Booking a trillions.

I'm Joe Webber and I'm Eric Altunas.

Eric, there's a country that is actually like big in ETFs and we actually don't really talk about it enough, but you're heading to Asia on a trip, and then all of a sudden we started talking about Japan and I was like, well, you know what, we should actually do a Japan episode.

And to do that, we're going to have Jeremy Schwartz, who's the global Chief investment Officer at Wisdom Tree joining us.

What are we going to talk to him about?

Eric?

Yeah, well, beyond those reasons, there's also a new prime minister there who, by all accounts is very like Abbe and Abe Nomis was a whole thing from about ten years ago where this guy just cut He did a lot of you know, currency manipulation in order to exports and that created what was called the fee wars for a couple of years there.

And DXJ, which is the Wisdom Tree Japan hedged DTF was like a total rock star.

In fact, remember the trivia episode we did.

One of the trivia questions was what was the LASTDTF that wasn't Vanguard or I shares to win the annual flow crown and the answer is DXJ.

In twenty thirteen, it took a nine billion, but then it started to underperform the non hedged, a lot of people left.

It was like a rise and then a fall.

Then it actually had a good run again, but people didn't really come back like they did.

It was like it didn't get a second bite at the apple, which we've seen on occasion.

But with this leader in here, maybe we'll get a third bite at the apple.

Maybe this time it will work.

I can already see some of the assets growing in it, but it's still, you know, basically a shell of what it was ten years ago.

But the design of DXJ should be perfectly fit for this prime minister.

Of what I'm reading is true.

That prime minister is Sanai Takeishi, the first female prime minister in Japan's history.

Her nickname is a throwback to Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady.

And joining us is Jeremy Schwartz of Whitstry this time on trillions is Japan back.

Jeremy, Welcome back to Trillians.

Thanks so much for having me.

One of my favorite topics to talk about with Eric from first episode of ETFIQ to back.

Japan might be coming back.

Oh so, Jeremy, we did a check.

You were on in April of twenty twenty two.

It's been a second so excited to have you back.

So let's hear you answer the question, is Japan back?

I'm gonna guess you're gonna say the affirmative.

Well, the thing is that Japan never left.

I mean, the thing is people might have traded it wrong.

But you know, if I look at the performance of DXJ compared to the S and P five hundred since twenty twelve, how many international funds can you say have beaten the S ANDB five hundred since twenty twelve.

EFA by the way, MSCI EFA, the broader national benchmark that everybody buys for international has returned like seven percent a year.

The S and P has done fifteen percent a year, okay, and so seven versus fifteen for thirteen years, by the way, compounds to like one hundred and fifty percent versus five hundred percent.

So this is how much international has beaten.

What has beaten the S and P since that time.

D x JET.

So it's like that now there's a period where it wasn't but as of today.

That's you know, and we're recording early October.

That is true, and so there's been I think, you know, this comes back to a fundamental problem through international I mean, Eric, this is something I've talked about for a long time.

This is somewhat a.

Branding problem, but you know, it also just a sequencing problem that people think hedging is this exotic thing, when like betting on currencies is actually a much more interesting, more exotic thing.

Like why are you going to go long the en?

You know, if you had to say default, should it be long the en or should just be neutral the en?

Most people would have been neutral, but they default to being long v en all the time.

It's kind of a crazy thing.

But I'd say DXJA never left, but people left and they made a mistake.

So what's interesting about that timeline that you lay out is just how much has actually changed in Japan.

You know, this huge monetary policy experiment.

It was they had like negative interest rates forever year and change ago.

They left that and like re entered sort of the normalcy.

Now there's inflation and even Japanese are starting to have to invest differently because they can't just keep cash under the Mattress anymore.

So is this is dxj's success.

Is it really like the the international investment opportunity or is there a domestic story there or too.

Yeah, people do ask that question about if it's also one of the oldest populations of declining populations.

So like when when we talk about it, is it really about the local Japan story or just their global you know, sort of footprint.

I have said that it's not about just the local economy, that it's Japan is generally like a global growth play that it sort of exports all around the world.

They have some of the you know, they're they're the infrastructure from their their semiconductors can find their way.

Soft Bank is like an AI play.

Tokyo Electron feeds into a lot of the other global AI stories, you know, so they are components.

They don't have like a they'd say the mag seven like we have these tech leaders, but they have things that support a lot of that, you know, I'd say.

The other person who's brought the most interest to Japan has been Buffet.

So like you think about world's premier best value investers.

Five years ago, I was telling people follow Buffet in Japan I've probably done six or seven different pieces follow Buffet into Japan, and in fact, they actually then created a fund.

To buy half the stocks.

You know, half of its weight basically is in the Buffet stocks, so OP j OPBJ Japan Opportunities, which we took a smaller fund to do that.

We had a small cap fund.

That's the more local that was the more local story.

I just said, you know, people don't care much enough about the small caps.

As much as I cared, people didn't care.

But the Japan.

Opportunity story with Buffet tagging along actually is is just as interesting today.

Actually, when we look at the year today returns, it's pretty close.

So the non hedged is up eighteen percent, d XJ is up about the same, and the SMP's up thirteen percent.

Now, the dollar has been weakening, and usually if the dollar's weakening, it's not good for currency hedged international ATFS, right, you want the dollar strengthening and Japan's currency getting weaker.

That's the perfect trade for d XJ.

Is this prime minister going to do what Abe did and like really purposely make the current see worthless in order to jack up exports, and how much is left in that trade because when I just went back and looked at five year, d XJ is destroying the non hedged.

So I guess that would be my two questions as somebody thinking about going in now.

Yeah, it's a very tricky question.

These cursies can be very unpredictable, which goes back to like do you really want to bet on the end going up?

You know, which it's a it's a high bar to say, like do I really want to bet on the end?

You know what d XJA you're basically getting today.

You're getting called three and a half to four percent on top of the local market or this is an important distinction because when you hedge, you get the interest rate differentials on top of the local market return.

Like you hear about the end carry trade.

You hear about these carry trades.

When you're hedging, you're paid the interest rate differentials between the local you know, between the US and local market.

So, yes, the Feds bring rates down, Japan's been hiking a little bit for a little while.

We're getting five to six percent carry on top of the local market return, which is again is how much the end has to go up to break even with the hedge, right, so they're starting out four percent behind the eight ball is how much the unheedged has to go up now the end had the dollar had beginning week, A lot of people are think the dollar had peeked out and things go.

So it is not just in Japan's control.

I mean, for sure, when AB came in, you had eighty en to the dollar.

Today we're over one fifty end to the dollar.

So it's definitely a very different starting point.

It was a very overly strong end when ABI came in.

You wouldn't say it's an overly strong end today.

But it sort of comes back to the policies, like if she's trying to get them to delay raising rates, if they do a lot more physical spending.

They've got some the highest debts to GDP.

You know, there's just the questions.

It's like what you know, Now, she might be pro growth and that might be good for the currency, but it's it's sort of an it's it's unpredictable, so it's like, is that your thesis?

The thesis is is she's.

Good for the equities, she might not be good for the currency, or at least it adds extra noise and extra volatility when you know, you could buy the stocks and get paid over three percent today to hedge it.

One thing you mentioned was the debt to GDP.

As Joel knows, I've been deep in this bitcoin book, and one of the things that you have to cover when you're covering this is deficit debt inflation.

And I think the US is like one thirty percent.

I have to double check out, but I believe Japan's double two hundred and fifty percent.

They're basically like the highest in the world for a big country.

That seems crazy to me, But as some people pointed out, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get a lot of inflation.

And Japan is also you know, there's a famous like kind of meme on social media where somebody starts talking about US stocks and somebody comes in, now do Japan, And it's usually looking at like the Lost Decade of Japan, like, which was a couple decades ago, about how a stock market can just do nothing.

So I guess with I don't know as.

An investor, and I'm thinking, like, hey, this is a debt ridden country.

I don't hear a lot of things about mag seven type stocks there.

What am I really buying here is it just to trade on monetary policy?

And how much more monetary policy can be dubbish or loose given they're already at that debt to GDP level.

My friends at all Star Charts j C, PERETZTI, Strasa do these like thirty year breakout charts on Japan, Like, you know, like they has been building this base for thirty years and you just got like the Nieka breakout of forty eight thousand, and it's you know, nineteen eighty nine was the peak.

It's just catching up to the nineteen eighty nine peak.

But it was like one of the.

Greatest bubbles of all time.

Like international stocks were sixty percent Japan in nineteen eighty nine.

It was one of the most expensive markets.

You thought the tech bubble in two thousand was expensive, more of Japan was more expensive than tech bubble of two thousand, Right, That's how big it was.

Now it's the inverse today.

If I look at that, you know, I've got two different Japan foots.

But let's just stay with di XJA the flagship fourteen and a half pe when the S and P's twenty three pe.

Okay, so SMP selling at a four to five percent earning sield.

We've got a two and a half percent equity premium.

Let's call it, you know, like we look at the earning zield versus a tipshield, so you know'll take you over forty years to w your money in bonds today in perching power terms, under two percent, tip shield stocks might take you fourteen to fifteen years.

In the US at a five percent earnings field, Japan at a fourteen pe is like an eight seven to eight percent earning yield.

It's more like a eight to nine year doubling of your perching power.

It's a much.

Better value than is like the call it the inverse bubble, Like people just have lack of apathy.

You know, there's not any interest.

International has been out of favor for this fifteen twenty years at the US Max seven have been in favor, and so nobody cares, and so the valuations support that.

The Japan Opportunities Fund, which has all those buffet stocks, is a twelve and a half pe eight percent earn ex zield, very high quality stocks, doing a ton of buybacks, growing the dividends.

I mean, it's such a good value story.

In my opinion.

And if you get any positive catalyst that taik these takaichi trades.

If she is, you know, there's there's questions on how effective she's going to be.

She's got to get her coalition together.

But if she is productive in lowering tax, if you're talking about doing a ten percent consumption, like bringing a flatter tax to ten percent to try to restimulate demand, that could be a very very big deal.

And it's a cheap market.

So you know, I obviously I like the market.

How big are these challenges that that she faces, just to kind of lay out the landscape tough.

Man, I mean, it's a tough set of politics.

She's got to figure out who's going to to go with her, how she brings it.

They do have these inflation problemts, but people are somewhat Eric's when you talk about the currency before versus abe.

You know, the end was way too strong before.

Now people are worried that their yen aren't going as far and there's inflation, and so the week end makes it a hamster.

One of our former strategies said she needs to go for.

A strong end policy.

So there's there's questions, but that is one of the things she's got to confront.

But she's definitely being trying to bring a pro growth mindset the battle.

Like I call it, Eric, we launched an Asia Defense fund, and Eric was giving me a hard time in the name of like, well is it why you know?

Is there China in that Asia Defense fun?

And I said, well, no, no, this is with the battle for China and.

Joel I told him they need to run with that and call it.

I forget the name.

We came out with defending ourselves from China, Asia Defense etf versus.

Just like Asia Defense.

I'm like, you should own the fact that it's a specific situation there.

I don't know if Jeremy wants to comment on that.

I mean, it is the battle with China fun in some ways.

I mean we called it Asia Defense.

I thought I was implied that it was for the battle for China.

Yes, I understand his point, like is it with China or for the battle?

But that is very topical too.

In ta Kaichi, one of the ta Kayuchi trades, I wrote a piece that the ta Kaichi trades, and one of the trades is a defense positioning like she is very strong against China and she thinks they if there were to be a conflict with Taiwan.

She wants to defend Taiwan and she wants to increase spending, and so she you know, now, if you think back to the US politics and geopolitics, there is you know, Trump is negotiating hard with China.

Maybe by the time people hearing this, they negotiate some grand bargain, but it's it's hot, you know, the China US has been one of the big hot topics this year.

Abe was one of Trump's close allies, and then you had sort of a fledgling of prime miships that weren't you know, doing as well with Trump.

The idea was Takaichi might be a better negotiator with Trump on some of these issues, more friendly with Trump because she is kind of viewed as this abbe two point zero in some ways.

But the defense story is one of the big stories, and so I think, you know, the European defense was one of the hot ETFs this year.

Like we somehow in our European team launched a European Defense Fund like the week Zelenski was in the White House, and that fun just took off like like.

You would expect.

But we actually think this Asia defense today is the hotspot actually for where things could go over the next few years.

And Takichi is very supportive for Asian defense.

As long as we're talking about China and Trump and Japan sort of in the middle, but maybe leaning a little bit more towards Trump, I just want to go back to trade, which has obviously been the backdrop for so much of what we've been talking about all year.

Japan very much an export economy.

I'm curious specifically about the automotive industry and sort of your exposure to it and how it's going to try and navigate what's to come and how that might impact your investments.

Yeah, that that is why I've been highlighting this second fund.

I have this Japan Opportunities Fund because it's much more in the industrials, the five buffet stocks than just betting on the car companies.

Now I'm not saying that DXJ is just.

The car companies, but in terms of the sectors, you know, DXJ fourteen a half pe it has, it's going to have more exposure to like Toyota, which is its second largest holding, or Honda, which is in the top ten.

You know, so it's going to have twenty five percent may be closer to twenty percent in conservatives.

Grechary's industrial is still a big sector there twenty five percent, So it's more tied to that.

The autos has been a sector, you know, that China's rise has been competing with.

Like my colleague Sam was just in Mexico coming off of a Mexico trip.

Everywhere, everywhere, like everything is all China cars, and Elon had said, you know, nine of the ten largest car kept are gonna be Chinese, you know, because of the competition that they are so strong.

It's global competitive that the car industry has been under pressure everywhere, and so that is China a big China competitive dynamic.

I got an ETF NERD question for you here a little bit d XJ again.

When I wrote my first book, The ETF Toolbox, it.

Was like DSJA had taken over the industry.

So I have a whole chapter called currency hatching, which isn't that big of a deal anymore like, but at the time, that's how big it was.

I made a whole chapter for it, and I just thought, you guys really set the bar for how to market an ETF I called speedboat marketing.

Instead of acting like an aircraft carrier.

If you have one of these ETFs that gets hot, you drop everything and you rally around this one product.

They had ads Jrol on Bloomberg TV and elsewhere.

Take the yen out of Japan.

I mean that is good, right.

Jeremy was everywhere, and Deutsche Bank had a competing product that had actually launched earlier, but DXJ got all the money.

Now.

DXJ then saw some outflows since and it's had great performance, but it hasn't able to kind of get back to that peak.

What do you make of that?

We on a team have this phrase called like it's hard to get a second bite at the apple.

If you look at high flyers and history past, especially active managers, these shooting star types like the Janus twenty, it's just hard to come back.

Even if you come back performance wise, it's hard to come back in a sort of zeitgeist way.

How do you get DXJ back on people's radars, given that they might have been like, well, I did that ride already and it was a little and I'm not doing that again yet.

It's very interesting.

I'll say I probably talked more Curtsey Hedging than anybody of the industry for the last fifteen years.

I did my first one in nine.

I think I was the first ETF actually, and the first one was broad EFA and now, interestingly in the history folklore, HDJ, which became Europe, was the first one we converted.

It's fascinating.

I remember talking about a market maker.

We had a client who wanted to buy it, and the market maker didn't want to make this is we're talking two thousand and nine, enty ten, and they didn't want to quote all the spreads because you had to put on these hedges and it was too wide of a thing.

And the broad EFO just didn't take off.

And then it was April twenty ten we had DXJ unhedged.

From six April twenty ten, I added the hedge.

We added the hedge to the end, and then it took off during the earthquake in twenty eleven, so the end really went up and people were starting to say, oh, this was a going up too much, and so it started to work for the end.

So we probably talking about five hundred million and twenty eleven timeframe after the earthquake, and we saw that it was working for a single currency with Japan, and then we made hedge the European one, which we should have just launched a broad EFA one versus converting.

But you know, who know you're going back in time.

But then then both of those took off, you know, as you said, Eric, like the single currencies did take off, the broad EFAs took off.

We've started doing a little bit below the radar now some more active hedging, Like we have a multi factor family that's actively hedging.

We have a dynamic family.

Probably our big our fund that's raising the most in the international marks this year has been a dynamic fund that does it just as part of the factors.

So it does seem scary.

I get it comes back to branding, Like people think dynamic currency hedge, Oh it's a scary thing, but dynamic international the branding I think is a bit better in multi factors just one of the factors.

And so we're trying to win the longer game.

But you know, for sure, it.

Real juice is volatility taking the taking out this noisy thing.

Currency moves seven eight percent a year.

Do you really want that volatility?

I think most people wouldn't accept that.

It comes back to benchmarking questions and all right, AQUI or EFA have the currency, so they feel like they're going to make an active call to hedge, but really the active call is to bet on the currency.

It's like, really, do you want to bet on the euro?

Really you have the long term strong bealon the Euro.

This is the challenge with currency hedging.

You have to actually change the way your mind works.

You have to see almost the way I would describe a Jeremy, I would say this lets you invest as if you're a person in Japan investing in the stock market.

It takes out this other element.

So when you buy EWJ, you're actually.

Buying two things.

And I hear you because I remember I used to say this was an A minus b ETF and you're like, no, it's just a the other one, asked me, yeah, and you got me.

It took a while.

Some of this stuff takes a couple of years.

But I also think you guys, that are great job of diversifying away.

You've got you had like this huge hit song, but instead of just like relying on this one, like your next couple products over the next decade, you've got some huge hits that really diversified the product line.

D XJ is still up there for you.

But like you've got USFR and dg RW both seventeen sixteen billion.

We've written about that a couple times.

But anyway, it's just interesting.

Wisdom Tree has always been like an interesting case study.

Puer ETF company, publicly traded ETF company, and you know how to like survive after you know your big hit and not make sure you're not just living off of that, which I think is a good lesson for all the issuers out there.

Well, just as we as we come to the end here, Jeremy like, what's next.

Well, in some ways it's interesting, Eric, you talked about the A plus B ETFs and A minus BUS test, the one that's gaining a lot of traction.

Now that should be so much bigger.

You know that we if you said, go back to the TV the TV days.

You know what we have TV right now is our gold stack.

You know, are sort of.

Capital fishing gold funds where you put gold on top of things.

As gold up fifty percent year to date, we have it basically US equities plus gold futures on top of it GD and then we have gdm N, which is miners plus gold that competes with that, those are now you know, the miners are taken one hundred and fifty million this year the gold overlay to the S and P kind of stocks, to our own basket of five hundred stocks.

But gd is, oh my god, run is up one hundred and eighty percent.

Top performing compared to your standard miners.

That's efficient gold plus miners.

So that's gold miners.

Is that like leverage at one hundred and fifty or something.

Well, it's it's ninety ninety.

So ninety percent the stocks, ninety percent the futures.

So it's say, you know, it's adding the gold futures on top.

And we do the same thing with core stocks.

So if you go back to your deficit problems, the debt and deficits, you know, people worried about the dollar.

You don't have to go to.

International to do that.

Just add gold on top of your US large stacks with GDE.

So that's our that's that is really a p This is you know, this is a good a good family.

By the way, Joel, they got a China X state owned enterprises and so that I told them that should be take the communism out of China.

But they didn't run with that, I said, that's on the house.

It's pretty good.

Bring it back.

Then they have one EM that's X state owned EM companies, and I said, probably can't.

I'd say take the socialism out of the emerging markets.

I'm gonna go back with that.

I'm gonna bring that back to the marketing team after we get off.

This call here.

All right, Well, you clearly have a way of surfing some interesting situations.

Uh so, Jeremy, thanks for coming back on Trillions and looking forward to having you back again soon.

I always do to show with you guys.

Thanks for listening to Trillions.

Until next time.

You can find us on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you'd like to listen to.

I'd love to hear from you.

Hit us up on social I'm at Joel Weber Show, He's at Eric Balchino's.

Trillions is produced by Magnus Hendrickson.

Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcast