In this episode of the Derivative podcast, we’re hanging out with Bob Elliott, co-founder of Unlimited Funds. Bob used to work at small shop you may have heard of… Bridgewater, working his way from (nearly) the mail room to Ray Dalio’s right hand man. And now he’s doing something pretty interesting – he’s figured out how to systematically replicate what hedge funds do and package it into ETFs that regular investors can actually access.
We dive into Bob’s journey from the hedge fund world to building financial technology, and he walks us through how his team studies and recreates these sophisticated investment strategies. Bob shares his take on what’s happening in the economy right now, how he reads market dynamics, and the nuts and bolts of understanding complex investment approaches.
It’s a really solid conversation whether you’re already into investing or just curious about how this whole world works. Bob has some thoughtful insights on how alternative investments are evolving and becoming more accessible to everyday people. SEND IT!
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From the episode:
Finding the Next Tom Brady for your portfolio: https://www.rcmalternatives.com/2013/…
Picture from Space: https://www.rcmalternatives.com/2013/…
Advanced Hedge Fund Replication with the Top Down – riding diverse ETF modeling flows with DBi’s Andrew Beer: https://www.rcmalternatives.com/2024/…
Check out the complete Transcript from this week’s podcast below:
Bridgewater, Botany & Breaking the 2/20 mold with Unlimited ETFs’ Bob Elliott
Bob Elliott 00:08
Part of the challenge in the replication space is there are people who approach it as a statistical exercise, having created systematic strategies for a long time. There is, there’s a science to it. There’s the sort of statistical work that’s done and computer science work that’s done, but there’s also an art to it.
Jeff Malec 00:30
Welcome to the derivative by RCM Alternatives Send it.
Bob Elliott 00:36
Hey there. This is Bob Elliott, co founder and CEO of Unlimited, here to talk about hedge fund replication and how it might be beneficial for your portfolios the Fed and monetary policy, and maybe a deep dive into the live cattle market at the end on the derivative.
Jeff Malec 01:07
Hey, Bob, how are you good? How are you doing? Great. Thanks. Where are you?
Bob Elliott 01:14
I am in what looks can look to be a undisclosed location, a very sparse office in a generic roadside office complex in central New Jersey, which is not where our main office is, but it’s where I work, sometimes
Jeff Malec 01:33
nice. And what the main office is in New York? Main offices in New York, yep, downtown. Love it. And what’s your background? You’ve always been an East Coast guy.
Bob Elliott 01:43
Yeah, that’s right. Well, I grew up in Detroit and ventured to the East Coast, to what I thought was the big city in Boston when I went to college, and have stuck around the East Coast, basically somewhere between Boston and Central Jersey through most of my my time. So I don’t I, you know, I, I consider myself a Detroiter by heart, even though it has been, I guess, almost 20 years, more than 20 years since I’ve lived in Detroit.
Jeff Malec 02:13
But weren’t you ragging me the other day that you’re a Vikings fan? Not a not a Lions fan?
Bob Elliott 02:19
No, not a Vikings fan. No, no, just a non Bears fan. Got it for, yeah, just, just giving you a hard time about being a Bears fan, which is only second to being a Lions fan for 30 years in terms of ignominy. So I, fortunately had the benefit of my sort of primary football allegiance is the University of Michigan. Having grown up there, my parents went to the University of Michigan. And so when I moved from Detroit to Boston for college, was when this guy, Tom Brady, started playing for the Patriots. And so I had a few decades of patriots allegiance, mostly due to my Michigan allegiance. Those teams actually had a bunch of different Michigan players on them, but since he left, I you know, I guess I’m back to the lions, who are a bit of a heartbreaker
Jeff Malec 03:13
these days. You guys took it to us last week. We had a good blog post years ago, put it in the show notes with that picture of Brady from the draft. You know that famous, he looks like a weakling, nobody. And then tied it into basically, like, hey. So you might be looking at these different hedge funds, and don’t just throw a bunch of these away, because the recent performance is no good. Like, actually understand what’s going on and if they’re winners or not, so what. And then where was college? In Boston, yeah, Harvard. Oh, you’re one of those guys. So I went to some small school, and Harvard, I’ve heard of it, awesome. And then I was, there’s something about botany in your bio what was that?
Bob Elliott 03:55
Yeah, yeah, no, my, my, my academic training is, actually, was in the pure sciences. I thought for a while that I was going to be doing botany for a career. And you know, after the after months and months of being in the sixth basement of the biological laboratories growing plants all alone in the dark, I decided maybe I’d want to do something a little a little more interactive with with people.
Jeff Malec 04:29
That was before Matt Damon made it cool in the Martian, right? Exactly. I wonder what the botanist like curve is. Spiked up after that, and then so decided to go into finance, and ended up at another small place nobody’s heard of.
Bob Elliott 04:47
That’s right, yeah. I mean, I actually part of my time at in in college I spent working on public health issues, and sort of increasingly recognized public health is connected with macroeconomic. Dynamics and a lot of instances. And so I went to Bridgewater, kind of with the idea that they’d pay me pretty well to get, like, a master’s in economics. I had not really had much in the way of any formal training. And, you know, I went and really fell in love with the markets and the macro economy and and, and, you know, and now it’s 20 years later, just like that.
Jeff Malec 05:27
What kind of public health like covid type pandemics, or was more of like, everyone’s too fat, or we’re eating the wrong stuff, or a little
Bob Elliott 05:37
bit of both? Well, back then, probably the biggest global public health issue was the HIV and AIDS epidemic, and it was an interesting time where a lot of the therapies that could help stop both the transmission reduce the transmission rate and also prolong Life were available in Western countries. But the predominant problem existed in the Global South, and so a lot of my work was around, how do you, how do you get, you know, folks in the Global South, to have access to it. And part of the challenge there was building enough of a of a national grassroots constituency that was supportive to that concept in order to put pressure on Congress and and the president at the time, and sort of the peak of the success was building the grassroots constituency that helped get PEPFAR, which was, which was Bush’s AIDS treatment program through Congress, which was the, probably the biggest global public health success of the 21st Century probably saved, you know, saved 10s of millions of people’s lives and extended, you know, 10s of millions of others lives. It’s no longer in existence as of this administration.
Jeff Malec 06:58
I thought that was Bono who did all that? That was you.
Bob Elliott 07:04
We he, you know, for there’s many rock stars who focus on lots of different lots of different things. So certainly, his work was appreciated, for sure, but, but it was not just him.
Jeff Malec 07:23
And then interesting to hear, you call it the global South, that’s basically Sub Saharan Africa, or you’re saying even into southern Asia, and when Yeah.
Bob Elliott 07:32
And at the time, places like Thailand, Thailand had Yeah, that Thailand, Latin American economies struggled with with the HIV and AIDS epidemic. And so sort of, it’s sort of a way emerging countries is not is more like a finance term than it is like a public health term. And so there’s other communicable diseases that particularly affect the global south that so it’s more of a statement of public health geography than it is a statement of like economic geography or something like that. Got it and
Jeff Malec 08:16
then what was it like to get the seat at Bridgewater? Were you one of 1000s trying to get in there. Were they less known at the time? Like, was that a hard interview? Is that a hard job to get?
Bob Elliott 08:26
Yeah, I mean, it was, it was interesting at the time. It was, it really was an unknown. And so my my college roommate intern there as a technologist, and was like, I think you’d probably like these people and and like the work and, you know, the sort of core effort, basically the core edge there was, was looking for people from non traditional backgrounds. You know, whereas the big banks were hiring anyone with an economics major, they were really looking for non traditional backgrounds. And the reality is, pretty much everyone who was there, who started there, out of college, was was from something that you know was quantitative and rigorous, but not narrowly tied to economics. And the truth is, most of what you learn in school for economics is pretty, pretty useless when it comes to day to day trading of markets.
Jeff Malec 09:26
Yeah, friend of mine said peak six here in Chicago, and they hire like poker pros and, yeah, geologists, all sorts of weird stuff. Same, same concept. And that tells me my son’s a junior in high school looking at the colleges like it’s not necessarily where you go or what you’re into, but that just that connection, right of your roommate got you into,
Bob Elliott 09:49
yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s just that, and, you know, I think being curious and flexible, right? So, like, you know, this question of whether you focus on learning skills or. Just interest and ways of thinking and that that matters in a in a 50 year career, being curious and having sort of the sort of picking up the certain aptitudes, let’s say, rather than skills, meaning, like, you know, if you have a Quantitative Aptitude, your skills. Like, I just think about my career, like, you know, we went from running regressions in Excel to, like, you know, building machine learning strategies. You know, the world has changed a lot in 20 or 25 years, but the sort of setting the foundation of having that those sort of aptitudes are the things that really matter.
Jeff Malec 10:39
And then, so somewhat you started on the ground level there, and became, yeah, I
Bob Elliott 10:43
actually started one seat from the mail room. They used to leave the mailroom door open. It was in the basement, and they used to leave the mail room door open and and even when it was very cold. So some days I had to wear gloves, and there was no there was no natural light or anything like that. So I do like to say I started literally at the ground level as an analyst.
Jeff Malec 11:08
You left the basement of botany for the basement of Bridgewater,
Bob Elliott 11:11
exactly, exactly,
Jeff Malec 11:16
and then, but semi quickly, or how long eventually you were kind of raised right hand man that fairness,
Bob Elliott 11:22
yeah, relatively quickly, started to work with him directly in after roughly a year, give or take and and you know, that did a bunch of different interesting work, and It really sort of accelerated around the financial crisis, where, as a sort of was 24 years old, or something like that. He turned to me, looked at me, says, this housing crisis. It was not the financial crisis, it was the housing crisis. Back then, this housing issue, big deal or small deal. And so I had to quickly become an expert in banks, the housing market, product structuring, credit risk and and I came back to him, and I said, I think it’s kind of a, I think this could be a big deal. And so that was, that was a good call. Oh 607, yeah, in I distinctly remember in the in the fall of 07 basically looking at, looking deeply at, you know, all the financial institutions and the credit risks and things like that. And basically in the fall of oh seven, it was pretty clear that every financial institution in America was going to be broke as a result of the credit risks associated with this and, you know, and with a with the housing market, and, of course, you know, those, a lot of those institutions were super highly levered at the time, right? So you looked at a bank, right? You know, it was at many of them, and on a sort of true capital basis, were 30 times leverage. So it’s not like you had to lose that much to be broke, but it became pretty clear even at that point, that that that’s where we were headed,
Jeff Malec 13:07
and that were you guys looking at it two ways, right of like, hey, also, these are our primes and custodians. And right. Like, not only is it market moving, but we have risk on the other side of the equation too.
Bob Elliott 13:20
Yes, for sure. When you when you run money, you’re the credit risk of your counterparties. That matters a lot. And while I won’t talk too much about anything in specific, you know what the thing that really broke Lehman was not really, there was not really the credit risk that they were holding, but basically, as their CDs spread widened, basically everyone cut them off from business and enforced more collateral. And so that it highlights
Jeff Malec 13:53
that for any financial relying on overnight repos and everything
Bob Elliott 13:57
exactly, exactly, and that for any financial institution, the thing that really liquidity matters more than credit worthiness, because credit worthiness you can you can deal with meaning like you can paper it over, you can extend it and pretend you can do all sorts of there’s lots of nonsense that you can do to deal with credit worthiness, but if you have run into a liquidity problem, you’re dead. And so that was the Silicon Valley Bank for exactly, exactly a perfect example, a bank that, you know, basically is totally fine, if anything, actually,
14:32
you know, the
Bob Elliott 14:33
folks who bought it got a steal for it, because the credit and the and the business relationships were pretty good.
Jeff Malec 14:42
Oh, all these thoughts of yours are making it into the daily observations, the famous facts. Yeah, facts, or was it getting emailed? What was happening?
Bob Elliott 14:52
It did, actually, when I started, there were, there were still faxing. Do. Yes, I got very good at working the fax machine many years ago. But yeah, you’re right. You’re right it. It was sort of known on the street as something that faxed everyone. There’s a whole production of faxing it to folks, which was, which was fun, but, but yes, I was, I was writing the daily observations pretty, pretty regularly. I mean, over the course of almost 15 years, I wrote hundreds and hundreds of those daily observations.
Jeff Malec 15:30
So free AI, you like, actually had to hammer it out.
Bob Elliott 15:34
You actually had to type. And still, even today, you know, in my sub stack i or Twitter content or sub stack. You know, people are like, Well, where are all the analysts helping you? Or whatever, you know, who helps you, or do you use AI or things like that? And I like, No, I I just write. I know it’s, yeah, this guy, right? Who does all the work? Me, it’s very, I know it’s a little analog, but it’s, it’s how I learned how to process what’s going on in markets, and so that’s what I do to this
Jeff Malec 16:08
day. And was your name on those? Were you getting credit for that? Oh yeah, yeah. All right, perfect.
Jeff Malec 16:20
So before we leave Bridgewater, get me, like, known for their radical transparency, all that, was that just more PR, or was that actually happening? Was it weird? Was it cool?
Bob Elliott 16:32
Yeah. I mean, I think I like to sort of describe the place there was, sort of, there was a small group of people who were largely in a, in a in a small building, who ran the money and that, and that group, you know, operated like any high performing Financial Group, you know, in the sense of people were straightforward and it was hard work. And you know, you, you, you didn’t pull any punches when it came to trying to figure out what was going on. But, you know, honestly, not that much different than most. If you went to most financial firms that were, you know, high performing, basically the same. And then there was, like, 2000 people that were engaged in some sort of social experiment, which, like, I didn’t see those people. I didn’t engage with those people. I’d show up the holiday party. I’d say, Who the hell are all these people? They’re just like, we’re not a meaningful component of what the core part of the business
Jeff Malec 17:31
was. What were they doing? Faxing, faxing each other. Who knows?
Bob Elliott 17:41
And honestly, the people were running the money didn’t have the time to worry about what all that other nonsense was. We were just focused on on, you know, running the world’s largest hedge fund at the time.
Jeff Malec 17:52
So, so one of those 2000 couldn’t come into your office and be like, you’re doing this all wrong. And here’s how it should work. Like that is kind of the perception from what you read of like anyone could do anything.
Bob Elliott 18:03
Yeah, I think there are a lot of people outside of the core of the business who were doing those various activities, but the core of the business was, you know, it was just, as I said, just basically normal. I mean normal in the sense of, you know, consistent with any high performing organization, which isn’t necessarily right for everyone, but it is. If you’ve been in any of those seats, you know, you know what it’s like. If you worked at a, you know, on the trading floor, you probably know what we’re talking
Jeff Malec 18:38
about. I did, yeah, right, right. Normal for running $180 billion or whatever, whatever exactly something in that order mentioned, which always annoyed me. I was writing blog posts about managed futures. Barkley hedge would report the Managed futures. Aum, it was like 380 billion. And I would I finally like, dug into it, and 180 of it was Bridgewater.
Bob Elliott 19:04
Oh, that is that right. I didn’t realize that, yeah, there’s before, yeah, not real that. That doesn’t seem right. That’s not
Jeff Malec 19:11
that would gotten a big fight with Saul Waxman over there, and was like, Hey, you got to take Bridgewater. And he’s like, Well, we can’t just take managed futures assets from 380 down to 200 overnight, slow wind down of like, Oh, that’s interesting. Programs out and, yeah, yeah, that’s interesting. But I was like, I think if I would, you have considered your yourselves managed futures at the time.
Bob Elliott 19:33
No, no, no, no, I systematic global macro would have been the way I would have described it at the time.
Jeff Malec 19:40
You were using futures, but, yeah, yeah,
Bob Elliott 19:43
exactly. I mean, futures are just an exposure tool, but not, you know, just a way to implement a view, but not, not, you know. And I think actually sometimes when I talk to people, they get sort of confused. There’s that. Trophic fusion. I was actually talking to advisor yesterday, who asked a simple question, like, what’s the difference between macro, global macro, and managed futures? It seems like it’s the same positions that you’re trading or the same markets that you’re trading, and it really comes down to the way in which the views get constructed. So like, you know, let’s say traditional sort of managed futures is really focused around price trends and movements pretty strictly, whereas global macro trades the same markets, and may even look at price trends as part of their approach, but they’re also looking at like concepts of value inter market action. You know, what’s priced in to the you know when it comes to the economy relative to what’s likely to happen with the macro economy. You know, dynamics like that. What’s going on with policy moves can shift what’s going on with policy, with global macro views in a way that might, you know, lead or not be reflected in price trends. So macro, in some ways, is like a, I’d say, a more strategy diversified way of approaching the same markets, then, then traditional trend following approaches.
Jeff Malec 21:07
I 100% agree. I also sometimes say, like macro can be long, short, flat, whereas trends are going to be more long, short, and they’re just going to take a position regardless of what’s going on. Whereas a macro man or woman might say, Hey, hold on, this looks scary or this doesn’t look risk, risk worthy. Last bit, we’ll dive into more of this stuff. But on Dalio, you got one or two words? Was he brilliant, quirky, eccentric, all the above?
Bob Elliott 21:38
Well, I think, um, I’d say, when I, when I started my career, you know, he, he was a, it was, it was great to work with him to develop a really good understanding of, you know, the macro economy and markets and the insight, I’d say the insight to systematize macro was your pretty unique insight at the time, You know, it was sort of the time with where, if you sort of were in the macro milieu, you’d sort of say, Oh, well, these are people taking huge, concentrated bets and in a discretionary way, you know, trying to break the pound and stuff like that. And the insight, exactly the insight to basically say, no, actually, a better way to run money is to have a 5545 you know, probability of being right, and diversify over 100 markets or 120 markets. That was, that was a smart way to manage money, and a differentiated way to manage money. And so, you know, I thought at the, you know, when I started my career, is great place to start my career. The other thing, actually, which I think probably doesn’t get enough credit in terms of building the business, which I still use today, is just the investment in communicating investment, thinking clearly on a day to day basis, to your to your clients, and helping them to both help them understand what’s going on and as part of a process of helping them manage way more. You know, manage any, any single manager is going to be a tiny slice of any portfolio, right? And so, how do you help managers manage the whole book? How do they? How do you help them A, sound smart to their either higher ups or clients. And B, how do you help them manage their whole book? A lot of the business, a lot of the stickiness of the business was built around that sort of strategic partnership. The both the daily observations were essentially a tool in that regard. And and, you know, the longer term strategic relationships, beyond just whatever the return was, was important. So that’s, you know, a lot of I still like that sort of ethos of how to build a business is, you know, in many ways, at the core of what we’re doing, it unlimited in what I do in a day to day basis. And so I think that probably doesn’t get people talk about the running of the money, but that building of the business part probably doesn’t get the credit that’s due.
Jeff Malec 24:04
Yeah, which, it seems to me, he kind of went too far that way in the last few years, promoting a book and doing all this stuff.
Bob Elliott 24:10
But, yeah, yeah. I mean, I, you know, I mostly focus on on the for me, the the strengths of it was a great place when I was starting my career as a fast growing and we went from being the challenger to the incumbent, like, it was a great place to, it was very interesting time in markets. And so you put all that together. Was, it was, you know, it was a great foundation for for a career, for sure,
Jeff Malec 24:32
yeah. And they, it definitely became the like, you don’t get fired for buying IBM kind of thing, right, to your point of like, Hey, that was the result of all that work.
Jeff Malec 24:49
All right, enough on those guys. You left for a reason. You hung your own shingle. So tell us about unlimited Well,
Bob Elliott 24:57
it’s interesting in a lot of ways. I. Uh, having sort of been in the two and 20 business for a long time, I sort of increasingly recognized some of the challenges of the two and 20 business, particularly, you know, given the fact that two and two and 20 businesses are pretty good for the manager and not necessarily that great for the investor. And the reason why that is is a couple different reasons. I mean, the core reason why that is, is the fees are too high, meaning, you know, managers, 1000 people, right, exactly, managers that charge two and 20. It just, it just doesn’t make sense for particularly when you see strategies that are run that sort of bond, like risk, the fees are too high. And so the manager, I like to say, hedge fund managers, generate plenty of alpha. It’s just they, they take it all for themselves, and their clients never see it. And, you know, on top of that, starting to think about whether there was, you know, seeing that a lot. For a lot of folks, they’re totally locked out of hedge fund strategies for a variety of different reasons. And and so that got me to thinking, with my co founder, Bruce, about whether there was a way to bring sort of concepts of diversified, low cost indexing and bring it to the world of two and 20. And of course, you couldn’t to do that. Well, you can’t invest directly in managers, right? You can’t build fund of funds, because you pay the managers, and they pay yourself. And now we got too many fees. You know, fees you know, fees were already a problem. It’s even worse than that structure. And so our idea instead was to build technology, leveraging our experience having built these strategies that looks over the shoulder of how managers are positioned in real time, and then takes that understanding and uses it to hold long and short positions in liquid securities that can back things like ETFs. And if you put those strategies into an ETF wrapper, both, not only does that open up the door for essentially any investor to have access to these sort of approaches, but because we’re using technology to run it. We can offer it at a much, much lower fee point than what, than what typically exists. And we can also target the return to be something away from not just, you know, institutional like returns, which is like cash plus a few 100 basis points. We can actually take the same understanding and target something like equity risk, which has a much more which is much more cash efficient and a much higher return potential that’s in a in a portfolio. And so that’s the core of the business. We’ve been around for three years and and have you know over the course of that time, proven out that our replication tech is working well. And you know, in the recent period, have launched some of these individual sub strategy, ETFs, meaning things like hedge like globe macro, managed futures, equity, long, short, but doing it at a 2x target return in a way that makes it a pretty what we think is a pretty compelling pairing in a lot of client portfolios.
Jeff Malec 28:08
And I love the name. What was the you guys sat in a room, sat at a bar, went through a list of 20?
Bob Elliott 28:15
Yeah, well, the idea naming is a real pain.
Jeff Malec 28:19
That’s what I would say. And a great one. You’re like, damn it, someone’s got that.
Bob Elliott 28:23
Yeah, exactly. So we needed something that was that you could spell so Unlimited, you could spell easily. Which was, which was important, something that that wasn’t already taken. And then also what, what it is, is it’s a little bit of a play on limited partnerships. You know, we’re unlimited because anyone can invest and then are you, which was designed here. You can see in the background here has the up and to the right, that line that’s up and to the right is reflective of what an ideal return profile looks like that. We’re trying to help people go up into the
Jeff Malec 29:05
right, and you couldn’t very well try and disrupt two and 20 with, like, some fancy Greek word that all the two and 20 guys use, right
Bob Elliott 29:12
exactly, exactly. Like, yeah, we’re not, yeah. There’s always people trying to get two ways too clever. Like, I need something that someone can spell, you know.
Jeff Malec 29:25
And then interesting to me, you didn’t write with your background. You didn’t come in and say, Hey, I know how to build these models. We’re going to build the next great macro model based off my expertise and run it in an ETF, right? Like, yeah, easily done that as well. What was that? Yeah, well, decision of like, I think replication is better than my own ideas.
Bob Elliott 29:46
That’s right. And I think part of having lived the experience of a individual manager, it was, is recognizing that any one manager, you know, the. Are going to be times when it’s doing well relative to the index, you know, to their peers, and there’s going to be times when you’re not doing well relative to your peers. And I think in many ways, the world, the world of allocators, thinks that if they try hard enough, they can find the managers that do better than other managers over time. And the reality is quite compelling that there is no single manager out performance persistence among among a group of hedge fund peers. There’s plenty of alpha generated by hedge funds, particularly gross of fees, but no one manager does particularly well. And I live that life up and down around. You know, through my time at Bridgewater. And if, if you take that as a reality, which there is no manager outperformance, persistence, I should say, beyond random chance, then the best way to approach running money, the best way to extract the alpha from hedge funds is actually to diversify and lower fees, rather than try to either pick managers or do it yourself. And so that was, that’s sort of the core idea. Is, you know, in some ways, the humility of saying, hey, look, I can probably, you know, I can generate alpha over time. But if you really want the best return that you can get, you actually don’t want to pick me as an individual manager. You want to, you want to use the wisdom of the crowd and get a more consistent return.
Jeff Malec 31:25
And the we’ve had Andrew beer on the podcast before, who’s doing replication on trends, and we dove into an interested your thoughts, like, but you need those other guys to stay in business in order to replicate them. So it’s a weird concept of, like, I’m trying to disrupt that and take all these assets, but also, yeah, them to keep replicating. So it’s a little weird of like, well, we’re going to take some of your money, don’t we’re not going to take all your money. You need to stay in business. Yeah. I mean, if
Bob Elliott 31:51
you think about the hedge fund industry, there’s $5 trillion of assets in hedge funds. Like, just fine, yeah, if we got 1% of that, like, we would be one of the most successful, you know, startup asset managers in the last couple of decades, you know, so we’re good.
Jeff Malec 32:10
But if everyone’s trying to do the same replication, right, then it becomes like a, I don’t know, it’s like a splinter in my mind, a little bit of, how do you how do you square that? Of, like, the thing you’re trying to replicate needs to exist.
Bob Elliott 32:23
Well, I think, if anything actually, the benefit is that there’s probably the evolution is actually beneficial over time and and in that sense, like, the reason why that is is because what, what replication would do, will do over time is it will, it will knock out a bunch of marginal managers, meaning managers that don’t really justify their two and 20 fees. And it will create selection towards managers that do justify two and 20 fees. And look, there’s lots of reasons why you might want the two and 20 fee structure. You can tailor it. There’s all sorts of things, you know, if you’re, if you’re a institutional investor, some mandates only let you invest in fund structures, or you have to invest in individual managers. All sorts of institutional reasons why that is and and so my guess is that there’s always going to be a demand for, you know hedge fund strategies, it’s just the people who should be worried are the people who are not worth their fees, right? So that’s, that’s what we’re really going after.
Jeff Malec 33:30
Um, and then, for our wonky, nerd listeners, you’re doing top down or bottom up. I think, per our discussion right here, you’re doing top down.
Bob Elliott 33:42
Yeah, that’s if, if someone knows the off the cuff, the difference between the top down and the bottom stuff. It’s a framework that Corey, off scene highlighted, which I thought is, frankly, like a helpful framework, which is, you know, this idea bottoms up, meaning, you know, in some ways, it’s basically saying replicate the decision rules versus top down is replicate the or infer the positions. And so predominantly, I say any replication is a little bit of a combination of both, because in some senses, even the selection of the exposures is a bit of a bottoms up concept, meaning, like for our replication for each individual hedge fund strategy, we tailor the positions, the plausible positions, based upon the style. So equity, long, short, you know, is sectors, factors, size, geographies versus global macro, which is, you know, global currency, commodity, fixed income, etc. So there’s sort of a bottoms up part of it there, through the selection of what what the exposures are, but we predominantly focus on a top down approach. And the primary reason why that is is at least in things like global macro, but really pretty much in any of these strategies other than maybe managed futures. Um, you there’s some, there’s a combination of discretionary, systematic thinking that goes into positioning at any point in time, and so you don’t want to be too stuck in rules. It’s like one of the reasons why a lot of that sort of smart beta or factor type stuff has been kind of mediocre, because, yeah, like, as you know, something like Carry, carry is good in certain circumstances. It’s bad in other circumstances. And it’s sometimes it’s irrelevant. Like, if you know an administration is trying to impose a bunch of tariffs instantaneously on the economy, you know, carry probably doesn’t matter at all relative to whatever that dynamic is, or if there’s a pandemic, or all those sorts of things, and so we like to infer the top down. It also allows us to sort of follow on in terms of as managers are getting better and better, because they’re constantly investing in capital to create more Alpha. We’re agnostic to that process, because we’re just following their positions. So if they find better and better way sources of alpha, we’re just following the positions and essentially following their evolution, rather than getting stuck and trying to replicate their decision
Jeff Malec 36:09
rules. But you don’t actually know their positions, right? So that’s the machine learning and the the technology of inferring, as you say, Okay, this per they made 6% last month. That’s probably a high number. They made point 6% last month, right? That was likely due to these 20 Long, short equity positions. And you can run this regression analysis and basically find what, what position would have resulted in that
Bob Elliott 36:32
return? Yeah. So That’s right, we’re inferring the positions from from the path of returns. And so the thing that is sort of the sort of core insight in terms of how we approach it, is that positioning is continuous, meaning, like hedge fund managers don’t flip their positioning instantaneously. Any one hedge fund manager doesn’t because you take transactions costs, and certainly, you know, if you talk about 500 global macro managers, they’re in aggregate, not flipping their positions instantaneously. And so that actually gives you
Jeff Malec 37:09
like that spaghetti chart, and you’re looking for the middle of the of the chart there,
Bob Elliott 37:14
yeah, I mean, that gives you like that means, because positions are continuous, it means they’re path dependent. And so there’s actually a lot of information value in the path of returns, because the outcomes today are a function of today’s positions. Today’s positions are adjacent to yesterday’s positions, and yesterday’s positions can be seen through yesterday’s returns. And there’s only so many portfolios probabilistically that describe today’s outcome and an adjacent portfolio that describes yesterday’s outcome. And then functionally, what we do is say, and all the adjacent portfolios back for the last 25 years, all the way back up to today. What are all the portfolios with probabilistically that are describing the returns? And so the good thing about that approach is it solves one of, sort of the core problems of replication, which is most replication, sort of traditional replications, are using back histories, meaning using regression approaches, where you have to have back history. So you’re really average. You’re getting a sense of the average positioning over a time frame, because we’re using, essentially, you think about it like sophisticated Monte Carlo simulation, like a Bayesian approach. What we saw for is actually today’s portfolio, but in the context of the previous portfolios, but not averaging the previous portfolios. And so, you know, our view is that that gives us a much better sense of the tactical Alpha positioning from these managers.
Jeff Malec 38:34
And then how often are getting your inputs just monthly data from the indices?
Bob Elliott 38:39
No, we get daily performance information, some weekly performance and some monthly performance that that we’re all putting together, you know, taking into consideration the daily stuff is a little smaller in terms of the coverage, but very correlated, same, you know, with the weekly and then the monthly is pretty much the best in class stuff. But we’re, in many ways, we’re constantly getting performance information, and we’re, you know, updating our views on how managers are positioned as a function of that. And then, you know, trading to when you know our view of that is sufficiently divergent from our old positions, and it makes sense to trade.
Jeff Malec 39:17
And then how do you protect against the model shooting out like, Oh, you’re supposed to be short natural gas, and that explains these long, short equity returns, or something of that, right? Wasn’t part of this correlation? Yeah, part
Bob Elliott 39:29
of the way that we do that is by tailoring for each hedge fund strategy to ensure that we don’t, you know, this is equity long, short, right? Yeah, equity. Longshore managers don’t trade natural gas, and so the way that we we approach that is we have a defined set of exposures tailored for each hedge fund style, which is reflective of the type of exposures they have on. And in that process, we use what we call a parsimonious but comprehensive set, meaning we’re not going to try and over optimize our process. Uh, to any, you know, specific subset. What we’re trying to do is say, here is, you know, the largest scope of different possible positions that are within the scope the that they normally trade. In order to come up with the positions,
Jeff Malec 40:15
I think you should have named it parsimonious ETFs instead of
Bob Elliott 40:19
parsimonious ETF that would be hard to say.
Jeff Malec 40:30
And then, so it started with the, what was your first one? Just the first replication, yeah, our first.
Bob Elliott 40:40
Our first rep, ETF, we basically built the technology, which is seven underlying sub strategies, individually created. And our first ETF, we basically put those seven strategies together into one ETF, a multi strategy, and and we our goal was to match the index. The, you know, was to match the index performance with with lower fees. And so it’s sort of run at Bond volatility, and it’s consistent with the index. And so, you know, we’ve, it’s done what it’s supposed to do, which is, you know, track the hedge fund industry returns. It’s, it’s just it didn’t, you know, it didn’t really blow anyone out of the water. And when we talked to a lot of advisors, they basically said, Look, we we like the strategies. We like the diversification. We see that you can do what you’re saying you can do because you’ve shown it for the last few years. Is there any way to either break out the individual strategies or turn up the expected return, so that it’s a little more cash efficient, you know, you have a little less line item risk in the portfolio, and it sort of compare with equities more effectively. And so that’s really what our three okay, right, right? And that’s, and that’s really what a what our strategies are that we’ve launched, we’ve taken the same exact decision, rules, technology, the same thing we’ve been running for three years, that’s worked, and we’re just breaking out the individual sub strategies and then targeting a 2x target return in in our newest products that we’ve launched this year.
Jeff Malec 42:11
That’s funny to me, right? The advisors like, wait, I had no idea hedge funds are so boring. Yeah, this. I mean, I think that’s a lot of money, and they chug along.
Bob Elliott 42:20
Yeah? And you know, if you’re an institutional allocator with the mandates that you have, you know you’re not really looking for something that has equity, like risk, because it’s inconsistent with your mandate. I think for a lot of you know, you know, retail oriented advisors, you know, meaning, like people who have less than $50 million or something like that. You know they’re not trying to cash plus 200 would be disappointing to their to their clientele over time. And so, you know, they want return streams that are complementary to things like equity index risk. And so that’s what we’ve built, yeah.
Jeff Malec 43:03
And also you’ve kind of doubled down on your fee discussion there, right? Because now you’re getting 2x for the
Bob Elliott 43:12
yeah, don’t tell don’t tell our backers, financial backers, but yes, by launching it at 2x I essentially cut the cost in half, and overall, just for context like it basically takes, you’re getting 2x the target return of a traditional hedge fund exposure. And instead of 400 basis points of fees, you’re paying 95 basis points of management fees. And so that’s about an eighth the fees. And then, of course, in the ETF wrapper for taxable investors, it ends up being roughly half the taxes. I have
Jeff Malec 43:47
that argument with people on time, like, well, your fee, as a function of your volatility, is extremely high. Like, here you are, compared with all these other managers in our portfolio, and you’re 10x and they’re like, whoa, you can 4x our returns. I’m like, Yeah, but, um, I’m forexing the fee as well, right? So kudos to you for doing that. Um, what you have a favorite of them all? Or they’re just
Bob Elliott 44:15
like, it’s like, asking, yeah, yeah, asking, actually, what your favorite kid is? The reality is, every parent does have a favorite kid. Yeah, they just, they just don’t talk about it, or at least they don’t talk about it to the kid’s face for us, you know, I think we’ve, we’ve found the most resonance with, you know, advisors most resonated with the global macro strategy. I think because it it pairs nicely in a traditional 6040, portfolio. It’s got some of the defensive if you look back through time, macro managers have shown some of the defensive properties of things like managed futures, because they can trade short, you know, like in 2022 they could trade short stocks and bonds, and traded that period quite well. Well, in the same way managed futures did in an environment of good performance and risky assets, it’s still a diversifying strategy in positive risk asset markets. And so that’s kind of the that’s the one that most people have liked. Some other people find the equity, long, short strategy compelling too, because it’s equity like returns are better with lower volatility, so it’s more of an equity replacement than it is, sort of an absolute return strategy. And then, of course, you mentioned managed futures, but we have a Managed futures at 2x which, you know, in some ways, so, you know, folks have found compelling, because it reduces the line item risk of managed futures, right? That’s the challenge with it is, you know, you have to, if you just match the index, you basically have something that you have to put a lot of capital to to get the juice out of it. And so we’re basically saying, Well, you put half the capital and reduce the line item risk on it.
Jeff Malec 45:55
How do you think advisors are coming along to these concepts? It’s been, right, you mentioned Corey hofstein, he’s pushing this like, hey, yeah, we’re creating these products that already have this built in. Leverage is a scary word, but we’re not borrowing money. We’re not we’re
Bob Elliott 46:10
just using we do higher target return. We don’t do leverage. We do higher target return. There you go,
Jeff Malec 46:13
right, but Right, it makes way more sense of like, then you don’t have to put as much of your you don’t have to sell down as much equity. You don’t have to do right? It makes their lives much easier. But it seems they’re slowly getting there. Yeah, I think question in there, but yeah, no,
Bob Elliott 46:30
I even in the few years that I’ve been doing and, you know, someone like Andrew has been doing this for a long time, in some ways, he’s like the, you know, he’s, he’s the OG in this space, that’s for sure. You know, I see, I see a increasingly rapid recognition that these strategies make sense, particularly in the ETF wrapper. You know, folks are really starting to kind of accept that as like a somewhat as a given to say, hey, look, this is, this is the best way to do it, and you can do it. And, you know, the the there’s a lot of compelling reasons for why it is, part of that, I think, is paired well with increasing push towards model portfolios, particularly from the independents, who don’t really necessarily want to spend money on a Blackrock model portfolio. They also don’t they want to be differentiated from the Blackrock model portfolio. And so they’ve had a good they find these strategies beneficial because it’s essentially a way to create a model portfolio add diversification and differentiate from other advisors. So, you know, we’ve seen a lot of interest there.
Jeff Malec 47:44
The Yeah, the wire houses and the big custodians have seemed slower to catch up. They think they see leverage was bad. No, you’re like, No, this isn’t the negative 2x Nvidia play. This is actually smart target return. I’m gonna, I’m gonna borrow that. Can I have that? You’re gonna have that? Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
Jeff Malec 48:16
What’s your thoughts on the current market? The Fed? Are they locked in a in a box? What can they do?
Bob Elliott 48:24
The broader macro economy story is that we’re sort of late cycle. The economy was slowing very gradually, somewhat as a function of high rates eroding the strength of the economy, even before the new administration. And then the new administration has implemented a number of negative growth policies related to constructing immigration and and and hiking tariffs, which are effectively just attacks on business, on businesses and households. And that, that is, you know, that slowed the economy in the first half. We grew at 1.8% in the first half, which is quite, a bit lower than the sort of two to three that had been consistent in the few years prior and and so it’s not surprising, given that slowdown that we’re seeing weakness in the labor markets and from there, you know, weak job growth and the Fed. You know, the Fed has a dual mandate, but you know anytime, it seems increasingly that any time there’s a tension point between those two, the dual mandate, the employment and inflation, that they tilt towards expressing concern about employment relative to worry about inflation. And so the transition. There’s a lot of noise around here, but in some ways it’s kind of the same. In some ways it’s kind of the same thing that we saw last year, which is, you know, everyone sort of says that was a big political move. But like, you know, unemployment rate started rising. I think smart people recognize that it was probably not persistent. But if you were sitting in the. Bad shoes. You saw the unemployment rate rising, you were a little worried about it. Inflation was elevated, but not extreme. And so you cut, and that’s basically what we’re seeing now, which is the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate is very modestly rising, but also labor market conditions are clearly soft. And, you know, inflation is up, but it’s not crazy high. And so why not? Why wouldn’t you sort of cut into that dynamic? And that’s basically what’s happening.
Jeff Malec 50:26
That’s too boring. Come on. I want some like, you want something to hide, a pal?
Bob Elliott 50:30
Yeah. No. I mean, the thing that I think is interesting from a financial markets perspective, is, in the last two months, we’ve really priced in a fair amount. We priced in basically the most amount of easing that the Fed is going to deliver without, without conditions getting really bad. Meaning, basically all financial markets have been lifted from the declining the discount rate. Like, I mean, it’s interesting, like, these are the sorts of times where everyone thinks themselves as a genius. They’re like, Ah, I’m a genius. All the my assets are up. And it’s like, everything’s going up. But if everything’s going up because of the Fed, because everyone’s recognized that the Fed is going to ease in some ways, a little bit proactively, you know, that’s basically what’s driving everyone’s genius. The real challenge is it’s hard to sustain those moves after they cut? What do you do? What’s right? It’s hard to stay in those moves, because in order to get the continued discount rate decline, you have to have, essentially, policy be easier than what is already priced in. And the challenge is, policy that’s easier than what is already priced in would require growth that is meaningfully weaker than current environment. And so if you’re sitting there holding equities, you know, you don’t really want growth that’s weaker than what’s going on right now, right that that would be a bad outcome for you, and you would probably have more and more of a negative influence than any further declines in the discount rate. And so that’s kind of the question is basically like, how do you get sustained asset appreciation from here now that you’ve basically gotten all the sort of benefit from a dovish fed
Jeff Malec 52:13
but that’s literally the game we played for like, dozens a year. Like, how do we how do we keep this machine going? We’ll figure out a way just by and do you like derogatorily? Derogatorily, we’d call you a macro tourist, right? Like you’ve given all these thoughts and all that, but like you’re saying, it helps you inform, right? The models are doing what they do, regardless of what you think, right?
Bob Elliott 52:36
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, what I the way I’d say is that we run our products based upon, in a systematic way, based upon the, you know, our views of what the aggregate hedge fund positioning is and and in a lot of ways, you know, I think part of what I’m doing with any personal, discretionary, macro views, they aren’t influencing how we’re running the money in those ETFs. They have two sort of primary values. One is it is important to from as a portfolio manager, as part of the process of understanding whether our technology is working, is to understand what’s going on in the markets, why folks would have views that they might have and constantly be triangulating, both systematically but also discretionary, meaning, talking to hedge fund managers, stuff like that, to understand whether we’re capturing the essence of what’s happening and so. So that’s part of it. The other thing is, in the same way that, you know, tying back to the earlier conversation that a real business benefit that Bridgewater brought to the market was giving high quality insight into what’s going on in the markets to clients to make sure, you know, to help them sound smart, to help educate them and sound smart in the market. That’s a big part of what I do on a daily basis is is going through that process. And so that starts with my own insights and commentary about what’s going on. And I, you know, I had a client, a client recently, who who reached out and said, you know, that that I that my view on the economy was, let’s say, more bearish than, than the, you know, the wisdom of the macro investment community and, and I said, yeah, that’s that. That’s right. And the wisdom of the crowd has beaten my understanding in the last few weeks. So isn’t that what you want?
Jeff Malec 54:42
But yeah, you’re good at it, so I’m glad you’re not just, there’s a lot of these people, replicator, systematic traders, are just like, I don’t care what the market does. I don’t need to know, right, right, right. Surely you have some opinion. Surely you’re reading the the interwebs, and have a have a stand.
Bob Elliott 54:58
And I think, I think part of. Yeah, part of the challenge in the replication space is there are people who approach it as a statistical exercise, and I think about some legacy replication products that are out there that like, if you talk to the people who created them, like they couldn’t tell you that the Fed’s meeting today, like they couldn’t tell you anything right about what’s happening in markets, and having been having created systematic strategies for a long time, there is, there’s a science to it. There’s the sort of statistical work that’s done and computer science work that’s done, but there’s also an art to it, because you have a lot of implicit decisions that are going on. And so in a lot of ways, what I like to say is like, we are, my co founder, Bruce and I, we’re basically, we have 50 years of experience having literally built systematic strategies across these funds, and we’re applying that thinking and that understanding, because we understand how funds actually operate, how they actually think about these things and using that to craft a systematic approach. So it’s a bit of an art and a science that, you know, a lot of the replication stuff that’s out there is mostly science, and the worst case, you know, lab science, rather than practical reality, having done done the work in the past, right? Like, does your global macro include foreign indices, equity indices? Of course, yep, yep. Example, right? Like, if I’m just in a lab, I’d probably just have the s, p, right, right? And actually, one of them, 20 years. Like, why include anything else? Yeah, one of the things, some of the markets that have delivered some of the best performance this year, Japan, China, you know, which basically started talking about Chinese stocks, and everyone kind of looks at you like you’re a crazy person, but, but those are all you know. But those are markets that global macro managers trade and so, and to be frank, I’ve traded in my career. And so, you know, they’re important components of how we think about the overall replication approach.
Jeff Malec 57:05
And to be frank, for me, are way overdue for a for a re reversion to the mean. What
Jeff Malec 57:16
kind of rabbit hole you’ve been going down recently?
Bob Elliott 57:20
Well, one of the interesting things that that I like about having a Managed futures product is trading all of these markets that I wouldn’t, you know, I wouldn’t otherwise have at the at the top of my the top of my head. And so give
Jeff Malec 57:40
you quick props of launching a Managed futures product in the midst of a like historic 18 month drawdown.
Bob Elliott 57:48
That’s right, that’s right. Well, the best time to buy is after, after some pain, blood in the streets. Blood in the streets. So I recently went down a rabbit hole on the live cattle market, which was which actually added a fair amount of positive return, both for our Managed futures product as well as our as well as global macro. And, you know, I It’s a very interesting it’s a very interesting market. For instance, you probably don’t know that that that the herd size today is at its lowest level since 1950 and you know, that has created real tight supply in the market. Or, you know, we talk about macro and the impact of tariffs, but you know, a lot of our beef imports are from Brazil, and at a 50% tariff, that’s actually a big problem, because a lot of those costs are going up in sort of, let’s call it the cheap beef that’s coming into the US market, or, like the fast casual burger, exactly, exactly it’s coming from Brazil supply, and that’s 50% tariff. And that actually is a real problem when it comes to prices, or, I mean, not to mention the Mexican screw worm, which is, you know, really caused some challenges with Mexican supply, which
Jeff Malec 59:08
not a joke, people, there’s an actual thing, Mexican
Bob Elliott 59:11
screw not a not a joke, not a joke. So anyway, this is, this is was a little bit. I wrote a, I wrote a blog piece about it recently as well, just kind of getting into these markets that I, you know, wouldn’t normally spend any time thinking about, but either bigger live cattle has been sort of a march up into the right pretty much more than any other, any other agricultural commodity. And so I went down the rabbit hole on live cattle,
Jeff Malec 59:42
which is an odd because grains have been going down into the right, massively, right. They’re at all time lows, which you would right. That’s what the cattle are eating to fatten up. So usually those two would be more correlated. So yeah, you outed yourself, though, as not a list. Avid listener of the podcast, because two pods ago we had a guy on talking all about live cow.
Bob Elliott 1:00:05
Is that right? Oh my gosh, I should go back and listen to that. I actually the I occasionally do. I do a radio program called agri talk. Shout out to all the agri talk listeners out there. Now there’s probably not so many, but it’s, it’s the largest syndicated farm oriented show in the country, in middle America, and so I always love it, because we, you know, we sort of talk Main Street macro dynamics that are going on, which is helpful for folks, but I always enjoy the segments ahead of time where I’m learning about, you know, the the soybean yields in southwest Iowa, or whatever running into, running up into what I come
Jeff Malec 1:00:54
the basis trades blowing out in Pierre, South Dakota. Exactly one more blog post, I’ll mention, we had a blog called the picture from space that proves why commodities are non correlated. And it’s basically 1015, years ago. There was a snow storm in July in Wyoming, and the cattle hadn’t maybe was August or September. The cattle hadn’t grown their winter coats yet. So like 70,000 cattle basically died frozen from this freak blizzard. So it’s like, yeah, that kind of stuff’s not priced into equity, P, E, ratios and all that. That’s why you need, right, right?
Bob Elliott 1:01:30
And it’s a great, you know, live catalytic is great because it it both like, you know, when you look at it, there’s sort of, like, fundamental reasons why you why there’s been strengthened the market. But there’s also, if you’re a trend follower, if you’re, you know, then you’ve picked up this price trend that’s been, you know, running quite well. So it sort of speaks to the value of both traditional fundamental analysis, but also price trend analysis, as you know, ways to find opportunities and markets that you otherwise wouldn’t find.
Jeff Malec 1:02:03
And the weird thing cattle cure for high prices is high prices, right? Everyone will start slaughtering their cattle to grab those high prices. But that hasn’t seemed to happen yet.
Bob Elliott 1:02:11
It has a little it’s happened a little bit. Supplies increased. But you know, the thing that is incredible is the insatiable demand for us, for for Americans, for for hamburger meat and such. And it’s kind of incredible.
Jeff Malec 1:02:26
Watch your commercials over the next couple of weeks. Listeners to like, you’ll see McDonald’s all these chains pushing chicken. Ah, that’s interesting. Like, a guy mentioned that to me, and like, I’m starting to see and I go to McDonald’s like, five times a week for just to order a Diet Coke. But it’s popping up in my app and on the on the menu of, like, order a chicken today, or
Bob Elliott 1:02:49
did that’s, that’s, that’s interesting. They’re trying to figure out a way to reduce supply or reduce demand, because they’re probably not going to change their menu prices. Are they? That’s, that’s so interesting.
Jeff Malec 1:03:00
Last question I wrote down here, I never got to going back a little bit like you. Never mentioned risk parity in talking about Bridgewater, which was kind of synonymous with them in the past, and you don’t have a risk parity. ETF, what any reasons for that?
Bob Elliott 1:03:16
I mean risk parity, in a lot of ways, is just a it’s a somewhat smarter way to build a passive portfolio. It’s in this, in this world like, you know, I think, when it comes to diversification, and, you know, I talked to a lot of advisors that are out there, you know, most of them will have 6040, or the equivalent. And when you’re thinking about what are the most important ways in which you could build diversification into your portfolio, the highest bang for the buck, it’s not really shifting all the way to a risk parity portfolio. It’s really doing simple things like maybe you add some gold into your portfolio, or you know, adding Long, short strategies like tactical, long, short strategies at a reasonable fee, that those are the sorts of things that will move the needle for, uh, advisors. And, you know, risk parity is a, is a, is a fine theoretical concept, but it’s not, I
Jeff Malec 1:04:18
think the first replication, ETFs, right? Our par Yeah, yeah. That’s right. That’s right. Do very well, from my recollection.
Bob Elliott 1:04:26
It’s just there’s a challenge with the the distance between that strategy and, you know, where most advisors benchmark themselves, and that’s, you know, line item risk or peer risk is a practical reality that exists for any manager. And you’re better off recognizing that that’s, that’s, that’s the reality, than trying to think that it doesn’t exist.
Jeff Malec 1:04:55
Love it. Get get yourself some managed futures and global macro instead. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Awesome. I think we’ll leave it there. Got any other thoughts? Leave us with
Bob Elliott 1:05:05
no no. Thanks so much for for having me. Is it was great to catch
Jeff Malec 1:05:08
Agree next time, I’ll try and find you at future proof. We missed each other, but there’s 5000 people running around, and we’ll look you up next time we’re in New York.
Bob Elliott 1:05:21
Yeah, for sure, it was great, great chatting, and let’s let’s definitely do
Speaker 2 1:05:26
it again sometime. Awesome. Love it. Bob, thanks. Talk to you later.
