Invest Like The Best
Episode 302 A Macro Tour
Invest Like The Best

Episode 302: A Macro Tour

Invest Like The Best

Episode 302

A Macro Tour

Bob Elliott is the CEO and CIO of Unlimited. We cover the relationship between rates and inflation for different asset classes, why we're seeing a return to boring economic cycles, and how to find alpha in private markets through quantitative strategies.

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[00:02:45] - [First question] - The Economic Organization of a POW Camp and key lessons one can learn from the paper

[00:07:22] - The way that supply and demand arrives at a price and how that plays into his thinking about investing across asset classes 

[00:09:58] - Whether or not he has a generalized investing worldview or framework

[00:11:46] - Deciding on what data is signal and matters most when analyzing markets 

[00:15:46] - A crash course on easy money and tight money regimes and the implications of both in a macro environment 

[00:20:28] - The rise and role of inflation and what should be done about it

[00:24:00] - What the next couple of years will look like if we draw lessons from history

[00:30:12] - Why gold could ever belong in someone's portfolio when it doesn’t produce or yield anything back to the investor 

[00:35:08] - Supply and demand constraints and the state of the housing market today 

[00:40:42] - What might happen in future labor markets given our current macro environment

[00:46:27] - Currencies, energy, geopolitics, and what he’s most focused on globally

[00:52:19] - What movements in the charts are worrying him the most 

[00:56:04] - The original “All Weather” portfolio and what one would look like if he built it today

[01:02:05] - How his career has taught him to find talented individuals who might deliver alpha

[01:07:19] - Lessons learned from early-stage and venture investing and thoughts on that world now

[01:12:41] - Why there hasn’t been an iconic early-stage technology investing firm driven by systematic strategies

[01:16:10] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

A Macro Tour

Introduction

Patrick
My guest today is Bob Elliott, the CEO and CIO of Unlimited, which creates low-cost index ETFs for alternative investment strategies that typically cost 2&20. Prior to cofounding Unlimited, Bob was a senior investment executive at Bridgewater Associates where he served on their Investment Committee and led Ray Dalio's personal research team for a decade. His breadth and depth of experience makes him a great person to assess the current macro landscape. We discussed the relationship between rates, inflation and asset classes, Bob's approach to identifying data with the most signal and finished with his view on quantitative strategies in private markets. Please enjoy this great discussion with Bob Elliott.

Bob's Background and Worldview

Patrick
Bob, I've been so looking forward to this conversation, mostly because of your extremely unique background across both breadth and depth of different asset classes and strategies for investing inside of those asset classes. So this is going to be sort of like a tour, if you will, across all that experience. But I found, I think, a very interesting place to start our conversation, which was based on something you shared publicly, which was that you could really learn an incredible amount from a paper called The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp. That definitely popped off the page of me sounding very interesting. Maybe you can describe how you came to that paper and walk us through the key lessons that you take from it.

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