In his youth, George Michelakis, was a top 3 global under-20chess player. No surprise he is pretty good at investing too and runs a $2bn long short equity hedge fund out of London. Since 2006, he has compounded capital at a rate of 5.35x vs 3.43k for the MSCI world, on net exposure of 30-45%. That’s an impressive record but astonishingly, he entered his longest-running short position 10 years ago.

We talked about his investing philosophy, his theory about alifestyle recession, why shorting is critical to performance, how he manages the fund and the team, why he focuses on management and why, as in chess, man plus machine or analyst plus AI will beat the lone human, which has profoundimplications for investors.

Dan Rasmussen is the founder and CIO of Verdad Advisers, an unconventional quantitative investment boutique. In this conversation, Steve and Dan agree that private equity and credit look highly risky for the next decade. They debate the value of forecasting, where they have very different views. They similarly disagree on forecast horizons, with Dan favouring near term accuracy and Steve thinking longer term forecasts are more likely to be accurate. They also debate the persistence of growth and discuss Dan’s favourite financial metric.

Steve and Dan have different perspectives on many issueswhich leads to apparently contradictory conclusions but in reality, they don’t disagree – the issue is base rates versus marginal opportunities. Steve and Dan view markets through different lenses, which makes for an interesting discussion.

In this episode with Tom Slater of Baillie Gifford, manager

Anthony Bolton is best known for Fidelity Special Situationsfund’s 19.5% pa returns, 6% above his benchmark, over a 28 year period. He was not only a highly accomplished investor but was both revered and liked by his colleagues. Pragmatic, unfailingly courteous, courageous, and universally popular, he exhibits none of the arrogance that is sometimes exhibited by successful investors with far inferior performance.

In a first for this podcast, this interview was recorded live at the Library of Mistakes in Edinburgh on November 21, 2024, in front of an audience of investors, professional and amateur.

Bill Nygren has been at Harris Associates for over 40 years and considers himself a value investor. Yet his portfolio has owned Netflix, Amazon and Meta recently, while Alphabet is his largest position. Bill explains his unusual but highly effective approach to value investing.

Peter Oppenheimer is chief global equity strategist and head of Macro Research at Goldman Sachs in Europe and the author of two books on market cycles.

His first book, the Long Good Buy is sub-titled Analysing Cycles in Markets. His follow-up book Any Happy Returns, is sub-titled Structural Changes and Super Cycles in Markets and looks at longer term secular trends and the future outlook for economies and markets. Our discussion covers both.

Our episode title refers to Peter’s study of cycles in

John Armitage is a giant in the hedge fund world and in the world of investing more broadly. His firm, Egerton Capital,  celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. In

And Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, the largest single equity owner in the world, explains why John is so highly regarded by his peers.

John is our first podcast guest to return for a second episode.

John Huber is an investor with a small fund managing his family assets and outside capital in a concentrated portfolio.

John has written an excellent blog, Base Hit Investing, for many years, explaining his investing principles.

We discuss these in this episode, including what John looks for in an investment, why he emphasises capital allocation even more today, where he sees the sweet spot in revenue growth, why he likes Alphabet, why he is focused in North American stocks but is now looking at Japan and US small caps and why Floor & Décor is one of his major positions.

Show Notes