The 14 Year Investment Pattern With Mark Yusko
1h 0m | Apr 1, 2022Guest:
Mark W. Yusko
Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer, Morgan Creek Capital Management & Managing Partner, Morgan Creek Digital Assets
Mark Yusko is the Founder, CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Morgan Creek Capital Management. He is also the Managing Partner of Morgan Creek Digital Assets. Morgan Creek Capital Management was founded in 2004 and currently manages close to $2 billion in discretionary and non-discretionary assets. Prior to founding Morgan Creek, Mr. Yusko was CIO and Founder of UNC Management Company (UNCMC), the Endowment investment office for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before that, he was Senior Investment Director for the University of Notre Dame Investment Office.
Mr. Yusko has been at the forefront of institutional investing throughout his career. An early investor in alternative asset classes at Notre Dame, he brought the Endowment
Model of investing to UNC, which contributed to significant performance gains for the
Endowment. The Endowment Model is the cornerstone philosophy of Morgan Creek, as is the mandate to Invest in Innovation. Mr. Yusko is again at the forefront of investing through Morgan Creek Digital Assets, which was formed in 2018. Morgan Creek Digital is an early stage investor in blockchain technology, digital currency and digital assets through the firm’s Venture Capital and Digital Asset Index Fund.
Mr. Yusko received a BA with Honors from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA in Accounting and Finance from the University of Chicago.
Hosted By:
BZ: welcome back to another episode of the long-run show. This is your host, Austin Willson, along with Mike OConnor. And today we are going to be having another guest on our show. We have Mark Yusko from Morgan Creek Capital. He's actually the founder and CIO of Morgan Creek capital and the chief managing partner of Morgan Creek digital.
Hopefully I got that right, Mark. And we're going to be good. We're going to be talking about we're gonna be talking about a lot of different things today. Spanning many different aspects. Obviously, mark, you have a lot of experience investing money and allocating capital and also a lot of experience just with thinking about large long run issues which is the name of the show.
M: One of the things that I really don't like is everything is focused on short term and social media. And that just the explosion of content has made it even shorter and shorter. And really, if you think about investing, the art of investing, it really is about the longterm. And it's nice. You're nice to say I have a lot of experience. That's just a very nice way of saying I'm old and I am and that's actually a good thing because it means you survived all the mistakes that you made when you were young. But importantly it goes to. My whole career has been around. Long-term thinking, I a series of happy accidents. I didn't plan to be an investment guy. I planned to be an architect. And then I tried pre-med and none of those things really fit. But I went to work for an insurance company out of business school and the guy who was doing investments retired. And so I was now the investment guy. And what I found is it was the perfect thing for me as a science guy. And science is all about format hypothesis, forming experiment, gathering data, testing the hypothesis, and then deciding if it's right or wrong. And that's exactly what you do in investing, right? You come up with this form an experiment.You, you make exposure and then you test it. You gather the data and the market tells you whether you're right or wrong. And part of the. my aha moment over my career was that time arbitrage. So long run thinking, right? The title of your show is the ultimate win in investing. If you have a long time preference, if you have the ability to think longer term than the average investor, you will make more money. And that's kinda cool. And you don't have to be right as often either. That's the nice thing is you don't have to always be right or prove that you're right. Which is very dangerous and investing. Yeah. So quick. Went to school. I said to be an architect or a doctor then went to business.School, came out, went into investing. And my next happy accident was I went back to my Alma Mater. I went back to Notre Dame and I got into endowment management. And what I realized was I thought investing when I worked for the bond management part of the insurance company and then an equity firm. Was that It was just about picking stocks and bonds. That's what investing does. That's what the TV tells you. You should pick stocks IBM or GM or Ford. And what I realized is those were 15% of the longterm returns. 85% of returns comes from asset allocation. The big picture allocation of capital across stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities within stocks. Do I go international? Do I go domestic? Do I go technology? Do I go healthcare? And those big asset allocation decisions drove everything. So the endowment model of investing, which I learned at Notre Dame brought with me down here to university of North Carolina at chapel hill. Whereas the CIO there, that's what I learned. And all that endowment model means is you have a long time horizon. It's permanent capital. Therefore you have this ability to take advantage of time arbitrage. The second thing is you have to have an equity bias, because if you want to have a long term positive return, you need to outperform inflation and bonds just don't do that by very much. So you have to have an equity orientation, but equity doesn't mean stocks. You mean stocks? It means private equity. It means venture capital. It means commodity equity. There's all kinds of equities. And then the next stage was I left the university back actually now a long time ago, back in 2004, and I formed Morgan Creek Capital and more capital is just about bringing the endowment model to other investors, taking this idea of alternative, thinking about investments to the masses. Now everyone says what do you mean alternative thinking? I'm like I don't like the term alternative investments. People talk about it all the time. Hedge funds or private equity or venture capital. Those are alternative investments. alternative to what? you own stocks, you own bonds, you own currencies and you own commodities. How I own them in a mutual fund, in a hedge fund, in a private partnership, doesn't change the nature that I own. Stocks, bonds, and currencies and commodities. And the problem is whoever thought of the term alternatives, who was not a marketing guy or gal, they were not very smart. People don't like alternative stuff, alternative medicine, alternative music.They don't like alternative stuff. They're afraid of it. . And so what did he do? Tape put 5% in alternatives and 95% in tradition. That doesn't make any sense because if the traditional stuff isn't attractive, why would you want to own it? So fast forward Morgan Creek over the years has migrated from, this alternative thinking about investments to my big aha moment, which was investing in infrastructure around technological innovations. And it's a wave of about 14 year cycle is where the big wealth is created. on Twitter it's my pin tweet. The greatest wealth is created by investing in something that you believe in before others even understand. you will be mocked, you'll be ridiculed and it's worth it. And so back four years ago, we set up Morgan Creek digital subsidiary of Morgan Creek capital to focus on long-term investing in the digital asset ecosystem and having a blast. had more fun than I've ever had my career. And I love every stage of my career. But I'm having way more fun. Now I get to hang out with young smart people. I get to focus on this innovative technology. That's changing the world anyway.
BZ: I love the term time arbitrage. That is just such a great term. And I find it so interesting because like you mentioned, using the that's so interesting, the endowment model, because that seems so foreign to wall street of the last couple of decades, or, having this model that you're actually considering long-term implications. You're not just looking for the next big short or something like that. What's been the reception from others in the field of that. Cause it seems like so much common sense to be able to look at the long-term, but it's pretty uncommon. What's been the reception ?
M: We actually created a vehicle a number of years ago called the endowment fund and it took off, it was the most successful launch of a product in Merrill Lynch's history and everybody piled in and then something happened, gold financial crisis happened. We actually did well relatively well. We didn't do well. Absolutely. But we did less badly than everybody else. And, in investing the most important thing, right? There's three rules to investing rule. Number one, don't lose money rule number two, don't lose money rule number three, don't forget the first two rules and Roy Neuberger coined that phrase.And it's because of math. If I'm down 10, I got to be up 11. If I'm down 20, I gotta be up 25. I'm down 50. I gotta be up 100 to get even, God forbid you're like Russian market. I'm down 95 when it gets back to even which it will. Cause this has happened before. You'll be up 20 fold buying Russian equities. Great idea for the long-term not for the next week or the next month, but if you can buy spare bank at this price, you make 20 times your money, probably over a long-term period because you're down 95%. But that idea of avoiding the downside is what the endowment model is all about. And what happened though is after the gold financial crisis, the FED and other central banks around the world started pumping liquidity into the market. And that changed things. And what it did is it created this illusion that stocks, the S&P or going up every year. And so over the last 13 years has been pretty much a bull market in nominal terms, not in real terms, but in nominal terms. And maybe people not want to be value oriented. They want to be momentum players. They didn't want to take the long-term. They didn't want to make an investment today in a company that might take 10 years to harvest an S&P is up 15% every year. I'll just do that. So the endowment model kind of faded and can got out of favor and, necessity is the mother of invention that led us to say, all right, if nobody wants to think like long-term investors, then we'll find products that are, and the problem there was, we had an asset liability mismatch. We let people come out of the fund on any quarter, but we were making investments for long-term periods of time. And that doesn't work very well. It's like a bank. I give everybody, went to the bank to take their money. That's a problem. Cause there's not enough money for all the. Because they took $1 and lent it out 11 times and made lots of dollars. And there's nothing wrong with that. Fractional reserve banking is not in itself evil. It just, it operates on faith and custom where everybody doesn't run to the bank at the same time. And the same thing is true in long-term investments. If everybody wants their liquidity, they can't get it. So now we raise vehicles with longer-term lockups so we can focus on making those long-term investments.
BZ: Interesting. Very interesting. So this kind of shifts and long-term cycle, or I guess midterm cycle, you were saying the 14 year investing in something that you're very convicted about, how did that fit into the endowment model or was that a kind of the next iteration for you?
M: So it definitely fits into this endowment model of investing. But it was a discovery by being at the endowment actually. So I go back now and it's easy to tell the story because I grew up on the west coast. I grew up in Seattle and my dad sold and installed mainframe computers in hospitals. That's what he did cause they didn't have computers. And so if you go back to 1954, there was this innovation out in Boston, outside of route 128 around computing and suddenly companies could have computers. And 14 years later, there's an innovation out in Silicon valley on a microchip is suddenly computers can be smaller and companies like Intel and Cisco were formed and they did pretty well. Right then in 1982, 14 years later. And why it's always 14 years. I don't know exactly, but it's really because young people invent all the new stuff, because they don't know not to. And they don't know what they don't know. And so they just go ahead and do it. Marc Andreessen, 19 years old, he invented the browser. Larry and Sergei invented this company, Google, which I'll talk about in a second in their twenties. And so it's that young generation that gets innovation going. Cause the old guys are like, I'm fine. My flip phone is fine. I don't need a smart phone. And it's true. Confirmed myself that as I get older, but the key was I grew up in Seattle, many of my friends, they don't work anymore.They went to work for this little company called Microsoft. I was too stupid to do that. Now I defend myself saying if you've seen the picture of the original Microsoft 11, you wouldn't blame. Now there are multibillionaires. I'm not, I shouldn't make fun of them, but they looked pretty funny. We all looked bad in the seventies. Clothes were bad. Hair was bad. But look at the picture tonight, Google the original Microsoft 11, you go, oh my God, I wouldn't work for those guys either. So Steve bomber's mom said, honey, why would you work for that company? No one would ever want a computer in their house. He has 18 billion reasons. He was right. Mom was wrong. So 14 years later, I'm at my Alma Mater. I'm at Notre Dame and I'm working in the endowment office and we had the chance to make this investment in a company called Sequoia at the time. No one, not no one, but very few people knew who Sequoia was. It was not a famous venture capital fund. In fact, it was on the verge of failure because Don Valentine, the famous founder had hired this guy Michael Moritz, Michael was a wall street journal reporter. He had never done a deal before. The other partners like Don, what the hell? We're the future? Why are you hiring this kid? It turns out Michael turned out to be a pretty good investor, Yahoo, Google a few other things and maybe one of the greatest venture capitalists of all time, but we gave them 5 million bucks. They put half a million dollars in Google. And I actually remember. I remember saying guys, I don't get it. They're 20 search engines. There is web crawler and AltaVista and ask Jeeves, what do you need Google for? It's a stupid name. Now it's a verb, right? We totally reinvented search because Larry and Sergei young guys figured out that the way to do search is not to search the whole internet. There are 1.7 billion websites in the world. Half of them are owned by Google. What are you talking about, Mark? Think about it. When you start typing a question. They've set up a website for every question that has ever been asked. And as soon as you start asking the question, it directs you to a little tiny slice and they've already put all the information that you need to know. And sometimes maybe there's some bias, but that's how they do search and it revolutionized everything. And so we put in 500 K and we took out 200 million. So I now had this aha moment. This is a long story for an epiphany, but I had this epiphany that investing was about long-term investments in infrastructure companies around this cycle. And so 14 years later the mobile phone comes along and apple releases the smartphone The iPhone, their stock goes down 46. Think about this for a second. this iPhone and the stock goes down because people are never going to pay $500 for a phone.My flip phone is just fine. My Razor's awesome. Apple's now the biggest, most valuable company in the world. And I remember being back in Seattle at Craig macaws house, he was having an event for venture capital people. And Craig is a very famous pioneer in cellular telephony, the original flip phones. And I'm asked, as I asked his family office, guy said, do you think the mobile net will be as big as the internet? He's mark, you can me ask me if they want a computer? Yeah, whatever, ask them if they want a phone. Like I already have two, I don't need another one. So yeah, it's going to be a big deal. And what it did is it created the first network. 1 phone not valuable at all.2 phones, a little more valuable, 2 million phones, pretty valuable, 2 billion phones, really valuable. And the network effect is exponential and the people are bad at math. People suck at math, but that's just linear math. If I say what's two times two, both of you will say four. I say, all right guys, what's 17 times 23. I'll wait. That is the limit of human intelligence. The average person can not do 17 times 23 in their head. And so how are you at nonlinear? Exponential regression? Not very good. And so I do this challenge all the time. I say, take out a piece of paper, fold it in half, pull it in half again. I defy you to fold it seven times and it was a bag full of seven times. No problem. And they're like, whoa, okay. I can't fold it seven times. If you could fold it 20 times. It would be as high as your house. If you could fold it 30 times, it'd be the atmosphere. If you could get to 50, it'd be to the sun. And 100 is the known universe. So exponential growth is a really big deal. And so the network effect created these massive opportunities and the light bulb went off for me, just get in front of those waves. So buy things and you know how to find them, whatever the old people like me now say, will rot your brain or is a fad..anytime those two terms, come out, just buy it, tuck it in a drawer and go away.
BZ: I love that guy that was going to be, yeah, that was going to be my follow-up ETF. And the 14 year pattern Have you seen that be very consistent?
M: It's incredibly consistent and okay. What's amazing. So you went 1954 was the mainframe and they had four years, 1954 to 1958. We could make a fortune in deck and Wang and it's winching. Then you have a crash. Then 14 years later, 1968-1972 Intel Fairchild, et cetera. Then you have a crash then 1982 to 1986. Everything's great. Microsoft. Wintel. They have a crash then in 2010? No. Then in 1999, then in 1996, around the internet, 1996 to 2000, everything's awesome. Yahoo, eBay et cetera, Google, then you have a crash 2010 to 2014 to 2015. You have a little crash wasn't as big as the other crash, but there was a crash right now in 2024, which is the beginning of the blockchain era or the trust net as I call it. So the internet 1996, the mobile net 2010 and the trust net 2024. It's when everything in the world, everything in the world, everything of value, every stock, every bond, every currency, every commodity, every private piece of real estate, every piece of art, every collectible car, every private business, all $700 trillion of assets in the world will be tokenized. What does that mean? All a token is an entry on a block. It's an entry on a public ledger. That's all it is. It's not super crazy and exciting. It's really pretty simple, but it's code and we can trust code differently than we can trust people. And if you think about this, every technological evolution goes to making that trust in code better. When the internet first came out, people are like, I don't know what this thing isn't. It doesn't really work very well. And Netflix started a company and they're like, all right, we're going to use it. We're going to have video on demand. If demand is defined as four days, it took four days to download a movie. No one's going to wait four days to download a movie. So they almost went bankrupt and it wasn't until bandwidth was increased because South Korea innovated around broadband and suddenly you could deliver it in less than four days as a Netflix done pretty well. Pets.com. I'm going to deliver, pet food over the internet.Failed. It's the poster child of the failure of the internet, chewy.com. It's the same damn company, exactly the same, but we needed GPS tracking. We needed instantaneous access to information, to broadband. So it's these inflection points in technology and why they're 14 years. Again, it doesn't really matter, but it is very consistent. And so 2024, as great as it's been in blockchain and Bitcoin and all this other stuff, it hasn't even started. The players have entered the stadium, they're warming up. We haven't even played the National Anthem. And I was like, oh, it's the third ending? The eighth inning game. the game hasnt started.
BZ:I think that's a phenomenal point because it's amazing how much we're already talking about Bitcoin and blockchain and web3. And it's The current figures are maybe 5% of the world has cryptocurrency. Like global adoption is still so early that it just seems like it's the next huge network effect
M:If you overlay Mike, to that point, if you overlay the internet adoption and web three adoption or blockchain adoption, we're in 1997. Around the time when we invested in Google. And E-bay, I remember taking E-bay to our board at Notre Dame and they're like, let me get this straight. You want us to put money in a garage sale? Really? No. Think about this. So they were against it. The firm benchmark capital, some of the best investors on the planet they put in, they raised an $85 million fund, $85 million, not a lot of money. And they put a bunch of money into eBay, not all of it, but a decent amount. They took out $10 billion. The whole fund was a 96 X the whole fund. So she put it in a dollar, you got $96 back and on a garage sale company because people didn't get it or look at the market cap of PayPal today. And how many of the PayPal mafia are out there doing amazing things. humans are optimistic, right? If you weren't optimistic, you'd literally sit in your house in sheer shuttering because you wouldn't go outside. Cause you could get shot. He get eaten by a bear, all kinds of bad things could happen, but we're optimistic. And so we go on it's I always say, who was the third guy who went out to try to get a Mastodon with a spear? Cause the first two didn't come back. So who was the third guy who figured out, if he hit him right under the chin, you can kill the Mastodon. He was a hero, but, or who was the first person that tried surgery on without anesthetic before we figured that out. So we're optimistic and we try new stuff and that's good. And we have progress, but we're unable to imagine the unimaginable, right? We can't imagine. Right now we are talking to each other. We're actually, we're not talking to it. We're talking to a metal box, right? A metal and glass box. And it's coming in my glass metal and glass box into the airwaves, into a cell tower down through fiber optic cable out another cell tower into the airwaves, into your metal glass box and into your earphones in real time. Are you kidding me? I could imagine that 20 years ago, 30 years ago, no one. So it's really hard to invest for that long cycle opportunity set because you can't imagine. So who could imagine that money as we know it, which isn't money it's currency, the only money is gold because money is something exist in the absence of a liability dollars are not money they are currencies. But who could imagine that all of money will eventually be entries on a book? Not very many people. Yeah. It's amazing to me. And you spoke to this. The thing that we are the worst status imagining unimaginable, right? Cause we have a word for it that, that just goes to show you how big a bias it is.
BZ: We have a word for it. It's unimaginable. And so I think the bias is to go, okay I can't do that. Or I guess the thought process is, I have this bias. I can't really know what's next because I can't see it. So therefore, I'm going to tighten my time horizon. I'm going to look for the short play I'm going to, and nothing against day-trading.I've seen it to be profitable, but I'm going to look for this short, interim intraday play or a week play or month play. At the expense of a longer term play, that may be an investment that may pay off 96X like, like the eBay story. And so it's a great, it's interesting that biting, there's nothing wrong with trading.
M:There's nothing inherently bad about trading. It's hard. It's work and it goes to income and passive income and investing, we all work hard, right? We're doing what we do. We either create content or we manage somebody's assets or we make widgets, we all have this work that we do, but you think about it, the return on that, that work pales in comparison that if you can have something, take up a piece of real estate that you own, that someone else pays you rent and you make money while you're sleeping, it's actually a pretty cool or a Royalty. Think about Qualcomm that every time somebody builds an Android phone, they get paid. That's cool. And so they monetize their intellectual property and then you get into investing. Sure. If I can figure out if CEO, Adam tomorrow is going to wake up and do another great deal, like buying a gold mine, maybe I can get out ahead of AMC and it'll go up and I'll make some money, but what if he wakes up and he makes a bad investment, actually gold mines are usually are bad investments, but maybe this will be a good one, but what if it makes a bad investment? And it goes the other way. That's that? I don't have control of any of that, but if I can Intuit that, let's see. All right. Blockchain technology is really just an operating system for this injured, connected everything. Okay. That's interesting. So what makes money. When goods get traded marketplaces exchanges.
So what if I just own a little piece of one of the exchanges like Coinbase, it doesn't matter if the price goes up, price goes down, people got to trade it. They take a cut. That sounds pretty good. If you look exchanges or there's the NASDAQ exchange with London stock exchange or the Brazilian , all of those have been great investments over the long term. Even the LME before they killed themselves the other day, by letting the Chinese billionaire say, "oh, I'm sorry. I know I lost money, but I'm not going to let you take it from me." And they screwed everybody else. Just mind numbing, how to destroy the capital of a business and one easy lesson, but there's time arbitrage. Right? There's short-term thinking I got this angry Chinese billionaire, right? Who's given us a lot of commissions saying he's not going to honor his margin call and I'll just cancel all the trades. That sounds good. Oh, shit. I just killed the golden goose because now no one will ever trust my exchange again, ever. Let's go to a different exchange. That's negative time arbitrage.
BZ: So the way to, and I guess I, wasn't trying to position, day trading versus long-term investing because you're exactly right. They are very different. I guess my question that I was building to is with that bias in mind.How do we look at all of the trends that are out there, right? Because we could make an argument for metaverse right. that is the next 14 year cycle. Not withstanding there's crossover between the two, obviously, not withstanding that crossover. Okay. This is what I'm going to do. Or quantum computing, this is going to be the next large leap in computing technology. We're going to be able to calculate things we've never been able to before. So how do we think through these things that we might be seeing as trends or fads? And I like your rule earlier. Okay. "If some old fart says, oh, this is just a fad buddy, look into it." But how do we think through that? I tend to be more cynical. So I'm thinking, all right, great. We have all these trends. But how do we imagine the unimaginable? Sounds like a riddle
M: it's the question that all of us should be spending at least a little time on, in fact, one of the best things to become a better investor is to spend some time every day or at least every few days just away. Not staring at your screen, take a hike, take a walk, meditate, whatever it is, and actually just think and try to cobble together these ideas because you're a hundred percent right. But the metaverse oh it's just Facebook. No, come on. Just think about that one for just one second. The metaverse is the decentralization of technology and the eraser of nation states and industrial conglomerates. That's clearly what the decentralized world is. So the idea of a centralized organization being the metaverse, it's an oxymoron it's jumbo shrimp, or military intelligence or whatever, and it just doesn't work. but the metaverse is big. Okay. So most, so maybe the metaverse is this next trend? And my 14 year cycle is all about computing power mainframes, microcomputers personal computers, internet mobile net trust net. And to your point, maybe the next is quantum net actually like that. I'm going to think about that a lot. Im going skiing next week with my son. So there are other cycles could be coincidence with the same 14 year cycle, or maybe they could be offset maybe within the 14 year cycle. There's a seven year offset for these other secondary or second order effects. Yeah, the metaverse is clearly something that, that is created out of this innovation around computing power. And so we do have to think, okay what does that mean? Does it mean I should invest in these centralized organizations that are renaming themselves? It's like when we were in long island ice tea named themselves long island blockchain stock went crazy for awhile, but what do you do? You don't do anything in blockchain. you make tea, but it's a great meme play, right? But they did it in 2000 and last bubble. I lived it and I, we invested in a company, true story called art technology group and what they did all this company. Did they help companies change their name to die? Because if you change your name to.com price went up. So these guys actually then listed as a public company. They were consulting company, long story short. We'd put some money in, through a firm called tutor ventures up in Boston. And our cost basis was 50 cents. The stock went public at a hundred dollars. Okay. So maybe 200 times our money. And I called the principal and I said, what should we do? He says, I'm an insider. I can't really talk. But I can tell you two things, revenue is 6 million market cap is 6 billion. And there was a silence. He's mark, did you hear me, Mike? Yeah. I heard you ı was like SELL, GET RID OF IT NOW! Here's the crazy part. It went to four. So it went down 96%. And I think about that at four, it was still an eight. Off our call list, but we sold at a hundred made 200 X. But the thing is that company didn't do anything. And these, so the third part of the question is, so you've got the main wave then how do you have then do you have these other opportunity waves, but then you got the scams that come into it that you want to avoid. So there's lots of crosscurrents and how you try to think about these big themes. But then the other thing is if you spend too much time thinking about it and not enough time acting on it, right yet, paralysis by analysis, you miss all the opportunities. And this is, to me, one of the things that's most, most important about investing is winning investors.Great investors lose more often than bad investors. They do win a lot, but they lose a lot. The reason losers, bad investors don't win or lose. They don't do anything. They're so afraid of losing that. They don't actually commit capital. So to your point, rather than try to figure out, do I, can I figure out which is the one I like to put bets and there are bets in a lot of different places. And then when things start to go double up, most people want to double down, right? When things go against them, they want to put more money in to prove that they're right in the market's wrong. The market is never wrong. The market is always right. You are wrong. And when we make mistakes, it's okay. As long as you Ralph. Okay. And we need to talk about this. Cause cause from Dean Smith and it's March madness and Tarell's play tonight, so recognize them. Not that hard. It's usually right in your face. Here's the hard part. Admit it. Yes. I made a mistake. there was a show on TV a hundred years ago called happy days. And there was this guy, Arthur Fonds rally, the cool guy. He said, Hey, and he couldn't say the word wrong. He couldn't say the word wrong. You got to say, you're wrong. Then you got to learn from it. Most important thing. And thinking investing is with every investment we get richer or wiser. Never both. We either learn something or we make money because when we're right, we don't actually analyze. We just say, oh, look how smart we are. Whoa, of course it was so good when you lose money and then you've got to forget it. And the forgetting is really important. And this goes to the other great coach who is still in the tournament as well. University of duke at Durham down the street, coach K has this great line. He says, you know what? Separates great. Players slash investors from the average? No, he says the greats focus on the next play. Watch the tournament game tonight and see how many times did you, so miss a shot go down and commit to a stupid foul. Cause they're thinking about the shot, a great player, doesn't even remember taking the shot, goes back, plays good, different defense steals A ball makes a layup.
Bad investors they're constantly focused on, oh man, I'm a mistake. And I just can't believe it. It. Got to learn from it, but you got to erase it, forget it and go get the next up.
BZ: Individual plays versus ETFs?
M: You guys probably both play Fortnite. I watched my son play Fortnite. Does he take a shotgun or a sniper rifle? He takes both. Cause a shot is really good in some situations and the sniper is really good at another. So yes, the answer is yes. You definitely want a spray and pray and the whole spray and pray.
I prefer spray and then water, the seeds that start growing. Okay. That's better to me and I pray a lot too, but hope is not an investment strategy. Hope is a four-letter word, particularly in investing, but the sniper rifle a hundred percent. And here's the thing. If you're willing to do the work, the sniper rifles really awesome, because if you actually will do the work that most people won't, then you get a better shot. And if you take that better shot, you can make a lot more concentrated portfolios, make you rich. Every great fortune in the world came from constant. Concentrated stock position, concentrated real estate position, contrary to business ownership, every fortune start with concentration. Now the joke is how do you create a small fortune start with a large fortune and stay concentrated, concentrated long enough competitors will come up and chip away and take all your wealth. So diversification keeps you rich. So if you are in the business of making money, which when we're young, we should be and ice. And I'm really good at talking because I sucked when I was young. I didn't do any of this stuff. I talk about. In fact, I sent a pre out to myself the other day, maybe a year ago, advice to my younger self, all the things that I did wrong, that I want people not to do wrong. And the key somebody asked me, how do you become a better investor in. Like all the time, a lot, like all the time and do the shotgun and do the sniper. And, but when it goes against you just move on, just sell and move on. And when things start going, don't pull your weeds. Don't pull your flowers, right? Peter Lynch has this great line. He says, investing is super simple. You pull your weeds and you water your flowers. But he says, the average investor does the opposite. They pull their flowers. Cause they're so afraid to loosen and they water their weeds because they want to prove they're right. Soros is not whether you're right or wrong. That has nothing to do with anything. It's how much money you make when you're winning, how much money you lose when you're wrong. And if you can constantly minimize your loss. First loss of the best loss and let your winners run and then do that work so that you think about a sniper. You guys have seen the movie sniper? .Does he just like randomly pull the thing out of his bag and then start shooting? No, he plans. He sets the stage. He gets where no one can see him. He's got the stuff, the cammo on. He lines up the shot, he waits and he makes the kill. So it's not like that's planning. And so if you do the work you set the stage, you do the plan, you get the cammo, you get the right rifle. You get the right ammunition. Yeah. You'll make some, you make some great investments. But that does mean an ETF is bad. Now the problem, the only thing on ETS, just make sure they actually do what they say they're gonna do in what you name the ETF. So you could have value ETFs that are filled with 30 times revenue. These is crap companies. Yeah. It's not value now, but the new value when it goes down 95%. But, and again, this personal experience. So when I, my first job, I had a 401k and, we had six options and one of them was the blue chip growth fund. And I had a thesis that the world was going to get lousy. This is back in 1991, 1992. Oh, we're going to have recession. I'm like, I'm going to put my money in the high quality blue chips. So I moved all my money there and we had the recession just like we thought, and this thing went down 40%. What the fuck? Probably shouldn't say that, but what the hell? And I go on, I look and it says in the footnotes though, "the blue chips of tomorrow" What the hell? This is my fault. I didn't read. I gotta pull that prospectus.
BZ: It's interesting. I want to go back to what you said earlier, And I agree with everything you said, and I think it's actually one of, one of the episodes we recorded about two months ago. At this point we talked about just thinking about. How you invest in approach money and what are your biases and knowing yourself. And so for me, I know that I am very bad at acting quickly.I take, and I do the analysis paralysis. For me at certain points and this is one of them right now. I don't have the time to go and research and then implement and act quickly. Cause I know I won't. So I'm just going to buy a bow broad basket for now and hold it. And then like you said, in your answer, there's different ways to double down and concentrate, right? Whether that's your skills, whether that's, I'll say starting a business, right? So there are different ways to think about investing, especially as an individual. And so I, I'm interested to hear what you would say about the asset allocation portion that you said earlier, that's almost more important than picking the winners and losers because it seems like you can build a great portfolio that has a phenomenal asset allocation out of individual stocks, right? And individual positions. You can also do it with ETFs and it might be easier for the individual to do that. Factor in a lot of things. You've got to do your research on those ETFs. You can't be buying on the name of the tick thing, but it's that's the answer more than one or the other, right?
M: Yup. No, you're a hundred percent right. Austin and the ETFs are an amazing tool because they give you big swaths of the canvas. So if you think of a canvas and it's got all the different colors all over and, international and emerging markets and developed markets and equities and fixed income and commodities and currencies and derivatives and leverage and all the things that you need to build a diversified portfolio. Using individual securities, you can do it. It's hard, like super hard because you got to decide, okay, I want autos, but do I want European autos or Japanese autos? Or, what about this Tesla thing? Is that really a car company? Oh, I thought it was a software company. It's a car. It sits out, it collects dust, just like every other car. And, oh, by the way, you're only in your car 3% to 4% of the time. Think about that. You're inside your car 3% to 4%. So I would say don't spend a lot of money on cars unless you're like really into cars. But the interesting thing about all of this is how you build that portfolio is important. So if you think about the four steps of investment asset allocation, manage your selection, portfolio construction and security selection. So the 85% is in those first three, that is the allocation piece. And then the security selection piece is the 15%. So it really doesn't matter over the term, whether you own Ford or GM, it actually doesn't. In short periods of time, it can matter a lot for sure. But over long periods of time, it's less important than knowing should I be in automobiles or should I be in flying cars or should I be in, whatever. So the big picture asset allocation, should I be in stocks or bonds? Credit or equity, should I be in currencies or commodities? Should I be long biased or should I be long short? Should I be fully hedged? Should I be in cash? Should I be in, in emerging markets or international? Where's the growth, all of those big pictures. It's those asset allocation decisions are really important. So that's where I always start. And I try to come up with five big themes 10-year trends that I think are going to drive investment and growth. And one of mine is the middle classification of the emerging markets, right? There's about 3.5 B that live at middle-class or below around the world. Most of them in Southeast Asia and. Most of them are going to move up. And it's just math got to move up. Now, China alone, China took 750 million people out of abject poverty and put them in the middle-class over the last 30 years. I don't know. Maybe those people that want to move up. They've seen Dallas. They want that life. So there's probably some opportunities in retail and consumer in China over the next. Give or take giving us the size of the U S and Europe put together. So that's a big thing. How do you play that theme? I could buy a and have bought this ETF called K web. Why? Because it owns technology companies that are making those middle-class lives better now marked I think is down 90% in the last year. Yup. So I bought it two weeks ago because anytime something's down that much, you gotta buy it. It doesn't matter what it is. If something's down 90%, you got to buy it. And so how else would you play the growth? The Asian consumer commodities is going to be more in demand. So I play it that way. Then you got to say how am I going to implement? That's the manager selection piece. So manager selection. I could do it myself. I, Mike and I could go decide, we're going to go rifle, shoot. We're going to sniper. And we're going to pick the stocks. SoI'm going to buy Alibaba. I'm going to buy jd.com. Totally fine. Totally acceptable. But what if we miss Mae Twan? What if we miss Pendo that K web is going to have them all. So that's outsourcing the manager to the group. That's doing that. Now the challenge with that is you got to pick between the managers and Howard marks has this great line. He says the problem with picking managers and picking people to manage your money is you have to decide between the good person who sounds good and the bad person who sounds good. They don't let the person who sounds bad, make the presentation. And it's so true. They all sound awesome. But then there's portfolio construct. This is, let's say I pick 10 things, either individual stocks or ETFs or hedge fund managers or mutual funds. I got 10, 10%, each 50% to one and 5% to the others that matters. It matters a lot actually. And there's capitalization waiting. There's equal waiting, there's rebalancing or not rebalancing. So all those portfolio construction things matter. Now the nice thing is most of us, we have lives. So it's like the cobbler's kids who have no shoes. We intend to manage our portfolio and we intend to rebalance and we intend to do all the work, if I look at my IRA, I have this little IRA from your way back when, and I look at that relative to the things that I do, or I just put it in my funds that are managed by people in my firm. It ain't close. You have all these great ideas. Why didn't you just put them in your IRA? Because I got busy and I didn't do it. And I wasn't smart like Peter teal to put in, private shares, which is what I really should have done, should put private shares at Morgan Creek. And then I should have written them down to the, basically zero in the global financial crisis like he did. And so then he gets this big basis and it created billions of dollars. Now I wouldn't have created billions of dollars, Peter is a genius. He's a mad genius, but anyway, so it's a long way of saying allocation first, spend your most time there because it's the most impactful. And particularly for younger investors, I have this thing that don't listen to anything I, or any other pundit on diversified portfolios and portfolio management. Under 60 years old, don't listen to that. Just concentrate on venture capital, equities tech. Like I believe it's not hyperbole. I believe it should be against the law for 25 to 65 year old people to own bonds. It is the waste of time and money. You don't need the volatility reduction because your volatility reduction comes from your future earnings. That is your fixed income.
BZ: What are your emotions and feelings looking at blockchain now? Is this kind of is this really exciting?
M:Oh, my God. It's the greatest look. It's the greatest wealth creation opportunity. I'll see in my lifetime and I'm gonna be around a long time. I got an 11 year old still. So I, I have this funny thing, we're a good Catholic family. I joke we had nine. We just skipped the middle six. So we have two older kids and a baby. And so we're going to be, I'm going to be around a long time. We'll be working for a long time. And so I'm not going here, but this is the greatest wealth creation opportunity I've ever seen because we're building on great tech. When you built the internet, you were building on shitty tech client server technology is really bad when you built the mobile net. You're building on pretty good tech. The internet was pretty good, but now you're building on top of an installed mobile net infrastructure. That is extraordinary and blockchain is a technological advance that is not linear, but exponential. So all these things are incredibly powerful. So I look, I got exposed to blockchain and Bitcoin in 2013. I didn't understand it. And so I was not a cryptography student and I missed it. I got blockchain, I got infrastructure my whole 14 year cycle thing and have done quite nicely. We've made good investments in infrastructure but I missed the opportunity of, a generation to really be early in, in behind joke that I got introduced to it the same month as the Winkle vie. And they're multibillionaires and I'm not. but there's a movie called the graduate and the graduate. There's a scene where he's asking his uncle for advice is one word plastics, go into plastics, which was good advice in the sixties. And today I said one word, "Jack blockchain go out to California. He wanted to live in San Francisco, said, go work at Coinbase." And he goes out and he interviewed and talks to people and it's I don't know, dad, maybe it's gonna be a big deal. I'm just going to KPMG safe. Gets me to San Francisco. " you're going to hate it whenever he did hate it. Quit after nine months" Coinbase goes public. Cause I find the right should have gone to Coinbase, but not as bad as you think you are. I might go, oh, do tell. I told you to go to quit, but you didn't lever up the house and put on Bitcoin. I'm like, "oh you a little shit." Okay. That's fair. No, one's crying for my son. Cause he works for snowflake and he's doing great, but, and I'm really proud of him, but I think it's interesting. It's a long winded way of saying I have never been more excited in my life. I've never had this much fun in my whole career and I loved my career. I loved every stage of my career. But my career has been in chapters, right? Chapter one, I work for not-for-profits. I was an allocator. I had fun. I loved it. I got second income working for the universities. Chapter two, I built a really nice asset management company, Morgan Creek, capital chapter three three years into a 20 year stint of tokenizing the world. And I really am having more fun. Now I get to hang out with young, smart, really creative people. I'm seeing technological innovation like the world has never seen. I now spend all my time doing venture capital, which has just so much fun backing founders and watching them build things. And it's, again, back to that long game, if you think that there are only four ways in the world that you can make money, all four require you to take risk. If you leave your money in cash, you get the risk free rate. Hence the name because you're not taking any risks. And unfortunately, if you do that, all your wealth is chewed up by inflation, right? Leave your money in the bank today, you get less than one. Inflation is eight, that sucks. So you gotta take risks. You can take credit risk, first risk.You can buy a bond. Now bonds are an actual claim. If you don't get paid, you can Sue pretty good deal. But you don't get paid a lot. You can take 2% above Risk-free rate not a very good deal. Look at bonds day, 2.4%. Woo big deal. And then you can take equity risk. Second risk equities are contingent claim. Meaning you only get paid if all the bond holders get paid. And so that's, that makes 7%above risk free rate. That's pretty good. So equity should be at the core of your portfolio. Then you can take illiquidity risk, private investments, private equity, private real estate, private equity, private debt, better get 5% more, 12% above risk-free. Awesome. 14, 15% compounded venture capital, even higher. And then you can use structure or leverage and leverage cuts both ways. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's bad, but illiquidity and venture capital and innovation as an asset class. And for all the ribbing she's taken, Cathy Wood is exactly right. Innovation is an asset class. It is where you want to invest for the longterm. And that's what I'm doing right now.
BZ: That's amazing. Mark. It's been so good to have you on, I know we're running out of time here. But it's just been an absolute pleasure for both myself and Austin. Thank you so much for the time.
M:I appreciate you guys having me on the show. I love this. That you guys are doing a show on the longterm, instead of all the day trading stuff again, nothing wrong. Day-trading totally fine. But sometimes you got to step back, take a hike, think big thoughts and really enjoyed the conversation to appreciate all your hard work, getting ready for it. And we'll talk again soon.
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