Co-founder & CIO, Cambria Investment Management · host of The Meb Faber Show · publisher of The Idea Farm — a quant/value/trend ETF manager who builds portfolios that deliberately break the market-cap link. Running synthesis of his video/podcast appearances, with per-transcript breakdowns and a fund index.
Cambria Global Real Estate ETF — global REITs, offered as the fix for the third of his three allocation mistakes (no real assets). A five-star fund "having a great year"; REIT returns in 2026 have surprised him to the upside.
Cambria Emerging Shareholder Yield ETF — the EM leg, just past its 10-year mark and top decile alongside the other two. Named as the direct swap for a generic EM index sleeve: "I take out my US equities, I put in SYLD, or EYLD for emerging equities."
Cambria Foreign Shareholder Yield ETF — the developed-ex-US leg, also top decile over its first ten years. Sits at the crossing of two of his arguments: Americans own almost no foreign stock ("a big mistake"), and ex-US is far cheaper on CAPE while two years into unnoticed outperformance.
Cambria Global Asset Allocation ETF — the buy-and-hold end of the four allocation funds: a global spread of stocks, bonds and real assets you "just buy and are done," and one of the two halves TRTY combines.
Cambria Global EW ETF — the November 2026 351-exchange launch: global large-cap (top ~500 across 45–50 countries) at 25bp, deliberately not market-cap weighted, built to "break the market cap link" that concentrates passive money in the most expensive names. He is the manager; the fund is the reason for the webinar.
Cambria Global Momentum ETF — the trend end of the same universe: holds only what is trending, can concentrate, and can go 100% cash and bonds if nothing works. Currently equities, some sectors and a smattering of commodities. He concedes trend is where he departs furthest from a conventional allocation.
Cambria Global Value ETF — country-level deep value: rank ~45 markets on CAPE plus cash flow, dividends and book, buy the cheapest 12–15 (high-single-digit CAPEs vs the US at 42), top 10 stocks from each market's top 30, rebalanced once a year. Launched 2014 and lost to the US for six years; "still wicked cheap."
Cambria Shareholder Yield ETF — the US leg of the trio: dividends + net buybacks + debt paydown, sector/size/country agnostic. Thirteen years old, top decile of its category over ten years. Pitched as a drop-in substitute for a plain US equity sleeve, not an add-on.
Cambria Tax Aware ETF — US stocks paying low-to-no dividend, on the argument that for a taxable investor compounding wealth "the last thing in the world you want is dividends." His "favorite idea in all of investing, but perhaps one of the worst marketing ideas"; targets the high-dividend strategies, not the 1.04%-yielding S&P.
Cambria Trinity ETF — half buy-and-hold global allocation, half trend, which he calls "the perfect all-in allocation for me." Cambria's largest allocation fund and, on the record, "what I do with most of my money."
Cambria Value & Momentum ETF — a satellite "for the nervous nellies that want equity exposure but want to be hedged," able to hedge 0–100% with futures. Currently 50% hedged "because the broad market's expensive but going up" — his yellow-light macro call expressed as a position.
Cambria Endowment Style ETF — a recently launched aggressive allocation targeting Yale-endowment-style returns, leveraged to 140% gross (~70% equities / 30% fixed income / 20% real assets / 20% alts). His own caveat carries it: "awesome portfolio, but it's going to have some juice to it" and "will be volatile at some point."
Cambria Foreign Tail Risk ETF (closed) — the one fund Cambria shut, and a product-market-fit lesson rather than an idea: almost no US investors own foreign stocks, those who do think them already cheap and won't hedge, and anyone hedging international beta shorts the more expensive US instead. Funds are never closed for small assets or a bad five years — only for a structural reason like this.
Cambria Tail Risk ETF — portfolio insurance: 10-year Treasuries plus a ladder of puts on the US market. Down in 2026 "because US stocks are doing great" — a deliberate hedge for someone who wants to bet on a puke, not a core holding.
Cambria Tactical Yield ETF — the trend-based bond fund (paired with a value sibling that only takes credit risk when spreads pay). He likes the vehicle, not the asset class: "one of my hills to die on is there's not enough yield in fixed income," and rates "could and should go higher, which I think would surprise a lot of people."
In one line: a quant manager whose entire product line is one argument — market-cap weighting is an unexamined bet that puts most of your money in whatever has already risen most, which is usually whatever is most expensive — and whose entry discipline is long-run valuation, chiefly the CAPE ratio applied at the level of a whole country rather than a stock. As of Aug 2026 the reading is a yellow light: the Shiller CAPE is ~44 and about to eclipse the 1999 all-time high, and "never once in history have we found a market that closed a year, a country, at a CAPE ratio of 40 and had above average 10-year real returns. So the batting average is pretty low, zero." He immediately disarms the timing temptation — "there's no ceiling on valuation… it could easily go up to 50 or 60" — so the output is a tilt, not an exit: ex-US, value and small are far cheaper and already two years into a rebound nobody notices (foreign +30% last year, +25% this year) because the S&P is still doing 15%. The macro overlay is short and blunt: "all roads lead to inflation — you have to be an owner, own assets," which makes real assets (commodities, TIPS, global REITs) part of a complete allocation; and, against near-universal positioning, there is not enough yield in fixed income relative to T-bills, with rates that "could and should go higher, which I think would surprise a lot of people." His second signature argument is shareholder yield over dividends: count dividends plus net buybacks plus debt paydown, because buybacks have exceeded dividends for 20+ years and gross buyback figures lie — "5% buyback… they also give the C-suite 7% a year in shares… so it's actually negative buyback yield." Dividend growth, he argues, "is largely based on a faulty study." The third leg, and the commercial engine of 2026, is the 351 ETF exchange — contributing a concentrated, heavily-appreciated portfolio in kind to seed a new ETF without triggering the gain — which he is careful to call "a tax deferral, not a tax dodge." Read every fund view in this hub with the conflict in front of you: he manages all of them. The standing caveat he volunteers himself: "there'll be plenty of times in the coming years where our funds do poorly and we look really stupid. This is not really one of those times."
Valuation is gravity, not a trigger. The CAPE test is run on year-closes across every country in the record, and above 40 the forward 10-year real-return base rate is zero-for-zero — "doesn't mean they have to be bad, in fact they were okay in many cases, but in general it's a gravity and it's a weight." He asked Shiller himself in 2022 whether the 1999 record (~44 and change) would fall; "I don't know." He commits to being scored: check back at the end of 2036. Above CAPE 40 "you're getting into bubble territory," but the honest corollary is that Japan went far higher, so the conclusion is a tilt toward what is cheap rather than a sale of what is dear. Aug-19: "yellow light. Expensive market going up" — with real competition appearing for the first time in years from "old-school bonds. Pretty good yield on those."
Break the market-cap link. Buying the market has historically worked, but by construction "it concentrates you in the biggest positions… you concentrate in the things that have gone up the most, which usually are the things that are also the most expensive" — Rob Arnott's version being that cap weighting makes you "buy high and sell low." The fix is a different weighting scheme, not a different asset class: equal or fundamental weight across the same global universe. That is the design premise of the November 2026 launch GEX (top ~500 companies across the 45–50 investable developed and emerging countries, 25bp, "less than ACWI" and low for anything non-cap-weighted), and it is the same idea GVAL applies one level up, to countries.
Shareholder yield beats dividend yield and dividend growth — and the number that matters is net. Cambria's book argued it and the ten-year records now carry it: SYLD, FYLD and EYLD are all past 10 years and "top decile over the past 10 years… some of them it's like top 5% versus their category." The mechanism is that "buybacks are bigger than dividends and for the last 20 plus years," so any dividend screen that ignores them is incomplete by construction — when Morningstar profiled hundreds of the best dividend funds and left shareholder yield out, "do you know how many of these funds shareholder yield outperformed? The answer was all of them." The audit that does the work is subtraction: a company announcing a 5% buyback while issuing 7% a year in stock-based comp is a net issuer, and "the average stock in the US is an issuer." Same symmetry as value — "you want to buy cheap companies, but it's also you want to avoid the expensive." Incumbents can't follow because they are in "narrative jail" after 30 years of promoting dividend growth, which he says rests on "a faulty study" ("The Dividend Growth Myth").
Dividends are a tax leak for a taxable compounder. The TAX thesis: a forced distribution takes cash out of the business, taxes it on receipt, and leaves you reinvesting the remainder — "the last thing you want is to take money, pay tax, and reinvest it. It's crazy. And yet, the whole world operates as if that's the ideal scenario." Against a 1.04%-yielding S&P the drag is currently small; the real target is the high-dividend strategies that historically yielded 6–10%. The decision is account-type-first (the argument vanishes in a sheltered account) and measured after tax: "if it even comes close to matching the indices on an after-tax level, [it] will do much better." He concedes the marketing problem is severe — "hundreds of billions and a whole culture of dividends and income… they're still stuck in their dividend fantasy land of passive income."
Country-level value: rotate markets, not stocks.GVAL ranks ~45 national markets on CAPE plus cash flow, dividends and book (they "usually almost all say the same thing"), averages them, buys the cheapest 12–15, then takes the top 10 stocks from each market's top 30 by market cap, rebalancing once a year and sometimes making no trades at all. The output today is a basket at "high single digit, low double digit CAPE ratios. Remember the US is 42." Countries usually only get that cheap after falling 50–80%, and small markets (his example: the Czech Republic vs Japan) push the basket somewhere bottom-up screening never would. He is candid about the cost of the discipline: launched 2014, and "for the first what 6 years foreign just sucked it up versus the US."
Core/satellite as LEGO substitution, plus the four-question audit. Improve a sleeve by replacing it, not by bolting something on: "I take out my US equities, I put in SYLD, or EYLD for emerging equities — those are very simple substitutions." Core runs from GAA (buy-and-hold global) to GMOM (trend, allowed to sit 100% in cash and bonds), combined half-and-half in TRTY — "the perfect all-in allocation for me… what I do with most of my money" — with the leveraged endowment-style ENDW (140% gross) as the aggressive end, carrying his own volatility warning. Satellites are the genuinely different exposures: GVAL, VAMO (hedgeable 0–100%, currently 50% hedged "because the broad market's expensive but going up") and TAIL as explicit insurance, down in 2026 by design. The audit he runs on a typical US allocation — retail and institutional — has four failures: US-only, market-cap weighted with no value/mid/small tilt, no real assets (commodities, commodity equities, TIPS "which look pretty good now," global REITs → BLDG), and no trend sleeve.
The 351 exchange is the vehicle — and he says out loud what it isn't. Concentrated positions "on average are a horrible, terrible very bad idea," and the survivor stories hide it: "no one's taking that position that owned Enron or CMGI." The obstacle to fixing it is tax, and the 351 exchange lets liquid stocks and ETFs be contributed in kind to seed a new ETF. Two rules do all the gatekeeping — no position above 25%, top five under 50%, so ~11–12 names, with index ETFs passed through to their holdings. It is open to anyone (unlike accredited-only exchange funds) and Cambria has now run five. His own honesty test is the part worth keeping: "it's a tax deferral, not a tax dodge… most likely these funds will grow, they will compound, and the tax liability will actually be bigger. It's just delayed" — and a sponsor who "launch[es] a portfolio and turn[s] it over on day one" has revealed the tax was the whole product: "you should want to invest in the strategy no matter what." He welcomes Treasury scrutiny for exactly that reason.
Inflation and rates — own assets, and don't reach for yield. On the national debt he skips the politics and goes to portfolio consequence: "all roads to me lead to inflation. And in that world you have to be an owner and own assets," because "inflation is a destroyer of wealth if you don't put that money to work" — with the US structurally advantaged by an equity-owning population "an order of magnitude" broader than Europe's. The corollary is the contrarian call he says makes him "a lone wolf": price every bond sleeve against T-bills, note that nothing currently pays enough of a spread to justify the risk (Cambria's value and trend bond funds barely overlap as a result), and allow that "rates could and should go higher, which I think would surprise a lot of people."
Seasonality as a tilt. One of Cambria's first papers covered the four-year presidential cycle and the 12-month cycle for the market and small caps separately. As of Aug 2026 "we're about to enter the best 12-month period… starting in like October," with "the biggest month of returns for small cap and small cap value" in January — held loosely ("we'll see if it remains true") and currently pointing the same direction as the valuation read.
The product — Cambria Investment Management, The Idea Farm & The Meb Faber Show
What it is: an asset manager first — Meb Faber is co-founder and CIO of Cambria Investment Management (Manhattan Beach, CA), approaching its 20-year anniversary with ~$4.45bn across 20 ETFs — wrapped in a large free-content layer that functions as the top of the funnel: The Meb Faber Show podcast, The Idea Farm weekly research digest (formerly $500/yr, now free), Cambria's published papers, and books. The paid product is the funds themselves (the flagship new one, GEX, at 25bp) plus a concierge-style 351 exchange service for advisors and holders of concentrated stock. There is no newsletter subscription, model portfolio or trade-alert tier — the "trade" he sells is a rules-based, low-cost fund you hold.
All of the below is grounded in his own statements in the appearances archived here (currently 2026-AUG-19).
Offering
What it is
How he runs it
Seen in the archive
The Cambria ETF lineup
20 funds, ~$4.45bn and "knocking on five," spanning core allocation (GAA, GMOM, TRTY, ENDW), shareholder yield (SYLD, FYLD, EYLD plus US large- and small-cap versions), value (GVAL), tax-aware equity (TAX), real assets (BLDG), hedged equity (VAMO), tail risk (TAIL) and fixed income (TYLD plus a value sibling).
Low cost and rules-based; holdings published daily ("you can always check see what we're up to"). Openly demand-driven on new launches — a global shareholder-yield fund is filed and waits on requests; each unlaunched idea "cost me about a quarter million each" to subsidize. Policy is never to close a fund for small assets or a bad five years, only for a structural reason (FAIL). All Morningstar-rated funds are three, four or five star, with the caveat he volunteers unprompted: "there'll be plenty of times in the coming years where our funds do poorly and we look really stupid."
Lineup, AUM and the core/satellite map on 2026-AUG-19; the FAIL closure rationale at 24:07
The 351 ETF exchange service
The commercial centrepiece: contribute a concentrated, heavily-appreciated portfolio of liquid stocks and ETFs in kind to seed a new Cambria ETF, without triggering the capital gain on the day. The autumn 2026 vehicle is GEX (mid-November, 25bp). Five done to date, usually two a year (spring and fall); custom strategies available to an advisor bringing scale.
Resources, videos and PDFs at cambriafunds.com/351 plus a portfolio-qualification tool run by the sales team. Contributions must be in roughly a month ahead of launch. Guidance minimum ~$5M per advisor relationship ("be serious about doing this"), though the Schwab account floor "could be as low as 150 grand" and "my dream is to get that as low as possible." Requires an advisor; not available to European investors. Custodian support is the binding constraint — Schwab has "a whole 351 department," Fidelity "won't do it," wirehouses are hard.
Mechanics, the 25%/50% rules and the deferral-not-dodge framing on 2026-AUG-19 (insights §3)
The Idea Farm
A weekly research digest — the top two or three research pieces and podcasts of the week plus a potpourri of papers and ideas. Ten years old. Free, once a week on Sunday, at theideafarm.com; formerly $500/year.
Explicitly a human filter, not an algorithm: a work channel where staff throw in whatever they've read, curated down. Premise is the information flood — "not just email and banking research, you got books and podcasts and TikTok and Instagram." Cambria's quarterly country-valuation metrics (the GVAL inputs) are published there.
Selection process and the free-weekly-Sunday model on 2026-AUG-19 (29:33)
The Meb Faber Show
The podcast, also ten years old — long-form interviews with managers and researchers (David Booth of Dimensional recorded for an upcoming episode; Rob Arnott "on the podcast half a dozen times probably").
Free. Doubles as the distribution channel for the ideas the funds implement — he notes the only equity-rich founders who know about 351 exchanges are "usually just podcast listeners."
Cambria's research output is the argument behind each fund: Shareholder Yield (subtitle "a better approach to dividend yield"), The Dividend Growth Myth, the global-value book behind GVAL, the bear-market-diversification paper, the presidential-cycle paper, and the new coffee-table book Investing in America.
Free papers; the new book's proceeds "go into Investopedia charity." The papers are used as public evidence rather than marketing — he emailed Morningstar to point out its best-dividend-funds survey omitted shareholder yield, which beat every fund profiled.
The research is free and the fee is the product. The podcast, the Idea Farm digest and the papers cost nothing; the only charge is the fund's expense ratio — 25bp on GEX, which he benchmarks openly against ACWI.
Substitution, not complication. His pitch to a retail allocator is to swap an existing sleeve for a better-weighted version of the same exposure, which keeps the asset allocation — and the risk — unchanged.
Daily holdings disclosure. Every Cambria fund publishes what it owns each day, which makes his own "did they turn the portfolio over on day one?" integrity test runnable against him.
He discloses his own money. TRTY is "what I do with most of my money" — a useful, checkable statement, and equally a reminder that the manager is his own biggest customer.
The limits are stated, not buried. 351 exchanges need an advisor, are not open to European investors, may be the wrong answer for a low-income young investor (gain-harvest instead) or an older one relying on a step-up — and are a deferral that grows the eventual bill.
Read the fund commentary as promotion. Every ticker in this hub is a fund he manages, discussed in his own webinars and podcast. The methods (the net-issuance audit, the country CAPE screen, the 25%/50% arithmetic) are reusable by anyone; the fund conclusions are a sales pitch.
Transcripts
One dated page per appearance — each has its full stock table, talking points, and the saved transcript. Newest first.
Meb Faber appearances discovered via YouTube search (Meb Faber) and The Meb Faber Show feed, not yet processed — verify publish dates & channels, newest first. Limited to the last ~2 years. None queued yet.