We had a good conversation with Jim Callinan, which is reflected in our Elevator Talk. Mr. Callinan was a star with Putnam OTC in the mid90s, a superstar with Robertson Stephens in the late 90s, a crash victim shortly thereafter. He refined his strategy in light of the risks he hadn't earlier accounted for, managed an RS (successor to Robertson) fund, brought it to his own firm when he wasn't thrilled about the parent firm's direction, then migrated to Osterweis (a fine and feisty group) when he had the chance. Exceptional performance as OSTGX. The public record of the talk is a bit less interesting than the actual conversation, just because the marketing folks stripped out a bit of the colloquial color and the compliance folks stripped out some statistical information. Both are doing their jobs, so I'm not complaining. The direction of his argument remains clear and intact.
Launch Alert for the AMG TimesSquare Global Small Cap fund, whose siblings - whence the managers are drawn - are all four-star performers. Another Launch Alert for the Fido ZERO funds, just as an opportunity to point out three things: the underlying funds are nothing special, the move is made to increase Fidelity's profits, not yours, and its economically sustainable for Fido.
I've read a dizzying array of bad financial commentary lately. I ignored one of them, which attacked Bogle's claim that ETFs encourage excessive trading (the essayist badly misuses the evidence, then snarls "Any presentation of conflicting data by Bogle or anyone else to discredit Vanguard's excellent ETF research, with the chief purpose of supporting an anti-ETF narrative, should be absolutely viewed as spurious," a/k/a "if you disagree with me, your evidence is invalid") but did address two: the blanket claim that "investors" should be buying inverse and leveraged inverse ETFs with no plan clearly than "hedge my risk" and the nearly-blanked claim that ESG-screened investments will underperform others. The evidence supports neither claim.
In general, the industry was moving slowly in July: many fewer manager changes, many fewer liquidation but a slight uptick in interesting funds in registration (Rajiv Jain, Mario Gabelli and an interesting French "anti-benchmark" strategy).
I was mid-way through profiles of the long-short funds from RiverPark and 361 and an article on market-neutral funds (uhhh ... many of the heavyweights have a positive correlation to the market well above 70), all of which I'll finish this month. (God just laughed.)
David
