Listen on The Move
While everyone else was at the beach celebrating another S&P up year, global value stocks quietly returned 50% — and Meb Faber is done being polite about it.
Cambria Investment Management Founder and CIO Meb Faber joins Pierre Daillie on Insight Is Capital for a conversation that starts where most investment discussions are too comfortable to go. US equities are expensive, concentrated, and priced at CAPE ratios within striking distance of their all-time peak. Yet the complacency is total: the S&P is up mid-teens again, the beach crowd is happy, and almost no one is paying attention to the fact that global value stocks returned 50% last year and are up 25% again this year. Meb and Pierre dig into why that gap exists, what it reveals about herd behavior and passive indexing dogma, and what a genuinely diversified portfolio — one that includes shareholder yield, trend following, real assets, and ex-US exposure — actually looks like in practice. Along the way, Meb dismantles some of the most persistent myths in finance: that dividends are a free bonus, that T-bills are safe, that passive indexing means owning the S&P 500, and that buybacks are a modern invention. His new book, Investing in America: The Rise of a 250-Year Bull Market, surfaces as the historical backdrop to all of it — a reminder of what patient capital actually earns across generations, and a quiet indictment of everything designed to distract investors from that truth.
Timestamped Chapters
00:00 — Introduction: 250 years, one chart, $1 into $200 million
03:00 — COVID, meme stocks, and a generation let in through the casino door
06:30 — Creative destruction: why the top companies of every decade eventually vanish
09:00 — Railroads, dark fiber, AI: how every bust seeds the next expansion
12:30 — The valuation problem: writing a US bull market book when US stocks are historically expensive
15:30 — CAPE at 42, dividend yield at 1%: the global opportunity hiding in plain sight
18:00 — The 50% return nobody at the beach is talking about
21:00 — Time Billionaires: human capital, ownership mentality, and the delayed gratification problem
26:30 — Young investors have always been gamblers — the narrative of desperation is wrong
27:30 — Nominal vs. real: why T-bills have had a 50% drawdown and almost no one knows it
30:00 — The dividend myth: 80% of retail investors think a dividend is a free check
35:30 — Shareholder yield: why ignoring buybacks gives you an incomplete and often negative picture
44:00 — SYLD's 10-year track record: top decile across three geographies
46:00 — Energy: from a third of the S&P to under 5%, and what that asymmetry means now
50:00 — Trend following and managed futures: the AI optimizers say 15 to 30%, zero investors do it
55:00 — The investing pyramid: the 80% that matters before any of the sexy 20%
01:01:00 — Passive investing's Achilles heel: market cap weighting loads you into the most expensive things at the worst time
01:08:00 — The passive dogma problem: nobody who calls themselves an indexer actually indexes globally
01:13:00 — One habit young investors must build; one habit seasoned investors must unlearn
Meb Faber, Cambria Investment Management, global value stocks, shareholder yield, SYLD ETF, global diversification, international equities, ex-US investing, CAPE ratio, passive investing, market cap weighting, dividend investing, stock buybacks, trend following, managed futures, behavioral finance, fixed income real returns, equity valuation, investment strategy, Pierre Daillie, Insight Is Capital, AdvisorAnalyst
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