Meb Faber is a co-founder and the Chief Investment Officer of Cambria Investment Management. His speciality is quant investing. Meb is the host of The Meb Faber Show podcast and has authored numerous white papers and books. He is a frequent speaker and writer on investment strategies and has been featured in Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

In this episode, we talk why you need an investment plan, why the systematic approach is helping to have a better decision-making process, how to behave in the period of a market crash, is dividend investing a right approach for most of us, and many other topics. Only practical knowledge, no-nonsense theory.
Continue reading →

Robert Carver worked in the City of London for over a decade. For seven years he was a portfolio manager at AHL — one of the world’s largest systematic hedge funds — before, during and after the global financial meltdown of 2008.

In this interview, we talk about many trading topics, mostly around the systematic approach and why it’s so important for most of us to base the decision-making process on rules rather than discretion. Robert also explains why the most important factor to consider when investing is risk.

You can hear how people managing billions of dollars were considering liquidation of market positions during the 2008 crisis, while at the same time, mechanical strategies made over a billion dollars in a single day. The fund’s computer system had stuck to its preprogrammed set of trading rules and mechanically exploited the market moves almost to perfection, while terrified humans had discussed closing it down.

Although we discussed many negative aspects of trading and investing, there’s a positive message to all of us as well. With enough discipline and work, most of us may construct an investing vehicle at home and build our own capital successfully.
Continue reading →

It happens very often that we work because we don’t see any alternatives. Our job may be annoying as hell, we may even hate it, but the reality seems like we don’t have any other options. We have a mortgage, we have a family to maintain, or our qualifications aren’t allowing us to do something new. So we don’t dare to do something new, and we don’t have a plan, we’re just drifting — day by day.

My guest, Paul Novell, talks in this episode how he decided to live the life he wants to live. He left the semiconductor industry, a well-paid job at around 40, to pursue a more independent life. Already since 2006, his primary source of income is from investments.

I discuss with Paul many investment topics. It’s interesting to learn how Paul was maturing over the years, how he switched slowly from discretionary dividend investing towards quantitative and tactical asset allocation investment systems.
Continue reading →