Animal Spirits Podcast

Talk Your Book: Animal Spirits Live with F/m Investments

28 snips
May 4, 2026
Alex Morris, an executive at FM Investments who builds ETFs and tax‑aware fixed income solutions. He discusses bond pricing and rate expectations, why a T‑bill ETF took off, diversifying beyond traditional bond benchmarks, tax‑aware strategies and execution pitfalls, ETF liquidity and illiquidity risks, and how FM vets and plans new tax and inflation products.
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INSIGHT

Bond Market Often Leads On Inflation Signals

  • The bond market priced rate hikes because it anticipated inflation, and the subsequent inflation print validated that pricing.
  • Alex Morris used recent bond pricing shifts and rising gas prices as concrete evidence that bonds were signaling inflation risk ahead of policymakers.
ADVICE

Buy Clear Fixed Income Exposures Not Jargon

  • Choose narrow, clear fixed income exposures rather than broad, jargon-filled active bond funds that drift from stated objectives.
  • FM Investments builds funds to deliver pure factor exposure so investors reliably get the outcome they intended.
INSIGHT

Bond Benchmarks Can Be Uninvestable

  • Bond benchmarks like the old Lehman/AGG constructs are enormous and contain millions of issues, making them effectively uninvestable.
  • Alex Morris contrasted 47,000 holdings in the classic index with smaller 'investable' versions to show indexing complexity in fixed income.
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