Weekly Highlights: SPACs, All Weather Investing, Howard Marks on the Market, Inflation Expectations

요약 보기

이번 주 영상은 SPAC, 올웨더 투자, 하워드 막스의 시장 코멘트, 인플레이션 기대치를 다룬 주간 리뷰로, 특정 자산의 가격 방향에 대한 명확한 예측은 없다. SPAC(기업인수목적회사)은 제품이나 사업 없이 상장해 자금을 모은 뒤 비상장사를 합병하는 구조로, 전통적 IPO보다 공시가 적고 투자자 보호 장치가 약해 위험하다고 설명했다. 스폰서는 통상 지분 약 20%를 받고 2년 내 합병 대상을 찾지 못하면 자금을 반환해야 한다. SPAC은 스폰서(운영 팀)의 질이 핵심이며, 연예인이나 비전문가가 만든 SPAC은 피하는 것이 좋다는 입장이다. 대부분의 투자자는 잘 아는 산업이 아니라면 옥석이 가려질 때까지 기다리는 편이 낫다고 결론지었다. 올웨더 투자 팟캐스트(Standpoint Funds의 Eric Crittenden 출연)에서는 주식·채권 중심 포트폴리오가 금리 하락기 이후 잘 작동했지만 1970년대처럼 주식과 채권이 함께 하락하는 시기가 있다는 점을 짚었다. 다양한 환경에서 견디는 포트폴리오를 목표로 하며, S&P 500과 비교하면 장기 추종이 어렵다는 단점이 있다. 하워드 막스(Oaktree)는 성장주 투자에 대한 최근 메모에서 가치투자 관점을 재고하는 모습을 보였고, 현재 밸류에이션이 높아 디스트레스드 투자 기회를 찾기 어려운 시기라고 언급했다. 전례 없는 대규모 부양책에 대해서는 역사적 근거가 없으므로 강한 결론을 내리기 어렵다는 입장이다. 인플레이션 기대치 기사 소개에서는 경제학자들 간 의견이 크게 갈렸다. Mankiw는 근원 인플레이션이 12개월간 3%를 넘으면 우려된다고 했고, Summers는 장기 고착·금융 불안·정책 성공을 각 1/3 확률로 제시했으며, Edelberg는 일시적 과열은 잃어버린 경제활동을 메우는 것이라 문제가 아니라고 봤다. 지속적으로 3~4%대 인플레이션이 이어지면 연준의 금리 인상과 경기 둔화 위험이 커질 수 있다는 점이 공통 논점으로 제시됐다. 진행자들은 개인적 견해로 '잘 모르는 영역은 판단을 보류한다'는 태도를 강조했다. 영상 전반에서 특정 종목·지수의 향후 1~3개월 가격 방향에 대한 발언은 나오지 않았다.

다듬은 글

※ 자동 자막 원문(다듬기 전)

01. all right today we're going to talk about some of the most interesting articles we read this week and also our original investing commentary in the podcast we did on valydia's group investor blog for the week of april 15 2021. tomorrow tomorrow's usually or tax day but that was postponed due to the pandemic so if you haven't sort of started your taxes don't worry you're really not behind um anyway so to start out uh i'll just kind of talk about the article that i did and it was more of um an educational piece for me because it's something that uh is happening in the market um and you're hearing a lot about but i just didn't really know too much about sort of the workings of these things and basically i did a very um introductory piece on spax so spax um just briefly they are special purpose acquisition companies and basically what they are are companies that come to the market with no product no business they basically just have a blank check so they have cash that they've raised that they can then use to turn around and usually buy another private company and roll them merge them into the spac so it's a it's a quicker somewhat cheaper way um at least on the surface to bring a company public and in the in the article i took a uh visual visualization from the wall street journal piece that showed just how many specs have come online here over the past year year and a half or so um one of the things that i think that happened during the pandemic is like these ipo road shows and stuff like that kind of shut down but coming you know since last march the market has been very strong so companies are looking for ways to get quick and easy access to the public markets and spax as a vehicle offer companies the ability to do this um and you know everyone's got in i mean you have shaquille o'neal involved with this back you have michael eisner former ceo of disney bill ackman has one of the larger stacks out there uh richard branson alice rodriguez so it's a bunch of like there's good investors here that are in some of these facts but also there's like influencers and personalities that are trying to um sort of drive up interest in these and so you know i just kind of talked about some of the structures in terms of the fees one of the things is that as a sponsor so the team that's behind the stack typically they get like 20 equity in the spec they bring public so it's you know they they're pretty handsomely rewarded once they find a company to purchase um but they only have two years to find a company and if they don't find a company within two years they uh they actually have to give the money back and then i just talked about i think some of the one of the things that i think is sort of maybe being a little bit lost in all this is you know spax don't have to go through the traditional like ipl regulatory um hurdles that you know an ipo would have to and so there's more limited disclosures there's less transparency some of these sponsors can get out and really promote like these ambitious growth rates and and um you know valuations and stuff so i don't know i just think that there's there's sort of some risks here that investors should try to understand and and you know for most people my conclusion was you know unless you're really intimately familiar with maybe the company or the technology or the industry that the spac is actually merging with you know for most people they should probably just put these in the too hard pile and wait until things shake out a little bit more to see you know who the winners are going to be here um so that was my piece this week this was actually a really informative article for me because i know i know very little about specs like for instance i really didn't know how the compensation of the sponsor of the stack worked and you know so you touched on that in the article you know how they take 20 i guess of the deal once they finally find you know their their target acquisition but i think in general you know you have to look at spax sort of as just a vehicle and so really what matters is who's behind the vehicle you know spacks are not necessarily good or bad but the person behind it is is probably important so for instance if warren buffett released the spec which he clearly is never going to do that's probably a spack you may want to take a look at you know if some celebrity who has no business you know releasing us back is doing it you probably want to avoid that one so i think you know it's definitely important understand the fees but it's also important to understand this is just a vehicle that's being used for a specific purpose and so the person behind that vehicle or the team behind that vehicle is really really important what do you think should we take valydia public via spac if we if anyone wants to call us you know call us up we're available so i don't i don't think anybody would be calling though we clearly have a uh you know billion dollar evaluation at this point with our with our podcast traffic and in our in our own minds at least we do right yeah this podcast we started or whatever we think this thing's worth a ton but uh yeah exactly the the market may feel differently than us uh what was the uh podcast this week we did yeah we did a we did a great interview with eric crittenden of standpoint funds um and the topic was all weather investing which i think is really interesting to think about right now because we've had you know if you're most people think investors should just have stocks and they should have bonds and you know if you've been a stock and bond investor since 1980 you've had this massive tailwind where bond your interest rates have been falling the whole time so bonds have just been going up stocks have been doing really well and so you really haven't needed anything else besides that but that sort of misses that there's been big periods in history where stocks and bonds have gone down together you know the 70s being an example you know so there's been these periods where the stocks and bonds weren't necessarily enough to reduce risk and some other things may have added to a portfolio so we we talked to him about the topic of all weather weather investing the types of things that might be in an all-weather portfolio um you know some of the behind-the-scenes details on how you create the portfolio how you weight the positions um and we just talked about the the general pros and cons of that approach and what goes into it so i thought it was a really interesting interview i liked his analogy of the suv he basically you know when he when we were talking about all weather investing he's like you know think back to you know we used to have like the station wagon you would load all the kids up but the station wagon probably wasn't great at you know keeping up with the corvette necessarily on speed or maybe getting through the snow but then you know a corvette it might be great to drive on the highway you know at seven o'clock in the morning and really open it up but you know clearly that's not going to be good in like bad weather so he was kind of working through these examples of like cars and basically he came to like his example of the suv that said you know you can put the kids in it it's going to get you around town it has pretty good you know pretty good speed and so that's kind of like what an all-weather investing portfolio is supposed to do it's really just supposed to be good in any type of environment so that the investor can stay invested in the strategy over time and get the most out of it it's not necessarily gonna be the fastest one it's not gonna be the most powerful one it's not gonna be you know maybe the one that fits the most people but in terms of being diversified for all those different types of environments that's really what an all-weather strategy um is made to do yeah and we we all tend to one of the downsides and the challenges of all weather investing is we all tend to judge ourselves by the s p 500 and so this is such a different approach than the s p 500 it probably shouldn't even be you know judged in the same category as the s p 500 but the challenges of these approaches they look different and there's going to be times where the market's on just a massive run and you're going to be trailing but then there's going to be other times where the market's down a lot and you're doing a lot better so just separating yourself from the s p 500 is probably one of the challenges with this type of approach what article stood out to you this week uh we had a great and there was a great bloomberg interview with howard marks and i thought there you know anytime he speaks i try to listen but you know he's great about the fact that he's he's been willing to pivot and learn over time and i think that's really i don't know if you listen to uh or i listen to it but it's also in writing like his two memos ago he did a memo on growth investing um that that i thought was really really good because it shows that he's sort of evolving on the topic you know he tends to be a value guy like i do and he's sort of rethinking you know how we're valuing these growth companies and maybe what's going on is more justified than all of us thought and that that's a really important characteristic an investor is this ability to sort of take what your core beliefs are and maybe to to rethink them or to look at things in a different way but in this particular article he was just talking about or in this particular interview he was just talking about how things have gotten a lot harder right now you know the things things may have there's certain times with any investment strategy where seems things seem a little easier but with valuations the way they are in the market you know whether you're a distressed investor like he is or whether you're an investor like us things are a lot harder and you know he was talking about how that's when you really distinguish yourself as an investor when you when you go through these periods where things are difficult what you do and how you handle those periods is really important um and then the second point i thought that was really good from there is he he was talking about this this idea that we've never seen stimulus like we've seen like we're seeing right now ever in history and you know one of the things that i think is really important to do and i try to do it myself is whenever you can say anything is going on in the market and we've never seen it before in history you probably can't draw any definitive conclusions about it and that that's what he was talking about so i try to ask myself the question whenever we're going through anything have we ever seen this before and then if i have a strong opinion about how it's going to end i probably shouldn't have that strong opinion because if we've never seen it before none of us know how it's going to end and i think that's that was a really important point with respect to the stimulus he made which is none of us know i mean people there's these obviously doom and gloom people out there who think this all ends in a catastrophe but none of us really know because we've never done it before so there's no evidence from history to show us how this might end yeah i mean given the fact that oaktree's a distressed debt you know distressed company type of investor it's he makes the point in here that you know they're trying to the the fact is every strategy goes in out of favor he says um but you know you have to be resourceful and maintain your standards and it's really challenging when you're a value investor looking for you know cheap assets or cheap stocks or companies and you have sort of what's going on in the market which is driving valuations you know a lot higher but i think his point is you know they're trying to maintain their investment methodology and not you know over pay for stuff but that probably also means that you know and i don't know this for sure but that their you know performance may not be what i don't know but it just may be a challenging time to find those distressed debt type of opportunities to actually put money to work and you know we struggle with that too i mean we're value investors in a lot of our models and what happens when you're a value investor and there are no more values you know what do you do i mean you don't want to necessarily be in cash because the market can keep running for a period of time so it's a challenge you know it becomes like he said in the article or in the interview it becomes much more difficult when when your universe is is smaller because you think things have just run up a lot what was your article this week so yeah it was an article in new york times um and it was titled how 10 prominent economists are thinking think about overheating and basically it was a article about inflation expectations and it you know was basically serving all these different leading economists and sort of what their thoughts are i mean right off the top i mean it's you know you get very different um opinions from all these different economists which is kind of what you might expect but you know very rarely do you get like a consensus view although i do think there was some maybe overarching points and i'll try to bring those out here but you know just in terms of i mean one the article did a good job of defining inflation so you know you have like pce inflation which is you know personal consumption inflation and that's an inflation measure like measure that the fed likes to look at and then you have break even inflation which is refers to level of future inflation priced into the treasury bond market in terms of inflation protected securities so there's two different types of you know i guess inflation that investors sort of can look at we're more familiar with like the personal consumption inflation which shows up in you know the goods and services that were we're buying um one thing with core inflation though too is that you know that excludes food and energy so you know a lot of times when you hear the word core inflation you wouldn't think it would exclude those things but it but it does but anyway so just in terms of a few that sort of jumped out at me gregory mancue who's a popular economist he said he would be concerned if core inflation rises above three percent for a 12-month period um larry summers uh said i think there's a one-third chance that inflation expectations meaningfully above the fed's two percent target will become entrenched a one-third chance that the fed will bring about substantial financial instability or recession in order to contain inflation and a one-third chance that this will work out as policy makers hope so he's kind of you know splitting those three things a third or third third down the middle in terms of what we might expect coming out of all this and then you had um wendy edelberg from the brookings institution she said the level of economic activity will temporarily rise above its sustained level for a time and inflation will rise above the fed's target if you want to call that overheating i think that isn't in and of itself problematic in fact i think make it's making up for some of the lost economic activity is beneficial so you know her point is is that you know even if we do go above um that target rate it's probably going to be okay because you know we're making up for lost economic activity that the the economy hasn't um generated you know over the past few years one of the sort of just the sort of common thing i think that i took from the article is if you got let's say three three and a half four percent inflation and it persisted so it's it's you know it's consistently higher and that sort of that that inflation level gets stepped up that could be um a little bit more problematic and it might cause the fed to to start to raise rage which you know we know when that happens it sort of is a sign that um you know they're going to try to slow down the economy and that could you know obviously put us into a contraction or recession so so anyways that was a lot of different interesting thoughts in there it was a pretty meaty article um it's about inflation yeah for for me whenever i see an article where i've got a bunch of people that are a lot smarter than me disagreeing about stuff you know typically that means i probably you know don't have a strong opinion either one way or the other but what's interesting is when you see people that are you know this quality of economists you know they're really disagreeing about two different things which which is what makes it hard there's sort of two different problems here one is what is inflation going to go to you know some people think inflation is going to go a lot higher than others and two is at what level does it actually become problematic and they disagree about that as well so you know not only is it do i have to try to figure out what inflation is going to be which is very hard to do but in addition to that i try to have to try to figure out what is the impact and at what point does it become problematic and that's that's a tough thing to figure out as well so for me this is definitely beyond my uh my level as an economist i guess your uh honors degree in economics isn't serving you well here for these this inflation uh well one one i forgot all of it but two it turns out that a lot of the stuff we learned in economics it turns out to not be true um with what's going on with mnt and stuff like that so uh i'm definitely i definitely need to check out of this one yeah good point all right guys thanks for watching uh this week and we'll see you next time thank you justin carbino and jack forehand are principals at valydia capital management the opinions expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the lydia capital no information on this podcast should be construed as investment advice securities discussed in the podcast may be holdings of clients of lydia capital