The Question Is...

The debate over value versus growth stocks has eclipsed a style that has outperformed them both over the last two decades: quality. But "quality" is one of those words that every investor wants to be associated with ̶ so what does it mean to be a true quality investor? In this episode, Louis Florentin-Lee, a Managing Director and Portfolio Manager/Analyst on the International Quality Growth strategy, Global Equity Select strategy, and others, describes how he and his team define quality, what makes the style a compelling investment choice, and what any of it has to do with toilets and anime.

US consumers are an important force for global economic growth. As vaccination efforts bring the end of the pandemic in sight, these buyers are flush with nearly $2 trillion in savings. What are they going to spend it on? Jay Levy, a Director and Research Analyst covering the US consumer sector, talks with Ron about how the calculus has changed for consumer companies and those who invest in them coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Women are vastly underrepresented in senior leadership positions at companies and on corporate boards. But is that an investment issue? Marina Leacock, a Director and Portfolio Manager/Analyst on the Minerva Gender Diversity Strategy, certainly thinks so. In this episode, she talks with Ron about why companies with more women on executive teams tend to earn higher returns, why the market hasn’t solved the gender economic gap on its own, and why her strategy insists that companies are financially productive and inclusive.

Since the beginning of 2020, private companies have raised more than $100 billion through special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs. That’s more than all other initial public offerings (IPOs) combined over the same time period. Why are investors and companies looking to go public suddenly flocking to these vehicles? Ron and Dmitri Batsev, a Managing Director and research analyst focused on financial services companies, attempt to demystify SPACs, which are still unknown territory even for many professional investors.

In the 1920s, the end of both World War I and the Spanish influenza brought an explosion in consumption and a burst of technological innovation. Could it happen again in the 2020s? In this episode, Ron and Nathan Cockrell, Co-Director of Research and a senior analyst covering global consumer discretionary companies, discuss whether consumer spending will shoot up as more people are vaccinated against COVID-19 and what such a spending boom might look like.

Many investors conflate transformational change and the emergence of disruptive new companies. But what if we’re thinking about market-bending change all wrong? In the second in a two-part series on long-term investing, Steve Wreford, a Managing Director and Portfolio Manager/Analyst on Lazard’s Global Thematic strategies, discusses why the actions of incumbents are just as important as those of new, disruptive companies; why the healthcare sector is ripe for change and the companies best poised to capitalize on that change may not exist yet; and what the scarcest resource in the investment world is. (Hint: It’s not money.)

Technology, geopolitics, COVID-19 vaccines, and a new approach to monetary policy…let’s just say the next decade seems likely to be vastly different from the one gone by. In this episode, Ron talks to Steve Wreford, a Managing Director and Portfolio Manager/Analyst on our Global Thematic strategies, about why investors tend to throw up their hands at major long-tail risks, why downside risk gets more attention than upside risk, and how the response to the global financial crisis may have inadvertently created the conditions for the coming decade’s single biggest threat to financial markets.

After nine months of living in a pandemic, two vaccines with a 95% efficacy rate have been approved in the US. But that’s only the beginning. These vaccines and possibly others still need to be produced in large enough numbers to vaccinate large swaths of the world population, distributed under difficult conditions, and perhaps most importantly, embraced by the public. In this episode, Ron talks to Lazard’s top healthcare analyst, Rhett Brown, about how all of this could unfold, when an end to the economic and existential misery of COVID-19 could be in sight, and what a return to "normal” might look like.

Massive debt loads, financed by printed money. Once upon a time, that might have described emerging markets, but the tables have turned. Ron asks Arif Joshi, a Managing Director and Portfolio Manager/Analyst on the Emerging Markets Debt team, how investors might know whether developed markets are in danger of using up their credibility with bond investors and finding themselves in a crisis like the ones that befell Russia and many Asian countries in the late 1990s.

It can be hard to make the case for investing in bonds at a time when over $15 trillion worth of outstanding bonds fetch negative yields. In this episode, Yvette Klevan, a Portfolio Manager/Analyst on the Global Fixed Income team, argues that bonds still provide critical ballast to a portfolio and that attractive opportunities are available to those willing to diversify out of developed markets.