Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works,

how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host, David Stein,

and in this episode, 510, we're going to do something a little different. As many of you know,

prior to launching money for the rest of us more than 10 years ago, I was an institutional investment

advisor for 17 years. My former firm is FEG Investment Advisors. I've remained close to many

of my former partners and colleagues there. FEG launched a podcast almost five years ago called

the FEG Insight Bridge. The host is Greg Dowling, FIG's chief investment officer

and head of research. Greg and I worked together for years as part of FEC's investment committee.

On the FECG Insight Bridge podcast, Greg interviews in his words some of the world's leading investment,

economic, and philanthropic minds to provide insight on how

investors can survive and thrive in a world of markets and finance.

This year on The Money for the Rest of Us podcast, we wanted to share some of the standout

interviews from FEG's show, along with my key takeaways.

The first episode I wanted to share was Greg Dalling's

conversation with GMO's Ben Inker, released a few weeks ago. GMO is an asset manager co-founded by

Jeremy Grantham in 1977. Ben Inker is co-head of asset allocation and a portfolio manager at GMO. I've been impressed with Ben's

writings over the years and have been influenced by GMO's approach to asset allocation. In the interview,

Inker says something that should sound familiar if you have listened to money for the rest of us

over the years.

Inker said, when you're looking at an asset, it's not enough to be looking at what its returns have been.

The really important thing is to decompose those returns into the underlying drivers, because

if you understand the underlying drivers, you can understand which pieces of this return are likely to persist,

...