In the latest episode of Inside the Rope, David Clark sits down with Mark Barker, Head of International at GQG Partners, a renowned asset management firm. Mark retraces his journey, originating from his early days in London’s hedge funds back in 1985, and eventually leading to the birth of GQG in 2016.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

David Clark: Welcome to Inside the podcast, where we speak to the leading minds in wealth management. I’m your host, David Clarke. In this episode, I’m speaking with Mark Barker, the head of International and one of the founders of GQG A global asset manager with expertise in emerging markets in developed markets since inception in 2015. GQG has enjoyed strong growth in both funds under management and the performance of their investment funds.

We talked to Mark about how he identifies top grade analysts, portfolio managers and people who can manage money. We also talk about the various aspects of global investing that I think investors will find very pertinent. Please remember to keep your feedback coming. You can get me via email at. David o’clock at Kota capital dot com. And please remember that this podcast isn’t designed to be, nor is it specific or financial advice of any sort.

People are always encouraged to listen to the disclaimer at the end of the podcast. Have a great day. Mark Barker, Welcome to Inside the Rope.

Mark Barker: Thanks very much. Great to be here.

David Clark: Can we, as we like to do, is maybe a kick away with you, giving the listeners a bit of an introduction to yourself? Sure. So I’m look, I’m now getting far too old for this industry.

Mark Barker: I’ve been. I started my career back in 1985, in one of the very first London hedge funds and sort of cut my teeth in in a very, very early industry. And then I for my sins, sort of spun off and set up one of the first fund, a hedge funds back in sort of the late eighties, which was a business that we built up over the years until I sold it to an Italian bank and ran it for them for a while and then sort of developed through the industry, set up a couple more businesses against broadly around hedge fund land.

But I would I said when we were a couple up that we were seeding early stage hedge funds, so trying to identify young upcoming talent and provide sort of structural capital for them in to, to allow them to build the business. And that’s where I found myself falling into GQG as I did a couple of these in sort of joint venture with Tim Carver and who’s our CEO.

And when he was looking to expand the international business for GQG We sat down and figured out that this might be a good way to work together. Now, before we dig into GQG who gigs and what it does and how it does it, let me just go back to that point you raised there about trying to identify managers and people who could manage money.

David Clark: What are the key learnings you got out of that and what are the key sort of points You you would say, you know, these are the things I want to look for now, given what I know.

Mark Barker: Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting question because, you know, we spend a lot of time looking at process and you know, is it repeatable, which is obviously important.

There’s I think the signal to noise ratio in this industry is very poor. So you can have what looks like a great track record because somebody could have been lucky, you know, particularly early on when they set up their business. So how do you try and tease out whether their results were actually a result of luck or actually the real application of a skill or them finding some sort of structural advantage?

But I think what’s important is to try and understand some of the emotional drivers for an investor. Investing is a very emotional process. We sort of invest a lot of intellectual and emotional capital into making decisions and sometimes it can be very hard to let go of those and everybody brings their own biases into their investment decision making.

And so you want to try and identify people who understand what those biases are and whether they have worked out a way to mitigate them. And I think that that, you know, if I look at the truly great investors that I’ve met over the last 30 years, it’s it is generally a sort of a there are certain characteristics that they have where they that they’re able to walk away, they’re able to pivot and change their mind on a decision that they’ve previously made.

And I think they have no emotional attached moments to the decision that they made yesterday. And that and the other thing and I think this is the most important thing and it’s it’s part of the same thing is humility. You have to accept that when you are making decisions. And I think this is more but more about more than just investing is actually this is part of my world view.

But, you know, we all make our decisions based on the information available to us. And you have to recognize that there’s every chance that you are wrong in that decision. And so, you know, you just got to make sure you don’t end up flogging a dead horse.

David Clark:  Yeah, I love I think in you know, we’re up to over 150 of these podcasts with the leading minds in wealth management as we build it. And, you know, sometimes you just feel that, right? I love it. And sometimes people have an answer or an explanation for everything and a justification. And then there’s other people who I think have been wonderfully successful and a very, very good who say, look, I don’t know.

Mark Barker: Yeah.

David Clark:  And that separation and that maturity to be able to say, oh, I don’t know.

And there’s a whole heap of things that I when I make this decision of variables that I can’t control and also the fact that they can actually make a decision and say it was actually the right decision with all the data that I had on hand, even the outcome, even when the outcome doesn’t suit them or go their way, it doesn’t mean it was necessarily the wrong decision at the time.

So some of those behavioral heuristics and you really facing into behavioral finance and Kahneman here and his sort of work, it’s kind of fascinating an area that fascinates me. And how do you go about identifying those people? Are they how do you work out? What’s the difference between skill and luck, and how do you measure when they can walk away and make those decisions without emotion?

Is there some objective way to do that or just really interrogating what and how they’ve done?

Mark Barker: Yeah, I wish there was a way that you could sort of bottle this.

David Clark:  Yes,

Mark Barker: because I’m not sure that there is. I think it is. Yeah, it is. It really is. Through conversation and clearly the more data that you have available to you, the, the easier it is to draw some threads and some commonalities out of what they’ve someone’s done in the past.

You know, if someone pivots at the right moment in time then and they’re a hero, then that’s great. But it doesn’t necessarily tell you much. But if if you understand why they pivoted and you can see that that is sort of very much in common with behavior that they’ve displayed in the past. Now you can start to draw some conclusions from that.

But and clearly, you know, one of the disadvantages when you’re working with early stage managers, as I was earlier in my career, is that you have less of that data. So the process was much more in-depth and it would often take a sort of a year plus of conversation to really try and understand what drove someone.

David Clark: until someone develops a serious type test of blood to work out whether it’s in the person’s DNA to act and behave that way, we’ll have to stick with it.

So maybe fast forward and give us why GQG And well, firstly, who is and what is GQG. And then why.

Mark Barker: Okay, so GQG is a firm that we set up back in in 2016. We’re a global equity manager. We are focused on owning large and mega-cap, you know, high quality businesses, which is a well-trodden path by a lot of investors.

And, you know, we are a very client centric organization. We really set out to be one of the most aligned investment houses. And, you know, in the world when we set it up, which mean ultimately comes down to skin in the game, you know, So the founding partners have committed to having the vast majority of their that, you know, sort of net wealth invested alongside of our investors and pretty much every employee and is an investor in our strategies and sort of you know, amongst the senior management we’re kind of all in and but you know, we are we are a very performance driven sort of high clock speed organization.

I think we recognize that asset management is about the most competitive industry in the world. You are measured every day over a series of different time span, so you’re kind of being measured for your 100 meter sprint and your marathon at the same time. And that needs to keep you on your game and I think, you know, it’s also the only industry that I can think of where the average is free.

So if you are not above average, it’s very hard to justify demanding being paid for what you’re delivering. And I think a lot of people forget that in this business. But yeah, we are we are a, I believe, a high quality global and emerging market investor and very focused on delivering returns to our to our clients.

David Clark: So what makes you think that and what made you think back when you founded the business that over a prolonged period of time you could scale and build because quite a big organization, what’s the headcount?

Mark Barker: So we’re about 165 people now. So I mean, considering that we are, you know, just over 100 billion us, say what, 155 billion AUD today and we’ve just gone through our seventh birthday, we’re actually still a very lean organization and that’s very purposeful. I think, you know, we going back to the point I made about alignment, we part of that is that we have always set out to to try and have, you know, fair and reasonable fees for what we deliver and have always tried to have our fees sort of at or below the median for the industry.

I think a lot of firms that have been around a bit longer have a lot of legacy costs. And, you know, we’ve  been able to use technology and to come into the industry, you know, as a as a as a as a new business to just operate leaner than most of our peers.

And therefore, you know, we can, I think, remain competitive on the fee front.

David Clark: What would be an example of that sort of legacy cost you referenced?

Mark Barker: I think we were laser focused when we set the business up on doing what we do well and outsourcing the parts of the business that that we felt that we couldn’t add any value. So the older firms, they tend to have built departments to cover every element of the business. So we outsource all of our middle office globally.

We certainly didn’t set out to build a big fat marketing department. You know, we’ve been very targeted in the way that we built the business. We don’t have those budgets every year, you know, for every different element of the business. So it’s you’ve got to be focusing on, okay, what are we where do we need to spend money, you know, to ensure that we are delivering the optimal service to our clients.

But don’t we don’t get forced into doing something because we did it yesterday. And I think that that that we see a lot in this industry that it’s very easy to to become a little bit bloated in this business. And you know, ultimately you pay a price for that. And I think, you know, we’ve seen a lot of cases where, you know, you’ve had sort of, you know, consolidation taking place because you need to try and refine those economies of scale.

But that generally doesn’t lead to a good outcome for investors.

David Clark: And can you talk a little bit when you set up the firm, you must have been pretty confident that you could outperform certain benchmarks or attract capital. What gave you that confidence?

Mark Barker: Look, so say the you know, the that that the intellectual founder of the business in terms of the investment strategy was Rajiv Jain.

He already had a very long and very successful track record. You know, during his tenure at Vontobel Asset Management, where he’d been since the early nineties. And I think it we you have to go back to basics and investing. I think it’s very easy to get caught up in the in the world and we have some very simple principles and that is you know if you if you can understand the longer term drivers of earnings and earnings growth for a business and by longer term I mean sort of five years out and to try and identify the potential threats to the sustainability of those earnings over the longer period, then then you have a reasonable basis on which to say, you know, do I think I can get a compound return from this business of sort of high single, low double digits? And you then go back and say, look, what does the market pay me over the longer term? And it’s typically sort of seven or 8% is very long term market returns.

So we think that we can we can build a portfolio of names where you have a structural outperformance. And if you’re trying not to be too greedy, then you’re going to should be able to, over the longer term, be in a reasonable position to deliver sort of two or 3% over benchmark, which is well above the average in this industry.

And so I think, look, we were confident in the process. We were confident in the in the ability of the types of businesses that we like to own to outperform. And then we had to build an investment team that allowed us to really sort of maximize the outcomes

David Clark:  And is performance defined within the firm is really relative to the benchmark or is there some absolute overlay in that? You know, I’m thinking if the founders have the vast majority of their wealth in the fund, they either are very confident in those markets going forward or they’re some sort of absolute return overlay.

Mark Barker: Yeah, we’re actually, we think very much in absolute return outcomes. The relative outperformance that we look for is more of an outcome than a target.

So we do say it’s over a full market cycle. We expect to see those outcomes, but we are, yeah, with all that skin in the game, we’re very focused on managing the downside and, and you know, our belief is that if you can manage the downside in more challenging environments, then you’re going to be compounding from a higher base.

And therefore, you know, that just makes life easier for you. I mean, we all know the math, you know, if you if you lose 50%, you’ve got to make 100% to get back. And, you know, and part of the human condition is that you attach a much greater value to a 10% loss than you do to a 10% gain.

So it’s even more important to manage the downside.

David Clark: And talk to me about performance. Housing’s been since inception of the firm.

Mark Barker: Look, I think we have we’ve been fortunate we have delivered I think to you know not over every timeframe and you always go through little periods, particularly periods like today where we see the market really ripping to the upside.

You know, our expectation is that we’re most likely to deliver outperformance during more challenging markets. And, you know, we have just come through one of the more challenging periods in recent memory through the sort of 2022 where we delivered significant outperformance. I don’t want to get into numbers specifically, but and but I mean, I think that outcome for our investors has, you know, has been good since inception of the firm.

David Clark:  And how would you categorize the difference between managing money in developed markets to emerging markets and how should people think about that in terms of the difference of the sort of journey and outcomes they’re likely to receive in each of those?

Mark Barker: I think we live in a very joined up world. One thing that’s important to us and we think we believe gives us an edge is that we have a one philosophy, one process, one team approach.

You know, everybody in the investment team as a generalist, both sectorialy and geographically. And there’s perhaps a little bit of an artificial construct between emerging markets and developed markets because they are so interrelated. But, you know, I think you by having a deep understanding of emerging markets and the sort of the ecosystem in which companies are operating, they’re actually helps you with your develop market business and vice versa.

You know you if you want to own Apple, you have to understand the supply chains that are coming from all across the world. And you have to understand, you know, the behavior of the end consumer, which is in both developed and emerging markets. So I think, you know, the that there are structural headwinds that the developed world is facing.

And there are and a lot of that is around demographics. We have aging populations in most of the developed world. You have increasing demands on, you know, health care. And for much of the world, particularly where that’s publicly funded, that that that creates, you know, challenges. Whereas, you know, in much of the emerging markets, you have you know, you have structural tailwinds.

The median age in India right now is 28. That that gives you an idea of how dynamic the economy is likely to be in the coming years. So I think there’s probably a bit of a misguided belief that emerging markets will always outperform developed markets. As you know, typically in economies tend to be somewhat more cyclical than developed markets, which is why they can appear cheaper.

But I think what you get from that is there’s a lack of synchronicity. And so you know these are return streams that that that are to a certain degree uncorrelated. And if we think right now you know as the developed world is you know is still facing the challenges of inflation and, you know, sort of more hawkish monetary policy after, you know, ten years of abandonment of any sort of fiscal rectitude, the emerging markets have actually become very used to dealing with inflation.

We haven’t seen it since the seventies. And it’s something that that they understand and have learned how to manage and more specifically, actually are coming off the back of a sort of a tightening environment. And we’re starting to see sort of more easing monetary policy in a number of these markets just because they’ve been through the cycle before us.

So that has to create some opportunities.

David Clark:  And how, if at all, has the changes in geopolitical position and what was expedited, many would say via COVID in sort of this globalization that’s going on, how has that affected the or has it affected the sort of thinking around investment within the firm?

Mark Barker: Yeah, look, I think it’s a really good question. Quite often, perhaps too much attention is paid to politics and a let’s move on to geopolitics afterwards. But, you know, the political discount that is applied in countries like, say, Brazil today, where you have, you know, a you know, a very left wing leader in Lula. I think that often creates more opportunity than risk in terms of geopolitics.

I mean, the world is clearly changing the, you know, the export of production to the emerging markets through globalization has been, you know, a strong deflationary factor for many years. And to be honest, there is for most of my career and I’ve been doing this for the best part of 40 years, and that is being reversed.

You know, we are we are seeing, you know, particularly in technology, trying to, you know, to globalize that and to bring production back to the home markets that that’s going to create some challenges. I think it is. You know, and if you look at the emerging markets that have traditionally been very export driven, the opportunities there for you have to think about them much more with regards to the domestic market than their export business.

So as an investor, focus on that side of it.

David Clark: You referenced India and its low population age and the dynamic sort of theme they’ve got going on there is it amongst the biggest growth opportunities you say, or what are some of the other themes within that that the that GQG is thinking about really able to be taken advantage of over the next period of time?

Mark Barker: Yeah, I mean, we really try and avoid theme thematic investing as a business. We are very bottom up. So you know, every name that gets into the book to talk me through the process.

David Clark: What you’ve got 21 analysts or thereabouts I think there but 21 I think what is the process is of you know idea generation through to something finding itself in the portfolio.

Mark Barker: Yeah it’s sometimes it’s hard to put it down to it to a simple list because it it’s very multifaceted. But first of all you have to think about the that the types of businesses that we like to it. Yeah. And these are sort of, you know, large and mega-cap liquid names that have a dominance or structural advantage in their market and have a sort of a wide moat around them.

Now that means that there is, you know, a lot of these businesses have been in a strong position for some time now. And so there’s a sort of a cumulative knowledge that you have around these businesses that that that you keep going back to. Yeah, there’s a few hundred names that are really the ones that we’re likely to be working on.

Now. It doesn’t mean to say there aren’t new opportunities coming forward, but the bulk of our ideas are names that we’ve been in before that we understand the business quite well. We are very valuation sensitive about names that we want to own and, you know, but you need to keep the research on on all of these names relatively fresh so that you can keep revisiting and saying, you know, is this looking more or less attractive today than it was yesterday? ideas. You know, a lot of our ideas come from when we’re doing work on one name. You start looking both at its competitors and you look at other businesses within the value chain and you can identify new opportunities from that. So so you often find yourself starting in one place and ending up somewhere really quite different because you’ve identified something a little bit special that that’s come out of that.

We do also run screens, I think, and here you have to be careful because quality, it’s very easy to be backward looking when you’re looking at quality companies. You know, it’s done well for the last five years, so it’s going to do well for the next five. That’s something that we’re very cynical about. But obviously any screen that you use is inherently backward looking, but we like to run screens on a variety of quality metrics, sort of return on equity, return on capital, you know, margins, efficient use of balance sheet and low balance sheet leverage, these types of identifiers and those are what that’s designed to do is to ensure that you’re not missing something. And to, you know, ultimately, if you see names that start screening, well, then then you need to go and do some work. And that may well be to underwrite your decision to not own it, but at least forces you to have a view on that business. But just occasionally, I mean, very significant trades come out of those screens.

I’m I think, you know, as a lot of people are aware, we had a significant overweight to energy in in recent years that actually was a result of the energy names starting to screen well, for us back pre-COVID. So in 2018, 2019, we saw for the first time the energy majors sort of popping up on the screens and showing much higher quality earnings than we previously seen.

And that was a very interesting data point. And in fact, we initiated a small position in in Chevron as it was back in in 2019, shortly before the pandemic. Now, clearly that wasn’t the position that we were going to keep on for very long, given that the world was falling apart. But the work had been started then.

And so it was as we then came back out of the pandemic. And  I, I hate to say that we saw the world normalizing because it still feels far from normal but, you know, even as we’re talking earlier about people coming into the office or not, but we started dusting off that research. And what we saw was that these businesses had gone from being very cyclical to having, you know, a much higher quality earnings stream.

So now you need to try and identify why that is the case. Is it is it just by chance or is the data pointing to something? And so what became clear is that these businesses had become much better stewards of their balance sheet, and that had been forced upon them in large part due to the to the ESG agenda where they had been denied capital, you know, by the markets for the for the last ten years.

And, you know, particularly having gone through that sort of boom bust cycle around shale had been forced to be more thoughtful in terms of how they built their businesses. And there was a much smaller focus on exploration and production growth and a much greater focus on profitability, on reducing lifting costs of cleaning up the businesses. You know, and we started doing more work and realized that the KPIs for management had had ceased to be about production growth and were actually about things that nobody would ever put into the same sentence as an energy company, free cash flow.

And so that that becomes now very interesting. And, and so you then have to do more work. And what became clear is that these factors and obviously having oil getting down to $20, you know, during COVID helps the case, you know, in terms of forcing those businesses to be better stewards of their balance sheet. But, you know, we started to look at the structural supply demand imbalances in the industry.

You know, if you don’t have production growth, then there are going to be constraints on supply. And you know, as we talk to other businesses within the supply chain, sort of those who are either providing manpower or or, you know, or engineering to businesses, we realized that there was, you know, a major blockage in in in the supply lines to it to allow them to really bring production levels up, even if they wanted to, but management were not being incentivized to. So that becomes more interesting. And we were able to you know, I think what’s interesting is if you look at sort of the oil majors, they were producing significantly higher free cash flow at $70 oil than they were in the previous cycle at 120 hundred and $30 oil. So that that’s where we get interested.

It’s not a punt on the oil price. It’s about these businesses becoming significantly more interesting. And look, despite the move to, you know, to a low carbon economy, the major investment that we’ve seen into alternative sources, we are still at peak oil demand and that that is probably going to continue for a long period. And I think, you know, a lot of people forget that the transition to a low carbon economy, which is something that I think that we all want to see, is actually a very energy intensive process.

You know, we’re going to have to build a lot of stuff. We’re going to have to use a lot of copper and steel to get it done. You know, you can’t build an offshore windmill on cloud computing software, but, you know, if you’ve got to build stuff, you’ve got to mine stuff, you’ve got to refine stuff, you’ve got to smelt stuff, and then you’ve got to transport that stuff, all of which requires a significant investment in energy.

So I think, you know, one of my concerns, to be honest, is the denial of capital to the fossil fuel industry over the last ten years, which is ultimately resulted in pushing prices up and creating the investment opportunity that we were able to take advantage of has probably ended up delaying the transition to a low carbon economy by decades by making it so much more expensive.

So, you know, it’s a classic case of sort of the perverse unintended consequence of, you know, of sort of policies that were really put in for, you know, for the right reason, then. Yeah.

David Clark: So Mark, it’s a great example and. Thank you for that. Now they say that you learn more from your mistakes or where things go wrong. What would be an example where the firm has taken a position and said, Well, in hindsight, if we did that, if we did that again today, we’d do things a little bit differently. And of course it’s super easy to manage a hindsight portfolio. You still looking for.

Mark Barker: I mean, look, I think with every day we push the envelope and we try and find, you know, find new ways to lose money in the hopes of finding new ways to make money.

I think I think what we’ve got better at over the years and we forces sort of intellectual honesty on ourselves and, you know, is being more able to pivot. I honestly I think a lot of the mistakes that we make are made for the right reasons. And I go back, you know, we were about this right at the beginning.

We you know, we became much more constructive having got out of technology for, you know, sort of through 21 and really exited by the time we got to the to the end of 21, you know, around concerns on fundamentals and valuations. And that was a sort of a double whammy that clearly the market saw that. But, you know, we became constructive again around the space and sort of started becoming constructive in August and we started rebuilding our exposure to semiconductors and then to the broader sort of technology ecosystem.

So by the time we came into Q4, we were actually overweight again. And the Q4 of 2022, we then saw the CHIP Act coming out in the US, which was, you know, prohibiting the export of of high tech to to China. And you know, you can if you’re going down a track and you see a pool of water, you don’t necessarily know whether it’s a puddle or a bottomless chasm.

And we were looking at the names we’re writing and saying we don’t know how significant the impact is going to be, you know, on this name. You know, if they’re forced to cut their exports to China. So we stepped out of the way. Yeah. And that meant that we were then, you know, significantly underweight technology again coming, you know, going through Q4 and into Q1 of this year.

And it’s fairly obvious what the implications of that were. Yeah, you know, we’ve had some significant underperformance coming into this year for that pretty much that reason and that reason alone. Now we are back in because what we saw is the numbers coming out of these businesses and find it actually hasn’t had any meaningful impact on their earnings.

But I would say that given the same set of circumstances tomorrow, we would make exactly the same decision because it was the right decision, given that there was a new known unknown Yes. To trade. RUMSFELD.

David Clark:  Yeah. No, that’s very helpful. How has the firm’s thinking about the global investment outlook at the moment? You just mentioned that things have been sort of spectacular sort of rebound of things of late. Has everyone thinking about that in the medium to long term? It’s a it’s a hard one to answer, I’d say.

Mark Barker: It’s a particularly hard one to answer because we try not to forecast. I think you know it at the beginning of every year, every major financial institution and the banks in particular, and some of the advice groups, they put out their forecasts for the year.

Yeah. And there are hundreds of them. I think you pretty much only have one certainty and that’s so they’re all going to be wrong. And yet the investment industry is very good. Or rather, you know, it seems to be very consistent in building an economic forecast and then modeling its portfolios around that forecast. And I always find that quite challenging.

I mean, ultimately what you’re doing is, is your primary reference point is use is using the process, which is almost impossible to get right. And that doesn’t really make any sense to me. So we build our portfolio very much more around the that we see today, the economic conditions that we have today. You want to be thinking about what the potential outcomes or pathways be from here, and how your portfolio is positioned for that.

And then if you recognize that there are potential weaknesses, you have a couple of choices. Either you can try and mitigate that now, but that may have implications on the portfolio that you have today. And they could be quite negative consequences if you find yourself not going down that path or you can you can try and identify the data points that are going to give you a better idea of which path we are now going down.

And then, of course, correct your portfolio accordingly. And I think we try not to spend too much time thinking about tomorrow. We want to focus on today. Now, I mean, saying that I think the big question is, you know, is the US going to go into a recession or not? And we have no House view. My personal view is that actually there are, you know, corporate earnings are pretty robust and similar so that there is no unemployment.

Inflation, at least in the short term, is sort of on its way back down in the US. And I think one of the things that a lot of people don’t take into account is, you know, ten years of free money has allowed a lot of zombie companies to survive. All of these businesses own a piece of market share and are not economically productive.

Higher rates and the denial of free capital is now forcing those companies out of business and their market share is being taken up by their competitors who are more economically productive.

David Clark: It’s a great point. I think there’s been a lot of companies that are selling dollar bills for $0.50.

Mark Barker: Exactly.

David Clark: And that’s being found out.

Mark Barker: Exactly that. And you know, you kind of need a wash out every now and then to make it more economically robust. So personally, I’m relatively sanguine. But as I say, we have no house view. We’re not going to build a portfolio around that. I think we all have to be conscious that there is a higher probability of economic volatility than we are used to in the US. It may feel like inflation is under control. Is that transitory to, you know, to go back to the point of view that we saw back in 21.

And so I think that there’s every chance that we can see sort of, you know, inflation ebbing and flowing a little bit more than we’re used to. So I think it’s going to be a more challenging environment. You know, as we were… I was out here last year and I was doing a series of fireside chats in the conferences.

And I one of the points I was making is that over the last ten years, you know, pre the, you know, the markets rolling over in 22, it’s been very hard. It’s been very easy to make money and very hard to beat the benchmark. I think we’ve moved into an environment where active management will probably make it a lot easier to beat the benchmark and very hard to make money and you know, the I think the active passive debate is probably going to change as a result of that Now.

But it’s look, we’re in a tougher world than we were, that’s for sure. And I think that return expectations need to be tempered.

David Clark: Mark, congratulations on your success at GQG. I hope that they continue going forward. Thank you for joining us at Insider Open.

Mark Barker: Thanks very much. It’s been great to be here. Really enjoyed the chat.

Views and opinions are expressed as of August 21, 2023.

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