David Rosenberg: "The Fed Just Made a Policy Mistake"

Dan Nathan (0:00)

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All right, welcome to the Risk Reversal Podcast. I am Dan Nathan, that's Guy Adami. Hello, Dan. We have one of our easily most favorite guests.

Guy Adami (1:04)

We have David Rosenberg.

Dan Nathan (1:05)

We have David Rosenberg of Rosenberg Research. We just call him. Rosie. Right, and Rosie is a guy who's been very, very generous of his time over the five and a half, nearly six years that we've been doing this podcast. So Rosie, we want to thank you for being back again. On a busy day, Fed Share Wars just got done, raised the Fed funds rate 25 basis points. He did his little presser, there was nothing to see here. We're gonna get into all that. But I wanna do a little housekeeping because you've been a busy man. You just introduced a new ETF. It's based on a portfolio that you have been running over the last, I think, three plus years at Rosenberg Research. It's had very good performance. We don't have to get into that right now because you can go find that on, you know, go to Rosenberg Research.

Guy Adami (1:53)

Whatever documentations that are out there.

David Rosenberg (1:55)

Right.

Guy Adami (1:55)

Literature.

Dan Nathan (1:56)

But ROSI, R-O-S-Y, is listed on the Toronto Exchange. It's going to be listed at some point in Q1 on the New York Stock Exchange, which is really exciting. If you want to give us the quick 411 on the strategy of the portfolio that you've been running and how it's been rolled into ROSI, ROSI.

David Rosenberg (2:16)

The lightbulb went off in late 2022 when people kept on asking me how I would grade my career. I was always scared to answer that question because I always said that if I made it to Cooperstown for economist, I get there for at-bats instead of batting average because you make thousands of calls and not every call is born equal. There's big calls, little calls. Then I realized the 12 years experience that I had at Gluskin Chef when I was sitting out with the portfolio managers every day, so much of their discipline and skill set rolled off on me in terms of, how can I apply that? How does an economist grade himself like getting a non-farm payroll right when it gets revised two months later and you were actually wrong? In late 2022, I said I want to put my money where my mouth is, and I created a model portfolio. It's a single unit holder, David Rosenberg. It was not listed. It was not a fund. It was a model portfolio. It was 100 percent predicated on the top convictions and themes and ideas from me and my team at Rosenberg Research.

After about a year, I posted on the website and it went viral. I had clients of mine, I had 2,300 clients in 40 countries and they were trying to mirror it, a lot of them, and then they finally just said, why don't you just get this listed so that we could just buy it.

I'm not a portfolio manager. I'm not registered, neither is my firm. I had to find an ETF platform. I interviewed dozens and I came out down with this boutique ETF provider called Corton Capital. It's boutique and I'm boutique and they're very entrepreneurial, and they know what they're doing. I basically rented their registration, their compliance, their client service, their back office, and they're running the fund, and it's predicated once again off of my research views and my thematics. This Rosie model portfolio is still staying live because that's the feeder into this new listed ETF. That was the genesis of it. It's a global, macro, multi-strat diversified across all four asset classes, fixed income, equities, currencies, and commodities. Like I said, I got 2,300 clients in 40 countries, so it mirrors that diversity. Look, there's not many economists out there that put the money where the mouth is and actually have an ETF that they have influence over, so I'm very excited about it.