Treussard Talks.

What does it mean to spend a career looking out for people?

For Chuck Jaffe, financial journalism is about more than explaining markets. It’s about helping people make their own decisions, holding institutions accountable, and making money conversations useful in everyday life.

The longtime financial journalist, author, and host of Money Life joins Jonathan Treussard for a conversation that steps away from market forecasts and toward the work—and the relationships—that give a career lasting meaning.

Chuck reflects on five decades of writing for readers and why the sources who challenge his thinking are often his most valuable. He shares the story of a Kentucky police lieutenant who discovered Money Life while searching for an interview with Jack Bogle and stayed for years, sending Derby pies as his portfolio reached milestones he once thought out of reach. Those connections, Chuck explains, are among the most rewarding parts of his work.

That same spirit carries onto his front porch each Halloween. Trick-or-treaters choose among candy, cash, uncertain rewards, and, this year, a charitable donation. The choices open conversations about risk, preferences, generosity, and why the best answer for one person may not be right for another. Sometimes, getting exactly what you want means choosing three Snickers bars over money.

But the impact doesn’t stop with children. Listeners bring the tradition to their own neighborhoods, parents join the discussions, and one Halloween conversation becomes a connection that matters months later—when a neighbor helps a listener whose car won’t start before a job interview.

Jonathan and Chuck also explore allowances, gifts of stock, and the importance of giving children room to make decisions while mistakes are inexpensive. The goal isn’t simply to build wealth. It’s to build understanding, confidence, and the freedom to make meaningful choices.

The conversation then turns to Chuck’s observations about Super Bowl advertising and corporate vanity, before closing with the show’s signature personal questions—and a glimpse of the family relationships behind his relentless optimism.

What holds it all together is a commitment to helping people: not telling everyone to follow the same path, but giving them the understanding and encouragement to find their own.

You’ll hear us cover:

If this conversation is useful to you, the next step is the Wealth, Empowered newsletter—free, published every two weeks, and written for people who want to think seriously about markets and wealth without the noise. Subscribe at wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com.

Important Disclaimer: Statements by Chuck Jaffe about Super Bowl advertising and subsequent stock performance reflect his own observations and opinions. Treussard Capital Management (TCM) has not independently verified these claims and does not endorse them as a reliable predictor of investment performance. This discussion is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Past performance and historical patterns do not guarantee future results, and future investment performance should not be presumed from these observations.

This podcast is for entertainment and education only. Nothing here is financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of Treussard Capital Management. References to individual securities are for illustrative purposes only and are not investment recommendations. Treussard Capital Management is a registered investment adviser. Please visit treussard.com for additional information and disclosures.

Ari Polychronopoulos has spent nearly two decades building and explaining systematic investment strategies. He joined Research Affiliates in 2008, became a partner, and helped oversee the RAFI index business as assets tracking its strategies approached $200 billion. Following the sale of that business, he now oversees RAFI Indices at VettaFi.

Important Disclaimer: This episode discusses certain investment strategies and their historical performance. Nothing discussed constitutes an endorsement or recommendation, nor should it be considered financial advice. Past performance does not predict future returns.

The market-cap-weighted index is often treated as the neutral starting point of investing. But it contains a mechanical rule: as a company’s share price rises, so does its weight. That rule mattered during the technology bubble, when a small group of increasingly expensive companies came to dominate the market—and it matters again today as major indexes approach similar levels of concentration.

In this conversation, Jonathan Treussard and Ari trace the development of fundamental indexing as an alternative: weighting companies according to economic measures such as sales, cash flow, dividends, and book value, then rebalancing against those anchors as market prices move. They also work through factor investing in plain language—including why value and momentum can both exist, why an expensive company is not necessarily a growth company, and how systematic strategies occupy the territory between traditional active and passive investing.

The conversation then turns to the promises made by newer investment products. ESG can help investors express genuine preferences, but it should not be confused with an independent source of return. Covered-call and defined-outcome strategies can produce attractive distributions or reshape downside exposure, but only by changing the pattern of risks and rewards.

What holds the conversation together is a simple discipline: look past the label and understand the mechanics. “Passive,” “ESG,” “growth,” and “income” are descriptions—not explanations.

You’ll hear us cover:

If this conversation is useful to you, the next step is the Wealth, Empowered newsletter—free, published every two weeks, and written for people who want to think seriously about markets and wealth without the noise. Subscribe at wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com.

This podcast is for entertainment and education only. Nothing here is financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of Treussard Capital Management. Treussard Capital Management is a registered investment advisor. Please visit treussard.com for additional information and disclosures.

Three seemingly unrelated stories have dominated markets since January: a collapse in software valuations traders nicknamed SaaS-mageddon, a South Korean stock market swinging harder than Bitcoin, and a hedge fund named Situational Awareness down tens of billions of dollars in days.

Jonathan Treussard connects the threads with Kiara Galvin, an economics undergraduate serving as guest teaching assistant for the episode, working through how AI is reshaping not just which companies win and lose, but how markets themselves behave — from pricing power to leverage to the cost of borrowed money.

The conversation covers why software's decades-long pricing power is eroding, why identifying AI's winners has proven far harder than identifying its losers, how a concentrated market like Korea's gets pulled into a frenzy, and what actually happens on the other end of a margin call — including how Ken Griffin of Citadel stepped in when Situational Awareness ran out of runway.

In this episode:

This podcast is for entertainment and education only. Nothing here is financial advice. Treussard Capital Management is a registered investment advisor. Please visit treussard.com for additional information and disclaimers.

Ludovic Phalippou has spent twenty-five years studying one subject, every day, from every angle. Private equity for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as he puts it.

A Professor of Financial Economics at Oxford's Saïd Business School, he has read the limited partnership agreements, reconstructed the fee arithmetic, testified before the House of Lords, and built the models behind widely cited private-market return assumptions.

He is also, by his own account, not especially popular with the industry he studies.

In this conversation, Jonathan Treussard sits down with Phalippou to work through the actual mechanics of the asset class.

What holds the conversation together is a single discipline: separating what an investment has returned from what it will, and refusing to let the first quietly stand in for the second.

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This podcast is for entertainment and education only. Nothing here is financial advice. The views and figures expressed by guests are their own and do not reflect the views of Treussard Capital Management. Treussard Capital Management is a registered investment advisor. Please visit treussard.com for additional information and disclaimers.

Conscious Leadership, Curiosity, and Culture by Design — with Kaley Klemp | Treussard Talks (E26)

Most cultures aren't built. They emerge. A founder has an idea, recruits two friends, and the three of them live and breathe the mission until it works. Nobody stops to ask what values they're building on. Nobody writes down who gets to make the call when there's a jump ball. And then the firm grows, the osmosis stops working, and the culture they didn't design starts running the show.

Kaley Klemp has spent her career helping leaders see that clearly — and do something about it. She is the co-author of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership and has worked with organizations from YPO member companies to Research Affiliates, where she and I first met over a decade ago. The conversation that follows is about what it actually takes to lead with intention: in firms, in partnerships, in families, and in the relationship you have with your own wealth.

What We Cover in This Conversation:

Disclaimer: The content of "Treussard Talks" is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Treussard Capital Management or its affiliates. Listeners should consult with their own financial advisor before making any investment decisions. For full disclosures, visit treussard.com.

Stay Connected

This podcast is for entertainment and education only. Nothing here is financial advice. Treussard Capital Management is a registered investment advisor. Please visit our website www.treussard.com for additional information and disclaimers.

Eduardo Repetto is the Chief Investment Officer of Avantis Investors, the systematic investment firm he founded in 2019 that now manages more than $125 billion. Before Avantis, Eduardo was Co-CEO and Co-CIO at Dimensional Fund Advisors, where he worked alongside Eugene Fama and Ken French. He holds a Ph.D. in Aeronautics from Caltech.

The history of investing has been a slow march from artisanal to systematic. Markowitz gave us the framework. Fama and French gave us the factors. The toolkit Eduardo has spent his career building is what happens when those ideas get implemented at scale — broadly diversified, daily-managed, transparent, and priced to respect the investor. In the industry, we sometimes call it "core and bore." The "bore" is the point.

We also talk about ownership. Avantis sits inside American Century, whose controlling shareholder is the Stowers Institute for Medical Research — an endowment built from the donated shares of a cancer-survivor founder, funding fundamental research that grant cycles rarely sustain. Eduardo describes it as "taking one for society."

And we get into discipline. Liquid wrappers around illiquid assets. Thematic ETFs that turn out to hold the Magnificent Seven in disguise. The behavioral pull to bail in a drawdown. Eduardo's framing — build the expectation of volatility into the journey the way a traveler builds in traffic on the way to the airport — is the kind of anchor a client can actually hold on to in a hard moment.

Eduardo is unhurried, undramatic, and uninterested in selling you on a person. He believes in the process, not in himself.

You'll hear us cover:

If this conversation is useful to you, the next step is the Wealth, Empowered newsletter — free, published every two weeks, written for people who want to think seriously about markets and wealth without the noise. Subscribe at wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com.

Disclaimer: The content of Treussard Talks is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guest and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Treussard Capital Management or its affiliates. Listeners should consult with their own financial advisor before making any investment decisions. For full disclosures, visit treussard.com.

Newsletter — Wealth, Empowered: https://wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com/

Website: https://www.treussard.com/

Andrea Eisfeldt holds the Laurence D. and Lori W. Fink Endowed Chair in Finance at UCLA Anderson and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, trained under John Cochrane, Lars Hansen, and Doug Diamond — three names that account for multiple Nobel Prizes between them. Her research covers intangible capital, liquidity, human capital compensation, and what AI is doing to firm values and labor markets.

The accounting data that underlies most factor investing was built for an economy that no longer exists. The companies that dominate markets today run on software, customer relationships, and engineering talent. None of it shows up on the balance sheet the way it should. Andrea has spent the better part of two decades building the tools to correct for that — and the implications are significant.

We also get into liquidity. Why it dries up in bad times. Why that is structural, not accidental. And how the current stress in private credit fits a pattern that goes all the way back to her dissertation.

Andrea is an eternal optimist. Her optimism is grounded in mechanisms, not sentiment.

You'll hear us cover:

If this conversation is useful to you, the next step is the Wealth, Empowered newsletter — free, published every two weeks, written for people who want to think seriously about markets and wealth without the noise. Subscribe at wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com.

Disclaimer: The content of Treussard Talks is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guest and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Treussard Capital Management or its affiliates. Listeners should consult with their own financial advisor before making any investment decisions. For full disclosures, visit treussard.com.

Newsletter — Wealth, Empowered: https://wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com/

Website: https://www.treussard.com/

The conventional tools of monetary policy assume the central bank is in charge. What happens when the debt burden gets large enough that it isn't? At some point — and no one knows exactly when — raising rates stops cooling the economy and starts feeding it, because the interest expense on the debt itself becomes a source of stimulus. That's fiscal dominance. It's not a theoretical curiosity. It's the logical destination of a decade of spending without restraint.

Jim Masturzo has been thinking about this carefully. As CIO of Research Affiliates — the firm behind one of the most widely used asset allocation frameworks in the world — he spends his days asking what today's market and economic circumstances imply for the decade ahead. We recorded this conversation on February 25, 2026, days before the US–Iran war began. We weren't talking about the news. We were talking about the structure underneath it. That structure hasn't changed. If anything, it's more visible now.

You'll hear us cover:

If this conversation resonates, there's more where it came from. Wealth, Empowered is my newsletter — published twice a month. Just rigorous but accessible thinking about markets and wealth, and what it actually means to manage money with purpose. Written for people who want to understand what's happening, not just be told what to do about it.

Subscribe: https://wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com/

More about Treussard Capital Management LLC and how I work with clients at: https://www.treussard.com/

Disclaimer: This content is for informational and educational purposes only and is not financial advice. Views are those of the host and guest. Consult your own advisor before making investment decisions. Full disclosures: https://www.treussard.com/

Wall Street is building a trillion-dollar business around slashing the tax bills of wealthy investors. The innovations are real. So are the risks. This conversation is about how to think clearly about both.

Erkko Etula built his career at the intersection of academic finance and institutional practice — MIT, Harvard, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a decade at Goldman Sachs rebuilding the wealth management investment process from the ground up, and ultimately founding Brooklyn Investment Group.

We start where his research started: what broker-dealer balance sheets reveal about risk appetite in the system, and why the overnight repo market remains one of the most important and least-watched corners of finance. We then move to what Erkko spent his Goldman years solving — how to manage a taxable portfolio holistically, treating tax efficiency not as an afterthought but as a structural input from the start.

That work led him to what he considers one of the most consequential innovations in wealth management since the invention of the ETF: tax-advantaged long-short strategies. We get into the mechanics carefully, because the mechanics matter — especially when markets are volatile and the institution renting you balance sheet capacity changes its mind.

What We Cover:

Risk appetite and balance sheets: Why broker-dealer leverage is a better real-time signal of systemic stress than many other economic indicators — and what that research revealed when Lehman collapsed.

The ETF timeline: Mutual funds, ETFs, direct indexing — each step brings taxable investors closer to keeping more of what they make. Where long-short fits in that arc.

Direct indexing 2.0: What happens when you combine tax-loss harvesting with long-short portfolio construction — and why the potential power of that combination is measured in months, not years.

Risk management first: The three-layer framework — benchmark beta, tracking error, concentration risk — and why communicating tail risk matters in this context.

Balance sheet as rented space: Why leverage works until it doesn't, and what that means for investors in these strategies right now.

Building Brooklyn: What Erkko learned leaving Goldman — about humility, team, and the relationship between certainty and disappointment.

Erkko Etula is CEO of Brooklyn Investment Group and winner of the Smith Breeden Prize for Outstanding Capital Markets Research.

Want to go deeper? Jonathan's newsletter Wealth, Empowered. covers markets, wealth, and what it all means for sophisticated families. Free to subscribe at wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com

Treussard Talks is for entertainment and education only. Nothing here is financial advice. Treussard Capital Management is a registered investment advisor. Visit treussard.com for additional information and disclaimers.

The Strait of Hormuz was always the thought experiment. The scenario commodities traders ran when they needed a stand-in for the unimaginable. Fifteen to twenty miles of waterway. One fifth of the world's oil. Now it isn't a thought experiment anymore.

Nic Johnson spent years at PIMCO as head of commodities, managing large commodities portfolios. Before that, he was a research fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is one of the more technically grounded people I know on this topic — and a friend. We recorded this conversation two and a half weeks into the disruption. Not to predict what comes next. Neither of us knows. But to understand what is actually happening, and where to look if you want a clearer picture than the headlines are giving you.

What we cover:

Understanding your wealth requires understanding the world your wealth lives in. This is that conversation.

The content of Treussard Talks is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Treussard Capital Management or its affiliates. Listeners should consult with their own financial advisor before making any investment decisions. For full disclosures, visit treussard.com.

Stay Connected

This podcast is for entertainment and education only. Nothing here is financial advice. Treussard Capital Management is a registered investment advisor. Please visit our website treussard.com for additional information and disclaimers.