Welcome back to the Rated Change with York Wealth Management.
As advice as to some of the wealthiest families in the country, Rated Change is a podcast
designed to help you in the pursuit of building long-term wealth through the insights of some
of the brightest minds in asset management.
I'm your host Murdoch Gatty and in today's Rockcast, I'm speaking with Dr. David Allen,
Plato Investment Management's co-head of research, head of long short strategies and portfolio
manager of the Plato Global Alpha Fund.
For keen rugby fans out there, you may be familiar with David as he was a professional
rugby player and is currently the president of the Eastern Suburbs Rugby Club.
For me, I enjoyed hearing David explain the unique structure and how the fund achieved
a high alpha return without having a highly concentrated portfolio like a 2020 portfolio.
There's something like 750 companies interchangeably in the strategy at any one given time, long
and short, which is quite remarkable.
He also unpacks the red flag process, which he used and gives a whole lot of examples,
which is incredibly interesting.
And also the return on the fund has generated roughly 8.5% over the MISCI World Index since
inception.
Before we get into the Rockcast, I'd also like to encourage you to listen to the disclaimer
at the end of this Rockcast and to keep your feedback coming.
If there's any other guests you'd like to have on, any specific fund managers or any
particular thematic with current markets, please reach out to me at mgatti at ywm.com.au.
So with that being said, I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
So sit back, relax and enjoy.
David Allen, welcome to the Rate of Change with York Wealth Management.
Thank you guys.
Thank you very much for having me.
Looking forward to it.
Why don't we kick things off by telling us a little bit about yourself and how you got
into financial markets?
Yes, sure thing.
So I guess I actually originally went over right after university, went over to play
40 overseas.
And then within the first year I was playing over in Ireland, I injured my neck and that
was kind of the end of my footy career.
And it's probably a good thing because I think I ended up being a better fund manager than
I was a rugby player.
And went over to London, did the typical rite of passage where you, I thought I'd just be
there for a couple of years as Aussies like to do.
But in the end I was there for 15 years.
So it was a great stint and I was incredibly lucky.
I had some amazing mentors and incredible experiences over that time.
And you know, life, you know, you need a bit of luck, right?
And within two weeks I had a job at Jacob Morgan Asset Management, which over in the
US and Europe, obviously is a hugely important group.
And that was a group that was really on the rise.
When we started, we had 18 billion euros under management and we reached a peak of 75 billion.
So I was very much right place at the right time.
I had some great mentors and learned a hell of a lot.
Went through the sort of end of the tech bubble to the GFC, through Brexit, sovereign debt
crisis.
So lots of great experiences there where you learn more in two weeks than you do in two
years.
So that was a really exciting time of my life for sure.
And then I guess I met an Aussie girl and she was a little bit sick of the weather,
which is fair enough.
We wanted to come back and start a family.
That's exactly what we did.
So I've been back at Play-Doh in Australia for five years now and really enjoying that
and running some long short strategies here, which has been really exciting.
Gotta love Europe, must say.
100%.
Why don't you shine some light on what exactly is Play-Doh investment management, the philosophy
of the investing process.
And when we were chatting the other day, you mentioned that essentially the strategy is
very similar.
The Alpha strategy is very similar to what you were doing over in the UK.
I was just curious, how is it similar and how is it different?
Yeah, so for people who don't know Play-Doh, there's 11 billion under management and the
process, it's deeply fundamental in nature.
But that said, we extensively use data and systems and code to really drag the role of
the traditional bottom-up fundamental manager kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
So I think going to the days where you've got a few mates who are brokers that feed
you some tips and then you put the tips on and go out for beers after lunch.
Our process is being developed over a 20-year period and has huge similarities to what I
was doing at Jake and Morgan.
We did, when I joined Play-Doh, we did a drains up in the investment process here and I brought
together all of my learnings over the years, synthesized that with the best of the Play-Doh
investment edge.
And more recently, we brought in some fantastic guys from the Macquarie Hedge Fund Group.
That was a really successful group.
They were generating over 100 million profit a year and we've brought a handful of those
really top global investors, long short investors specifically into our group and bringing together
the best ideas and the best thoughts from all those areas.
The process, if you look at it, it's pretty straightforward.
I'm a big believer that there's two things that are really difficult to do in markets.
One is market timing.
The second is style timing.
Value shot the lights out last year, but who would have thought we'd be sitting here in
October and that growth had gone phenomenally well.
You had this AI frenzy, NASDAQ had gone through the roof in an environment where rates were
rashing up so aggressively.
Style timing is very, very difficult to consistently get right.
So we're very much of the philosophy that at all times you want some fantastic value
companies, some fantastic growth companies and some fantastic quality companies.
And only by doing so can you give that all with a performance that's immune to a certain
extent to changes in inflation and interest rates that are largely hard to predict and
out of your control.
So that's the first thing, really striving for all weather investment performance.
The strategy since launch I think has outperformed in 88% of rolling quarters.
The other really distinctive thing about our investment process Murdoch is the red flags.
Lots of people talk about value, growth, quality, but the red flags is something that is pretty
distinctive but we've actually got 130 different red flags that we look at before we make any
investment either on the long side or on the short side.
It's a bit corny, but Buffett was always one to saying that there's only two things you
need to know.
Rule number one, don't lose money.
Rule number two, don't forget rule number one.
And that's really what the red flags process is all about, making sure there's no landmines
lurking on the long side of our portfolio.
But also identifying companies that are great shorting opportunities that we really expect
to underperform materially.
And it is very interesting, like the strategy we're talking about today is a 150-50 strategy,
so it's 150% long and 50% short.
Typically, the net exposure to the market is always 100%.
This will rise and fall like the traditional long-only equity funding competes in that
morning's bucket.
But the red flag is something that's actually our most potent alpha signal.
The genesis of this was actually I was invested in back in 2014, a Spanish tech company.
This company had gone up 45-fold since we held it.
So it was a phenomenal investment for us.
But the Spanish prime minister was coming out and hailing this tech company.
They did public Wi-Fi as the next unicorn in Europe.
And sure enough, after you get a kiss of death of that kind of politician, then we should
have known there is time to sell.
The stock price was uncovered as a huge accounting fraud.
Stock price goes to zero.
CEO gets indicted.
And we said, damn, well, let's make damn sure.
It's okay to make mistakes, but let's make damn sure we don't make that same mistake
twice.
So we did a post-mortem and said, okay, what did we miss?
And we missed a couple of things that were pretty straightforward.
The first one, they were using an auditor that nobody else was using.
The second thing is they're paying their auditors a really, really small amount, only 0.02%
of revenue.
Typical for a company like this, you'd expect around, say, a percent.
So being evidence-based investors, we said, okay, let's identify every company we can
over the last decade across 10 different countries, so tens of thousands of companies that have
a really obscure auditor.
And sure enough, those companies do go on to be more risky and often do blow up.
So on average, you do want to stay away from those companies.
And there's countless examples where from Bernie Madoff using his uncle up in Queens
to do the books, where the quality of those service providers is really important.
And Darnie, a recent one where they had a very junior auditing firm that didn't have
the capability to deal with a company of that complexity and the web of transactions.
So really, that was the first red flag.
And over the years, we've built up this toolkit.
So there's now 130.
So we looked at Enron, the poster childs for special purpose vehicles and related party
transactions that are present in pretty much every accounting manipulation that you see.
We look at the history of all the directors of companies we invest in.
Have they been involved in a corporate failure in the past?
What are the directors doing with their own money?
Are they suddenly selling equity in the companies?
We look at what's the hedge fund community saying?
Do they have some big short positions in names?
Maybe they know something that we don't know.
The interesting thing is each one of these red flags in isolation is not actually that
powerful.
It might give you a 51% edge.
So not much better than a coin toss.
And often, with something that's low edge like that, you might just ignore it and just
move on and just get on with the investment anyway.
But what you find when you add together this very large group of eclectic different red
flags across governance, forensic accounting, financial distress, that the whole is much,
much greater than the sum of the parts.
And you get a situation where if a company has eight or more red flags, they tend to
underperform the market by about 20% a year.
And that's been a big driver of our alpha today, where we've actually made 90% of the
alpha on the short side.
So investment...
Well, let's talk about that alpha, because the thing I found really quite interesting
about your approach and your strategy is, I think I was on your website and it was a
comment or an article made, which is you have the return is quite good.
And normally, essentially a return associated with that type of portfolio is a concentrated
portfolio like 20 stocks, right?
But how many holdings are in the portfolio?
Yes.
So this will probably surprise you.
Even though we've managed to outperform the index by almost 9% per year after fees, we
actually have a lot of holdings in the portfolio.
There's about 500 names long and about 250 short.
So 500 names long, 250 short.
And what's been the average return?
So the average return of the portfolio overall has been about 9% above the MSCI world benchmark
since launch.
So people say they struggle to get their head around it.
They go, how does that make sense?
You're so diversified.
But the reality is that there's no one right way to make outsized returns.
Like Buffett's done it for a number of years using a very concentrated portfolio at one
end of the spectrum.
But the most successful hedge fund of all time, Renaissance, generated 35% returns after
fees for almost 30 years.
They've got thousands of positions in their portfolios.
So there's no one right or wrong way.
We tend to be more diversified.
A lot of your listeners are probably familiar with the concept of active share.
So that's how different I am from the benchmark, which is the kind of important thing.
Our active share is about 100%.
So that's similar even more than the active shares you get with your 20 stock all in portfolio.
So why are we quite diversified?
Well, it's certainly not by accident.
A top course of our manager, when you look at it statistically, we only get 55% of our
stock picks right.
It's pretty depressing, right?
You spend your lifetime doing it and you're not much better than a coin toss, right?
But our models and our process, we think we can get in the high 50s, almost 60%.
But even so, we're getting four out of 10 wrong.
So if we have a 20 stock portfolio, you can easily be, even if you're skillful, you can
be unlucky and underperform.
So a good analogy, if you like, is the roulette wheel, where the house has a pretty small
edge, right?
But because players are playing at thousands, hundreds of thousands of times, the law of
large numbers, the house is guaranteed to come out on the right side of that, even though
they have a very small edge.
Okay, so the, well, I don't want to compare us to gambling here, unless we are the house,
of course.
If your edge isn't that large and no one's edge is that large because markets are quite
efficient, you do want to be diversified to ensure that you just don't have unlucky periods
of low-key performance.
No, it makes a lot of sense.
And the other thing which I wouldn't mind understanding is it's a lot of direct holdings,
are they defined, they sometimes concentrate in a particular sector of the market or?
Yes.
As an example, right?
You know, AI has been moving, you know, would you potentially allocate five or 10% of the
portfolio to AI, but that might encompass, you know, 10, 20 direct companies.
Yeah, sure.
So yeah, we absolutely do that.
You know, whereas a traditional 20 stock portfolio might have two or three thematics in the portfolio,
you know, that are really driving things, you know, we might have 50 thematics, 50 micro
thematics and AI will be one of them and we've held Nvidia, Broadcom and ASML as part of
that thematic.
But we certainly don't want to go all in on any one investment trend because I just don't
think that's good risk management.
We saw the Cathie Wood ARK funds that were all in and then they had a horrific drawdowns.
I think investors have moved on from wanting something that's super concentrated, that's
going to be up 30%, down 30%.
You know, they want a bit of a more of a consistent journey.
You know, a nice sort of simple analogy that I just heard for the first time the other
day actually was the great Don Bradman.
How many sixes he hit in his career and I don't know if you're a cricket fan, but he
hit only four or five sixes in his entire career.
Everyone's a Bradman fan.
Even if you don't like cricket, you're a Bradman fan.
Well, that's right.
That's right.
And yeah, that's pretty, pretty extraordinary.
The batsman with the greatest average of all time, almost a hundred, barely hit any sixes.
So how do you square that?
Well, his philosophy is you don't get out if you only hit the ball on the ground looking
for singles.
And that's more our approach.
We only go all in on the big kill.
You know, it's got to be all in this biotech stock or whatever.
You know, further, you know, to express lots and lots of different views in the portfolio.
And if you hug the index, that's obviously you're never going to generate any alpha,
but we have nothing like the index and what we hold in the portfolio.
And that's what allows us to generate those really robust terms.
Yeah, and it's interesting you mentioned like funds like Cathie Wood.
I'd actually say that there's no one hard, fast way for fund managers to operate.
And I kind of respect what fund managers like Cathie Wood or, you know, some funds that
have one specific thematic because it is literally that rises and falls depending on macroeconomics.
Like they can't control, they can do is pick the best internally at that time and then
risk manage accordingly.
But the reason they all have their place.
So we've seen what's happened with gas, commodities, you know, all different areas.
But the reason why it's good to talk to yourself, David, is a lot of people out there in the
market are looking for old classifiers.
You'll find as a stable, solid entity, which you can kind of just hold consistently.
Right.
Meanwhile, you have these satellites where essentially you are some investors are looking
to take positions and, you know, take a bet or a view on a particular thematic for a period
of time based on, you know, fiscal and macroeconomic policy, which is fine in itself because there
is a level of volatility we haven't seen for the past seven years for like 50 years.
So it's quite interesting.
Wouldn't you agree?
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Like if you're a savvy investor and you can risk manage well, then yeah, by all means,
investing in different thematics is absolutely a way that you can add value.
The timing as with everything is all important.
There's an interesting study that came out of Journal of Portfolio Management this year,
which is one of the preeminent journals.
And they did a study in the US and said that every time a new thematic ETF is launched,
so think of robotics ETF or infrastructure ETF or lithium batteries, etc.
So what they did a very, very simple study that's quite instructive.
They said, okay, if you'd done nothing, but every time a new thematic ETF has been launched
on the day the launch you buy it, that's your investment strategy.
Okay.
And then you hold it for a period after that.
On average, that strategy underperforms the market by 20%.
So just rather than just going into like the S&P 500, right?
Underperforms the S&P 500 by 20% over a five-year holding period.
And why is that?
Well-
That's quite remarkable.
It's really remarkable.
And we replicated the study for Australia.
We looked at all of the thematic ETFs in Australia.
And we found that the numbers are even worse, that if you just bought every thematic ETF,
the day it launched, then you underperformed the ASX 300 by 20% over the first 12 months.
So more extreme.
So this is incredible.
Why is this the case?
Well, thematic ETFs, when are they launched?
They're launched when public excitement about a theme is at its peak.
Or Uber driver is talking to you about crypto or batteries or lithium or marijuana, that's
right when the valuations are really, really stretched.
And it's when a lot of the investors can jump in.
But that's just reverting to my point about timing.
Absolutely a place for those sort of thematics.
But you just can be very careful about when you're jumping into that.
Speak to your advisor and professional.
See counsel.
See, you know, and always, always, you know, invest within your means and all that as well.
But yeah, let's get into the mechanics.
I really do like how everything's structured.
Do you mind letting everyone know how you've structured the fund?
You know, the alignment, you know, just give everyone a bit of an overview of how it all
operates.
The structure is quite simply, it's a 150 50 fund.
So that means that it's it's a lot more complicated.
It says all that means is you've got 50% more firepower, because you're 150% long, 50% more
firepower for you, you're attractive ideas, okay, that you really like that juices up
the returns, right?
But you've also got this 50% short component to generate alpha on on the short side.
So you've got these almost like these two different alpha engines that can add into
the portfolio.
Sometimes the longs are driving all of the alpha and periods of, you know, free money,
like you talked about before, it's great for the longs.
But in periods like this, where interest rates have ratcheted up very, very aggressively,
then it's a great environment for shorting and you know, 80 or even 90% of our offers
come from the shorts and and a lot in Australia, actually, Australia had names like brain chip,
for example, they had a market cap of two or three billion not so long ago, had 23 red
flags on our investment process.
We were short and subsequently the fall, I think the 80 90% off their page.
This is a company that with such a huge market cap, they've got less revenue than some cafes.
And it's purely based on speculation, hype and hope.
So when we see companies like that, then they're great opportunities for us to make alpha on
the short side.
And, you know, going back a ways, I still remember Volkswagen had 17 red flags, which
most companies only have one or two.
So they have 17 is huge.
And that was before diesel.
So they're an incredible tool for identifying which companies are vulnerable and could end
up blowing up and and then you definitely want to avoid and hopefully want to have a
small short position.
Interestingly, in Australia, there's quite a lot of really good Australians and 130 30
strategies, you know, which are similar to almost identical to what we're talking about
here.
We've got the
share plus fund that booty runs, there's the Tribeca funds, there's the hospital funds,
there's your billion dollar fund.
But in the global space in Australia, global one 30 30 or 150 50, there's virtually nothing.
So there's a it's a great opportunity to be able to generate alpha because I fundamentally
believe that this setup this structure where you 150 long 50 short, it it really magnifies
your ability to generate great returns.
And you know, a traditional long only fund that doesn't have that additional juice on
the longs or the ability to generate it's almost like going to war with water.
It's hard.
This is if you're if you're a skilled manager who can pick longs and short, then you will
generate much better returns in in this type of 150 50 structure.
They're massively popular in Europe massively popular in the US but not as well known in
Australia.
Yeah, no, we can definitely see the advantages in this volatile economy we're currently in
right now.
I'm on that point, I would love to hear your thoughts on we have had quite a big recovery,
I suppose, been held up by the Magnificent Seven.
But I'm reading everywhere.
This is underbelly current what's happening in the bond market and then essentially the
rising inflation, the impact on commercial debt.
They're starting to say they're rolling over the contracts for 2024 through to 2028.
You know, CBD, the saying occupancy is down, you know, and the roll on impact and then
I think someone commented that the chart looks very similar to 1987.
The other day on LinkedIn, I'm just very curious.
Since you cover you technically have a go anywhere strategy, right.
So I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on where we are and what do you believe is
around the corner?
Yeah, like in terms of the macro, like, I think the increasing rate environment is really
going to expose a lot of companies, the default cycle is really kicking into to gear.
And China has a huge amount of debt and isn't going to be able to just pump liquidity to
get out of its problems as easily as it's done in the past.
So I think it's going to be harder to for many, many companies.
And if you remember, like, you know, going back to Japan in the 1990s, this phrase was
coined zombie companies, the companies that for year after year, they can't even generate
enough cash flow to pay their interest bills, but I sort of kept on life support.
And there was a lot of that record number of zombie companies in Australia in particular.
And when ranks jack up, these companies can no longer that have often grown by acquisition,
never really made positive operating cash flow.
These companies can get torched.
And so it's a great environment for shorting.
It means that higher rates is obviously tends to be a negative for growth, although we saw
growth do well this year when interest rates have gone up.
But it comes back to you've got to have like some great value names in the portfolio as
well.
Because if rates go up and growth suffers, you don't want to be like an all out growth
manager.
And we've seen this, there's so many of these growth star managers have been hammered over
the last couple of years, concentrated high growth, high beta portfolios.
So we've got some great value names in the portfolio.
So one of my favorites, it's been a great investment for us is BMW.
So BMW, they traded six and a half times next year's earnings.
And they've got a lot of pent up demand.
And people say, oh, and the long term PE for the BMW going back 30 years is 12.
So they're trading half the price of the they normally do.
And so well, they're not growing very fast.
They're not like a Tesla that's growing 35% a year for their revenues.
Well, BMW from a lower base is actually growing their EV revenue at 100%.
If they wanted to be, they can be fully electric in five or so years.
So I think that's a much safer investment and margin of safety is there relative to
Tesla at 72.
Don't get me wrong, Tesla is a great company, great cars.
But so much of that doesn't necessarily mean it's great value at this point.
There's not much margin for error baked into that stock price.
So having in this macro environment we're going into, having the shorts and the red
flags allows us to drive alpha because we may not get those returns to equity markets
in general, just trending upwards.
So you need to be able to generate alpha through something else such as the short, but you
also need to be in companies that do tend to do better in rising rate environments like
the value names like BMW.
What do you think's happening with the banks in Australia?
It's not my specialty.
The banks are, in terms of how well sort of regulated and capitalized, like I was obviously
in Europe, the GSC and so on, a lot of very poorly run and managed banks over there that
were incredibly leveraged.
Australia, I think is much safer in terms of their books.
And it's not something that is not one of the things that keeps me keeps me awake at
night.
Again, Australia is only a couple of percent of our investment universe.
So it's not a massive area of focus, we're not long or short any of the Aussie banks.
Yeah, right.
So actually, the other day, Qantas popped up, it was quite talked about.
So I'm just curious, like with the red flags system, did that pop up on the radar at all?
Yeah, it did actually.
So Qantas, I think, of top of my head has seven red flags.
So it's not insignificant, right?
So there's the red flags were they've got, like obviously, CEO and CFO just leaving two
red flags that can mean nothing but can be problematic for some companies.
We also saw one of the alternative data sources we use looks at employee morale and satisfaction
because the Burek Levin shows that's actually correlated with future company performance.
And no surprises here, like out of the 20 global listed airlines, stocks Qantas is right down
the very bottom in terms of employee morale and the trend of that morale and satisfaction
with management.
So that's a key red flag.
Carbon emissions is obviously poor, but that's not sort of specific to Qantas, pretty much
all airlines have very poor carbon ratings.
What else is there?
Remuneration structures totally out of whack with brand value, if you like, performance.
So there are plenty of red flags there.
But against that, I wouldn't be going short, Qantas.
Qantas have 62% market share, bringing Jetstar into it.
They're massively on the nose.
I'm no fan of Qantas.
They left me sitting with my family at Waikiki Beach when they lost all my bags in my tracksuit
pants that I had worn on the plane.
So I'm definitely no fan, but do I believe that they can reset?
And there's such a part of the global identity that I think that they will be able to get
it right.
And the valuation multiple is so undemanding at the moment.
It's extreme.
It's in the top 5% cheapest that it's ever been sort of thing.
So yeah, it will have another leg down.
But I think longer term, it's still going to be a good investment for most people.
Yeah, it's just very interesting to hear your opinion, though, because there's red flags.
But someone would say that the business is actually quite robust for what's happened,
even though there's a whole lot of headline, not so great headlines, so to speak.
I think airlines in general all have a tendency to leave someone in the lurch.
My favorite thing, I laughed my head off when I was traveling through Europe and I hopped
on a Delta flight and someone goes, you know what Delta stands for?
I go, what?
He goes, don't expect luggage to arrive.
I'm like, well, there's a reputation.
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
And Buffett has this sort of shtick that he likes to roll off that if the best thing that
they could have done for capitalism when they had the maiden flight of Kitty Hawk, back
in the day, the first ever flight, they could have burned that plane down because the amount
of money that airlines have torched over the years is extraordinary.
So yeah, airlines on average, they're not a favorite of ours, but everything has a price.
If something gets sufficiently cheap, it's still interesting.
Well, look, I love asking this question, what keeps you up at night and what gets out of
the bed in the morning?
And specifically, what keeps you up at night just as a fund manager?
There's so many moving parts happening in the world.
We just heard the conflict that's happening in Gaza right now, Ukraine, and there are
various conflicts around the world.
What keeps you up at night?
I've got like two year old and a four year old, so they're usually keeping me up at night.
But we just had vomiting bug go through the whole household over the long weekend.
But if it's not that, we are fundamental bottom-up managers.
Yeah, we use a lot of quantitative analysis, but everything we do is fundamental, whether
it's DCFs on companies, red flags.
And I think the biggest shortcoming that fundamental managers have is they get blindsided by the
macro.
They're reading footnotes on a Friday night in annual reports or corporate filings.
And then suddenly, a big macro event comes out like what we're the tragic news we're
seeing on our screens overnight in Gaza.
And so we're kind of a bit unusual.
We probably spend 20 or 30% of our time on the risk management piece.
Most fundamental managers, they're 99% picking stocks.
They think it's all about picking stocks and you'll win or die like that.
That's obviously critical, but you can easily screw up what should have been a good track
record by suboptimal risk management.
So we have, for example, 32 different stress tests we apply to the portfolio.
All our portfolios every day.
And these stress tests say that just like you stress test a bank, you stress test the
portfolio.
So if credit spreads were to go out or high yield credit spreads were to go out by 100
basis points, what would be the impact on our P&L over the day?
If inflationary expectations were to drop, if Chinese property was to get hammered, if
oil price was to double, every scenario and stress you can imagine, and we're adding them
all the time, we add into the portfolios because the macro is usually what will undo for a
fundamental bottom-up manager.
So that allows us to, any big macro risk that appears in the portfolio, we tend to try and
limit.
If the 100 PhDs at the Fed can't predict where inflation is going to go and interest
rates are going to go, then I prefer to say, I can't either.
Let's make sure the portfolios aren't unduly influenced by what interest rates do.
So that allows me to sleep a lot better at night is the long-winded answer.
No, look, I like it.
And look, that's the reason why I suppose we're having this conversation.
I find your phone quite interesting, which is in a volatile world, stability can be quite
attractive to a lot of people out there.
And it's just a very interesting approach which you have on that stability side.
And I still find it quite interesting that you're running a high, it's called an alpha
fund, but you just have such a wide array of companies within the portfolio from diversification
perspective.
It's been very interesting having you on and explaining how that works.
Look, have I missed anything?
Is there anything that anyone else loves to ask you that comes to mind?
No, I don't think so.
I know I really enjoyed the chat.
And yeah, just every day we're working hard, trying to fight for every basis point and
continue the strong performance that we had.
Our upmarket captures about 1.25, so we're doing better in up markets.
Down market captures 0.8, so we're preserving capital better in down markets.
And we're just trying to give a consistent journey so I can sleep at night and our investors
can too.
So I really appreciate you having us on.
It's been a great chat.
If people want to learn more, what's the best way they can find you?
Yeah, sure thing.
So if they go to the Plato Investment Management website, there's information on the fund there.
There's lots of insights.
If you go to Livewire markets, we've got lots of articles that we've written on the fund
and on investing.
And obviously, if they want to invest directly, then they can do so through the website or
their financial advisor as well.
All right, David, well, thank you very much for being on the road to change with your
QOLF management.
It's been really, really interesting and I really appreciate the insights you've shared.
Yeah, good man Murdoch.
Always a pleasure, mate, and hope to catch you in person soon.
Absolutely.
All right.
See you later.
Bye.
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