The index is risky. Why Antipodes is finding value beyond the AI trade

**Patrick Polk** (0:03)
On this episode of The Rules of Investing podcast, I speak with Vihari Ross from Antipodes Partners. We discuss what pragmatic value investing looks like in 2026, why today's highly concentrated market is creating opportunities away from the obvious winners, and where investors may be getting the AI trade wrong. Stick around to hear why she thinks one US senior housing company could benefit from a powerful demographic tailwind over the next five years. My name is Patrick Polk, and this podcast is brought to you by Livewire Markets.
Hi Vihari, thank you so much for chatting with us today.
Excited to hear your thoughts. How are you doing?

**Vihari Ross** (0:46)
Yeah. Well, thanks Patrick. I'm really pumped about being on my Rules of Investing debut.

**Patrick Polk** (0:52)
Awesome. Yeah. It's nice to have somebody on for the first time.
Why don't we kind of kick things off with a little bit about you and your background? I know you actually came from an actuarial background, which is, I'm not going to say completely unheard of, but slightly unusual in funds management. How do you feel that that background has kind of shaped the way that you think about investing, particularly thinking about risk and uncertainty, probability, things like that?

**Vihari Ross** (1:22)
Yeah. I mean, you just about answered the question for me, but I think, the actuarial background, there is a few actuaries around in our industry, but I think for me, it's really thinking, when you're trying to pick stocks, it's about thinking probabilistically, what is your sort of base case opinion about a company and what is the stock worth in that situation? But then what is the distribution curve? What's the range of outcomes?
And if you're wrong, how much of a disaster is it going to be if you're wrong? And if you can buy a stock at the bottom end of a distribution curve, when all that upside is available to you, that's the definition of margin of safety. That's you're buying where the returns outweigh the downside risk, but also the returns are there versus the risk you're taking as well. So I think it's sort of actually thinking probabilistically is actually how we have to think every day, and it's sort of the perfect backdrop. And frankly, just being working as an actuary, I think I probably prefer the excitement of markets.

**Patrick Polk** (2:38)
I can imagine.

**Vihari Ross** (2:39)
And they're sort of brown cardigan in the back room doing life insurance tables. Not that that's the entirety of what an actuary does, but the cliché is not so much me, so.

**Patrick Polk** (2:53)
It definitely matches the cliché, that's for sure.
Yeah, it's funny, I've spoken to friends who are investors and fund managers before, and a lot of the time, the way they try to think about risk and investment payoff is actually very similar to the way that an actuary would assess it. So it feels like almost a bit of an unfair advantage.

**Vihari Ross** (3:20)
Well, I think, you know, it's sort of something that I say too often, which is what's the distribution curve? And if you think about it, at the extreme end, if your distribution curve is a straight line, right? Everything's equally probable means you've actually got no idea. Don't buy the stock, you know, and so you're really looking for something that you can, where you can have some conviction. The narrower the distribution curve, the more conviction technically you should have. But equally, you want to avoid tail risks, you want to avoid a fat tail, so to speak. If you want to keep applying that analogy, there's lots of where there's a binomial outcome, for example, that can blow up your case.
All of those things you want to avoid. And so it's actually all just probability in practice. And that's why fund managers and a lot of our clients will focus on, what is your hit rate? How often are you right?
Because you're not going to be right 100% of the time. But if you're right more often than you are wrong, then that's how you can outperform essentially over a long period of time. So probability is pretty central to everything that we do.

**Patrick Polk** (4:32)
Do you reckon it makes you more focused on downside risk than maybe the average investor?

**Vihari Ross** (4:38)
Yeah, I mean, maybe compared to someone who's going to get really pumped up about a stock. I think being conscious of where you could be wrong, it's a really important part of our process, Antipodes.
People sometimes refer to it as a pre-mortem, which is sort of how might you be wrong, and knowing what those swing factors are ahead of time.