Five Good Questions Podcast

Meb Faber is a co-founder and the Chief Investment Officer of Cambria Investment Management.  Faber is the manager of Cambria’s ETFs, separate accounts and private investment funds.  Mr. Faber has authored numerous white papers and several books: Global Asset Allocation, Shareholder Yield, The Ivy Portfolio, Global Value, and Invest with the House.   He is a frequent speaker and writer on investment strategies and has been featured in Barron’s, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Mr. Faber graduated from the University of Virginia with a double major in Engineering Science and Biology.    It seems like a basket composed of each gurus’ highest conviction pick would be a smart strategy.  Yet you found their top pick was the worst performer of their top 10!  How is that possible?  And what can we do to benefit from that information? If I believed in following a copycat 13F strategy, how would I go about doing that in an intelligent, systematic manner? Only 25% of stocks are responsible for all of the marke

Bogumil K. Baranowski is a New York City-based value investor, author, and investment professional with over a decade of experience. He works at Tocqueville Asset Management, where he is the founder and portfolio manager of a private investment fund. He was born in Poland, educated in Paris and Brussels. He enjoys making a difference in people's lives through writing and teaching. He is the author of Outsmarting the Crowd: A Value Investor's Guide to Starting, Building, and Keeping a Family Fortune.   I loved that you stressed the importance of saving.  I repeatedly tell clients that saving is the most important part, and if they do that correctly, they don’t really need me on the investment front.  When you think about the path to wealth, it goes Earn, Save, Invest.  Most of us can’t control how much we earn day to day, or our investment returns.  Yet we all can control how much we save.  Why does the world seem preoccupied with earning and investing and ignores saving? You’re a fan of averaging down slow

Gene Hoots is the chairman of CornerCap Investment Counsel, an advisory firm that he co-founded in 1989.  He has worked in finance and investments for over fifty years.  His career in the corporate world included 21 years with R. J. Reynolds Industries where he spent a decade managing that company’s $4 billion employee benefit and savings plan investments. Have Americans had it too easy for too long?  What does the word “duty” mean to you, and why is it so important? What was it like leaving the corporate world and starting your own business? Are there any lessons you learned that would be helpful to others who want to start an investment business? You presided over RJR’s massive pension plan in the 1980s.  What was it like there?  What do you think about the M&A world having been so close? Who was Malcolm McLean and how did you meet him?  What was so special about him? What lessons did you learn from the late 90s tech bubble?  Do any of them seem especially pertinent to today?

Adam Levin is a consumer advocate with more than 30 years’ experience in personal finance, privacy, real estate and government service.  A former director of the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs, Levin is Chairman and founder of Identity Theft 911, Chairman and co-founder of Credit.com and serves as a spokesperson for both companies.  An expert on personal finance, credit, identity management, fraud and privacy, he writes a weekly column which appears on Huffington Post and ABCNews.com.  He is a frequent guest on television, and has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business News, Good Morning America, Fox & Friends, CBS Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight and scores of radio stations throughout the country.  He lives in New York City with his wife and son. Identity theft seems like something that everyone thinks only happens to other people.  I watched the first season of Mr. Roboto, so assume I’m an expert hacker now.  :)  But seriously, how big are the risks we talking about here, based on probability

Chris Mayer is the Investment Director of Bonner & Partners, a financial research firm.  He is the author of Invest Like A Dealmaker: Secrets from a former banking insider, World Right Side Up: Investing Across Six Continents and, most recently, 100 Baggers: Stocks that Return 100-to-1 and How to Find Them.   Five Good Questions: What are some of the key ingredients that might point to a 100x investment return?  Do we just have to depend on luck and strike oil or benefit from a big pharmaceutical drug approval, or is there any skill involved? When I was teaching at UC Davis’s MBA program, we did a study where we examined the performance of investing gurus vs. various value investing studies (Tweedy Browne, Magic Formula, What Works on Wall Street etc.).  It was amazing how the studies trounced even the pros.  One reason is likely liquidity, the bigger pros couldn’t get into smaller investments that the study did, which could constrain returns.  But another hypothesis I had was that because the studies ar

Tadas Viskanta is the Founder and Editor of Abnormal Returns.  Tadas is a private investor with over 25 years of experience in the financial markets.  He is the co-author of over a dozen investment-related papers that have appeared in publications like the Financial Analysts Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management among others. Tadas is also the author of the well-received book: Abnormal Returns: Winning Strategies from the Frontlines of the Investment Blogosphere that culls lessons learned from his time blogging.   Five Good Questions: With traditional media, TV, bloggers, twitter, etc., there’s so much information flow these days.  It can feel overwhelming.  How do we go about curating signal from noise? As special businesses have transitioned from primarily key PPE advantages (more readily quantifiable by accounting) to instead relying on IP, knowledge, network effects, intangibles (less quantifiable and more subjective), you could make an argument that the balance sheet is increasingly divorcing from ec

Robert P. Murphy is Research Assistant Professor with the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University.  In addition to The Primal Prescription, Murphy is the author of several economics books for the layperson, including Choice (Independent Institute 2015), The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism (Regnery 2007), and the textbook Lessons for the Young Economist (Mises Institute 2010).  He blogs at ConsultingByRPM.com.    Everyone has a sense that the healthcare industry is a mess in the US. Obviously it’s a big story with a lot of moving parts, but how did we all get into this mess? You wrote this with the help of a medical doctor, and with your background I’d expect you focused more on the economics side of things, but what would be the prescription for us as individuals to give us a better chance at surviving the “sick care” sinkhole? What does “primal” mean? Based on the continued trajectory of the Affordable Care Act, where do you see the likely future of the healthcare industry heading? As a soc

David is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and department chair at Cornell.  He specializes in organometallic chemistry with a particular expertise in the organic chemistry of lithium.  David is an avid student of markets, economics, and geopolitics and writes a Year in Review posted at Peak Prosperity and Zerohedge.  Dave has been cited in the Wall Street Journal and The Guardian and has appeared on Russia Today. What were the 3 biggest events in 2015 (or building over the last few years) that you think will have a big impact on 2016?  What’s your long range prognosis? This is your 7th year in review that you’ve produced.  What have you learned over that time from doing this incredible amount of informational synthesis every year?  Do you dread Decembers yet?  :)  What have you gotten most wrong? How did you get started and what insight has being an organic chemistry professor at Cornell given you? I love that at the beginning of every review, you include how your personal port

Victor Ricciardi is an Assistant Professor of Financial Management at Goucher College.  Professor Ricciardi is a leading expert on the academic literature and emerging research issues in behavioral finance.  He is the editor of several eJournals distributed by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) at www.ssrn.com, including behavioral finance, financial history, behavioral economics, and behavioral accounting. 1.  What’s the bias with the biggest impact that’s the least understood or noticed? 2.  Wisdom of the crowd usually exists only when there’s a diverse population.  Given the typical investor is pretty homogenous (white, affluent), should we expect the wisdom of the crowd to not apply to the stock market?  What about changing demographics with whites becoming a minority and women now earning more bachelor’s degrees than men? 3.  Financial literacy scores in the US are pretty dismal, which to me really calls into question the validity of the Efficient Market Hypothesis.  How can we improve financial

Gareth Jones is a Fellow of the Centre for Management Development at London Business School and a visiting professor at Spain’s IE Business School in Madrid.  Rob Goffee is Emeritus Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, where he teaches in the world-renowned Senior Executive Programme.  Goffee and Jones consult to the boards of several global companies and are coauthors of Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? and Clever, both published by Harvard Business Review Press.

Arthur T. Benjamin is a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College who specializes in combinatorics.  He is known for mental math capabilities and "Mathemagics" performances in front of live audiences.  His mathematical abilities have been highlighted in newspaper and magazine articles, at TED Talks and on The Colbert Report.  He is the author of several books, including The Magic of Math: Solving for x and Figuring out Why.

Michael J. Mauboussin is an investment strategist and has been in the financial services industry for more than twenty-five years. He has also taught at the Columbia Graduate School of Business since 1993, and is on the board of trustees at the Santa Fe Institute.He is the author of two previous books, Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition andMore Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places and is coauthor, with Alfred Rappaport, of Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns.

William Green is the author of "The Great Minds of Investing."  He has written for The New Yorker, Time, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Bloomberg, and The Economist.  He edited the Asian, European, Middle Eastern and African editions of Time.

Tren Griffin works at Microsoft.  Previously, he was a partner at Eagle River, a private equity firm controlled by Craig McCaw, with investments in the telecommunication and software industries, including McCaw Cellular, Nextel, Nextel Partners, XO Communications, Teledesic, and many start-up firms.  His early career included five years working and living as a business consultant in Korea and Australia.  Tren blogs about investing and other topics at 25iq.com.  He is the author of The Global Negotiator: Building Strong Business Relationships Anywhere in the World; Korea, The Tiger Economy; Taiwan's Economy; Ah Mo: Legends from the Northwest; and More Ah Mo.

Kabir Sehgal is the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of five books including Coined: The Rich Life of Money And How Its History Has Shaped Us.  He has written for MarketWatch, New York Observer, TheStreet, CNBC, Quartz, ZeroHedge, and Atlanta Business Chronicle.  He has appeared on CNN, PBS, NPR, C-SPAN, Bloomberg, CNBC, Fox News.  He was a vice president at J.P. Morgan and is a Grammy winning producer.

After serving as a Captain in the United States Marine Corps, Dr. Gray received a PhD, and was a finance professor at Drexel University.  Dr. Gray’s interest in entrepreneurship and behavioral finance led him to found Alpha Architect.  You can learn more about his firm at http://alphaarchitect.com.

Dorie Clark is an Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the author of Reinventing You (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013) and Stand Out (Portfolio/Penguin, 2015), as well as the e-book Stand Out Networking.  A former presidential campaign spokeswoman, she is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, TIME, and Entrepreneur.  Recognized as a “branding expert” by the Associated Press, Inc., and Fortune, Clark is a marketing strategy consultant and speaker for clients including Google, Microsoft, Yale University, Fidelity, and the World Bank.  You can follow her on Twitter @dorieclark and download her free 42-page Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook.

Andrew Palmer is the business affairs editor of The Economist, with responsibility for the business, finance and science sections of the newspaper.  He was previously finance editor, banking editor and Americas editor, among other roles.  He has been with the Economist Group since 1996, and lives in London.

Author Background: Gary Antonacci has over 35 years experience as an investment professional focusing on under-exploited investment opportunities.  His research introduced the investment world to dual momentum, which combines relative strength price momentum with trend following absolute momentum.  Antonacci is recognized as a foremost authority on the practical applications of momentum.

Author Background: Born in Montreal, Gillian Zoe Segal has lived in Manhattan since she was eight years old.  She received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan and a law degree from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.  She is also a photographer.