Today I spoke with an old friend, Chris Mayer. Chris is the investment director at the Bonner family office. We covered a lot of things including:
- The rise of passive investing and the inevitable consequences of what is almost certainly a bubble.
- How investors are increasingly buying equities and treating them as bond proxies.
- How it’s harder to say which sector is cheap and which isn’t – more than at any time in Chris’ 25 years of investing and why this is the case.
- How we’re in a market which rewards companies for buying back stock and increasing dividends (even to the detriment of the overall financial position of the company) and what Chris focuses on as a consequence.
- Why holding cash is exactly what companies should be doing in this market environment (despite being penalised for it).
- How index weighting is perversely penalising stronger companies relative to their peers.
- Two short ideas he took away from Jim Grant’s recently concluded conference.
- Thoughts on investing in frontier markets.
Direct download link (right-click and choose “Save As”)
Enjoy!
– Chris
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“Balance sheet strength is more important than price paid. It does no good to get a bargain on a zero.” — Chris Mayer
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