Bob Froehlich, owner of the Kane County (Illinois) Cougars minor league ball club and a veteran observer of macro and markets, discusses with co-hosts Jeffrey Sherman and Samuel Lau, among other ideas, his favorable 12-to-18-month outlook for global growth and stocks (14:01, 24:32), the place for commodities in investor portfolios (22:00) and the re-imagining of corporations (31:02) as they evolve for hybrid home-office work environments and face the need to take stands on pressing societal issues.

The upbeat outlook for growth and equities comes with at least one caveat. While losing no sleep over what the Federal Reserve might or might not do (18:35), Dr. Froehlich keeps a weather eye for inflation (14:51). Rising prices, he says, form “a headwind that we really have to pay very, very close attention to because that changes the dynamics quickly for any long-term equity investor.”

As do all Sherman Show guests, Dr. Bob, as he is known especially among business executives and financial professionals in the Chicago metropolitan area, shares how he came to his career in markets and investing, a career preceded early in his adulthood with summer jobs working in Pennsylvania’s steel mills and two years playing center field for the Independent Minor League North Side Mets in the Greater Pittsburgh Semi-Pro Federation Baseball League.

The Kane County Cougars owner and CEO also talks about the business of pro baseball with Jeff Sherman, one of the San Francisco Giants faithful and, in his varsity days in Bakersfield, California, catcher for the South High Rebels. “I’ve always been a numbers guy,” Dr. Bob recalls (1:42). “So it was a natural transition for me to go from Wall Street to baseball. It’s just the type of type of numbers I focused on were way different. Instead of worrying about GDP and inflation, now I worry about attendance and how may beers are being sold on a given day. But it’s still a numbers game.”

DoubleLine’s Jeffrey Sherman and Sam Lau welcome Emidio Checcone, the firm’s portfolio manager of actively managed equity value and core strategies. Mr. Checcone shares how his history in the business, including experience at both growth- and value-focused shops, informs his investment philosophy and influences his differentiated equity research approach. He also highlights how incorporating DoubleLine’s macro viewpoints into his bottom-up research process confers added insights. The trio discusses the equities market’s performance amid the pandemic and whether we have seen “peak earnings growth” (starts at 6:01), how this period of unprecedented fiscal stimulus impacts traditional valuation metrics (11:12) and what it would mean for equities if the Fed tapers its bond purchases (14:00). They also examine the risk of inflation and even stagflation (18:24); the relative performance and attractiveness of value versus growth stocks (24:37); and current portfolio positioning within each strategy, including a discussion of some larger individual holdings (28:25). This episode was recorded Aug. 24, 2021.

Elizabeth Burton, Chief Investment Officer of the Hawaii Employees Retirement System (HIERS), discusses her management of the pension’s $21 billion in assets with DoubleLine’s Jeffrey Sherman, Deputy Chief Investment Officer, and Samuel Lau, Portfolio Manager. Among other issues, Ms. Burton discusses her objective as CIO (3:57) “to achieve our target return within the given level of risk the board sets out, which would be 7% target return…. At the end of the day, the Number One thing I have to do is protect retirement benefits.” That task, she says, is “getting more challenging,” particularly given the prospect for higher inflation. Whiles HIERS a couple years ago increased its private equity allocation from 6% to 13%, she does not anticipate a further increase given signs of froth in that asset class (17:36). “I don’t want to call a bubble here,” Ms. Burton says, “if you look at the definition of a bubble, there’s a lot of signals that might be happening.”

Regarding her macroeconomic outlook (33:54), Ms. Burton doubts inflation will be “transitory. I do think it’s a little bit longer lasting. I don’t have a ton of faith in the Fed to reign it in.” She expects the “helicopter money,” and its flow into the equity market, to persist longer than many people expect (42:38). “My concern’s more on the regulatory side. What is this administration going to do if this does go south?”

Gregory M. Dowling, Chief Investment Officer and Head of Research at FEG Investment Advisors, joins The Sherman Show. FEG is an independent investment consultant and provider of outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO) services to primarily nonprofit institutional clients throughout the United States. In this episode recorded July 27, 2021, with hosts Jeffrey Sherman and Samuel Lau, Mr. Dowling discusses among other topics how he entered his career, the quest for alpha in a time of overvalued public fixed income and equity markets, FEG’s approach to selecting active asset managements, developing individual profiles of clients to manage within their risk tolerance and time horizons, the new momentum to social awareness in client investment objectives and macro and market outlooks.

Paul Christopher, Head of Global Market Strategy for Wells Fargo Investment Institute (WFII), covers with co-hosts Jeffrey Sherman and Samuel Lau his macro outlook for growth and inflation, the case for cyclicals, small caps and value in the U.S. stock market, commodities as a current “tactical favorite,” shortening duration for fixed income allocations and the suitability of a managed allocation to cryptocurrencies for qualified investors among other topics. While Mr. Christopher suggests the reprise of inflation might be stickier than foreseen by the Federal Reserve, he does not expect a return to 1970s rates of rising prices. “Inflation is really going to go with growth,” he notes. “And if we’re at peak growth, then you have to figure we’re at peak inflation.” The WFII, he says, expects inflation settling in at 2% to 2½%. “We don’t think that the market is worried about the Fed letting inflation go too far. That’s why the Treasury curve flattened the way it has.” Thus, Mr. Christopher likes stocks better than bonds, although he still recommends some allocation to shorter duration munis, corporates and preferreds to provide some ballast against the volatility of equities. This edition of the Sherman Show was recorded July 13, 2021.

Entrepreneur, author, philanthropist and world-famous life and business strategist Tony Robbins joins DoubleLine’s Jeffrey Sherman and Samuel Lau for a special edition of “The Sherman Show.” Perhaps best known for his efforts to empower millions of people through his audio programs, educational videos and live seminars, Mr. Robbins also owns through his holding company more than 100 businesses with annual sales of $8 billion. He has been honored by Accenture as one of the Top 50 Business Intellectuals in the World; Harvard Business Press as one of the Top 200 Business Gurus; and American Express as one of the Top Six Business Leaders in the World. In a cover article on Mr. Robbins, Fortune magazine named him the “CEO Whisperer,” and he has been named in the Top 50 of Worth Magazine’s 100 most powerful people in global finance for three consecutive years.

Among other topics in this episode, Mr. Robbins discusses his daily morning mindset and physical-conditioning regimens to prepare him for the day ahead, modeling super-successful people to uncover the clues to their success and the three fundamental pieces to the creation of businesses that thrive for the long term. In his conversation with Messrs. Sherman and Lau, Mr. Robbins shares moments from his life as a child and as a young man that transformed his understanding of life. Among these, the direct experience of communism during a tour at age 23 of the Soviet Union opened his eyes to the creative power of free enterprise. And at age 8, at a time when his family could barely afford to feed itself, he tells how the kindness of a grocery deliveryman showed him some people do indeed care for the lives of complete strangers. That epiphany would grow into a philanthropic campaign that feeds millions in the U.S., and one day, Mr. Robbins believes, billions of people around the world.

DoubleLine’s Jeffrey Sherman and Samuel Lau welcome highly rated and much awarded analyst Jim Reid, Deutsche Bank Global Head of Credit Strategy and Thematic Research, to “The Sherman Show,” recorded June 15, 2021. The inflation debate quickly takes center stage, and Mr. Sherman praises Deutsche’s analysis for putting out both the transitory view and the higher-over-time perspective. Mr. Reid says that in his 17 years doing Deutsche research, he’s never experienced such as divisive subject. The bottom-up numbers support the transitory view, he says. However, other analysts on his team see a structural change going on that while hard to model points to a new economic orthodoxy “that is quite tolerant toward both high government spending and money printing.” The trio also discusses, among other topics, if debt still matters, whether the boom-bust cycle is over, pricing power and wage pressures, and will the Fed be stuck holding its large balance sheet forever. On that last subject, Mr. Reid says, “I’ve had a longstanding view that central banks will be buying government bonds for the rest of my career,” as the once extraordinary use of QE measures has become ordinary.

Lori Heinel, global chief investment officer at State Street Global Advisors, joins this episode of “The Sherman Show” in a wide-ranging discussion of State Street’s tactical investment allocations, the evolution of institutional and retail investing, the place of commodities and alternatives in portfolios, cryptocurrencies and blockchain, State Street’s organizational and decision-making evolution in a post-COVID-19/remote working world, and other topics. This episode was recorded April 20, 2021.

Ms. Heinel oversees SSGA’s investment capabilities from index funds and exchange-traded funds to active, multi-asset class solutions and alternative investments. She leads an investment team of more than 600 professionals.

Louis Gave, founding partner and CEO of @GavekalResearch, tells DoubleLine’s Jeffrey Sherman and Samuel Lau that the price shifts of three key assets is not a “dead-cat bounce” but “the start of a new trend” in markets that will require investors to make fundamental changes in portfolio allocations if they are to succeed. Hong Kong-based Gavekal Research provides research on global macroeconomics, financial markets and asset allocation. This episode of “The Sherman Show” was recorded on April 6, 2021.

In the past three to five years, Mr. Gave observes, the markets have been priced to a “structurally rising dollar. I think this is now over. We’re now in an environment of a structurally weak dollar. We were in an environment of bond yields that were flat to down. In the past six months, we are now in an environment of bond yields moving higher. We were in an environment really since 2013-14 of falling oil prices, and I also think this is over. So this means the investment environment is changing before our eyes.”

As a warning sign that U.S. policy is out of balance, Mr. Gave points to a moribund dollar despite a backdrop of rising Treasury yields, recovering U.S. economic growth and the country making better progress than most of the rest of the world in vaccinating its population for COVID-19. “The market is telling me that the policy settings in the U.S. are way too loose, both on the fiscal side and the monetary policy side.” Mr. Gave suggests that massive debt-financed fiscal deficits in fact mean the Treasury issuance has outstripped foreign investors’ and U.S. savers’ appetite for bonds and “captured” the Federal Reserve as the incremental buyer for the foreseeable future.

Summing up some of the implications of this context for investors, Mr. Gave says, “You’re in a structural bear market on the U.S dollar. You’re in a structural bear market on bonds. And you’re in a structural bull market on energy.”

DoubleLine’s Jeffrey Sherman and Samuel Lau welcome political risk expert Lawrence McDonald, a New York Times bestselling author and regular contributor to CNBC, to “The Sherman Show.” Mr. McDonald is the creator of a finance and politics talk show on RealVision and The Bear Traps Report, a research platform with actionable trade ideas, which he serves up in this episode, recorded March 23, 2021. In addition to tips on shaping your portfolio, Messrs. Sherman, Lau and McDonald discuss the possibility of a supply-side squeeze in commodities, the Federal Reserve addressing inequality by a refocus from supporting assets to boosting the labor force and trillions moving out of tech stocks into value stocks. Of that equity shift, Mr. McDonald says, “I’ve never been more certain about a high-conviction thesis than this.” He also anticipates the Democrat-controlled Congress in the fourth quarter will use the reconciliation process to pass another trillion-dollar measure in the form of an infrastructure bill, widening already historic debt. As far as the Fed instituting yield curve control, Mr. McDonald sees it as inevitable while Mr. Sherman is skeptical Fed officials want to go down that slippery slope.