Author Archives: Devesh Shah

About Devesh Shah

Hi, I’m Devesh Shah and I’m pleased to meet you. As a professional, I was a co-inventor of the CBOE VIX Volatility Index, an equities and derivatives trader, and Partner at Goldman Sachs. My passions now mostly involve writing, teaching about investments, practicing yoga, playing the piano, and volunteering with a non-profit, Sponsors for Educational Opportunities (SEO), that opens up career and college pathways for underprivileged students of color. I am an alum of SEO. My hope for the months ahead is that I might share a few things I have learnt about investing.

In Conversation with Rakesh Bordia, Portfolio Manager of the Pzena Emerging Markets Value Fund (PZIEX/PZVEX)

By Devesh Shah

Rakesh Bordia co-manages Pzena Emerging Markets Value Fund (“the fund”) with tenured co-managers Caroline Cai, Allison Fisch, and (recently added) Akhil Subramanian. The strategy has approximately $1.35 billion under management and has been around just since 2014. Investing in emerging markets has been no cakewalk for this window. The passive Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets ETF (VWO), over the past 15 years, has earned just south of 3% annualized.

Pzena EM Value Fund has earned just north of 4% a year since its inception. The interesting Continue reading →

In Conversation with Scott Barbee, Portfolio Manager at Aegis Value Fund (AVALX)

By Devesh Shah

“Small value” is one of the market’s most inefficiently priced corners, and it has long been the home of famously successful and iconoclastic investors, from Joel Tillinghast with his love of low-priced stocks to Chuck Royce, who obsessed with tiny blue chip companies. So here’s an easy question:

Over the past quarter century, what has been the most successful small value fund you could have bought?

Continue reading →

In conversation with Andrew Foster @ Seafarer Funds (SIGIX & SIVLX) : On Emerging Markets

By Devesh Shah

Introduction: Trouble in the Emerging Market Equities asset class

Emerging Market Equities (EM Eq), as tracked by the iShares MSCI Emerging Market ETF, are up almost 10% this year. That would generally be welcome news for the ignored asset class. But the news is not good enough. I have the distinct sense that investors of multiple stripes are “giving up” on EM Eq. There isn’t a wholesale liquidation as much as the flow of money in EM has slowed down. The long-held conviction that EM Eq is an asset class where one has to be involved has now Continue reading →

Catching Up with Amit Wadhwaney @ The Moerus Worldwide Value Fund

By Devesh Shah

Our profile of Moerus Worldwide Value ended with the note, “Moerus offers a rare and intriguing opportunity to invest alongside (in another of legendary value investor Marty. Whitman’s phrases) a distinguished ‘aggressive conservative investor.’” In the years since that profile first appeared, Moerus has posted top tier returns for the past one-, three- and five-year periods. After rising 6.4% last year (2022), the fund is up another 20.6% through July 30, 2023 which about doubles the returns Continue reading →

Modest protection from runaway inflation

By Devesh Shah

Introduction

Warren Buffet has a long history of sharing sharp, colorful reflections on inflation and its role in controlling your profits.

Before we drown in a sea of self-congratulation, a further – and crucial – observation must be made. A few years ago, a business whose per-share net worth compounded at 20% annually would have guaranteed its owners a highly successful real investment return. Now such an outcome seems less certain. For the inflation rate, coupled with individual tax rates, will be the ultimate determinant as to whether our internal operating performance produces successful investment results – i.e., a reasonable gain in purchasing power from funds committed – for you as shareholders.

That combination – the inflation rate plus Continue reading →

A Dinner and Walk with David Sherman, fund manager of Crossing Bridge Funds.

By Devesh Shah

Last week I had the opportunity to sit down for dinner with one of our own, the legendary David Sherman. He is no stranger to regular readers of MFO. His funds, public and private funds through Cohanzick and CrossingBridge and the RiverPark Short Term High Yield Fund, for which he’s the sub-adviser, are uniformly first rate. He’s articulated four investing principles that are embodied in each of his portfolios: Continue reading →

Flows in Money Market, Inflation Linked Funds, and Series I-Bonds: Let the data talk.

By Devesh Shah

Inflation continues to be a hot-button topic. We (and many others) have written about TIPS, TIPS funds, and Series I Bonds. This article is not about adding or altering recommendations. Instead, we let the data do the talking. Instead of prescribing an investment thesis, I want to see how market participants are behaving by watching their actions. Some light commentary will try to connect the images and tables into a narrative. You could be forgiven if you detect an underlying theme that sounds like Continue reading →

Short Term Performance of Long-term Recommendations

By Devesh Shah

The eternal flaw of investment gurus, both on the web and elsewhere, is that they’re never held accountable for their bravado and bold recommendations. It is in the nature of the beast that one right guess lives on forever while an infinite number of horrendous recommendations vanish from the public mind. I think of Elaine Garzarelli, who made her fame from one right call – an impending market crash a week before the actual “Black Monday” crash in 1987 which saw the Dow drop 22% (7300 points in today’s terms) in a day – but somehow dodges rebuke for her Continue reading →

Artisan Developing World Fund interview

By Devesh Shah

An interview with Lewis Kaufman, founding portfolio manager of the Artisan Developing World Fund

My primary investment biases are two-fold. First, in general, I invest in public markets through low-cost, low-turnover passive vehicles. Second, in general, I invest in US equities. Both of those biases were arrived at through a combination of (painful) experience and careful research. That said, none of us benefit from being held hostage by our beliefs. In many ways, humility and self-doubt, curiosity, and the determination to keep learning are the hallmarks of our wisest citizens. And I aspire to learn from them. In consequence, I’ve spent a huge amount of time over the past six months talking with a cadre of the industry’s best emerging markets managers.

Home Bias

Investors worldwide have a powerful bias Continue reading →

Interview with Amit Wadhwaney: Co-Founder and Portfolio Manager, Moerus Capital Management

By Devesh Shah

Recently, I had a long chat with Amit Wadhwaney, the founder of Moerus Capital Management and the adviser to Moerus Worldwide Value Fund. He is a very thoughtful and seasoned investor. Here are some of his thoughts on his fund and his stock-picking style. I’ve presented a summary of my notes rather than an actual Q&A, but the flavor of their investing style will hopefully come through. Continue reading →

Just short of two cheers for active, international investing

By Devesh Shah

Readers know that I long ago concluded that active management rarely adds value to an investor’s portfolio. There are too many managers fighting over the same stocks. Very few of them have a meaningful Edge over the others. Most of those who add some value rarely add enough to overcome the drag imposed by their expenses and higher tax burden. Some few add serious value, but they are almost impossible to reliably identify in advance.

That said, I am about to commit two heresies in one column: I will suggest that you consider Continue reading →

In Defense of Taking Risk

By Devesh Shah

The S&P 500 Index peaked at 4800 in December 2021. Thirteen months later, at the end of January 2023, the Index is down 16%, at a level of 4076. Suppose you did a Rip Van Winkle and woke up just in time for the New Year 2024 celebration… and found the S&P 500 index trading at 2400, putting the index 50% below its all-time peak. Would you buy the market, perhaps doze off again, or would you sell? The record is clear: Continue reading →

Long-dated TIPS bonds: A margin of safety

By Devesh Shah

Happy New Year to everyone. May there be peace in your home, on the planet, in the stars, and in all living beings. I am very glad to share that I have recently published a book of children’s stage plays.

Growing up in Mumbai, India, I studied at a school where theatre and drama were an important part of our education. Many of our school plays were then drawn from English literature. A few years ago, I was asked to take on a project to translate nine plays written in Gujarati, my first language, to English. Acclaimed playwright Prakash Lala wanted to make his stories available to young children everywhere. The average 10-12-year-old child in India has a different upbringing than the American kid. Family, grandparents, household help, and even neighbors play a much larger role in raising the kid than we see in society here. I’ve enjoyed translating the plays, working with my own kids on editing, and recently publishing the book on Amazon. Look for the title “Nine Children’s Plays.” I hope you will Continue reading →

What Really Matters…is that we are American investors

By Devesh Shah

We are approaching the end of an extraordinary year, one that has left many of us – citizens, investors, employers, workers, and parents – feeling whipsawed, anxious and confused. Much of that comes from the sense that we can’t figure out what’s behind this year, so we don’t have much hope about managing, much less thriving in, the year ahead.

I entirely agree with your feelings, but I’m here to suggest that you take a deep, cleansing breath. We’re doing better than you know, and if we keep our wits about us, we’re going to do okay. Continue reading →

Kinetics Mutual Funds: Five Star funds with a Lone Star Risk

By Devesh Shah

The great charm of traditional index funds is that they offer broad market exposure at a low cost. Critics deride their diversification as “diworsification,” where a portfolio automatically contains too little of the really great stuff and too much of the really poor stuff. Bold and confident managers have staked their careers – or at least their investors’ fortunes – on their ability to find one or two great (and greatly misunderstood) companies and then pour resources into them.

At its peak, the legendary Continue reading →

Rebalancing, Portfolio Restructuring, Tax Loss Harvesting

By Devesh Shah

Down years in the financial markets are a heavy burden on asset holders. (We presume you’re noticed.) Holding assets through down years is the price we pay for earning long-term risk premia embedded in assets. Years like this are particularly challenging because the current downswing feels so very abnormal: it’s a correction in the financial markets (normal but painful) in which both investment grade bonds and speculative tech stocks are falling sharply and simultaneously (utterly abnormal and still painful), and the trajectory of the decline Continue reading →

Emerging Markets Investing in the Next Decade: The Players

By Devesh Shah

Who, from a universe of 200+ emerging markets managers, did we choose to speak to … and how?

Good question! We decided to rely on insiders’ judgment, rather than mere notoriety or a strategy’s recent performance. We started by talking with Andrew Foster about his take on his investable universe and its evolution, then asked Andrew whose judgments he respected and who we ought to talk with. We asked those folks the same. Those recommendations, constrained by time and availability, led to conversations with the six worthies below. Continue reading →

Emerging Markets (EM) Investing in the Next Decade: The Game

By Devesh Shah

Is it time to overweight EM stocks now? To answer this and many other questions, the Mutual Fund Observer reached out to six EM Equity Fund Managers. Our plan was to talk with each at length, sharing one manager’s insights with another and seeking their response. Our hope was to help you gain an insight deeper than “boy, EM valuations sure are low! Time to buy, right?”

I am deeply grateful to them for helping our readers further their understanding. This essay will walk you through their arguments and our reflections on what EM investors might Continue reading →