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Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham said US stocks are hugely overpriced, predicted copper prices should shoot higher in the coming years, and that he had an “overprivileged” lockdown in an interview at the Morningstar Investment Conference Australia this week.
The cofounder of asset management firm GMO also ripped into the major oil companies, saying they’re too cynical to engage with. And the 82-year-old said the SPAC boom and the Nasdaq had probably peaked.
Here are the 14 best quotes from the interview.
On the investing landscape
1. “The developed world is merely overpriced, no big deal on its own, but the US is heroically overpriced, and emerging markets is actually fairly cheap… I have complete confidence that if you bought the intersection, cheap emerging market stocks, that you would get a perfectly handsome 10- or 20-year return. And I am pretty darn confident that you will not get a handsome ten-year return from say the S&P 500 or Nasdaq.”
2. “[The] Nasdaq has, by the way, peaked quite a long time ago, two months ago…. This time, my guess is the super SPACs peaked in January, the Nasdaq peaked in February. And maybe in a few months, the termites will get to the rest of the market.”
3. “The super crazies are really anything to do with electrification. EVs, for sure, Tesla is the king of that group, [and] they’re down 30%. The SPAC index is down 30%, the last 10 SPACs having announced a deal are now [trading at] less than the $10 that they do these deals at.”
4. “There is no way copper will not rise hugely from here because of the electrification of everything. And that goes for cobalt, that goes for lithium. And all of the metals except iron and aluminum are really scarce… You have to be reconciled in the long run for a different world of commodity prices.”
On dangers for markets
5. “The higher an asset price is, the lower the return. So having high-priced assets is great for retirees, old folks like me selling off my assets. But for everybody else, it means you compound your wealth more slowly… So I welcome lower asset prices, which I’m confident will come.”
6. “It won’t take bad news. It won’t take a thoroughly bad economy to start bringing this market down. It will take a perfectly good economy and perfectly optimistic outlook, but a little less than it used to be a week ago, a month ago.” – Grantham also spoke of “pessimism termites” that would start to eat away at investor confidence.
7. “You look around and you find that real estate is suddenly pretty bubbly in almost every interesting market in the world… You can’t keep an asset class like housing, where the house doesn’t change, and you’re just marking it up in real terms year after year. Eventually, there’ll be a day of reckoning.”
8. “Don’t pull a Japan. Japan had the biggest bubble in history in land and real estate, bigger than the South Sea Bubble in my opinion. It also had the biggest equity bubble of any advanced country. [Now] 32 years later their land is not back to where it was in 1989 and their stock market is not back in nominal dollars to where it was in 1989. And that’s a perfect example, as the higher you go, the longer and greater the fall.”
On lockdown
9. “We had a totally overprivileged existence. We’re down in beautiful countryside with 50 acres of our own of woodland… And I did quite a lot more research than normal because I wasn’t wasting my time on airplanes. So my carbon footprint was magnificent, and I was reduced to worrying about rather small things like amortizing my tie supply. If I could wear three at a time, I would.”
On the oil companies
10. “The oil industry ran a deliberate campaign of obfuscation, political propaganda, to deliberately mislead the world… That should be criminal. It certainly has had a very damaging effect… It’s cost the world perhaps as much as 10 years of progress on climate change action and government support and sensible regulation.”
11. “I think engagement for the routine concerns [with companies over climate change] is the way to go… But with oil companies, I think they’re simply too cynical and too clever for engagement to count.”
On value investing and venture capital
12. “[Value investing] has had a brutal 11 years. It was the worst 10 years in history for value versus growth. And then last year was by far the worst single year. So you had the worst decade followed by the worst single year… We’ve had a lot of problems over the last 11 years.”
13. “American capitalism seems to me past its prime, a little fat and happy, not aggressive enough. There’s only half the number of people working for firms [that are] one and two years old than there were in 1975. So we’re losing some of our dynamism.”
14. “But there is one thing where the US is still exceptional and that is venture capital. And venture capital is really attracting the best people these days. They don’t go to Goldman Sachs to write algorithms. They go into venture capital or to start a new firm, and they should.”