Signs of the Time: Making Sense of a World in Transition
Rob Almeida is joined in this podcast episode by Bill Gevov, MFS Senior Regional Consultant, to discuss topics that are top of minds for many across the investment community, including the direction of interest rates, the impact of shifting global dynamics, and how investors may want to think about the effects of AI going forward.
Rob Almeida: Well, Bill Gevov, thanks for joining.
Bill Gevov: Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Rob.
Rob Almeida: So Bill, for the audience, maybe talk a little bit about what you do for MFS®, how long you've been doing it.
Bill Gevov: Oh, well, so I've been fortunate enough to be here 30 years. Actually, March 4th was my 30th anniversary.
Rob Almeida: You're old?
Bill Gevov: Yes.
Rob Almeida: Seasoned veteran.
Bill Gevov: There we go.
I'm in the retail wholesale, so I'm a wholesaler in the Los Angeles area, so I get to call on the wirehouses and independents and represent MFS funds in separate accounts and 401(k)s, and just work with some great advisors.
Rob Almeida: Awesome. Well, thank you. So for additional context, you and I were talking, I know six, seven, eight weeks ago, and as we do often, and you were asking me some questions and one of us, I can't remember if it was you or I said, "Well, that would be a good idea for a podcast." So we're going to do something a little bit different from what we do in these normal podcasts where I'm going to play the role as the guest and you're going to play the role as the host. No, we're going to try to emulate maybe some of the conversations you and I have had and hopefully folks will find this interesting.
Bill Gevov: Sounds like a plan.
Rob Almeida: Okay, so if you were to summarize the mood, the sentiment of financial advisors today, maybe we will start there. What are people worried about or what are some of the common questions you get?
Bill Gevov: The common questions always fall into the categories of — what we're trying to suggest is that there's questions on the equities, there's questions on international, there's questions obviously on interest rates, and there's always questions surrounding on are we going to have a soft landing or hard landing? And how all this transpires into what we're trying to do as mutual fund wholesalers, and I think the biggest topic of conversation for the last year has really been are interest rates going to come down or going into in a soft landing, is it time to move money out of treasuries or CDs or these higher yielding money markets and extend duration? And then it feels like every time that it looks like a good idea, immediately rates don't do what people think they're going to do.
Rob Almeida: It gets pushed off.
Bill Gevov: It gets kicked down the pike a little bit and we still have to show people all the history of perhaps it's better be early than to be late when you're moving money and extending duration, but the clients have to be convinced or they have to feel right about it, and the financial advisor has to feel right about it.
Rob Almeida: Yeah, okay. As it pertains to the economy, soft landing, and I guess interest rates, I tend to think that not just clients, not just financial advisor, but the public by and large — I tend to conflate these things. In other words, soft landing, recession, interest rates down, equities down or soft landing, interest rates lower, bond prices up. And oftentimes, I think sometimes we tangle these things up and where you sit or where you stand as a function of where you sit. So your perspective is obviously built upon your experience.
And as you and I have talked about a lot and as I've tried to written and communicate that in the last 15 years, but even our entire career — I've been doing this as almost as long as you — I'm not sure that's going to be the best predictor of the next five, 10 to 20 years because the factors that drove returns — and we can get into this if you think worthwhile — I think have changed dramatically, specifically the artificial suppression of interest rates and globalization. Those were the two biggest factors of returns globally and both of those have changed materially. So in other words, I wonder if the investor, they're seeking the right answers to the wrong questions.
Bill Gevov: Yeah, there's always a sense of to get the conversation started, almost like when you meet somebody and you go, "Well, how are you doing?" Do they really care how you're doing or is it just a nice way to get a conversation starter going? So generally in our industry, people want to know, so what's MFS thinking about interest rates, recession, soft landing, hard landing, whether that really relates to anything that they're talking to their clients about. It seems most just want to start the conversation with that. So that's why it's important that we have that, I don't want to call it opinion.
Rob Almeida: Point of view.
Bill Gevov: Point of view, that's why we want to have that point of view.
Rob Almeida: You need to have an answer.
Bill Gevov: You need to have an answer and nobody's going to check on you. But they just want to see that process of why does MFS come to that conclusion or that point of view, or not even a conclusion, but a point of view, and then that can lead into what we're doing as an investment company.
Rob Almeida: More better conversations.
Bill Gevov: Yes, exactly.
Rob Almeida: Is there an overarching obstacle that they're facing or you're facing in trying to answer something?
Bill Gevov: Just they don't like to be incorrect.
Rob Almeida: Okay.
Bill Gevov: So when it comes to topics of, like we said, are interest rate is going to come down and is a time to increase duration. When I do it, I want to be right sooner than later. My opinion on international, I want to be right.
Rob Almeida: International equity.
Bill Gevov: Investing in international equity, I want to be right. I don't want to feel like making the wrong decision.
Rob Almeida: So maybe let's start there. So my travels the last few weeks, which admittedly have been largely institutional and largely US institutional, so pension plans, endowments, etc. So they have the same job, the same function as the folks that you're calling on, but their levers or their time horizon might differ a little bit, but directionally, they're the same and a question, I guess maybe call it a complaint, that I heard throughout was international equities, and I think would you echo that? I think I've heard that from you before.
Bill Gevov: Yeah, we generally hear from the FAs, they understand the concept of allocation and how globalization and international equities should be a great part of an investment portfolio, but they feel often that it's underperformed for their liking.
Rob Almeida: For a long time.
Bill Gevov: Yeah.
Rob Almeida: And that's what I've been hearing from the institutional. In fact, I heard from two, which I was surprised at, that they're leaning towards giving it up altogether.
Bill Gevov: I've also heard that from time to time.
Rob Almeida: Yeah, which is pretty extreme. Maybe taking a step back, fundamentals, what a company does, how do they do it that drives return on capital, i.e., the profitability of an enterprise, and that drives asset prices. So hindsight's 20/20, and the US has outperformed the rest of the world in a material manner because profits outperformed in a material manner, and I can appreciate the disappointment that investors have because of that experience. But if you take a step back, it's not the way it's always been. Right? So coming out of the technology bubble in the late '90s where US outperformed from when that business cycle ended in the early 2000 up until the GFC, that seven-, eight-year timeframe was very different.
So non-US equities, or international equities, materially outearned US equities, there was a commodity super cycle happening. China was growing rapidly. International companies just have more profitability beta, if you will, to commodities and to economic growth. So international equities or international stocks, excuse me, were outearning US, which is why the MSCI EAFE was outperforming the S&P 500, then the correction of the global financial crisis. It wasn't just banks, it was overearning non-US enterprises, and then it flipped. It flipped for the last 15 years and so, I think — well at least what I try to impart is — just go back to what matters for future asset price. Of course it's valuation, but largely who's going to outearn or rather, which segment was overearning, because that's likely where the next correction is going to stem from.
Bill Gevov: And hasn't that generally been a good thesis of who was overearning and then it leads to a correction?
Rob Almeida: Yeah, so as you mentioned at the top, one of the catalysts for our discussion that we want to try to recapture today is akin to why US has outperformed non-US. It's about profits. Similarly, at a sector level, you see this too where investors are always gravitating towards industries with higher returns and they're pulling capital from industries with lower returns, that's the whole point of capitalism, and you've seen that with technology stocks. So yes, while you have some momentum and perhaps excessive valuation, certain segments of the US market, particularly the growth market, particularly technology, but underneath that, there's expectations of earning strength and earning superiority. So akin to why US has outperformed non-US, akin to why technology has outperformed everything else, it ultimately all comes back to earnings and profits, and then the question really is well, what's the sustainability of that? Because volatility is just simply the market adjusting for assumptions that were wrong — and we've seen this before. You saw incorrect assumptions in the '90s, you saw incorrect assumptions about banking leverage in the 2000s, and I think you're seeing some excessive assumptions today in certain parts of technology.
Bill Gevov: That makes sense. Then you also had mentioned that even some of the variables like the cost of running a business is becoming excessive. You want to touch upon that a little bit?
Rob Almeida: So really simple, fundamentals drive earnings, earnings drive stock prices, period. And in the last 15 years, you've had two major factors that drove what was all-time high, literally all-time high profitability. So maybe to take a step back, from 2009 to 2020, you had one of the weakest business cycles since the US Civil War — not one of, excuse me, it was the weakest.
Bill Gevov: So say that one more time.
Rob Almeida: So the post global financial crisis business cycle, so 11 years, really long, GDP was consistent, but very low. Inflation was consistent, but very low, growth was consistent and very low. No money velocity, very low level of lending, very low level of spending. Economists call that a secular stagnation that broke during COVID because of stimulus, but the overarching point is — kind of take a step back, 30,000 foot view — you had one of the weakest business expansions or cycles in 150 years, yet profitability particularly in the United States reached all-time highs.
Bill Gevov: Now, do you attribute that to inflation where prices were going up?
Rob Almeida: No, this is before that.
Bill Gevov: Before that.
Rob Almeida: Yeah, so this is by 2018.
Bill Gevov: Okay.
Rob Almeida: So by 2018, profits at all-time highs and this gets to your original question. So why? How did that happen? It's really simple. So profits are functions of revenues and costs. Revenues are a function of how many pairs of glasses do you sell multiplied by the price? Pretty simple, cost is your cost of running the business, which you asked about. Revenues have a directional correlation. I would argue this cause and effect with GDP. So when GDP is high, revenue growth is usually pretty high. When GDP is low, revenue growth is usually low.
Bill Gevov: Makes sense.
Rob Almeida: What you saw in the 2010s was not just below average economic growth, but below average revenue growth. It was 2%.
Bill Gevov: Yeah, very low.
Rob Almeida: Yeah, so you don't have to have a CFA to do a little simple arithmetic and say, "Okay, well if you have tremendous profitability and it's not coming from economic growth and revenue and pricing power and inflation, it has to be coming through costs, to your question." So what was driving cost down? Two biggest factors. One was interest rates, so as coming out of the GFC, as consumers were borrowing less and spending less, as banks were lending less, as companies were spending less, interest rates were coming down. So it allowed businesses to borrow at cheap rates and then recycle that capital back in form of dividends, buybacks, acquisitions, etc. That was one.
The other lever was globalization, just-in-time delivery. Now, the prerequisite for just-in-time delivery or globalization, if you just think about it in simple terms, you and I are running a business and we want to minimize the amount of inventory we have because inventorying something is expensive. You got to pay for the rent and shipping, all that stuff, but if we can get a good or service on demand or have it available for the customer just when they need it, we can reduce costs, but the prerequisite for that is a safe world. A world where shipping lanes are safe. A world where the globalization, the supply chain mechanism is running like a well-oiled machine.
Bill Gevov: And without excess cost like fuel or supply chain and issues.
Rob Almeida: Exactly. Yeah, so fast-forward to today. So the pandemic hits, we had the stimulus response to it, you got the inflation response to it, but at the same time, you've got a hot war in Europe, conflict in the Middle East, Cold War between the US and China. The world is isn't as safe as a place it used to be.
Bill Gevov: Doesn't feel like it.
Rob Almeida: No, and companies, I don't want to say came to the realization, what was exposed was the fragility of not having a good when you need it. To kind of put this in context, it takes 30,000 parts to make an automobile.
Bill Gevov: That's amazing.
Rob Almeida: That's a lot of parts and I'm cherry-picking, they have some of the most complex supply chains in the world. One in particular, sources goods over 60 countries has over 1,000, 1,200, or 1,300 different trading suppliers for 30,000 parts all to make a car or a truck as cheap as possible. So back to your original question, costs were so low I'd argue because of deflation, the interest rate suppression brought by central banks, as well as globalization, and what I think not enough investors are maybe concerning themselves with today is, well, that changed. What changed now is interest rates are at...
Bill Gevov: They're higher.
Rob Almeida: They're higher and my pushback on clients is when they say, "Well, interest rates are going to go lower." Maybe, the market will decide that, not a central banker. Right? That era is gone now. You can push interest rates to zero when the cost of goods is cheap. My mother, hope she's not listening, she probably is, but she can't afford food.
Bill Gevov: Oh, wow.
Rob Almeida: I actually have two mothers. I have a biological and a mother-in-law and I subsidize both.
Bill Gevov: And that's a harsh reality.
Rob Almeida: Prescriptions, food, health, shelter — things that you have to buy are really still expensive. Things that you don't have to buy are deflating. So it gets back to, I think, the cost of running your business or a business, it's just going to be a lot higher than it was in the last 15 years.
Bill Gevov: Which generally affects revenue, right?
Rob Almeida: Profits.
Bill Gevov: Profits, right? So the revenue's coming in but it affects profits.
Rob Almeida: Again, it all keeps coming back to investing when clients are talking about US versus non-US, sectors. I think the simple playbook, which has been oh, here's what has worked, US or non-US tech over everything else. Keep in mind this came against a backdrop of artificially suppressed interest rates and a fully functional globalized world because of US hegemony, and I'm not saying globalization ended, but it's changed now. It's materially more expensive and more risky to have your supply chain sourced out of Asia.
Bill Gevov: So what's interesting when we were having this conversation, prior to this conversation, was a few things that stuck with me is a few quotes from you if I will.
Rob Almeida: Okay.
Bill Gevov: So you said the environment's going to be different because the cost of capital went from cheap to expensive, and you just eloquently talked about that, right? Then the other part was the cost of running a business went up a lot. So you just also talked about how our company's going to work on that. Maybe we can lean that into building a mutual fund or looking at companies about that, and then last was this environment may wash out businesses that can't afford to stay in business, capital labor costs are expensive and cheaper, scarcity value and that kind of all plays into the conversation you just had.
Rob Almeida: Yeah, so kind of bring it all back. Let's just pretend for a moment and you and I have talked about this at other points in the past, which is pretend there's no S&P 500, pretend there's not an index. Pretend there's not an ETF. Pretend there isn't mutual funds and financial markets.
Bill Gevov: It's just companies.
Rob Almeida: It's just companies and you're deciding to invest in this company and maybe to make it even simpler, the world is comprised of savers and borrowers, and now the reality is you and I are both savers and borrowers. You might have a car loan or a mortgage or credit card loans, but you also have savings or investment.
Bill Gevov: Correct.
Rob Almeida: So in simple terms, there's an equilibrium in society between savers and borrowers. So when there's more savers, and I say borrowers, people who have an idea, a business plan, but they need capital to put it forward, right? So that's what investing is and the return on that project or their idea needs to supersede or be better than what you would get at savings rates, and of course it needs to be commensurate with the risk, etc. But for the last 15 years, when you push interest rates to the zero bound, now it made everything investable, it made everything fungible if you will. Something that might not have been a good idea 20 years ago was a good idea in 2017.
But my larger point is that projects, businesses get funded when society decides it's worth funding, and they pull that funding either from savings or from other companies and that's how you get a capitalism and efficient market, etc. And largely now, I think what's different is the cost of funding went up a lot. It went from being abundant and cheap to, let's call it, scarce and a bit more expensive. Labor went from being abundant and cheap because of globalization to now being scarce and expensive, goods, shipping, etc. Shipping costs are up dramatically just year to date. Commodity prices...
Bill Gevov: Were shipping costs up prior to the challenge we're having in the Middle East?
Rob Almeida: No.
Bill Gevov: No.
Rob Almeida: So put some numbers behind it and this all kind of triangulates back to post-World War II. Bretton Woods, really, it was an agreement, if you will, that the US naval power would police the seas and make it a safe and cheap place, the world to do business, a global alliance if you will. So the cost of a container, a can on a big ship has deflated massively over the years to, I don't know, like six, seven, 800. It's just such a small part of cost. It's still small, but it's going up and, in addition, now you're shifting supply chains to countries where there's maybe less geopolitical risk or it's closer to home. That requires people, it requires people with different skill sets that they might not possess. All of this costs more, so bring it back to your point about how to build a mutual fund, if you will.
I just come back to nothing's changed. What matters is fundamentals drive profits, profits drive asset price. I think what's changed now is the ease of generating an ROI just went up, or excuse me, it just went down, it got a lot harder. So we need to be more thoughtful and more careful. I say we, I mean the collective investor universe about who you're lending money to or who you're giving your capital to because the ROI that you're expecting might not be what it was the last five, six, seven years, and that price of that asset, that price is what you pay, value is what you get. The price is really high, the value might be a lot lower.
Bill Gevov: Which nobody likes.
Rob Almeida: Nobody likes.
Bill Gevov: Nobody likes that. So again, it's an environment of looking at companies that can just have better earnings, better return on investment, return on capital.
Rob Almeida: To meet expectations.
Bill Gevov: Yeah, meet expectations.
Rob Almeida: And I know that that comes across as so self-serving, or active managers, and I've been saying this for years, but if you just keep it really simple — which I think hopefully we've done here this morning — the operating environment has changed and I just think that, as a world, as an investor world, we've been operating in an environment of interest rates, suppression and cheap labor and shipping costs, and both those things changed dramatically in the last 12 to 24 months. Now, what we haven't talked about is AI and how that affects that and we can get into that if you'd like, and I don't dispute that AI isn't or won't be a step function changing–technology. It's going to make us all more productive and efficient, and I subscribe to that. I don't see how it can't, but it might make a good business better. It's not going to make a bad business good.
Bill Gevov: Got it.
Rob Almeida: Right? So if you have a product or service and you're competing against someone else who has a product or service, and their product or service is, let's say, a little bit better, the ROI of those two companies has probably been very similar over the last 10, 15 years for all the reasons we've talked about. Fast-forward to today, the better company, they still have higher borrowing costs, they're paying more for people, they're struggling too, but AI is going to help them be better. Whereas the weaker company just in my hypothetical, it's not going to help them get better, but they're still going to have the same struggle. So to your point that you mentioned earlier in one of the quotes, this should, I think accelerate the narrative that we're talking about here today, which is better companies with better returns get a scarcity premium in risk markets.
Bill Gevov: It's always an interesting conversation because some industries may be affected negatively, dramatically, and then it could benefit other sectors or industries over the moon if you will, right? And I think sometimes we have to get used to the fact that even when the personal computer came out, you could sit there and say, "Well, that's going to destroy the typewriter industry." But look at the benefits of not destroying an industry or watching an industry go away, but that cycle's been around since the beginning of time.
Rob Almeida: Yeah, no, you saw this with accounting. So when Excel came out and other types of tax packet, it didn't displace accountants, it just created more because tax reporting accounting just got more complicated. So you were able to do more. So I have no idea really what this is going to do to the labor markets, does it displace jobs, etc., and that's not our focus here. Our focus is if the market is signaling based upon the price of the stock that a company's going to have an 8% ROI. Our job is, with all of these factors that we talked about, are they going to be able to deliver eight, nine, 10, or is it going to be seven, six, five, right? And that's going to matter I think a lot more than it has.
Bill Gevov: And these periods of, I guess, transition if you will, interest rates were zero, now they're higher. We're not quite sure where GDP is, inflation is, how long rates are going to stay at these levels. The importance of understanding what a company is doing as far as ROI, ROC becomes ever more important.
Rob Almeida: Yeah, far more. Should we talk about fixed income interest rates since you just mentioned that?
Bill Gevov: Sure, why not?
Rob Almeida: So, just something, because you mentioned earlier at the top about expectation of interest rates coming down and getting pushed off and pushed off and pushed off because inflation data. So going from 9% inflation to three or whatever the delta was, I'm not an economist, but that was easy. Some of that was comps and some of that was just the stimulus fading, but I'm not sure we get back to the inflationary levels that maybe central bankers think or maybe the market thinks that they think just because there's some pretty significant structural dynamics here, right? The globalization, the deglobalization or however you want to think about on-shoring for ensuring shortage of labor, that's inflationary. Demographics is inflationary. You're going to have more consumers and less producers. It's pretty simple and so I just wonder, are fixed income allocations by clients, are they built based upon a narrative that may not come true, which is one that, well, interest rate's going to go back to where they were, and I'm not sure you're going to see that.
Bill Gevov: And as always, nobody rings a bell to tell us.
Rob Almeida: Right.
Bill Gevov: So that seems to be the overarching question or concern when you're talking about fixed rates.
Rob Almeida: Yeah, so would you say a lot of the decision is the decision tree for a financial advisor, I'm going to increase my fixed income risk budget, largely because I think rates are going to go lower, or I think the central bank's going to cut rates. Would you say, is that the catalyst?
Bill Gevov: Well, the catalyst is it seems inevitable that that may happen and I want to be prepared, but I don't want to jump in with both feet. I want to be strategic about moving money out of the current safe rate if you will, the treasury rate or a CD rate or a higher yielding money market and then extending duration, but I don't want to be too early, and I certainly don't want to be late.
Rob Almeida: Well, full disclosure we're overweight fixed income versus equities and portfolios that I work on. So we've made that commitment. So I think fixed income is more attractive than equities given potential risk-adjusted returns, but it's not built on this foundation that central banks are going to cut rates because I'm not sure, or I don't believe that they're going to cut rates maybe how the market thinks.
Bill Gevov: Or we thought going into this year.
Rob Almeida: Yeah, and just put it in really simple terms, every risk asset, stocks, bonds, etc., has a risk premium, the expected return over treasuries. Well, treasuries have a risk premium too. They don't call it that, they call it term premium. So one reason why rates were so low in the 2010s, it was not just central banks suppressing the short end of the curve and then the long end through quantitative easing. They were doing it because money velocity was so low, inflation velocity or inflation vol was so low, which drives term...
So if you know year in year out, high certainty that a dollar today is going to be worth a dollar tomorrow, the term premium is going to be pretty low. So fast-forward to today, I bet if we got 50 of your clients in a room, maybe half of would say rates would be a little bit higher or half would say rates would be a little bit lower, there'd be a more mixed view, and I think that's a function of just the uncertainty and so if you have more uncertainty regarding inflation, you should have more uncertainty regarding rates, and it should be a higher term premium. So just given I guess that framework, I think maybe we should caution folks on how much rates could fall.
Bill Gevov: And I think we've done a good job at that. I think we've done a good job at just making sure that there is, the position is we have to be more educated and listen.
Rob Almeida: Yeah, and I'll let you go. Is there anything we haven't covered or something that you want clients to know or something you want the listeners to know that your clients are telling you that you think is important?
Bill Gevov: I think if we could almost summarize, it seems like we talked a lot about earnings and because of cost of goods and services and labor are going up that we have to be more cognitive about companies, how their earnings and profits are being looked at going forward from here, it's not as, I don't want to say easy, it's just not as clear cut as it was.
Rob Almeida: It's just going to be more acute.
Bill Gevov: More acute. As far as international versus US, how are you looking at that as a summarized point?
Rob Almeida: Sure. I hear often sometimes a valuation argument being made and I don't dismiss that, but US should always be more expensive than non-US. So start there. So the United States respects property rights more so than any other country. You have greater labor mobility, so you can take your company, pick up, move it from state A to state B with lower taxes, cheaper labor, etc. It's harder to do that in Asia, harder to do that in Europe. It's easier to source capital here, which is the best functioning capital markets.
So for that reason, US companies tend to have an earnings premium and therefore, you get a valuation premium, but just the extremis of valuations, it's too high. So international to me, you're getting not only a valuation discount, but more importantly, all those things that we talked about of capital costs and the cost of running your business. Non-US companies I think have less to give back, right? US companies were taking advantage of that far more so than other countries. So yeah, labor costs fell in Europe, shipping costs fell. They're both going up, but not up as much as they are here. So I think you've got a fundamental story at your back outside the United States and you've got a valuation story.
Bill Gevov: Which has always been the overarching story anyway or historically, and then we talked about rates and it's a game of, I don't want to call it a waiting game, but we have to see what's going on and what's happening.
Rob Almeida: Well, I think we just need to reset our expectations. So I think fixed income is attractive here, not because rates are going to go material lower, because I don't think there's catalysts for them to go higher.
Bill Gevov: So fundamentals just seem to be ever more important now.
Rob Almeida: And I think they always have been, but it was blunted by a massive wave of cost suppression, rates and globalization, and so it's always mattered, but now the market — there's going to be greater dispersion, profit dispersion if you will. So it's been pretty tight, where outside of a few, maybe Magnificent 7 largely, 20 years ago, if you were getting a 14% ROI, you got a scarcity premium, but when everyone's earning 11, 12, 13, 14, doesn't really matter that much.
Bill Gevov: Exactly.
Rob Almeida: But if you're earning nine and your peers are earning four, that's a big delta and a massive alpha lever that I think active managers are probably going to be able to monetize, or us included.
Bill Gevov: I think that's a great way to end this conversation.
Rob Almeida: Well, thank you for doing this.
Bill Gevov: Oh, my pleasure.
Rob Almeida: Great seeing you as always.
Bill Gevov: You know I'll do it again.
Rob Almeida: Do you want to end with, tell folks why you're here?
Bill Gevov: Sure, as many people know, we are celebrating the 100th anniversary and the centennial of the creation of the mutual fund in America.
Rob Almeida: Pretty cool.
Bill Gevov: Yeah, that's kind of great and we are having our annual meeting to meet with all the analysts and managers and learn more about what a good job we're doing at MFS from an investment standpoint, but also to celebrate this great creation of this investment product.
Rob Almeida: Maybe for your two-, three-day conference, why don't you just play this podcast and you'll be done with it.
Bill Gevov: Just get it to me and I'll do that for you.
Rob Almeida: Thanks, Bill.
Bill Gevov: Thank you, Rob.
The views expressed are those of the speaker and are subject to change at any time. These views are for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a recommendation to purchase any security or as an offer of securities or investment advice. No forecast can be guaranteed. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
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