The Sherman Show host Jeffrey Sherman, deputy CIO of DoubleLine, closes out his end-of-the-year guest tour on The Investors First Podcast, produced by CFA Society Orlando. Investors First hosts Colby Donovan and Steve Curley get Mr. Sherman’s take on the investment landscape heading into the new year, including, the price of money (4:06), inflation (6:15), whether or not he expects a Fed pivot (9:06) and where he sees opportunity in the credit markets (18:36). On 2023 being a challenging year, Mr. Sherman notes, “It’s not challenged from investing. It’s just challenged from the uncertainty and the direction that investors are going to want to tilt their portfolio.”

The three also discuss, among other topics, the strength of the U.S. dollar (25:11) and expected returns for equities and fixed income (30:42). “I think it’s very easy to put a relatively high-quality credit book together that has a 6-handle yield,” Mr. Sherman says, “and it’s probably a high-6 handle.” This episode was recorded Dec. 19, 2022.

The Sherman Show host Jeffrey Sherman, deputy CIO of DoubleLine, again plays the role of guest with a visit to FEG Insight Bridge and host Greg Dowling, head of research and CIO at FEG, an institutional investment consultant and OCIO firm serving non-profits across the U.S. This episode begins with a discussion of Mr. Sherman’s podcast, including the decision to launch the show, how it boosts the profile of DoubleLine and Sam Lau’s role as the brains of The Sherman Show. Mr. Dowling then interviews Mr. Sherman on his background in math and as an educator, the importance of teaching STEM and Mr. Sherman’s transition into the finance world (5:31). “I was reading that these people on Wall Street made money,” says Mr. Sherman, who was thinking of going into academia. “They made a lot more than a professor did, and it took a lot shorter time.” The two also discuss the fixed income sector and yield’s return after a long absence (16:09), the Fed focus on fighting inflation (20:14), Mr. Sherman’s outlook on the possibility of recession (26:35) and why the Fed should step back on rate hikes (31:23).

Messrs. Dowling and Sherman also talk the status of consumer strength (36:00); the U.S., its dollar and the rest of the world (39:27); and why today’s inflationary environment has sparked retro ’80s (not ’70s!) comparisons (47:05).

The Sherman Show flips the script as DoubleLine Deputy CIO Jeffrey Sherman visits The Acid Capitalist podcast, where Hugh Hendry promotes iconoclastic thinking and interviews figures from the world of investment. The episode begins with Mr. Sherman discussing his career and role at DoubleLine (1:53) before Messrs. Sherman and Hendry get into how an investment firm operates, including team composition and harnessing the talents of quirky people (6:06) so that you stand out in your industry – but not too far. “You’ve got to be sexy enough, right, to get people to have interest,” Mr. Sherman notes. “You can’t be so sexy that no one wants to come to the party with you.” They also get into the importance of nurturing junior members of a firm (12:48), the value of not just copying what your industry peers are doing (16:54) and how “ruthless” a manager has to be (22:36). “If we had some roadmap that was guaranteed to success, then we would all be on it, and probably it wouldn’t be as successful,” Mr. Sherman says about the challenges of forming an effective team.

Mr. Hendry also questions Mr. Sherman about what it is like to operate in a down environment, with the two getting into portfolio positioning when clients are understandably anxious (27:44), the outlook for 2023 (35:52) and naïve extrapolators, who try to read too much into recent history (52:48). The Fed looms large in their discussion, with both of them noting the agency’s data dependency and history of lagging responses. “The last thing is always the Fed to get it. It’s the guy at the end of the queue,” Mr. Hendry notes. “You can't wait for the Fed.”

Ashok Varadhan, Global Co-Head of the Global Markets Division, Goldman Sachs appears Oct. 17, 2022, on The Sherman Show with hosts Jeffrey Sherman and Samuel Lau. After discussing his career in markets (2:48), which began with the last protracted Federal Reserve tightening campaign (1994-1995), Mr. Varadhan assesses the current Fed’s monetary management (9:20) and shares his leading indicators for the economy (14:36). Among further topics, Messrs. Varadhan, Sherman and Lau discuss the state of credit markets (17:44), the rising cost of leverage due to quantitative tightening (22:02), the dominance of the U.S. dollar (29:54) and the possibility that equities can remain expensive and become more expensive (35:56).

Philip Huber, Chief Investment Officer of the registered investment advisory firm Savant Wealth Management, discusses asset allocation and alternative investments on Sept. 13, 2022, with hosts Jeffrey Sherman and Samuel Lau. Mr. Huber is the author of “The Allocator’s Edge: A modern guide to alternative investments and the future of diversification.” The discussion begins (1:58) with Mr. Huber’s career in asset management. Then Messrs. Huber, Sherman and Lau discuss Mr. Huber’s views on the appropriateness, risks and uses of interval funds (13:11); his use of liquid and semi-liquid alternative investments, including managed futures, diversified arbitrage strategies, floating-rate catastrophe reinsurance assets, real assets and direct lending (21:23); the importance of a core allocation to bonds, even in a time of tightening monetary policy and rising rates (24:47); Savant’s long-term tilt to value in its equity allocation (26:44); and innovations in alternative investments (31:55), including the development of true private markets for wealth managers and, in the retail space, the advent of fractionalized ownership and trading of collectibles, paintings and other illiquid assets via consumer apps.

Barry Ritholtz, Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, appears on The Sherman Show with hosts Jeffrey Sherman and Samuel Lau, live Sept. 13, 2022, at the Future Proof Wealth Festival in Huntington Beach. Among other issues, Mr. Ritholtz discusses how investment advisers (6:46) should prepare clients for the cycles and vicissitudes of markets, attractive yields in municipal bonds (9:52) and the importance of an allocation to equities even to people who are well into their retirement.

The conversation turns to the Federal Reserve (12:09), including the flaws in models driving monetary policy. Messrs. Sherman and Lau ask their guest on his approach to building portfolios (21:30), including investment products and markets that he favors and avoids. In addition to munis, Mr. Ritholtz says (35:38), “Now to me, the best inflation hedge in the out years is going to be equities. Seems companies have the ability to pass along cost increases, or just say, ‘We don’t have any cost increases, but who is going to notice? Raise prices.’” The conversationalists discuss the long-lasting changes (39:45) remote work might bring to wages, the labor force and core urban market office real estate. Mr. Ritholtz shares how his firm (43:27) offers a spectrum of robo advisory, robo plus human advisory and full-time advisory providing the full suite of services, depending on client profile.

Jeffrey Sherman and Sam Lau welcome Brenda Vingiello, chief investment officer at Silicon Valley-based wealth management firm Sand Hill Global Advisors, to the latest episode of The Sherman Show, recorded Sept. 13, 2022, during the Future Proof Wealth Festival in Huntington Beach. Ms. Vingiello kicks off the podcast by sharing her career history and how she moved from the buy side to the advisory side at Sand Hill, where she and her team rely on the discipline from their institutional experience to guide their clients (1:30). The group then discuss what Ms. Vingiello and Sand Hill think of traditional asset classes versus the more private markets (3:53), how clients are responding to the firm’s outlook on inflation (6:58) and what the current environment means for Sand Hill clients who have retired or are getting closer to retiring (9:19). In their talk, Ms. Vingiello notes how commodities served as a “lifesaver” within Sand Hill’s diversified allocation coming into this year and how most of Sand Hill’s client base just likes traditional stocks and bonds.

Other topics covered include opportunities in the stock market (10:14), Sand Hill’s stance on the possibility of recession (11:44), the effectiveness of FOMC messaging (14:00) and putting big vacation plans on hold for the next year (16:34). In describing her relationship with clients, Ms. Vingiello says, “Such an important piece of what we do is helping people to not make a bad emotional decision at the wrong time with the market.”

Jeffrey Sherman and Sam Lau welcome Allen Sukholitsky, chief investment officer at art investment platform Masterworks, to DoubleLine’s The Sherman Show to discuss art as an asset class. Mr. Sukholitsky kicks off the discussion recounting how his background in researching asset classes led him to move from what he calls “traditional investment management” into the art space (1:30). They then get into the democratization of the art investment space (4:18), how Masterworks’ proprietary database guides its investment process (6:24), the price range the firm focuses on and why it prefers post-World War II pieces to Old Masters (10:53) as well as Damien Hirst’s Sharpe ratio – “literally close to zero,” says Mr. Sukholitsky (13:50).

Other topics covered by the group include a look at selling and momentum strategies in the art space (15:32), art’s correlation profile and performance as a portfolio diversifier (19:27) and portfolio management (26:33). On investing in NFTs, Mr. Sukholitsky says that Masterworks has not figured out how to value digital art, noting, “I’m not sure anybody has sorted that question out.” This episode was recorded Aug. 30, 2022.

Todd Rosenbluth, head of research at VettaFi, an ETF data and analytics company, joins The Sherman Show on Aug. 9, 2022. The talk with hosts Jeffrey Sherman and Samuel Lau begins (1:13) with Mr. Rosenbluth discussing his career that progressively saw him advance from client adviser to equities analyst to mutual fund and exchange-traded fund analyst to director of ETF research. Mr. Rosenbluth describes (3:08) the regrouping of ETF Trends, ETF Database, $14 billion of assets in index strategies and other business lines under the newly branded name VettaFi.

Turning to the state of the ETF world (6:53), Mr. Rosenbluth notes the U.S. market totals $7 trillion in assets, “boosted by $900 billion of net inflows in 2021. We are on pace to probably have about $600 billion of money go into ETFs this year,” which for inflows would make 2022 “the second strongest year ever.” Where the money is going (9:16) has been interesting, he says, with dividend ETFs enjoying a record year, and covered-call strategies and defensive equity strategies focused on the real estate sector also attracting assets.

After the hellish first half of 2022 for fixed income, Mr. Rosenbluth says (11:58), “Certainly tax-loss harvesting is playing a role.” But he also notes that “money is going into both the short end, ultrashort ETFs have been relatively popular,” and investment grade and high yield bond ETFs. While the ETF marketplace has been much quicker (21:21) than mutual funds to roll out niche and thematic products, Mr. Rosenbluth remains impressed by the prudence of advisers in limiting these products to the edges of diversified core bond ETF holdings.

David Wong, Managing Director and head of the Portfolio Solutions Group at Toronto- and Montreal-based CIBC Asset Management, appears Aug. 2, 2022, as a guest with Sherman Show hosts Jeffrey Sherman and Samuel Lau. Among other topics, Mr. Wong discusses the differences between the far more fragmented banking system in the U.S. versus in Canada where the “Big Five,” including Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (2:30), have 80% market share; $200 billion CIBC Asset Management’s history and business (3:41); his role heading the firm’s manager research team (5:35), which analyzes investment managers across the globe and the firm’s own internal investment strategies “to find the best solutions for clients that best fulfill their objectives.”

While cautioning against “over-optimized” statistical approaches that work only in a back-tested manner for evaluating investments and investment managers, Mr. Wong describes (8:26) the portfolio solutions team’s analytical process, starting with long-term forecast modeling to help determine strategic asset class allocations. “From that, there’s a bit of an optimization, a bit of an art, a knowledge and awareness of the global markets in terms of the market-cap weightings out there, what’s the opportunity set. And then we’ll supplement that with kind of that subjective assessment of where the puck might go.”

Messrs. Wong, Sherman and Lau (19:25) devote much of their discussion to the art and science of selecting individual investment managers – an endeavor Mr. Wong says that is “more effortful than people want to believe.” He emphasizes the importance of going beyond the checkbox of manager credentials to assess their humility “and that open mindedness to know when they’re wrong.” He says gaining that insight into candidate managers that can only come through direct interviews with them. “Probably the biggest thing people get wrong” in the search for good forecasters (22:58), David Wong says, “is looking at past performance and all its variants” through simplistic attribute substitution and rear-focused metrics such as active share and R^2.