Bs. I don't know why quality is consistently mispriced. The tricky thing for us about trying to value quality and answer the question is quality cheaper or expensive is because it's growthiness changes, right? If I am trying to figure out whether value is cheap or expensive, well the thing I know about value is it's not very growthy and it's anti-growth doesn't change very much. So it's fair value relative to the market doesn't change that much. With quality there are times when the quality cohort is kind of fairly dull consumer stocks that really do make good profits and reliably so, but grow at about the rate of GDP. And there are times like today where there's a lot of tech there that really does grow faster. So what we've seen historically is most groups at least over a five let's say, that next five year period, valuation is a decent guy. When value is more expensive relative to its history, it tends to underperform when it is cheap it tends to outperform if you give it five years. With quality that doesn't historically happen because in the times when it has looked expensive, it's been because it's actually been growthier in the times when it's looked cheap, it has been less growthy. And so the performance has been weirdly stable. That didn't happen in the seventies, right? The Nifty 50 was uniquely a quality bubble and quality was really very expensive and it really took it on the chin today. I wouldn't say quality looks cheap. If we try to take into account the fact that these are high quality firms and they're kind of growthy on our price to fair value model, it looks fine. The group that looks worrying is junky growth. So you talked about the pets.com era and of course those companies are always more obvious in retrospect than they were at the time. But we see a bunch of companies who are priced for as if they are going to make a ton of money in the future but have no history of having made a ton of money in the past. Those stocks look really kind of scary to us. Quality I think is about fair versus the market and if it's fair versus the market, I like it because I think it's lower risk but quality has been a tough group for us to try to forecast.

Greg Dowling (34:14):

Hard to time quality. How about value? And I was recently at your client conference and I heard a lot of talk on deep value.

Ben Inker (34:21):

Yeah so we are big fans of deep value today. So deep value and our definition is when people talk about value they tend to be talking about the cheap half of the market, kind of the value index versus the growth index. And value globally looks really cheap on that basis. So the discount that the cheap half of the market trades at versus the expensive half is much bigger than normal. That's a good thing for value. But within that we do see this bifurcation and it's most striking in the U.S. that the cheapest 20% of the market is trading at some of the biggest discounts we have ever seen. Whereas the rest of value is actually trading expensive versus its history. So it's cheaper than the market, it is definitionally cheaper than the market because hey these are value stocks but they are cheaper by a smaller margin than they normally are and when value is less cheap than it normally is, that gets us quite nervous. So we're not big fans of shallow value today but deep value to us looks like a really interesting opportunity. And that's true in the U.S. It's at least as true outside the U.S. which a lot of people including me find a little bit surprising because you know, you can come up with of course here are the names of the U.S. Growth stocks that have done so amazingly well. Outside of the U.S. they come less to mind and yet the deep value cohort is trading at just about, I mean like first percentile versus history type cheap. And the growth side is trading well into the nineties.

Greg Dowling (36:05):

So as we jump around, we talked a lot about large cap earlier and we talked about quality. I'd love to hear your thoughts on small cap and is small cap the anti-quality factor? There's a lot of junk in small cap, but is it cheap relative to its history?

Ben Inker (36:19):

A thing about small is I have said value is cheap all over the world. Small in different places in the world looks really quite different. For one thing, small in the U.S. has done a lot worse relative to the market than it has elsewhere. So in the last decade most of the world small's done just fine. In the U.S. it has underperformed in a reasonably striking way and in the U.S. small stocks are trading very cheap versus history against the market. So they are trading at some of the biggest discounts versus large caps that we've ever seen. Normally that would get us very excited. Today we are less excited because we do think some of that relative valuation fall is deserved. And what we have seen with small caps in the U.S. And again this is not something we have tended to see outside the U.S. to anywhere near the same degree, is the return on capital for small caps looks much worse than the overall system then large caps, right? I talked about, hey in 2002 I said profit margins should be really mean reverting and they didn't. They did for small. So small's profitability looks the same as it did, it's volatile it goes up and down with the, with the cycle. But in absolute terms it's no bigger today than it was in the eighties or the nineties or the two thousands. For the large caps it's a lot better than the eighties. It's significantly better than the nineties, it has been on this upward path. As a result, small deserves to trade at a bigger discount than it used to. There's two other things that have happened to small again, particularly in the U.S. One is they've levered themselves up so they have more debt than they used to and that makes them junkier. The other thing that's happened to them is they've gotten old. There used to be a lot more IPOs in the U.S. than there are now. And today even where you have an IPO in a lot of cases, by the time the company is going public, it's no longer small. So small companies are a lot older than they used to be and that is an issue because growth is a feature of the young, younger companies grow more than old companies. If you've got small caps and they're not going to be very growthy and they're not really that profitable, they deserve to trade at a discount and they do. If you decompose the returns too small, what you see historically is they've never been all that growthy. Their growth relative to large caps even in the good times is maybe a little bit better and is often a little bit worse. They give you less income than large caps because the dividend yield is smaller and they're more apt to issue more shares as opposed to buy back shares. So you get less income from them. So if you get less income and you don't get any more growth, they must underperform. Well no they haven't underperformed. And the big reason is the fact that small is not a static group of stocks. Some small caps graduate to large cap land or maybe mid cap depending on how you're defining your cohorts. And a small cap that leaves small to become large, good things have happened to it. It has almost certainly grown. And if it hasn't fundamentally grown then it's valuation has certainly gone up. So the companies in small that leave small almost always give you a pretty good return. And the large cap universe is also not a static group of stocks. Some of them become small and a large cap firm becoming small is not a good thing. Fundamentally bad things have happened and of course their valuation has fallen. So this rebalancing has been positive for small and is basically entirely responsible for the historic outperformance of small cap firms. And so it's not that we are confident small is going to lose from here. I think small is probably cheap relative to its fair value. It's not as cheap as it looks and they are junkier and riskier than they used to be. So where we own small in the U.S. we are particularly focused on the higher quality names because we don't want to be in a situation where if we do wind up in a recession, these guys are going to go bust on us.

Greg Dowling (40:47):

From an asset allocation perspective. Is there anything else that we haven't hit? We've talked about diversification, we've talked about kind of deep value versus just value. What else as we kind of try to put a bow on the investment side, is it EM, is it international?

Ben Inker (41:03):

One place we have been really pretty excited about and have owned for a while and the returns have been decent but we think there's more to come is not so much U.S. small caps but Japanese small caps. Japan is to us a really interesting market. Actually it is the only other market besides the U.S. that over the last decade has fundamentally done really well. So the underlying earnings growth in Japan has actually been better than the earnings growth in the U.S. Now the return hasn't been as good because Japan has de-rated over that period, whereas the U.S. has gotten a lot more expensive. So the returns have certainly favored the U.S. But the fundamentals have been very good in Japan. We think it's sustainable because what Japan did was go from having the worst return on capital in the world to okay. And they've done that the hard way. They did that by really increasing their sales margin. So in order to increase your sales margin, you need to become more efficient. You need to fire people, you need to shut down underperforming divisions, you need to do unpleasant things that kind of suck. They've got some more work to do but a lot of that work is not so hard. I talked about how in the U.S. small caps have been levering themselves up. That's been going on for about 15 years. In Japan, small caps have been paying down their debt for 30. And it is frustrating as a shareholder, right? Over the last 20 years the interest rates in Japan have been zero. And to take your retained earnings and use them to pay off debt that costs nothing, that's not a really good return on capital investment. But the good news is they have no debt. It's really hard to, to drive them into bankruptcy. And if they start doing some of the things to rationalize their balance sheets, they're hugely overcapitalized that can lead to really pretty good returns. And the thing is, you know why, what's the catalyst? How to have hope? Well, the Japanese government is putting pressure on them to do this. Right, Japan is a market which nobody wants to be the first one to do something, but nobody wants to be the last one either. And in Japan, you know, if you can't get your price to book above one and there's a bunch of companies trading at a price to book below one, you get demoted on the stock exchange. If you can't get your ROE above eight, you will not get bought by the big Japanese public pension funds and it's shameful. So companies are looking asking kind of, well what can we do to improve these things? We've never really worried that much about our ROE but help us understand what we can do to improve it. And the good news is the stuff you need to do to improve it isn't that hard. Just stop paying down debt, buy back some stock, pay a dividend. We see cheap valuations. We see really pretty straightforward ways for these companies to improve. And from an underlying perspective, there's a bunch of these companies, they're not Microsoft, they're not Apple, but in their little niche, these are companies with really good moats. They know how to make marine paint that nobody else makes as good a marine paint or the ceramics that cover that cover semiconductors or these things that you're just amazingly good at and have very little competition. They're pretty good companies. They haven't been managed well from a shareholder perspective and we're seeing that change. The other thing that's really cool as a foreigner investing in Japan is the yen is just stupid cheap. You hear about people going to Tokyo for vacation because it's cheap and anybody who's old enough to remember the eighties, that's impossible. But the yen is really cheap and that makes these companies really competitive. So it is a place we are quite excited about and a place we warmly recommend people giving an eye to. It's an easy place to overlook, but we actually we're pretty excited about it.

Greg Dowling (45:18):

Alright, excited, warm recommendation. There you have it. Japanese small cap. Hey, let's finish with just a couple quick lightning round personal questions. This might be a tough one for you, but what is one interesting fact that nobody else knows about you?

Ben Inker (45:35):

One of my former hobbies that some of the longtime people at GMO always pester me about having left behind. I used to write something called fun facts. I would sort of discover some weird thing about the world and give a writeup about that. I did that for about 20 years and then life got too busy and I had kids and it was hard to do that in the evenings, but that was something I used to do that I really liked.

Greg Dowling (46:03):

So here we go. A fun fact about you is that you wrote fun facts. I like that. I like that. What's your current hobbies? So you gave that up. What do you do other than like being dad taxi?

Ben Inker (46:15):

I am disturbingly addicted to the New York Times little games every morning. We have an email chain for Wordle and Connections and so that is something I do every day. In terms of things I really enjoy doing, one thing I'm very excited about, I used to do a fair bit of scuba diving. That was harder when the kids were little. My kids are now old enough, they are going to get certified this winter and we're going to go scuba diving as a family for the first time in March. So that's something I'm quite excited about. It is something I have loved to do and I've wanted to share it with my kids and they're finally old enough that they can do it.

Greg Dowling (46:55):

Fantastic. Final, final question. You've been around all of these luminaries, rubbed shoulders with lots of smart people. If you could recommend just one investment book to someone, what would it be?

Ben Inker (47:09):

Oh, this is such a horrible question,

Greg Dowling (47:11):

Hey, you're not supposed to tell me these are horrible questions.

Ben Inker (47:15):

Because it so much depends on what you're looking for, right? I was a huge fan of Peter Bernstein. I thought he was just about the clearest thinker and writer about investing in a very long time. And I loved Capital Ideas. It's from a long time ago, but just understanding how this all came to be, that's great. It doesn't tell you that much about how to invest now. So there's other books I could give you on that. But if it was going to be one thing, it would be Capital Ideas. To see whether, hey, this seems like an interesting area that you want to learn more about or not.

Greg Dowling (47:54):

Maybe it was a bad question, but that was a great answer and a great response. So thank you very much and thanks for sharing all this great wisdom with us. And we need it in 2025. So hopefully this leads to some positive returns for our listeners.

Ben Inker (48:12):

Hope so.

Greg Dowling (48:14):

If you are interested in more information on FEG, check out our website at www.feg.com. And don't forget to subscribe to our communications so you don't miss the next episode. Please keep in mind that this information is intended to be general education that needs to be framed within the unique risk and return objectives of each client. Therefore, nobody should consider these to be FEG recommendations. This podcast was prepared by FEG. Neither the information nor any opinion expressed in this podcast constitutes an offer or an invitation to make an offer to buy or sell any securities. The views and opinions expressed by guest speakers are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of their firm or of FEG.