It is time for another podcast of the week. I took the punishment of listening to lots of mediocre (and some great) pods for you and will now flag one (or a few) for your listening pleasure.
Today I will highlight the smorgasbord of pod appearances by Dr. Wesley Gray (“Wes or Gray”) of Alpha Architect where he discusses these issues, with a particular focus on investing.
Books
Gray and co are the authors of books on the Value and Momentum factors (and how to potentially exploit them), and a third book about combining the two factors with a trend following overlay. Gray also published another book, Embedded, about his time in Iraq as a Marine.
Pods
First, we will start with an appearance from 2015 on The Investors Podcast. He appeared in episodes 48 and 49 to discuss ETFs generally and more particularly his book on value. These were way back in 2015, but I’m going to back in time for some of these selections at least at the outset of this feature on my blog.
In 2016, Wes appeared on The Meb Faber Show, episode 4. This appearance was primarily about Wes’ blog post where he discussed how much tracking error (in this case underperformance versus the cap weighted bench mark) one would have had to go through even if you knew in advance what the best performing stocks would be (i.e., we an omniscient god). He says they gaps would have been so horrible there is no way your investors would not have “fired” you.
Later in 2016, Gray was on Master’s in Business, with Barry Ritholtz. This interview was probably heavier on the sort of background/career development, as Ritholz focuses in this podcast. Gray came back on TIP in January 2017, episodes 122 and 123, to discuss momentum and his momentum strategy generally.
Last summer Gray was on Invest Like the Best, with Patrick O’Shaughnessy (mr. o-shaq-hennessy). They get fairly deep into the factor zoo, limits to arbitrage and some of Wes’ background.
I also should mention that Wes now appears regularly in his role as co-host of the Behind the Markets podcast with Jeremy Schwartz. They have had some good episodes if you are into quantitative investing. My favorite of these so far is probably the one with Dr. Lu Zhang. They basically talk about the inability to replicate many factors and also behavioral and risk based justifications for value and momentum.
Neat Finance Tools
I think that’s it for the pods. I also recommend that you check out the Alpha Architect site. They have some neat tools including free value and momentum screens (if you are a financial professional), asset allocation models, as well as some awesome tools to evaluate holdings and active share of ETFs visually. They also publish and/or discuss a lot of academic research on their site. I was going to do a resource post on the site, but I think this will do for now. Be sure to check it out.
Thanks for reading!