+ Michael Burry, famous for shorting CDOs in the financial crisis, is calling index funds a similarly mispriced bubble. He thinks that small cap and value stocks have been trailing the market due to all of the passive assets pouring into the largest stocks in market cap weighted index funds. We think that his concerns are interesting, but overblown. Price discovery today is still driven by active managers – index funds, despite their large asset inflows, are only responsible for a tiny fraction of trading. If Burry is right, we will be happy to have a tilt toward small cap and value stocks when the market smartens up.....The Big Short’s Michael Burry Sees a Bubble in Passive Investing [Bloomberg]

+ John Rekenthaler from Morningstar wrote about a study that looks at trading data for two large Canadian financial institutions to determine if advisors were making the same investment errors as their clients. They found that advisors were buying funds with high fees, over trading, and performance chasing in their own accounts just as much as their clients’ account. The inference is that the financial advisors were not maliciously giving bad advice, they simply had no idea what they were doing. Rekanthaler suggests that this has important implications for the fiduciary standard. What good is a requirement to put the client first if you don’t know what you’re doing anyway?........Canadian Financial Advice: Good Intentions, Bad Results [Morningstar]

We talked to Barry Ritholtz (Episode 57), host of the Masters in Business Podcast and founder/CIO of Ritholtz Wealth Management about our shared investment philosophy, the state of the financial industry, calling the bottom of the financial crisis, and the poor performance of small cap and value stocks. Barry is always a good listen - this conversation was no exception.

In Episode 58, we talked about Canadian mortgage rates, the yield curve, Canadian housing prices, the rental market in Canada, and how REITs fit into an asset allocation.

Alexandra Macqueen (Episode 59) was one of the most impactful discussions that we have had in terms of changing the way that we think about financial planning. Alexandra is a CFP, an educators at York University, and co-author of the excellent book Pensionize Your Nest Egg: How to Use Product Allocation to Create a Guaranteed Income for Life. She (and her book before we talked to her) helped us to understand how much more efficient a retirement income stream can be if annuities are included in the overall allocation.

In Episode 60 we talked about the recession that everyone seems to be waiting for, did a deep dive on Wealthsimple's portfolio updates (we didn't like many of them), explained the theoretical framework that makes us believe that the empirical data on factor strategies should persist, and talked through some alternative spending strategies for early retirees.

Closing off the month was a fascinating discussion with Ted Seides (Episode 61). Ted is one of the most insightful and thoughtful people that you could have tell you about hedge funds. He was so good, that it changed our thinking on this asset class; it is not as black and white as we like to think. If you don't know Ted, he is the "hedge fund guy" that lost the bet to Warren Buffett - we learned in this conversation that he is a lot more than that.