Today's animal spirits talk your book is brought to you by Kalamos investments go to Kalamos.com to learn more about their

Kalamos long short fund which according to Morningstar through the end of May was one of only 19 funds in the long short category with positive year-to-date performance

Pretty impressive. We get into that in the show today. It's Kalamos.com

Welcome to Animal Spirits a show about markets life and investing join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about with their reading writing and watching

Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson work for Ritholds Wealth Management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholds Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Ritholds Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast

Then there was an article this morning in the financial times

US long short equity funds are down 40% on average this year

The first five months mark the worst start to account a year for equity long short funds on record

Okay

No offense. I know stock picking is so difficult, but like wasn't this the year

One of the hard things that I learned from tracking hedge ones back in the day is that

Long short funds have a lot of ways to be wrong because it's not only about picking the right sectors and the right stocks

And I which ones to go long and which ones to go short

But it's how much do you short how much do you go long what's your net and your gross exposure do you have leverage on how do you balance out your longs and shorts

You could be the best stock picker in the world

But your net exposure is off sides one time and it doesn't matter because the market goes against you

There's a lot of ways to be wrong

And I think a lot of long short funds probably are long funds and drag and the shorts just kind of

hurt performance. They're not moving things around enough

So we talked to Michael Grant today from Calimos and sounds like he does make these regime shifts and through the end of May

They were positive on the year, which is pretty impressive

the idea of like a

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