Welcome to Bogle Heads on Investing, episode number 23. Today, our special guest is Dr. Burton Malkiel, a Princeton economist and the author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street. First published in 1973, this book was an inspiration for Jack Bogle to start the first index mutual fund. Welcome, everyone.

My name is Rick Ferry, and I'm the host of Bogle Heads on Investing. This podcast, as with all podcasts, is brought to you by the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that can be found at boglecenter.net. Today, our special guest is Dr. Burton Malkiel.

He needs no introduction to many of the Bogle Heads. Dr. Malkiel received his undergraduate and master's degree from Harvard University and then went on to Princeton University to receive his PhD, where he started a long and illustrious career. Back in 1973, he wrote a book called A Random Walk Down Wall Street, where he called for the first index mutual fund to be created, which led to the index fund revolution.

With no further ado, a man who needs no introduction to the Bogle Heads, Dr. Burton Malkiel. Welcome, doctor. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to have you on Bogle Heads on Investing. This is a podcast that a lot of people were widely anticipating. And before we get into the nuts and bolts of investing, because we have a lot of topics to talk about, a lot of them come from your latest edition of A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

And then there's other things that we'll be talking about. But this will be an investing show. But before we get into that, if you could tell us some of your early background, where you grew up, where you went to school, and how you got involved in the investment industry.

Well, I grew up in the city of Boston, in a part of Boston, Roxbury, Massachusetts. I grew up in a tenement house. For some reason, I was always interested in numbers. And even though I had no money, and my family had no money to invest in the stock market, I knew the price of General Motors stock just about as well as I knew Ted Williams' betting average.

So this is something, for some reason, that interested me, followed me through my youth. I went to college and majored in economics, and then went to business school, much to the regret of some of my economics tutors, who said, you're really a very good economics student. You ought to go into the Academy.

And since I had grown up poor, I decided that the Academy wasn't for me. I didn't want to continue to be poor. I wanted to go to Wall Street, which had interested me since I was a little kid. And so I got a job with Smith Barney, the investment bank that's now part of Morgan Stanley.

But Dr. Malkiel, this wasn't just any business school. You received your bachelor's degree and MBA from Harvard University. Well, that is true. That is true. Before I actually joined Smith Barney, there was a draft at the time. And a few of my Harvard Business School classmates and I received direct commissions in the US Army Finance Corps, where we put into effect at various Army posts around the world a computerized pay and accounting system.

But then I did go to Wall Street. I was an investment banker for two to three years. Did finally start investing myself and made enough money so that I was convinced then that I would not continue to be poor. And the thought of possibly maybe getting a PhD in economics, since my college advisors had strongly urged me to do, was maybe something I should do.

And I went to New York University night school to try to do some courses. But I found that it was simply impossible. Because as an investment banker, we would be doing some due diligence for a company in Iowa or Chicago or the West Coast. And I was missing 3/4 of my classes.

Realized that that didn't work. And I then took a leave of absence. And I was living in Princeton, New Jersey at the time, and went to graduate school at Princeton. I fully expected to go back to Wall Street. But two things happened that I had not expected. One was that the people at Princeton said, gee, we'd like to hire you to teach.

And the second thing was that there was a scandal at Prudential Financial, where the CEO had been lending Prudential's money to companies with which he was affiliated. And when this broke, he was fired. And the New Jersey legislature decided that from now on, Prudential would have to have six public directors chosen by the Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court.

The Chief Justice wanted to have an economist there, interviewed me. And even though I was just a fledgling economist at the time, he liked what I had to say. And I became a director of Prudential Financial. And that made me decide, well, let me see if I like teaching.

I've now got a foot in business. Maybe I can do both of these things at the same time. And the board membership of Prudential led to a number of board memberships. And I enjoyed teaching. I was able to research the stock market, which had interested me since I was a little boy.

And I then developed a life that, in my view, had the best of both worlds. So I was still in the business and financial community. And at the same time, I was able to work on the projects that interested me in financial markets. That's really the quick story of how I came to do the things that I've done.

It's interesting when I look at your bibliography of what you've written that early on in the '60s, you had written a few papers on the bond market and the term structure of interest rates. A couple of papers. One of them was-- the first one was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Then you went on to write a book, your very first book, on options and option strategies. So it wasn't just the stock market. I mean, you were really expanding out into all of the financial markets at this time. Exactly. And was definitely interested in financial markets. The early work that I had done was all technical because you do not get tenure at a first-class university by writing things that were popular.

I wrote A Random Walk Down Wall Street in the early '70s and wrote it right after I was given tenure at Princeton. So I was always interested in doing things that would be more popular than the professional journal stuff that I did at the beginning. But I only did that after I had tenure at Princeton University.

So let's go ahead and move on to A Random Walk Down Wall Street. And I have in my hand your original first edition because right now you're up to the 12th edition. That is correct. The original book itself in the 12th edition is still there. It's still at the beginning of the book for the most part.

And you've just been adding to the book as we have been moving along. So I've read both the original edition. I've read other editions over time. And now the 12th edition, which I also have. But I want to quote something here in your first edition. You were an inspiration to many people, but particularly to Jack Bogle with the idea that what was needed is a index fund that just gives you the market return.

And here's what you wrote. Again, this was written in 1973. That's when the book was published, 1973. So you were actually thinking about this and writing about it or putting your words on paper even before then. But here's what you wrote. This is on page 226. "What we need is a no-load minimum management fee mutual fund that simply buys the hundreds of stocks, making up the broad stock market averages, and does no trading from security to security in an attempt to catch the winners.

Whenever below average performance on the part of any mutual fund is noticed, fund spokesmen are quick to point out you can't buy the averages. It's time the public could." And that was really an inspiration, I believe, to Jack Bogle. How did you meet Jack Bogle? And tell me what this first discussion was about.

Let me first of all say two things. I appreciate your quoting that. And I am certainly very pleased to have been one of the earliest people to recommend indexing. But I appreciate being given the credit. But I do think it's one thing for an academic to say crazy things.

And believe me, the first reviews of my book by professionals said that it was the biggest piece of garbage in the world. So it's one thing for an academic to do this. Jack Bogle deserves all the credit in the world because he bet his whole company on it. And yeah, I was early in recommending it.

But he was the doer. And believe me, this was a very unpopular idea. As you may know the story that Jack had hoped to raise $150 million at least and hoped for $250 million in the initial public offering of the first index fund. They, in fact, raised $11 million.

It was called Bogle's Folly. You talk about early conversations with Jack. Sometimes I used to kid him that he and I were the only holders of the first index fund. But just in terms of the chronology, I was in Washington in 1975 and '76 on the President's Council of Economic Advisors.

I left Washington in January of '77. And then Jack had asked me to go on the Vanguard board. And I was a Vanguard board member for 28 years. And obviously, in terms of initial conversations, Jack and I were certainly kindred spirits because both of us firmly believed and were both convinced that this was the absolutely best way for individuals to invest.

And you were both about the same age, too. That is correct. Jack was a bit older, but Jack and I were roughly the same age. And Jack and I both had the connection to Princeton University, where he was an extremely loyal and an extremely generous alumnus. The index concept, great idea.

But it took so long before it caught on. In the early years, as you said, they only raised $11 million in the initial offering. Now, a lot of that had to do, if I recall the story correctly, it was actually sold through brokerage companies. And it was sold with a commission.

And the commission was a little bit lower than the commission to sell active managed funds. So it didn't get any attention from the brokerage industry in many ways. That is certainly correct. But it was also an idea that the brokerage community really didn't believe. I mean, there was still a view that the reason the broker was important for the customer is the broker would be able to find the mutual fund or the individual stocks that were going to outperform.

And so the view that an index fund was the way to go was pooh-poohed with the idea that who wants to be mediocre? And that was what the index fund was. Well, this is a mediocre investment. This is average. The fact of the matter is that index investing proved to be quite above average when you think of all the other investment products that were out there.

I looked at the data. In the first few years that the S&P 500, the first index trust, as it was called, was out. And the first year, it was attempted to be sold through the brokerage firms. But then it went no load in 1977, about a year later. And so Vanguard was out on its own selling it.

But there was a period of time when there was volatility in the market. Stocks weren't doing very well during the late 1970s. In fact, Businessweek ran an article called The Death of Equities. I mean, so everything was against this fund. I mean, it was incredible that it actually survived.

However, in around the beginning of the 1980s, say 1982, '83, when the market started coming back, the fund finally started to pick up assets. And I believe it hit a billion dollars in assets in the late 1980s. It took, I think, 12 years before the S&P 500 fund hit a billion dollars.

But by that time, I think Vanguard was already looking at doing other index funds as well. And this was sort of the genius of Jack Bogle. He wanted to index everything. Absolutely. And Jack was the one who said, we really ought to be suspicious of the bond managers who tell you that they can outperform.

Maybe we ought to have a bond index fund as well. And do we need just the S&P 500 and what used to be the Barclays Aggregate Bond Index? Maybe what we ought to have is a real estate index, REITs. And maybe we ought to have international indices. We ought to have an index that tracks IFA, Europe, Australia, and Far East.

So you're absolutely right. And this was, I think, the genius of Jack Bogle, that there's no reason why indexing ought to be confined to simply the US stock market. Indexing should work and does work in all asset classes. When I interviewed Jack looking at the chronology of when different index funds were launched at Vanguard, it was actually 1996 by the time the last sort of major market index fund was launched, which was also, ironically, the year that he had heart issues and ended up having his heart transplant and ended up then resigning as the chairman.

But at that point, 1996, a person could go to Vanguard, and you had a whole suite of index funds. You had the US market total market index fund. You had an international index fund, emerging markets index funds. You had a REIT index fund. You had a bond index fund.

It was all there. You could do a all index portfolio now at Vanguard by 1996. So I think that was just an incredible accomplishment to get to that point. Absolutely, and remember also, because of Jack, we introduced a tax-exempt money market fund, introduced bond funds with different maturities so that you had a short term, an intermediate term, and a long term.

From the standpoint of Vanguard, there was a whole host of products that was really all that an individual investor needed. I want to pivot here for a second and start talking about exchange-traded funds, because Jack did not like the idea. That was one of the few instances where Jack and I disagreed.

There's very little that we disagreed on, because as I said earlier, we were really kindred spirits. But you're absolutely right. From Jack's point of view, exchange-traded funds were the instrument of the devil. Like giving gasoline and matches to an arsonist or something like that. Well, as I remember, I can't tell you how many times Jack and I would have this argument where Jack would say, who in their right mind would want to buy the market at 10.30 in the morning and sell it at 1 o'clock in the afternoon?

Anybody who thinks that they can do that and make money is absolutely crazy. People are just going to cut their throats on these things. They're an instrument of speculation. And we will never do exchange-traded funds, because I, as a board member, had actually urged Vanguard to do them. And my argument to Jack was, Jack, you don't think that buying and trading exchange-traded funds is something that is likely to be productive for people.

And I agree with you entirely. But you and I both know there are some people who will still want to do this. And when people do this in the context of a mutual fund, they can create transactions costs, accounting costs, and possibly even potential tax costs for those who stay in the mutual fund.

It's much better for those people who want to try to do this to do it through an exchange-traded fund, where there are even some tax advantages of the exchange-traded funds. And for the buy-and-hold investor, an exchange-traded fund is terrific. And you can do it at an even lower cost.

So that was the argument that we had. And Jack was never, to the day he died, never convinced that exchange-traded funds were worth it. And had Jack stayed as CEO of Vanguard through his long and productive career, Vanguard probably never would have had exchange-traded funds. I have to tell you, during the late '80s and '90s, I was working as a broker, first at Kidder Peabody, and then at Smith Barney, your old firm.

And I had very little access to indexes. I had my aha moment about indexing around 1996, when I read Jack's book, Bogelan Mutual Funds. And I had also heard him speak at a CFA Society annual event. It was actually the first speaking event that he had after he had his heart transplant.

But I mean, I wanted access to Vanguard mutual funds. But I could not get access when I was working at Smith Barney. Having ETFs would have given me access, given my clients access to these ETFs, to Vanguard funds. But they weren't available. Because Vanguard wouldn't pay for distribution, which I think was absolutely right.

The only way that someone in the brokerage community who believed in this could give the client access to these wonderful index funds was through the ETF. With Vanguard's credit, especially with the patent that Gus Sauter, who was the former chief investment officer, created, Vanguard didn't just create ETFs. I mean, they actually created a patent where when they did launch ETFs-- and they were called Vipers at the time.

They're not called that anymore. They're just Vanguard ETFs. But I think it was 2001 or 2002 when they launched ETFs. They did them as a share class of their opened-end funds, which was unique. It was patented. No one has done that since. And what that did was make the mutual fund itself more tax-efficient, because the ETF was now part of that.

Absolutely. And to the extent that there were flows out of the ETF, what you could do is lay off the low-basis stock, which had the effect exactly what you said of making the mutual fund more tax-efficient. Now, there is still a considerable amount of unrealized capital appreciation in the mutual fund.

And to the extent that one can lower that, if, God forbid, everybody started to liquidate their mutual funds, a poor mutual fund holder might get a 1099 at the end of the year saying, we realized the following capital gains on your behalf, and you owe some tax to the US government.

To the extent that you have the ETF as a share class, you are making the mutual fund more potentially tax-efficient. Now, this unrealized appreciation problem has so far been only a theoretical problem, because the funds and the ETF have continued to attract money from investors, and you have not had the liquidations that would create potential tax events.

But it is a theoretical possibility, and to the extent that you can get rid of the low basis stock through the ETF, you are making the mutual fund a more efficient vehicle. Well, the interesting occurrence at Vanguard now seems to be-- and I know you're no longer on the board of directors-- but there seems to be a big or bigger push to get people to invest in ETFs, as opposed to directly in mutual funds.

People write about this on the Bogleheads forum quite frequently. I feel that this is occurring. I don't consider it a bad thing because of the benefit, the tax benefit that occurs for everybody. If there becomes a parity, if you will, between the amount of money in the open-end mutual fund side and the amount of money in the ETF side, if there's redemptions on the open-end mutual fund side, you would sell the stock that is at a high-cost basis, basically that's at a loss, so that the fund could take a capital loss inside the fund.

And if there are redemptions on the ETF side, then you push out of the fund the low-cost basis stock. Exactly, yes. It's this double-edged way of cutting taxes. And I just think it's a fantastic idea they came up with this years ago. And I really don't know why other open-end mutual fund companies have not licensed this idea from Vanguard and done it themselves.

But it doesn't seem like anybody wants to pay Vanguard for the process. I think you're probably right. But I agree with everything you said. That's been a wonderful way of doing it. And it's another reason why Vanguard's going into the ETF business, finally, has been a major plus for the firm.

Well, let's go ahead and get into your book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street. And the latest edition, there's a lot of new stuff that you put in. And this has been added over the years, various editions. So the book is getting thicker. Well, there's more and more going into the book.

Remember, the book was originally written as an investment guide. And when you realize, from 1973 on, the whole investing world has changed. There were no index funds in '73. What I had recommended in '73 was buying some closed-end funds at a discount, which-- and the discounts were something like 40% at the time.

Those discounts are largely gone now. But there were no index funds. There were no money market funds. There were no tax-exempt money market funds. And in terms of the length of the book, it's actually been, for the last several editions, the length has not increased. Because if there was new material added, I've tried to compress other parts of the book.

So it really isn't thicker than it was 10, 20 years ago. There have been a lot of new things that I could tell-- Absolutely. --went in there. And one of the things you've talked more about in more recent editions is the value premium and high-dividend-yielding stocks. And could you tell us your views on, call it, factor investing?

Well, let me make two points about that. First of all, one of the reasons that I've become far more interested in dividend-paying stocks is that I really think we've got a very tough situation facing individual investors, and particularly facing retired investors for whom the original advice was very simple.

You need income, and you have a big chunk of bonds in your portfolio, both because of their stability and because bonds had been producing interest rates of 5%, 6%. So the retired people could, without having to go to their brokers to buy and sell things, could have that nice income coming in regularly.

That doesn't occur anymore. We're basically in a world where more than half of the sovereign debt in the world sells at negative interest rates. Interest rates for the 10-year Treasury in the United States is just over half of 1%. We live in an era that's been called an era of financial repression.

So what do you do as a retired individual? What can you do to get some income? And I do think that one of the, on a relative basis, more attractive parts of the US stock market are blue-chip companies that pay well-protected dividends. That strikes me as being a reasonable substitute for what otherwise would have been a bond portfolio that otherwise might have-- where I might have recommended a total bond market index fund.

The old kind of bond portfolio being something that you needed both for stability and for income doesn't work the way that it did in periods past. Let me now get to your point about factor investing. I have been somewhat suspicious about being a one-factor investor. While there's been a long-term history of value being better than growth, we know that we go through many years, including many of the recent years, where value investing has been absolutely terrible.

When people like Rob are not, say, indexing is OK, but you want to do fundamental indexing, which basically is a way of tilting the portfolio toward value stocks and small stocks, that I think of that as a very good way of charging 50 basis points or more for something that is not and has not, over the long pull, been better than regular index funds.

Now, having said that, to the extent that one wants to be a factor investor, I think a multi-factor model may give you index-type performance with possibly a bit less volatility than a regular index fund. And so to the extent that one wants to consider factor investing, I don't think you do it by buying a value fund.

I don't think you do it by just buying a small-cap fund. I don't think you do it by buying a low-volatility fund, because we know that on the individual factors, there will be long periods of underperformance. But what we know about the factors is that they tend to be uncorrelated.

When one factor does poorly, another factor may do well. And what you're looking for in investing is a portfolio where everything doesn't happen at once. Everything doesn't go down at once. And so I have a little bit of sympathy for a multi-factor approach if it's low cost. And I think something like a Goldman Sachs ETF, which is a multi-factor ETF that has had a reasonable return, I don't think you're going to do much better, if at all, than a regular index fund.

And for most people, I'd say keep it simple. But it is possible that a multi-factor approach could give you index-type returns with a bit less volatility and therefore give you a slightly higher Sharpe ratio, which is basically the return divided by the volatility. So that if the volatility is a bit lower, you get a little bit higher Sharpe ratio.

To backtrack a little bit to clear it up, the high dividend yield approach to investing that you do advocate, especially for retirees, isn't because you expect higher returns through the factor side of higher dividend yielding stocks. That's really two different arguments. One is just to get the higher dividend income.

That's why you would do high dividend yielding stocks. And by the way, Vanguard has a couple of really good high dividend yield. Absolutely, right. Those are exactly the kinds of things in the category that I would recommend. And it is largely a transactions cost argument. I mean, I believe in the old Modigliani-Miller theorem that dividends really don't matter.

You could always create artificial dividends by selling off a few shares. But both from the standpoint of the transactions cost and the bother for people of having to think about periodically looking at their portfolio and selling off a few shares periodically to get income, it's an ease of actually accomplishing what you want and a minimizing transactions cost strategy.

Very good. Well, thank you for clearing that up. By the way, if people were interested in doing multi-factor investing, which would include value and small cap, momentum and quality, all these-- the factor zoo, Vanguard also has multi-factor ETFs, which are very low cost. Vanguard has recently introduced one. That's absolutely right.

One new area that you have written about more recently and one of the companies that you're on the board for, which is Wealthfront, has developed and launched is a risk parity strategy. Could you comment on risk parity? And you believe in it, but how strongly do you believe in it?

Well, one of the interesting things about markets is that very safe assets may very well yield more than they should. And let me make an analogy to the racetrack. And I've actually done articles on racetrack betting. And there's an empirical regularity that we know about racetrack betting that I will describe to you.

If you bet on every horse in the race, you will have a winning ticket. And you will lose about 20% of your money. Why do you lose 20% of your money? Because that's the track take. When the track figures out the parimutuel pool, it deducts 20% for their operating expenses for the taxes that they have to pay to the government.

And they don't give that back to you. So you lose about 20%. Now, let's say instead you bet on every favorite. Well, it turns out you lose about 5% or 6% of your money. Let's assume instead you bet on the longest shot in the race. You lose about 40% of your money, 50% of your money.

In other words, there's a bias in the odds where long shots go off at far less favorable odds than favorites do. So it may be the same thing in the stock market and in the bond market, where safe assets actually yield more than they should if this was simply on an expected value basis the same kind of rate of return expectation for all classes of assets.

Well, if that's true, and there's maybe some long run evidence that it's true, then maybe the best thing to do is to buy some safe asset and leverage them so that they have the same volatility as the risky asset, but that they will then give you a higher rate of return.

Oh, that's an interesting observation. And I think that's the argument for it. As I say in the book, there is some evidence that, at least in the bond market, this has been a winning strategy. If a few years ago you bought 2.5% 10-year treasuries and leveraged them by borrowing at 1% or less, you actually then got a much higher rate of return.

And the rate of return would have been better than buying the 30-year treasury bond. Now, so far that's worked well. It made money for people like Ray Dalio. And you can't deny that it's worked well. At Wealthfront, our risk parity fund has actually done better than Dalio's because our expense ratios are much lower than Dalio's expense ratios.

So it has worked. Now, as I point out in the book, it might continue to work as long as the Federal Reserve keeps pumping money into the economy at the same rate that they've been doing it in the past. But God forbid we come to the other side of the COVID-19 crisis, the world economy goes back to some semblance of normality, and we have a little bit of inflation with all the money floating around the world, this is a strategy that might not work.

Dr. Malkiel, do you believe that the Powell put, as it's called, the Fed buying up corporate bonds, buying up treasury bonds, is distorting this relationship between quality and return? Yeah, I do think that, as we say in the drug industry, there are some uncomfortable side effects. I am very worried about the explosion of corporate debt.

I'm very worried about things I worry about today, that Hertz can raise equity money in bankruptcy, that when you look at institutions like Robinhood and find that Hertz was the leading stock that people had in their trading account when it went from 1 to 5, I think those are very undesirable side effects.

And on the one hand, there's no question that COVID-19 produced an enormous crisis. We had to do something extraordinary. So I don't fault the Fed with what it's done, but I count me as somewhat worried that there are side effects, and one should not ignore them. I'm going to do a quick lightning round on Boglehead, other Boglehead questions, just to wrap it up.

If you don't mind, it'll just take a few minutes. A safe withdrawal rate has been touted at 4%. Are we still at 4%? I don't think so. I think, again, this is one of the unfortunate side effects of what has gone on with monetary policy around the world. The base rate, if you think of the sovereign rate from sovereigns like the United States and Germany, the EU, that have the least risk, are essentially zero, so that the whole base of returns starts at zero.

And even if the risk premium on equities continued to be 5%, which it's been historically, according to the Ibbotson data, then equities would give you 5% or maybe 5 and 1/2%. So you will not preserve the real value of an endowment with a 4% withdrawal rate. The appropriate rate is clearly lower.

And I think that institutions that retain the 4%, 5%, 6% withdrawal rates are not living in what is, in my view, the appropriate world. But my clients, they tend to use 3%. Would you agree that 3%-- Yours is much better than 4%. OK. Well, that leads us into another question by the Bogleheads.

And that is, in your book, you talk about the allocation between stocks and bonds for different age groups. And you say, for people who are in their 60s, they should have 60% to 80% stocks, 70s, 40% to 60% stocks, 80s, 30% to 50% stocks. Has that changed in this new world that we're in?

If you look back at the additions, I have increased the stock allocation and reduced the bond allocation. And frankly, if I were writing the 13th edition right now, under today's circumstances, I would probably increase the stock allocation and reduce the bond allocation a little further. ESG, Environmental, Social, and Governance, seems to be more popular here in the United States.

Well, what is your feeling on ESG? And if you could, could you address the expected returns of ESG versus the expected returns of, say, just the market? Well, let me take the second question first. While ESG investing has recently, like in the first quarter of 2020, ESG funds have done a little better than regular index funds, the reason being that they avoid all oil companies.

And as you know, the oil companies have not been the place to be investing in the first quarter. However, over the longer run, there is no credible evidence that ESG investing will give you a higher rate of return. There have been some periods where it has, some periods where it's given you a lower rate of return, but there's no credible evidence that you'll be helping the world will give you a higher rate of return.

In fact, quite the opposite. If, for example, oil companies are permanently lower because many institutions avoid them, then they will probably give you a higher rate of return over the long haul. If a particular type of company is hated and therefore sells at a lower valuation than it deserves, it's going to give you a higher rate of return in the future.

Not a lower rate of return. So number one, don't think you can do this and you can both feel good and you're sure of getting a higher rate of return. Secondly, I'm very suspicious that you really ought to feel good about buying an ESG fund. There are various institutions that give companies ESG ratings.

They're wildly different. Some people will give you a high ESG rating. Some will give you a low ESG rating. You ought to really look at what you're owning. It's not at all clear that if you look at these things that you ought to feel good. For example, one of the companies that gets a very low ESG rating is Kinder Morgan, a natural gas pipeline company.

Now, it gets a low rating because it's carbon. On the other hand, to the extent that we use natural gas rather than coal, this will be great for the environment. We're never going to get rid of carbon completely. As an interim step, you're much better burning natural gas than burning oil.

It's much better transmitting this through pipelines rather than through trucks or through rails where there can be accidents and where the trucks are generally burning fuel to transmit oil or natural gas. So is Kinder Morgan really a very bad company, or is it one of the better companies? I think you can do that with a lot of those companies that get terrible ESG scores.

Now, what about the companies that get great ESG scores? If you look at what you're holding in an ESG fund, one of the big holdings is Facebook. Well, should you feel very good about holding Facebook or not? I don't know that I'm going to feel any better in my portfolio because I hold Facebook and Twitter than if I don't.

Now, it's true, there's very little carbon output from Facebook. But again, I'm very suspicious that you ought to feel better about holding these portfolios. And I think if this continues to grow in popularity, it's much more likely that they will give you lower rates of return in the future rather than higher rates of return.

And so neither should you feel good, nor should you expect to get an attractive rate of return by buying an ESG fund. Direct indexing is growing in popularity, which is very simply, instead of buying an index fund, people are buying or companies are buying individual stocks for you, say all the stocks in the S&P 500, and selling each individual stock that may be at a loss to generate larger capital losses than you could generate if you just had index funds and the market went down and you did tax-loss harvesting.

Now, I find that this works well with people who may have sold an asset and have a large capital gain, but it leaves you with 500 individual stocks and probably a lot of tax problems later on down the road. So even though I'm expressing my concerns about direct indexing, could you tell me, how do you feel about direct indexing?

No, I'm actually more of a fan of direct indexing. And we do this at Wealthfront. The surest way of getting an alpha is not by picking stocks, but by getting an after-tax alpha. In my own Wealthfront account, it's been used to offset some capital gains from some of the real estate funds and real estate index funds that I own.

And I think it's actually a very good thing. With respect to the longer run, are you, in fact, then just getting rid of all of your losses and your portfolio will then have larger and larger unrealized capital gains? I would say this. Unless we change the tax law where, at depth, there is no writing up of your assets where you have to realize the capital gains, but in fact, what you do is just write the value, the basis up, then you avoid the long run problem of your portfolios will tend to have more unrealized capital gains.

Now, if they change the tax law, I'd agree with you that in the longer run, you're going to pay some price. But do remember that avoiding capital gains for several years has an advantage, even if you later have to pay the tax, because a dollar today is worth more than $1.10 or 20 years from now.

I would agree with you with no disrespect. At your age, direct indexing would make a lot of sense if you had capital gains. However, I'm not sure if direct indexing makes sense for a 35-year-old who sold their app company for $10 million to do it because they sort of get saddled and stuck in these 500 stocks for 50, 60 years, and they have to pay fees on the portfolio to maintain it.

And that is-- Well, it's OK. We can agree on absolutely everything. OK. Very good. OK, one last question. This has to do with your view on China. You co-authored a book on China, which came out in 2008. China has not performed well since that time, because the question was this huge 500% run-up in the couple of years prior to the book being published.

But how do you still feel about China? I think the problem, and what's actually been disappointing about President Xi, is China's growth has almost entirely been on the private sector, not the sector of government-owned enterprises. The overall indices have done very poorly because the government-owned enterprises have been terrible.

But the private enterprises, the Tencent, the Baidu's, the Alibaba's, those have done particularly well. You know, you have to look at what's in an index. The problem is that the index, like the FXI, has not done well. And it's not done well because of the state-owned enterprises. The private companies, though, have done well.

And I am still optimistic about them. And to just give you an idea of how you could get just the private stuff, there's an ETF called EMQQ, which has the Alibaba's and the Tencent's, and in fact, all of the internet companies in China that have done particularly well. So I think the answer is, I am still optimistic about China, but not the whole economy, because I think that President Xi has been, unfortunately, emphasizing the state-owned enterprises.

And I think that's a big mistake. And it's one of the reasons why China's overall growth will not be anything like it's been in the past. Dr. Valkeel, it's been a real pleasure. We could go on for another two hours easily. Thank you so much for being on the Bogle Heads on Investing podcast.

It's been my pleasure, Rick. This concludes Bogle Heads on Investing, episode number 23. I'm your host, Rick Ferry. Join us each month to hear a new special guest. In the meantime, visit bogleheads.org and the Bogleheads Wiki. Participate in the forum and help others find the forum. Thanks for listening.