Private Equity Chairman Explains Why Most Market Information Is Noise

Jason Logsdon [00:00:00] But I still think if you're going to allocate to equities as a non-professional investor, I would, I would recommend that a thousand times before I would stock picking for someone that's not a professional or a high expense mutual fund that's in the 50th percentile of what they do. At the end of the day, they're destroying value. And that's my belief. I'm Brian Moose, a

Vance Crowe [00:00:20] Farmer

Jason Logsdon [00:00:20] Living in Florence, South Dakota, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:25] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we talk with Jason Logsdon of Broadview Group Holdings. Jason is a very interesting character, and I have been trying to get him on the podcast for months and months. In fact, I think we were trying to get him scheduled before COVID, and then it just didn't happen. But now finally, at long last, you are about to hear a conversation that I knew would be good. Jason grew up as a farm kid raising hogs, and then went on to college where he went on to learn about banking and all sorts of other things, to now he runs a private equity group that raises money and ends up buying companies that are producing revenue. But his whole strategy, the way he thinks, the way he approaches problems, is really interesting. I found myself thinking I should write that down. And then I was just glad it was gonna be recorded in this podcast so I can go back and listen to it too. So I really hope you enjoy this. It is a weird combination of agriculture commodities, talking about stocks and equities and different positions, but everybody here will enjoy this conversation because Jason has such a great way of explaining things. Before we go to the interview, one of the things that I've been working on and loving so much are these Legacy Interviews. This is when a person hires me to interview one of their loved ones. Maybe it's a young child or a grandparent, and you just want to preserve their memories, their family stories, their values, how they came to be who they are. This has been one of the great projects I've ever worked on in my life.

Vance Crowe [00:01:59] And in fact, just the other day, I received word that somebody that I had interviewed had passed away, and the family that had hired me to do their interview wrote really nice letter saying how they would be able to preserve those memories. So don't do it just because you think somebody in your family members may pass away, but I do think that it is a really powerful way to preserve their memory, to preserve your memory, and to capture those kinds of stories that are so important to us all and that make us who we are. So if you're interested in that, you can go to Store dot Articulate Ventures, and you can either choose to do it over Zoom, or if you're in the St. Louis region, you can always come visit me here in the studio. Another big thing that's been going on is the Articulate Ventures Network has been growing. We host a place where people that are interested in this podcast, they like the type of discussions we have, they like the way I think about problems and the types of guests that are on the show. If you wanna find a place where other people are like you, they love the show, they talk about things in a nuanced way, and you wanna be away from the open social media where people seem to be just fighting for the sake of fighting, then consider joining the Articulate Ventures network. There, you'll find a place where you can join in on our book clubs and movie nights and also just get in on talking about things. Just the other day, I was trying to figure out how am I gonna clone some roses? And I threw that into the network, and before I knew it, I had all sorts of great advice and tips so that that way I can clone my roses out in my backyard.

Vance Crowe [00:03:34] So without further ado, we're going to get to the interview, but if you're interested in joining the Articulate Ventures Network, go to Network Articulate Ventures to learn more. And now on to my interview with my man, Jason Logsdon. Jason Logsdon, welcome to podcast.

Jason Logsdon [00:03:49] Thank you podcast. It's great to be here,

Vance Crowe [00:03:50] Man. You are probably the longest awaited guest I've ever had. We've talked about doing this for a long, long time, but you are a very busy man, that is many interests. How do you describe the work that you do day in and day out?

Jason Logsdon [00:04:04] IT today I am chairman of a company by the name of Broadview Group Holdings, and Broadview is a really a, a dream come true for me. It's a holding company that has long-term capital. We just have three investors and we have long-term capital and look to buy businesses with revenue of 25 to 250 million and, and operate, build and grow those businesses. I merged into that business a year ago, a business by the name of Broadview Capital Holdings, that is a commodity trading business and really takes long-term investing principles that, you know, value investing would be a sort of a a a similar type of investing that's done in the equity world and applied that to commodity investing and have been doing that now for about five or six years. And Broadview Capital Holdings became the first portfolio company, as we would call it, the Broadview Group Holdings. And since then we've bought another business and looked to continue to buy and build businesses and very different than typical private equity. We are, our goal is to own and operate and build those businesses for many years.

Vance Crowe [00:05:17] And are you predominantly in agriculture spaces or that's just where you started and you'd go wherever?

Jason Logsdon [00:05:21] Yeah, that's, so those are my roots, as you know. And, but no, we, we invest in four sectors, food and, and agriculture being one of those. So we're focused on business to business, food and ag. So we don't pretend to know anything about selling consumer food products or consumer products to that are branded. We're more in the, in the business to business space. We also invest in commercial and industrial products and commercial industrial services. So think of that one component, one specialized segment we really focus in there is engineered products. And then the final space that we invest in is specialty distribution. So high margin value added distribution where there's a really important technical component to the sales of the product. Is technical product usually a small,

Vance Crowe [00:06:06] What would be an example of that?

Jason Logsdon [00:06:09] So actually my partner and I were on the board together of a business that was a, the largest distributor into the stone fabrication market. So very high and very important products that are a very small part of the spin. If you're a, if you're the local manufacturer or or distributor of stone stones to to residential setting, it's very important that you have the best equipment and, and to, to be able to sand and cut and whatever it may be. So, but it takes a lot of technical consultation service to be able to provide that product. So we were on the board of a business like that together, but it could be really any, any sort of distribution business that has a technical sales component. But yeah, our, my roots are in agriculture advance and so we, my, my personal time is spent spending a lot of time thinking about food and agriculture investing.

Vance Crowe [00:07:09] So you and I grew up in nearly the same place. Were you in Woodford County, Illinois?

Jason Logsdon [00:07:14] I was in McLean County. Oh, MCLE County. Yeah, we, we looked down at

Vance Crowe [00:07:16] People from

Jason Logsdon [00:07:16] Woodford County.

Vance Crowe [00:07:17] Oh, so, but you grew up as a farmer and now you're doing what I think would be on the upper echelon, you know, surfing the wave of, of change in things that are happening. Did you know that this is where you were going?

Jason Logsdon [00:07:29] I had no idea. I, and, and I would argue maybe this isn't the upper echelon of where things are going, what I'm doing, but I, I grew up on a farm and all I really ever wanted to do was to, to go back to that farm. I went to the University of Illinois, studied animal science. I wanted to become a veterinarian. So I was in pre-vet program and it took me a year or two in college to, to figure out that that wasn't really what I wanted to do. And I'm not even sure how, you know, those things just kind of hit you sometimes. But I worked, I wasn't a good student. I was a good student, but I didn't apply myself really well. I spent, I worked about 30 hours a week all the way through college and work is what I did on the farm. That's what I enjoyed to do. I stayed busy. So I had two jobs in college and I worked through college.

Vance Crowe [00:08:16] What kind of jobs did you have in college?

Jason Logsdon [00:08:18] Two very different jobs. I, one my, one of my jobs, I worked on the university farm, so the University of Hog Farm. So usually Saturday and Sunday I would be out there and I forget what time it was, it was insane. 6:00 AM 7:00 AM we'd work a normal day. And then during the week I worked at a consulting firm in town, which was, you know, I put on a, a coat and a tie, I think probably the same tie every day because I probably only owned two ties. But, and they were doing consulting for agribusinesses, which was, which was wonderful. It was, you know, we with clients like the American Soybean Association and Farm Credit System and people like that. So I learned a lot about agricultural business and then also about agricultural production from working on the farm. So it was a terrific experience.

Vance Crowe [00:09:06] That's probably the education in and of itself, right? That's, I mean, that's where you learn everything is doing it. It

Jason Logsdon [00:09:11] Was, you know, I, I tell my kids that all the time. I, I think classroom education is an important component to a student's education, but I learned so much more from the, the work that I did in those two settings, plus the social interactions I had with colleagues and, and the classroom education was valuable, but that, that being able to take that and apply it on a daily basis wasn't valuable to me, especially in the consulting job where I could take the ag business classes that I started taking and go put them to, to work. And you know, as a student, you're trying to figure out how all this stuff fits, what you know, what's it really mean and what theory means. And to be able to go apply that was really valuable. So love that. And then on the farm, as an animal science student, my first two years I was able to go, you know, to, and I'd grown up on a farm, but I had grown up on a family farm with, we had a hundred sows, which a hundred breeding females. And, and then we farmed corn and soybeans. And I went to the university. Farm to me was enormous. I'd never seen anything like that. It's completely confinement operation. And that was a learning experience. I mean, that was like something out of a, a futuristic book to me. And so I enjoyed that and learned from it. But a couple years in, I just ended up having someone twist my arm and convinced me that I needed to take a couple business classes. And then I got an internship with Asgrow at the time, you know, you know, Asgrow of course. And, and then the next summer I had an internship with Harris Bank in Chicago. And, and I'd never, of all the things I thought I'd never be doing, I thought I'd be, I'd never be a banker.

Jason Logsdon [00:10:47] And I moved to Chicago for the summer and I loved it. And I ended up going to, I left college then and worked at Merrill Lynch. So went to Chicago, worked at Merrill Lynch, and I was advising companies on mergers and acquisitions in the general industrial space and doing automotive stuff. And it's just, none of it really clicked with me. I didn't really enjoy it. And one day a guy in the office found out that I grew up on a farm and they, we had a, we had a large client in St. Louis that you're very familiar with, and, and came down to a meeting there. And that was the last day I ever worked in the industrial group. So I, I joined the Food and Ag group there and, you know, I, you wonder how those things happened, right? But it just ended up being a wonderful experience for me. I spent five years doing that and then left there to become a chief financial officer at Ash off family farms at the time and, and all those things, you know, that was five years outta college. And if you had asked me when I was a sophomore, I would've said I was gonna be back on the family farm, you know, raising hogs and hopefully being a veterinarian, but a, a part-time hobby farmer.

Vance Crowe [00:11:54] Yeah, it's, it's like Steve Jobs said in one of his commencement addresses, like, the most valuable thing he learned when he was at school was calligraphy. But there's no way he could have known how important calligraphy would be to setting typeface and creating Mac to be this thing where people could do beautiful print work. But you, you maybe are taking those classes 'cause you're interested in them, but you have no idea where that's gonna play out in, in the rest of the world.

Jason Logsdon [00:12:19] Yeah. Isn't isn't it funny how your experiences stack up and begin to lead you to a place that you didn't, you didn't see yourself going? And, and I'm, that's a part of my philosophy. I, I plan and I have goals and objectives, don't get me wrong. I think that's very important, but I also just believe in it, in, in doing, in acting. And, you know, and that's kind of, to answer your question, that's how my, that's how my career is sort of meandered. You just jump in with both feet and give it, you know, go all in and then the experiences and the knowledge kind of stack up and lead you to a place that ultimately has led me to something I'm very passionate about doing.

Vance Crowe [00:13:02] So how do you feel about preparing your kids for a world in which you're like, I don't know, you just kind of freestyle, you just learn how to do improv?

Jason Logsdon [00:13:10] Yeah, it's, it's, it's really difficult, right? Especially in today's culture. But you don't wanna just take your hands off the wheel and you sure don't wanna tell your kids to just take your hands off

Vance Crowe [00:13:21] The, but

Jason Logsdon [00:13:23] It is about, you know, I think it's about getting experiences, so making sure I, I've talked to my kids, they would never do this. And, but I think a skip year is an awesome idea. I I think taking a year, not not to backpack Europe, but to actually get a real life experience and something that you're interested in and have a job. And, and I think, I'm sure they'll never do that. And I'm, I think they're, they think I'm crazy. But I think the American system of just going straight through from, you know, kindergarten to graduate school is a little bit insane. I, it just makes

Vance Crowe [00:14:03] No sense to me. Oh, I saw that. So when I joined the Peace Corps, I had been out in the world, I'd worked as a deckhand, I'd bought a house and renovated it and sold it, and then I joined the Peace Corps. But a lot of those people came straight in from undergrad and they were number one top of their class. Absolutely the best. Yeah. But then when they got there and you're doing this training, first of all, that that first experience is the first time they've ever really been away from the guiding hand that somebody says, you have to be at this place at this time to do this thing. But then even more than that, I remember when we were, when they were just about to send us off to our sites. So we'd done training for about 10 weeks and then they're like, all right, now everything that you're gonna learn, you have to learn on your own. You have to teach yourself what have you taught yourself in the past? And the people's examples were like, I helped program my, my parents' VCR, you know, like I I I set up the stereo system in my, in my car, right? Like, and that was as much experience as they had had that they were then gonna go out into the wilds of, of Africa. Now maybe that then was gonna be their experience, but I'm totally with you on that gap year, if you worked, if you did not have a job all the way through school and you didn't have any of these experiences, like you have no idea the world that you're about to step into when you get done with college.

Jason Logsdon [00:15:16] Oh, I completely, I completely agree with that. I, it's, it's interesting how we've ended up here and I mean, your story makes me think about my partner and I, so my current business partner, clay Hunter and I met each other in 1998. We were at Merrill Lynch in a training class of 250 approximately analysts. And I remember never having been more intimidated in my life, Vince, than I think University of Illinois is not a school that Wall Street firms recruit from in case

Vance Crowe [00:15:49] You were one.

Jason Logsdon [00:15:50] And, and my partner went to Washington University here, great school, but not many people at the time from Washington University on Wall Street either. And so I remember walking in there and feeling so inferior and being so nervous. And I can tell you within two weeks I felt completely confident about the experiences I had had in my life at that point and my preparation for that job. And, and that is when the light bulb went off for me that I had had practical, real life experience. Even things like having an accounting class or two that just in a, a lot of the people in that program had to learn that from the ground up. And so, but the biggest thing was just having the grit, having the determination, the perseverance and having been through what it takes to grow up on a farm, as you know.

Vance Crowe [00:16:37] Well, I think like back to the, it's, it's so hard to name these lessons as you're learning them, but you know, back when I was growing up, you could, we still walked beans.

Jason Logsdon [00:16:45] Oh yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:16:46] And you can remember the time when you had like a crew boss or the guy that drove the pickup that everybody was in the back of that had some dumb idea, right? Yeah. Some something you were gonna do and you didn't wanna do it. And so you had to like have that battle of wills because if you just gave into it, then you were gonna be out doing something stupid for a long time. But if you fought too hard, well then you weren't gonna be invited back for the job. Right? But having those experiences at 15 are a lot better than having 'em for the first time when you're 24 or 25 years old. When, when now you have to go to your boss to be like, Hey, would you mind fighting this battle for me? Because you never got the experience of doing it in those, in, in those random things that happen as you're growing up.

Jason Logsdon [00:17:28] Yeah, that's, it's so funny you mentioned walking beans. So I, I think my dad had my sister and I walking beans when we were, you know, I don't know, six, seven years old. It's hard to say, but I, I have scars on my shins and my sister's shins from, you know, fights with the bean hook. I still remember walking beans with my grandfather for, you know, all summer. And he was, he passed away at a young age. But seeing, you know, I think about that today and that's, you think about things you would never see today, right? As a 63-year-old man walking through a bean field, sweating and wip and sweat from his brow. But you learn a lot from there. But I think one of the, one of the things of wisdom my dad did after my freshman year of college, I was going to come back and work on the farm in the summer and he encouraged me. He is my, he and my mother both encouraged me to go work for a neighbor farmer. And he was just down the road a couple miles. But I learned so much to your point about learning how to work with others, learning how to be unfamiliar, you know, work in an unfamiliar situation, how to apply the learnings from one situation to another, all those things. And that was a really invaluable experience for me. And I think probably as I look back on it, maybe one of the reasons I didn't end up back on the farm, but it, it, it, it was invaluable.

Vance Crowe [00:18:49] I, I wonder what will happen. I mean, it's already happening. It's so much harder for a young person to get a job today in particular. Not a job where it's like, okay, you're the 16-year-old McDonald's trainee. Which there's nothing wrong with that, but there's, there were so many more experiences when I was a kid. I worked construction, I worked, you know, detasseling, bailing hay, all of those things, you know, that being a fundamental part of the American education system, right? We were out in the summertime 'cause it was too hot to be in school, but all those kids had jobs. And by not having that, I think we really take something away from our culture.

Jason Logsdon [00:19:24] I think so, I mean, that, that's a great point. And I struggle with it with my own kids. I mean it's, it's, I want them to have a summer job, but at the same time, the opportunities they have outside of employment, through a school, through camps, those sorts of things are, are really great. And so those are tough decisions. And to be frank, now I'm, you know, I want to have fun with my family in the summer. Right, right. Yeah. You know, you don't want to spend all three months of the summer in, in St. Louis in 98% humidity when you could be gone for a few weeks having fun. So those are, I I think that's, that's a, a very good observation. And, and so, you know, I've encouraged my son to look at weekend jobs and to find ways to get those experiences, you know, nights and weekends and, and, but yeah, back, back on the farm, I, you know, this, even the town kids back on the farm de tased corn,

Vance Crowe [00:20:24] That's what I was, I was a town kid, right?

Jason Logsdon [00:20:26] Yeah, exactly. It

Vance Crowe [00:20:27] Was more money than you'd ever seen in your life if you got, if you were on one of those crews and suddenly you knew the value of, of making money and somebody else paying you to do work. But you also knew how hard you had to work to get the $7 an hour or whatever it was.

Jason Logsdon [00:20:42] Yeah. I'm also convinced that's why all the town kids like you never came back to the farm community because that, that wasn't fun work. It, that left a lot of scars.

Vance Crowe [00:20:52] So today, day in and day out, you, well you were working all the time on commodities, right? So it, when when you're talking about commodities, are you talking about the price of future corn or you talking more granular than that?

Jason Logsdon [00:21:06] Yeah, we are, the, the, the, the easiest way the most liquid market in commodities is the futures markets. So our business trades in about 20 to 25 different commodity markets around the world in the futures market. So agriculture, really two segments of agriculture, livestock and, and grains and oil seeds and then in energy, which would be crude oil and natural gas and, and heating oil and gasoline. And then in food or what, what the industry would call sauce, which would be cocoa, sugar, and coffee. So we, we trade futures in those commodities and we generally do it with a long-term value investing approach.

Vance Crowe [00:21:50] And so how would that be different from another way that people trade commodities?

Jason Logsdon [00:21:54] Yeah, I, a lot of commodities trading would be what you see in movies and here, here on, you know, and, and, and, and heard about growing up. So you, you know, there's no pork bellies con pork belly contract anymore. But, you know, there's a lot of commodity traders that may be long or short and nearby contract have a bias that the market's going up or the market's going down in crude oil and, and, and they're

Vance Crowe [00:22:18] Watching the news day in and day out to say what's, what's the tiny thing that's gonna happen in the near term?

Jason Logsdon [00:22:24] Yeah, I mean, they're watching the news, but then there's, I mean, there's a whole nother class today that you, you know, of algorithmic or momentum based traders that are all, you know, maybe the trader themselves does nothing but program a software, a platform to trade the market on a short term. So a lot of commodities trading is short term. I mean our, you know, people think about long-term investing in equities may, may mean that you buy a business and you hold it for 20 years. And I think a long-term investor in the commodity market may be holding it for a position for three months. We're longer term. I mean, our average position, our average hold period is over three months. And it, it sometimes is, is longer. And we're looking for relationships and commodity prices that we think are misvalued. And typically those are relationships between different months of the same commodity, maybe between different commodities, maybe between related commodities that, that are derivatives of each other. But we're looking for mispricings in that and then typically looking much longer term. So we don't have an edge. We, we wouldn't pretend vance that we can, we know what's anybody than anyone else, what's gonna happen to crude oil price this month or even next month. But we can look at the fundamentals and look at the relationships of the crude oil price to other markets, to other various indicators that are out there and take a position on a relative basis. So one of the things I learned in business a long time ago, it goes, it's another farm lesson.

Jason Logsdon [00:23:57] It's just you, you've gotta fish in a pond that everybody else isn't fishing in, right? So we're, we're trying to invest in a part of the commodity markets that are not heavily traveled by those that are sophisticated or lar large institutions.

Vance Crowe [00:24:13] You know, I've had this ongoing disagreement with my brother because my brother is a very interesting way that he analyzes the market, but I worked in a large corporation, so my brother ran his own company and, but I was at Monsanto and I have come to the fundamental belief that even the people that are representing the investor relations do not actually know what the company is selling. I mean, they have an aggregate kind of overall understanding that their balance sheet works out, but that there's no one that actually knows what the company is ha has, what they're putting out, what, what, what actually makes the company valuable. Because the amount of time and energy you would have to spend to do that would keep you from doing your day job, which is going out and representing the company as an investor. So you sit in, I think, closer into Dan's world, does my hypothesis sound ridiculous to you, to an accountant? He just goes absolutely insane when I say this.

Jason Logsdon [00:25:09] No, I I actually think most people would be surprised to know. I mean, it, my experience, if I go back to my days at Merrill Lynch was a very large company. I mean, I think it is quite common that people within a large institution like that very successful one don't necessarily understand the, don't have the time to, their job isn't to, they don't, they aren't allowed to or don't have the time to understand the business at a level that would really lead you to the insights to be able to predict where it goes. And I, I will say as a starting point, I, I don't agree that markets are efficient. I think even with all the information that's available today, markets are traded by humans. And if they're not traded by humans, they're traded by algorithms that were created by humans. And so they are a function of emotion even, you know, it's really hard as well to your example, if you, if you want to know something really, really well or really deeply in a market, it's hard to do that and ha and take the time and have the energy and have all of the things you would need, data, resources, networks to be able to do that and also see the big picture, right? So it's, it's a difficult to put all that together. And a lot of big institutions try to do that by having specialists who understand things really deeply and then pull it together into a macro viewpoint. But it's difficult.

Jason Logsdon [00:26:41] And so yeah, in our business we try to play in a sweet spot that we think others, when I say fish in a pond that others aren't fishing in, we try to play it in a sweet spot where we think the depth of knowledge we have about the markets we trade. So for example, we feel like we know agriculture really well, is balanced with a macro view and the tools, proprietary tools that lead us to opportunities that may not exist for others. And you put those things together and I think like any good business, you have to know how you're trying, how, how you make money and why you exist, right? I mean, I, I always look at a business, I mean, when we go to look at a new business that I, I really go in to look at it with one question to answer why does it exist? And I think that's the same for a trading business.

Vance Crowe [00:27:32] It, I'm so glad to hear you say this because when you describe going after commodities, this makes sense to me, right? There is a finite number of people that want that good that you have. There's a finite number of uses, well, maybe not even, you could use 'em in many different ways, but like how people are using 'em, how they're gonna turn it into money. But when I think of a place like Monsanto doesn't exist anymore, so it's okay to talk about, you

Jason Logsdon [00:27:53] Know,

Vance Crowe [00:27:53] They, if if you're gonna trade in glyphosate, you have to know where the phosphate mines are and what the current regulations are there, and the weather patterns that dictate how much water is gonna come into that RA mountain range and how much it leaks into the, into there. So how much you can pump out, like, and that's just one little tiny, tiny, tiny part of it. Yeah. Not to, nothing to do with the genetic data that you have to hold onto the seed supplies. So I, to me, the stock market is almost an absurdist place because the, to, to your point about people trading on emotion, I, I think there's, it's not just that there's not enough information, it's actually that there's vastly too much information, right? There's, there's so much information that there's, that the, that the only thing that anybody could really be good at is, is honing out as much of that as you possibly could. Because it's just like when you go to trial and the attorneys are like, here, you want, you want our papers, we're gonna give you, you know, a warehouse full of papers and somewhere in there is the information that you want. But you know, it's gonna take you so much time and money to be able to find that answer that it's really not possible. And that's the way I think our stock markets work. And I think like the quarterly earnings reports and all of these reports that you have to put together, the sustainability one, to me it's just so much noise. Yeah.

Jason Logsdon [00:29:13] That

Vance Crowe [00:29:14] The signal is, is I would say literally impossible to find.

Jason Logsdon [00:29:17] Completely agree with you. Noise was was the word I was thinking about while you were saying that. And I, I think, I think really good investors, really good traders can parse through and determine, you know, when I say why does that business exist, there really are typically a few questions you really have to understand when you're looking at a business and or if you're running a business, there's a, there's typically, it's another pet peeve of mine having operated a business for many years. I think corollary to this strategy is more about what you don't do than what you do do. I think typically people get really, you know, it, it's hard to shut paths. It's hard to not do something that looks mildly intriguing and enticing. It's, it's really hard to do those things. And because of that, I don't think people do a good, I mean, if you're gonna be really good at strategy and in my opinion build a successful business, you have to be very clear about where you're going. You have to deselect pass, you have to focus in on specific paths, and then you have to execute that really well, which comes down to communicating to other people regardless of how team, how broad your team is to motivate them and understand the why and the how. And then, and so I view investing very similarly. I mean, with, with our teams and our analysts, we focus on what are the key drivers of any individual market. And to your point, trying to get rid of that noise because the market, I mean, all you have to do is watch a ticker, right? To watch things move and quarterly earnings announcements, and you have overnight, you know, announcements of earnings and, and companies releasing things that to, to you or to, I may not have anything to do with the long-term value of that business and they move the stock dramatically.

Jason Logsdon [00:31:04] And so that noise, you know, a key theme of what we try to do is you use all that noise as an asset, not as a liability. And what that means is when that noise impacts the marketplace, it causes volatility. And so if I think a stock's worth 10 and it's trading at five, I wanna buy it. If it trades to to to seven, I might wanna sell a little bit of it. If it trades down to three, I might wanna buy a little more. The more times that stock goes from three to seven, the more times I can adjust whether I own a lot of it or a little of it. And either situation, I wanna own some of it because I think it's worth 10. But to the extent that's noise and that noise continues to hit the market and to affect prices to move, that provides opportunity. And so I complain about the amount of noise. I, you know, I don't like the fact that our markets trade off of a bunch of, you know, I I I think, you know, Warren Buffett, for example, has, has been an advocate of getting rid of quarterly earnings reports and, and guidance, I shouldn't say reports, but guidance. And I think there's some meritt to that, but I'll be frank with you, it wouldn't be good for our business because all that noise, I mean, if, if there's the more noise there is daily, the more volatility there is, the more chaos there is. And chaos is a good thing if you're, if you're trading, don't get me wrong, in the rest of our businesses, we're long-term investors and we're long-term investors in commodities too. It's just that it, our hold period's gonna be six months. In that example I gave to you, let's say that was crude oil, but not, not a stock. We're gonna vary a lot day to day, whether we own a lot of that or a little of it.

Jason Logsdon [00:32:36] And that each cycle of that up and down provides an opportunity.

Vance Crowe [00:32:41] How do you distinguish what you're doing from like a form of gambling?

Jason Logsdon [00:32:46] Yeah, that's a great question. It's, I think in true gambling, you know, if you're, if you're gambling against a house, that house has a mathematical advantage. And the fact is, we, we wanna be the house. I mean, I, I want to, I described it all the time. We, so in a way, Vance in our commodity business, I mean this is, this is the truth. I mean, it doesn't sound, this isn't something I want to tell my kids. They may not be able to listen to this. The, I tell our traders sometimes that, you know, when, when the, they show up at the office at 7:00 AM and they walk into a casino and let's say it's a blackjack floor, and their job is to find the five or six tables out of a hundred that are offering 85, 90% odds. And the truth is, when you, when you gamble, even if you're really, really good at it, you've probably got 50 50 odds. And, and I know there's certain, you know, certain types of gambling where that's not necessarily the case, but the typical casino games, you're gonna have 43 to 49% odds. And so in a way, yeah, it's, it's gambling. I mean that's part of the reason why we formed Broadview group polls as well, and why I partnered with Clay. I I was doing something for 15 years when I was at the mash offs where I felt like we were at creating real value for the world.

Jason Logsdon [00:34:18] And I had this idea, this concept, and I, I felt like it was something I couldn't pass up, something I was really passionate about. But I found myself, you know, a few years into this endeavor with that trading business, finding myself asking, okay, what am I gonna leave behind? What's the legacy gonna be into the question you made? I'm not gonna sit here and lie to you. I mean, it's, it's, I think it's probably more dissimilar to gambling than it is similar to gambling, but it's a form of gambling. I mean, let's, let's be clear about it. We, we in, we trade in a way that I would call investing and we are longer term, but at the end of the day, we don't, we, we backstop our trades with the ability to take physical delivery or to deliver that physical commodity. But we never intend to, we intend for it to be a paper trade the other businesses we own. We are Have

Vance Crowe [00:35:10] You ever taken a physical trade?

Jason Logsdon [00:35:13] Well, not in this business. I have obviously other times

Vance Crowe [00:35:18] Been

Jason Logsdon [00:35:18] A part of physical commodity businesses, but no, not, not in That would be a bad day if Yeah, two loads of cattle showed up in downtown

Vance Crowe [00:35:25] Clayton,

Jason Logsdon [00:35:26] I'll call you if that ever happens. You'll wanna see that.

Vance Crowe [00:35:29] I would like to see that.

Jason Logsdon [00:35:32] Yeah. No, but it's, it's, it's a very insightful question that you ask. And, and the truth is, I enjoy that part of that business. I mean it's, you know, Las Vegas exists for a reason. It's fun to gamble. We work really hard to make it not gambling. And, but the fact is, we are on a treasure hunt every day for an opportunity that we don't think anyone else can see that allows us to make a bet, so to say, I call it an investment, but a bet into something that has overwhelmingly positive odds in, the other important thing when we invest Vance is we always look for opportunities that have short left tails and long right tails, meaning where you can lose a little and make a lot, right. And it sounds obvious, but most opportunities in life are the opposite of that. You know, think about it as, as being the person that buys the insurance, not sells the insurance, but the opportunities to sell insurance life in life are much easier. They're much more abundant. And you know, when you make money 85 or 90 out of a hundred times, you make a little bit, you forget about the 10 to 15 times when you lose it all. And so we try to be on the side of a trade, not only, and I'm only clarifying this because when I say I, I want my people to find opportunities in the casino that are 80 to 90% probabilities. We wanna do that with a long right tail. We wanna do that with opportunities that have a, the ability to make a lot of money and lose a little.

Vance Crowe [00:37:04] So in order to be able to do this, people have to be paying attention to the right things without knowing what the right things are to pay attention to. So how do you, how do you advise your people? How do you manage your attention day in and day out?

Jason Logsdon [00:37:19] Yeah, we're the answer to that question is different if you're a long-term investor for a short-term investor. So we, we just have, we, we are focused on long-term drivers and typically we are focused on data associated with long-term results. And so we're not necessarily tuned in or too worried about crude oil dropping $3 the last two days because of shutdowns in China over the Delta variant. We're more concerned about what are the probabilities that China still shut down in 90 days or 180 days. And in my opinion right now, pretty small, partially because of the way China's handling the Delta variant shutting down one of the largest ports in the world because one person had COVID. And there will be impacts to that, but that's not, that doesn't really impact our trade. We're more worried about what the market for crude oil, I keep using that as an example, but it could be anything looks like in six months or 12 months, not what it looks like today. So we are parsing out, to use your term, most of that information that we deem only relevant to the short term dynamics of the market and focused on the long-term fundamentals. So we're building supply and demand tables for all of the major commodities, all the commodities that we trade. We're understanding those and understanding what's truly driving the, the situation.

Jason Logsdon [00:38:50] So, you know, example would be, you'd understand this in the, in the corn market, we're not going to spend a lot of time worrying about what the yield on Mississippi corn is, right? We're gonna spend a lot of time trying to understand what's going on in, in Iowa and Illinois and Indiana and Minnesota and focus our time on the true drivers of the, of the supply and demand of the commodity.

Vance Crowe [00:39:15] So then as you saw African swine fever taking off in China last year, walk me through how then that impacted if it did at all the way you thought about commodities.

Jason Logsdon [00:39:25] Yeah, so, you know, African swine fever is a great example of a long, a long tail trade. And how you're positioned on that is dependent on whether you're long or short. But we viewed, you know, at that point we spent a lot of time trying to understand the probability that the disease would spread to Europe and that it would spread to eventually the United States. And then trying to make sure that we are positioned in a way that we, we profit from rather than get run over by a Mack truck if that were to happen. So I I would really answer that question two different ways. So I still, I still sit on the board at the mash offs and,

Vance Crowe [00:40:09] And for anybody that doesn't know mash offs is a pork production company. They do all the way from the, the semen of the boars all the way out to farrowing and then production of pigs. Do they slaughter pigs as well? They do

Jason Logsdon [00:40:23] Not. Okay. They do not, no. So you're, you're all over this, your recent Oklahoma pork council experience at United Well,

Vance Crowe [00:40:30] Well, ox has literally the best website I have ever seen, period. Full stop in agriculture to explain their, the way their business works. Yes. I, whoever designed that a plus on that one.

Jason Logsdon [00:40:40] Yeah, yeah. Pretty cool, isn't it? Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:40:42] It's awesome. I,

Jason Logsdon [00:40:43] And, and that's, they've done a great job with that because a, a lot of the world doesn't understand how production agriculture works and livestock production in particular, but yes, mash offs are a family owned pork producer located, headquartered in Carlisle, Illinois, two brothers, Dave and Ken Moff and their wives, Julie and Karen and Ken and Dave started the business, what came into the business in 1979, grown it to be a, one of the larger pork producers in the United States. I couldn't tell you exactly what, where it would rank, but still family owned. They partner with family farms across the Midwest, I think it's nine states or seven states today, and produce, you know, somewhere around three to 4 million pigs a year. And so yes, they are, but, but to answer your question, they are involved from the breeding of the animal through the sale of that animal to a processor.

Vance Crowe [00:41:41] And so you're thinking about African swine fever from two different angles. One of them is you sit on the board of mashup.

Jason Logsdon [00:41:47] Yes. Yeah. So from that angle, it, it is, it's about the, the biosecurity, the risk containment. So I mean, the first thing you wanna do is keep it outta the United States. As a US pork producer, the key concern right, is, is losing export markets. So even though African swine fever can't be transmitted through consumption of a product, you would have the shutdown of export markets out the US and we export somewhere between 25 and 30% of our pork outta the United States, depending on the day or the month you're looking at. And so we would immediately lose access to those markets and, and there would be a time period upon which we would try to assure those trading partners that our product was safe and that we had the right controls in place. So as a producer, the first thing you're worried about is losing access to those markets because if that happens, the product's safe, it's not really going to kill a lot of pigs, most likely. So supply doesn't change, demand goes down 28%, that's a bad day, that's a really bad day. And so at that point, you start to work through the process of finding end markets for the product and eventually getting trading partners to open their doors back up. And in the meantime, you have this massive competition in the United States for the domestic consumers demand, which wouldn't be good for chicken or beef in the US because you'd have the price of pork dropping like a rock. But as a producer, you're also worried about, and this is much outside of my field of expertise, but all the things you would do if you actually had the disease get near one of your farms.

Jason Logsdon [00:43:18] So how you would ring-fence the area, how you would deal with the diseased animals, how you would protect the animals that aren't diseased, how animals would move around the country the first five days after this occurred, whether slaughter houses could actually operate or not. All those sorts of questions have to be dealt with. So on one hand you have the biological physical production impact that you're worried about. And on the other hand you have the, the fear that, you know, I think the Iowa State study that was done suggests that hog price would drop by 50% immediately. So if your, if your revenue is gonna get slashed by 50% immediately, if this event, albeit probably not a high probability event occurs, that's something to be very worried about. So I contrast that with, I mean, one of the things I love about our Broadview Capital Holdings commodity investing business is that we're nimble. So if you own a hog production business, like the mash offs do there, you can't really be nimble. You own, you own a lot of assets, concrete and steel and, and assets.

Vance Crowe [00:44:21] And once acid pig goes in motion, once you move semen from the boar to the sow, you you got

Jason Logsdon [00:44:27] It. The

Vance Crowe [00:44:27] Pig is coming and it's gotta be slaughtered and it's gotta be know that whole time has been fed and cared for and

Jason Logsdon [00:44:32] It's a long lead time. Yeah. Right. And to your point, I mean, you've got three months, three weeks and three days of gestation. So you breed the animal and then you've got a six month broad period, so you're 10 months from that decision getting made. And by the way, if you have new capacity coming into the industry, you've got build a new facility and the whole process to get the supply chain built in front of it might be a year to year and a half. So those decisions that are getting made are, are anywhere from nine months to, let's call it two to two and a half years. And that's what creates cycles, so to say. But it also creates a lot of risk. And our business, even though we're long-term investors in commodities, we can be very nimble if we see the market mispricing, the probability of African swine fever, we can create a position to take advantage of that very quickly. And, and that's what we tried to do. So we, we honestly thought, I mean, the demand for US meat has been very high in the last, really going back to COVID. So there was a huge spike in demand driven by, in pork in particular, by the shifting of dollars to retail consumption from food service consumption. So pork over index is in retail, and so pork demand has been really strong. If you look at it on a supply adjusted base, we run an index to say at this supply, what should the price be? And the price of pork has been anywhere from eight to 12% above what it should have been following that trend line. And this is in an environment where African swine fever is now the, in the Dominican Republic. So this is pretty scary.

Jason Logsdon [00:46:03] And that's, you know, as a trader, as as a, as the mash off you're looking at and saying, okay, I should probably hedge some of my revenue because there's a risk if this African swine fever crosses into Puerto Rico or into the contiguous 48 states, we have a serious problem. And

Vance Crowe [00:46:20] When you say hedge our revenue, you mean put some aside instead of reinvesting it?

Jason Logsdon [00:46:25] You could do that. I I was actually suggesting you can use future. So part of the, I mean, go back to the reason futures markets exist in this country is to, or existed originally, is to help the physical producer hedge their risk. So for them you would go sell futures of hog contracts to

Vance Crowe [00:46:42] Oh, I'll provide a pig at this price, will you pay

Jason Logsdon [00:46:44] It? And then Yes. In the future, yes. And, and somebody on the other side does, and you can hedge out about a year. So the first thing you're thinking about a as them is how do I do that? How do I, how do I hedge some of that revenue? And then yes, secondly you think about, okay, how does this affect my, you know, the investments I I'm gonna make? Do I need to conserve cash? Do I need to do things to, you know, but those are all very long-term decisions. Whereas on the broad view, commodity hold or capital holding side, it's about how can we position ourselves nimbly to take advantage of a mispriced opportunity in the market.

Vance Crowe [00:47:18] This is, I'm so glad we're having this conversation because oftentimes there's very few people that play in both worlds, right? That have ever actually been on the farm. I've had a lot of commodity traders on, I've had a lot of farmers on, but I've never had somebody that was bridging those two worlds. So this is very interesting. You mentioned that you left mash offs because you, when you had an idea, you had something kind of like, you know, your, your secret recipe. What was that, what was the thing that prompted you to say, I want to break out and do my own thing?

Jason Logsdon [00:47:49] Yeah, we had, when I started the mash house in 2003, they weren't doing any or if any very little hedging. And so one of my first jobs was to create a hedging platform. I knew if we were gonna grow the business, we needed to be able to hedge our cash flow. So I, I didn't know anything. My, my, I grew up on a grain farm. My mom would have me when I was young, charting outta the paper onto the little gra the, the like December corn chart, right? And I'm not sure if she ever used it or not, but she did that. And I still remember the card table that we would sit at and get caught up like a month at a time. But honestly, Vance, I had zero interest in it. I really didn't, I never even looked at the chart. I just thought it was a chore. Like I wanted to

Vance Crowe [00:48:32] Be outside

Jason Logsdon [00:48:33] With the pigs. And, which is really ironic now,

Vance Crowe [00:48:36] But

Jason Logsdon [00:48:36] When I started, when I got to the master, so I knew the point of, of saying this, I knew nothing about futures markets, but I knew that we had to learn something about it. And I think that if sitting here today, that's the reason our business has been successful, I, I learned it with no bias. I learned it with no, I didn't come in with, with any, anything but intuition. And so I took what I had learned and what I, I, I was an avid reader of value investing theory, you know, Graham buffet type theory and, and equities. And so I just started applying those principles and as we hedged over those, I was at mash offs from oh three to 2015, we started to find inefficiencies in the market, largely related to longer term investing horizons. And so we started to take advantage of those. And in about 20 13, 20 14 started to become curious, you know, I would drive 45 minutes each way to work, and I would in the car think about, you know, I wonder if these same opportunities exist in cattle. And so the only way you can really know that is to take what the, take the logic you're using to trade and to program it, so to say. So I did that into an Excel, Microsoft Excel file. Like, so you wanna make, I made a rules based system and said, this is how we do it. Like, if I had to tell somebody, if I, if I knew, you know, I had terminal cancer and I had to leave behind in the company the way we do it, this is how I'd do it. And so once you have that, what you can actually do is go buy the data from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for the last 25 years of cattle prices.

Jason Logsdon [00:50:12] And you run it through. And I really did this as a side show. I, I, I had very little doubt that it would just not work, and lo and behold, it worked better than what we had been doing. So that may, you know, then the, the, the wheels start turning and you start saying, wow, you know, we've got, we've got an opportunity here because I wonder if it works in corn. I wonder if it works in crude oil. So the mash off family has been great to me. I mean, I, Ken is like a, a, a brother and a, a combination of a, a, a, a friend, a brother, a dad, all those things to me. And they've treated me great, but I, but at that point in time, we started having a conversation about, look, I think this opportunity's really big. And, and so the opportunity to answer your question was, could we take what we had found there and, and, and replicate it across the entire commodity sector, which now sitting here five years later, we've done, and they're a partner of ours. They're, they're, they're one of the three investors I mentioned a key component of what we do and have been great partners and, and really supportive and, you know, allowed me to take a ginormous risk, to leave an opportunity and a job that I loved and, and still stay on the board, still be partner with them, but chase a dream. And, you know, and, and that dream has then evolved into now using, you know, we, we say we wanna become a poor man's Berkshire Hathaway.

Jason Logsdon [00:51:42] So think about our trading business is similar to the insurance business at Berkshire Hathaway and where that insurance business used to float that Warren Buffet used to float from the insurance business to invest. And we're using the float from our commodity business and the profits from that to buy and build other companies that are diversified. And, you know, we're focused on buying great businesses that we can grow and build.

Vance Crowe [00:52:07] So from the days of building your first Excel, when you're first starting to put this together to now, have you handed the, the creation of the algorithm over to people that, that do this professionally? Or are you still like, elbowing people away from

Jason Logsdon [00:52:22] Your

Vance Crowe [00:52:22] Excel sheet? Yeah,

Jason Logsdon [00:52:23] You know, I am. So we have a great team and the truth is I've handed the vast majority of the decision making and off, but I am, I'd laugh, they'd laugh if they were sitting here in this conversation because I think I have at times my, a propensity to elbow my way into things

Vance Crowe [00:52:41] I shouldn't be in.

Jason Logsdon [00:52:42] So I, I, I'm, I, I will acknowledge that and I still like to have my hand in. We we're, we are creating every day creating the new and different stuff and innovating in our business, and then we're also executing and operating on what we have. And so what's happened since that point is the algorithms and the tools that we've created have become less and less important. And our knowledge and understanding of the markets that we're in are, have become more and more important. If you go back to where, way back at the beginning of the conversation I was talking about being in that sweet spot and that sweet spot for us is having great people and having these great tools, but then understanding how deep we want to get into understanding a market, because these tools are, are really good, but if you can take these tools and then grind the edges off so that the risk gets reduced even further, then they become great tools. And that's what we've been able to do over the last five years. And we do that with qualitative risk management through our people. And so our teams that study each of these markets are aware of things that a computer can't be aware of, you know, and note African swine fever as an example, there, there's not been an outbreak of African swine fever in the United States, and definitely not a disease outbreak look like that, that would should offer export markets. When exports are 28% of the market. It doesn't know that, right? The computer doesn't know that. And so we qualitatively manage risk and, and, and we've kind of transitioned that into finding opportunities as well.

Jason Logsdon [00:54:16] But it's that sweet spot we like to play in. And, and, but no, I don't, I'm not, my role is very different at the business today and I'm spending a portion of my time with Clay out looking for new businesses and we've got a very capable team in that commodity business that's doing a great job.

Vance Crowe [00:54:34] So when you're out there looking for new businesses, you mentioned earlier that, you know, most of strategy from your point of view is choosing what not to do. How do you, how do you keep yourself open to new ideas as you're looking for new businesses, but not go down the wrong rabbit holes?

Jason Logsdon [00:54:49] That's great. Great question. We, we've evolved over time. And so Clay, my partner has, has spent a lot of years in the, in the, what was, what's known as a private equity business. And so we do wanna stay open-minded, but we are, we are not investing in startup businesses. We're looking at businesses with cashflow that are cashflow positive, that are established with 25 to 250 million in revenue generally. And so that sort of, you know, it's not that you can't find new, innovative, fast growing businesses, but we're not on the cutting edge. We're not doing what angel investors or venture capital investors do, and we have to be really disciplined. So I mean, like in a private equity business and, and, and, you know, ours would fit into that as we look at, look, finding companies, you're going to look at in a year, I, I can't remember Clay was here, he would know all the numbers. But let's say we look at 250 to 300 businesses a year, and that means you get approached either, either by them or by a banker or a broker or somebody representing them, and they send you a set of materials. And we've got a team that go that sorts through all that, and you'll do a first pass and you'll, you'll trim it down. But outta those 300 businesses, we probably only take an intimate deep study of let's say eight to 10 of them. And then out of those eight to 10, you may actually proceed to making a, putting in a letter in 10 on a handful of those, a few, and then might actually buy one business.

Jason Logsdon [00:56:25] So you, you're gonna, you're gonna look at hundreds of businesses to buy one. And the key part of that, if you think about what the key, yeah, capital's an important resource, but the most important resource you have is time. So if you're trying to narrow a funnel of 300 down to one, it goes back to same as same as trading commodities, you've gotta shed the noise. So very, you know, you, we, we have on our team a funnel that we work through and criteria that businesses have to hit margins and profitability and the types of dynamics we're looking for in businesses. It depends on the industry of course, but we narrow that down and by the time we get a business into the, we're gonna go visit the business phase, we've got a pretty high confidence level that it's a business. We'd like to, you know, that, that if things prove out the way that we think that we'll, that we have a decent profitability probability of wanting to invest in the business.

Vance Crowe [00:57:22] Time seems to be a critical thing, you know, in, in not just in your world of futures, but like you made the choice to jump out of doing one business to go into another. That's thinking long term, you're having to think in three month increments or longer than that. Tell me about your, like, concept of time. How much do you focus on living in the present moment versus thinking about the way things will be in the future?

Jason Logsdon [00:57:50] Yeah, that's a great question. I'll, so the way I do advance

Vance Crowe [00:57:56] Is, is, is

Jason Logsdon [00:57:58] To bifurcate things a bit. I find that being able to live at the cross section of strategy and action has been really fruitful for me. So I, I don't spend a lot of time planning. I, I spend, I love to go to the mountains and my wife and I love to love to ski and spend time with our kids in the mountains. And so I will a couple times of the year just go out and find completely quiet time and read and, and think, think at a level that I can't think at when I'm executing. But outside of that, I really, and and, and I'll throw into that our annual strategic planning processes with our businesses outside of that, I roll on a weekly planning cycle and I really try to live in the moment. I, I, I try to set high level priorities and, and, and goals to guide how I'm going to generally allocate times into things that are very important, especially things that are important but not urgent. But then the week happens, right? And I find joy and I find productivity out of just letting that happen. And so I'm not, if you went and looked at my calendar right now, it wouldn't be, you know, I try to leave as much of it open as I can to be spontaneous, to be nimble. You know, we're we, we've got 20 people in our trading business or, or less than that today. We can't, we can't not be nimble.

Jason Logsdon [00:59:33] We have to be more nimble than the big competition that we have. And so I like to, you know, I, I go through my weeks generally living pretty spontaneously. Try not to have my schedule too packed with, with things that will stop me from being nimble, creative, innovative with our team. Yet I do think it's very important for me to, you know, I I, every year I look out and kind of evaluate where I'm at on the path of where I wanna be in 20 years. And, and then a couple times a year, as I said, I I, I really step back and think about my life and our business at a much deeper level. And for me, I've gotta get away to do that. I can't do that in sitting in my office. So I head west.

Vance Crowe [01:00:20] Do you have a clear vision of, of what 20 year, 20 years out will be like for you?

Jason Logsdon [01:00:25] Yeah, I, I mean, no, I i, if you had told me 10 years ago I'd be doing this, I I would, would've, wouldn't have believed it. But I think I do. I mean, I've, this is my last, if you know, God willing, this is my last chapter of my professional career. So I think 20 years from now, Broadview Group Holdings, yeah, we, we are, you know, we own several businesses. We are building and growing those and we're creating a legacy to, you know, again, become this poor man's Berkshire Hathaway. And we are impacting, you know, we, we've got a culture and I believe we do today where our, what we do is positively impacting our people's lives and their families. And I'm, I've just always been a firm believer in that. I mean, I like to work, it's part of the farm ethic, right? I mean, I, I I love to work. It's what I do. And like, I mean, you, you know, I, I just on the weekends, I mean, I don't have a lot of hobbies. It's my kids and the business and it's because I'm so passionate about it. But because of that, I've never understood how a lot of people in the world, you know, can be fortunate enough to live in the United States and fortunate enough to be able to have employment available, but hate what they do. And I, I just, I believe that you can dramatically impact the quality of a family's life or a person's life at the workplace.

Jason Logsdon [01:01:59] And so we invest in that. We have, we have, I I think really well above our scale Fortune 500 type of training and development we like to do for our people. And I, and I believe all that stuff translates to the personal life, by the way. I think very little of that if done right is only for workplace effectiveness. So yeah, I, that, that's important. And then we, we are, it's important to me in 20 years that we are giving back significantly and that the wealth and value that we've created for ourselves gets plowed back into the communities that we're involved with. And for my wife and I we're passionate, my wife's a nurse or, or a trained nurse. And so we're passionate about kind of the intersection of children, education and health. And I don't know what those things will be Vance as we, as we age. And you know, they kind of nudge me further out of those conversations we were talking about at work, but it, it, you know, I'm, we'll find something in that domain to be passionate about and give our time and resources to hopefully.

Vance Crowe [01:03:01] I've been very curious about the way people envision the future because I went from being, you know, a guy that got to run around and do all sorts of life experiences for, you know, years and years, Africa and ships and all kinds of things. And then when I had my, my daughter it for the first year, it's almost like I've been not asleep because I feel like I've been very alert and awakened for her. But, but the vision of the future is virtually not there. Like I go to imagine something and it's just the, you know, a brown blank wall that I'm looking out on. And I, I, I have to hope that that comes back. As a parent, did you, when, when kids came into the picture, did, did the vision get confused or slow down or?

Jason Logsdon [01:03:48] I, you know, those seasons of life to me are what just makes it so spicy. It's, I have a lot of people with young children that work with me today, and I often look at 'em when they come in the office early in the morning and they just look completely, you know, I'm excited to be there and my eyes are clear and, and they look like they haven't slept in four days. And so yeah, it was really blurry. I mean, that's where I think there are times, and I think I maybe maybe you learn this on the farm, you know, in the spring and the fall, and maybe you learn that, I learned this in investment banking when you're in the middle of a deal. But that, you know, when, when my children were between, you know, really newborn and six years old, that was just sort of a time I just put my head down. I'm just trying to get through it, just trying to survive it and enjoyed it, don't get me wrong, but there wasn't a lot of planning vision. It was just about sur not survival, and it's true sense of survival that's insulting the people that have to just survive. But it was about getting to the other side of it. And I can tell you now, and I hope everyone has the same experience. I, it is so much fun. I have a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old, and the challenge now isn't that you have to chase 'em around the house, you know, when they learn how to walk or crawl, it's that now you have to get 'em to wanna be around you.

Vance Crowe [01:05:10] Yeah, yeah.

Jason Logsdon [01:05:11] And, and, but it's so much fun. I mean, they, and they, they have great thoughts and they're, they, they, in all seriousness, do I think like, having fun with us and, and spending time outdoors and having conversations that are deep and, and, but part of the consequence of them not wanting to spend as much time with you as I have a lot of time now, I have a lot of time I didn't have then it's a different season of life, right? And so we're, and we're, my wife and I are gonna enter a new, in five years, our daughter, you know, hopefully will go away to college and then we'll have a whole new chapter to start with just ourselves. And I have no idea at this point what I'll do with all that time. But yeah, I, I can relate to what you're saying. I mean, it was, it's just blurry. I can't, like, even to the point where, you know, people will talk about the diaper changing and all this, I know I did all that stuff, but you don't really remember it. I mean, you, you, I have vague memories of sitting in bedrooms at three o'clock in the morning rocking children, but it was a blur.

Vance Crowe [01:06:09] It's, this is really good to hear you say because I i, it just dawned on me as she turned one and started, you know, doing better at sleeping through the night and we've gotten better at coordinating our schedules and all of these things that I was able to have like a clear set of thoughts for a few hours where I was like, wow, I forgot what it was like to have clear thoughts and, you know, to to, to compare that to where I was, you know, before the baby was born. I mean, I, I, I can't believe how when you don't have kids, you don't understand how much faster you can run than the guy that's in the office next to you with kids. Like, I had no idea. I was just like, I don't know why you're so slow.

Jason Logsdon [01:06:51] Have you gotten, yeah, those are crazy times. Have you gotten good at the game yet where you, you hear the child in the middle of the night and you're just acting like you don't hear bo both of you're acting like you don't hear the kid.

Vance Crowe [01:07:03] Oh, my wife has literally no chance of waking up there is lit like that. If the baby was required to wake up her mother in order to survive, the baby would not survive.

Jason Logsdon [01:07:15] Are you sure that's the case or is your wife just maybe, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:07:18] Touche.

Jason Logsdon [01:07:19] I think I know who

Vance Crowe [01:07:20] The,

Jason Logsdon [01:07:20] Yeah, okay, okay. I won't ask any more questions on that, but yeah, I

Vance Crowe [01:07:25] Wake up on the, on a, on a dime, but it's okay because we have this whole relationship, the, the baby and I about when I come into a room and it's wonderful. I wouldn't give it up at all. But it is one of those things where so much of my self conception had been ideas, right? Having new ideas, being able to articulate them in clever ways. And I find myself, I've got a, a young guy I work with his business partner and I find myself just kind of staring off into space with my mouth open at sometimes and him being like, Hey, let's go.

Jason Logsdon [01:07:57] Yeah. And

Vance Crowe [01:07:57] Being like, oh shit, I must have done this to other people.

Jason Logsdon [01:08:01] Yeah, maybe that's where my bias towards action and not thinking as much came, it, it really kinda swelled was when I had young children because it is difficult. I mean, you, you, you know, it's a, it's a bit of a hangover every day.

Vance Crowe [01:08:16] A bit of a hangover. That's right. So one of the questions I like to ask some, some guests when they come through here is what I call the Peter Teel paradox, which you actually have one, you, you had the idea that you could do commodity trading in this, in this way, but the Peter Teal paradox is essentially what is one thing that you believe that almost no one agrees with you on? And the reason it's a paradox is because like if you say something I already agree with, well, then you failed. Yeah. And then if you say something I don't agree with, now you have to, you have to talk your way out of it. So thinking about the world and the way that you think about it right now, what's one thing you believe that most everybody else doesn't agree with you on

Jason Logsdon [01:08:59] Five years ago? I would've, I would've said it was a conversation we were having about education and, and, you know, secondary education. I, I think that's actually starting to become relatively mainstream view. Nobody's acting on it yet. But I, you know, the commodity thing, I, I think most people would say that what we're doing in long-term commodity investing is not really possible as a large scale business. I mean, I, I I would say I have, I have a strong belief that the, there is this belief in, you know, in the investing world that if you are a long enough term investor, that you can't lose money investing in US equities. And I just don't believe that. I believe that's been a fact. Whoa. You

Vance Crowe [01:10:01] Definitely have passed the first part of the test. No,

Jason Logsdon [01:10:03] Well, I, I just, I believe that's, and and don't get me wrong, I wanna clarify on this. I'm not saying that that's what's going to happen. I'm just saying the belief that it can't happen, the belief that the, you can't lose money owning US equities for long term. I just don't believe, and, you know, people look at, at Buffet's record, people will quote, you know, people will tell you that if you had held equities for any 10 year period over the last, I don't even know the stats, right? 70, 80, 90, a hundred years that you would've made money. And I just believe when a different, we, we have cranked, you know, the auger so tight. I mean, you know how that goes on a farm, that there's no room, there's no slack, there's no room in the system. And we are today as a country, you know, as investors, we've ridden a, a bond bull market since the eighties that has been like an enormous tailwind. It's like you're walking down a street, you're walking south down Broadway in New York, and you got this 20 mile per hour wind at your back.

Vance Crowe [01:11:09] Oh yeah.

Jason Logsdon [01:11:09] Municipal

Vance Crowe [01:11:10] Bonds paying out doesn't make any sense in the world to me. No, but I'm totally with you on this.

Jason Logsdon [01:11:15] And at some point we have to turn around and walk back up Broadway

Vance Crowe [01:11:19] And pay back all those moments.

Jason Logsdon [01:11:21] We may not, well, lemme say this, this is where the question, we may not have to walk back up Broadway, but we sure as hell can't walk any further. We'll be in the harbor. So, you know, at a certain point that Tailwind goes away. And, and I just don't know that the fundamental dynamics of our country today, and I'm, you know, I, I am an American, I believe in our future, and I would try to be optimistic, but the idea of us having excessive GDP growth and us having this bond, you know, this tailwind in our back, and that, that by definition has to mean that the valuation of equities today is not so high that anybody can make money if you buy and hold 'em for the long term. I just don't know. I believe in that. So I I, and to me as an investor, what that means is not that it's not gonna happen, it's that you have to be cognizant of that risk and you have to be cognizant of the fact that anybody, anywhere will tell you you're wrong. And that you have to be able to position yourself in your portfolio. And that's part of the other reason I started Jam on Capital, which has become broad group and five to six years ago, this commodity business that we have can make money in any type of market. I was talking about nimbleness earlier, and I also believe in skin in the game, right? So I, I should say the, the, the majority of my net worth is in my business. I mean, I just believe that's the way the world should be. And, you know, and and my partner's the same way. I mean, nothing, you know nothing better than to tell an investor that we're, I'm investing my money and my partner's money and your money.

Jason Logsdon [01:12:55] Oh

Vance Crowe [01:12:56] Yeah.

Jason Logsdon [01:12:56] That's what we do, right? So to me, selfishly, it is a tool for us to be nimble in these ever, in these really volatile, changing times. And to diversify away from the fact that, I mean, I was just listening to CNBC this morning on the drive to work and the, you know, you get done with all these conversations about where the stock market's valued today. And when somebody loses an argument about why, why the stock market isn't overvalued, the first thing they say is, well, where else are you gonna invest your money? Right? That is the logic in the market today. The idea is you have to invest your capital somewhere. 'cause you're scared. I mean, your dollar that the, your currency or whatever you invest in make it deflated away if you don't. And so you have to try to earn some yield or some return on your capital somewhere. But that's not necessarily how the game has to work. At some point, we could go through an era like Japan has, where risk assets just don't earn a return for a long period of time. And valuations have to get reset. Now, I think the thing about the American economy and our markets are we, you know, just like our bankruptcy system, we, we are fast to erase thing. I mean, we are, we are fast to kind of tear things up and move forward. And I hope that's what can happen. But I'm just, you know, today, the fact that you can invest in a 10 year treasury bond at 1.25%, that's all you can earn on a risk-free asset has, has led to a bunch of compression in the return that you get for risk assets towards that 1.25%.

Jason Logsdon [01:14:29] And if that for any reason, I'm not here prognosticating anything like that could happen, I'm just here to say that once you get to the end of the street, there's only so low you can go with the value of, of risk-free assets and the compression of margins on risk assets. And once you get there, now you're counting solely on growth in the economy, growth in earnings to bring you, you know, if you're a US equity investor to drive value going forward, and now the game gets a lot harder. And I'm not sure that game has to always end up positive like it has in the, in recent history.

Vance Crowe [01:15:02] So you made me think of, and maybe this is my, I I can't be the only one that thinks this, but to me, when you take exactly what you were saying and add in the idea of basically every single professional working American has every two weeks they're dumping money into the, the stock market, right? And like, it's just like a beating heart only, we just keep adding blood into the system. And then at the same time there's been this rise of index funds. Yeah.

Jason Logsdon [01:15:30] Which

Vance Crowe [01:15:30] The index funds are doing are are playing off the exact philosophy that you're talking about where it's like, well, yeah, you got us, you know, you, I'm, I'm, I don't know where the needle in the haystack is, so I'm just going to buy the entire haystack. To me, the index funds have some layer of danger in them in that it seems like blindly throwing your money into a larger system. And I'm sure my brother right now is, is yelling at the, at the podcast, but because, you know, he's saying, look, it's, it's going after people in the s and p 500 or it's the, you know, you, you're somebody is analyzing them and putting them into these collective indexes. But to me, index funds is a little bit like flying a plane blindfolded.

Jason Logsdon [01:16:14] Yeah. Now I'm gonna disagree with you a little bit. So I, I agree with the premise of what you're saying. I actually believe in a barbell approach though. I, I, I think the vast majority of investors, people that don't invest for a living, people that aren't professional investors are actually very well served by index funds.

Vance Crowe [01:16:32] Okay.

Jason Logsdon [01:16:32] And I think, yes, there is an argument that, that they could be causing the differentiation of market pricing to be less and maybe pulling up the valuation of, of assets it shouldn't be. But I really believe action in the market happens on the margin. And I think if those opportunities exist, it's people like me whose job is to make sure that price is reflective of that. But yes, there are times where you can overwhelm with supply of money, the price of an asset and push it higher. But I, I, I am a believer, and, and actually most people wouldn't think this of me because of what I do. I think very few money managers, I, I think very few institutions, I think very few large money managers add any value. I think their fees and their expenses are, are overwhelmed. Any positive alpha or positive value they may create for their investor. So I like my friends, my family, I guide them towards index funds, but with the caveat that I made to you and say, Hey, look, this is not, this is not a money tree. This, there, there is a distinct possibility that the allocation of these assets to a US equity index fund as a, as an example, doesn't make money over the long term. Mean I know it has for the last many decades, but I still think if you're going to allocate to equities as a non-professional investor, I would, I would recommend that a thousand times before I would stock picking for someone that's not a professional or a high expense mutual fund that's in the 50th percentile of what they do.

Jason Logsdon [01:18:07] At the end of the day, they're destroying value. And that's my belief. And that's the other thing that makes me very excited about what we're doing. And I, I think we have, you know, I I think there are vehicles out there that are niche vehicles that can create outsize returns over the long term. And I believe we found one in the business that we have in Broadview Capital. And I believe with what we're doing with Broadview Group owning high quality businesses, that I believe regardless of the broader economic environment and regardless of whether interest rates go from 1.27 to eight or to 10 are still going to create value because of the value we can add to them beyond them just being a financial investment and us being operators. And so that's our strategy. So I don't wanna, you know, I know it sounds like I might be contradicting myself, but I, on one hand, I believe the vast majority of money managers destroy value after they charge for fees and expenses. So I don't, I'm not, I'm a fan of index funds. On the other hand, I'm not sure that being, you know, I think diversification is very important and I think resetting our expectations around what returns your, if pensioners and retirees and others might get from their accounts, retirement accounts is, is critically important here. The old idea that a pension fund's gonna earn 8% blended is to me a joke. And by the way, if they do that, they're gonna do it with a lot more risk than they have in the past. The risk adjusted return is going down. And there's no doubt in my mind about that. And I just don't think as a world we've adjusted that partially because we can't, because we have all these liabilities that

Vance Crowe [01:19:37] Are all dependent on, they're

Jason Logsdon [01:19:39] All dependent on growth, right? Yeah, that's right. And that's why I say winding the, the, the crane on the auger up really tight. That's what I mean. I mean, it's, it, it won't, you know, this stuff doesn't show up. You could be wrong for a lot of years, what I'm saying could be wrong for a lot of years. But I am a believer we've, we've got so much risk in the system now that when I'm right, if I'm right, not that I will be, but if I am right, and I hope I'm not, it could be really ugly. And we have all, 'cause we have all of these liabilities and all of these bills to pay that, I'm not sure we have any way to pay 'em today. We're paying 'em very simply by printing more money. And that works really well as long as the rest of the world has confidence that at some point we have a way to pay them other than printing money.

Vance Crowe [01:20:23] It's a, it's the, that's a hell of a cliffhanger to, to, to put it on, man. I would talk to you all day. I hope that you will come back again soon. This was a, this was a real blast. If people found what you were saying compelling and you have a chance to direct their attention somewhere, where, where would you tell them to go to where, learn more about you or your business or Yeah.

Jason Logsdon [01:20:42] Broadview group.com. No, thanks for asking. I So we have a, a, a website there with our contact information and we, we don't actively raise capital. We're not looking to raise capital, but I, I love conversations like the one we're having and have always admired advance what you do. This has been awesome to be here. I know it's taken a while to put together, but I love listening to your podcast and I, I, I love the way that you provoke thought, you know, the, the conversations and the types of thought that you do. So appreciate

Vance Crowe [01:21:11] It. Thank you, man. I will have you back on anytime. Thank you so much for coming by. Thank

Jason Logsdon [01:21:15] You, mark.