| Ticker | Name | Research | View | What he said | At |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GEX | Cambria Global EW ETF (launching Nov 2026) | SA · STK | Positive | The fund this webinar exists to seed — a mid-November 351 exchange into a global large-cap portfolio at 25bp that is deliberately not market-cap weighted, "trying to break the market cap link"; less than ACWI's fee and "very few global equity ETFs are that low, particularly the ones that are not market cap weighted." He thinks non-market-cap global "could be a $50 billion category" and wouldn't be surprised if these become Cambria's largest funds in two years. | 9:31 |
| TAX | Cambria Tax Aware ETF | SA · STK · FA | Positive | Cambria's first 351 fund and "arguably one of my favorite ideas in all of investing, but perhaps one of the worst marketing ideas" — it targets 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." Against today's 1.04% S&P yield the drag is small; the real target is the high-dividend strategies. He thinks the concept is "a 100 billion plus concept at some point," but it is currently his second- or third-smallest fund. | 16:37 |
| SYLD | Cambria Shareholder Yield ETF | SA · STK | Positive | The US leg of the shareholder-yield trio, now 13 years old and past its 10-year mark: "top decile over the past 10 years… some of them it's like top 5% versus their category." Cap-size, sector and country agnostic within its geography (capped at a third per country or sector). He offers it as the drop-in LEGO substitute for a plain US equity sleeve. | 27:32 |
| FYLD | Cambria Foreign Shareholder Yield ETF | SA · STK | Positive | The developed-ex-US leg of the same trio — also just past 10 years and in the top decile of its category over that period. Fits the wider argument that US investors own almost no foreign stocks ("which we think is a big mistake") at a moment when ex-US is two years into outperformance and far cheaper on CAPE. | 27:32 |
| EYLD | Cambria Emerging Shareholder Yield ETF | SA · STK | Positive | The emerging-markets leg, which "just hit 10 year" alongside the other two and shares the top-decile record. Named as the direct substitution for a generic EM equity allocation: "I take out my US equities, I put in SYLD or EYLD for emerging equities — those are very simple substitutions." | 27:32 |
| TRTY | Cambria Trinity ETF | SA · STK | Positive | Half buy-and-hold global allocation, half trend — "those two come together and form sort of the perfect all-in allocation for me." Cambria's largest allocation ETF and, in his words, "what I do with most of my money." | 35:23 |
| GVAL | Cambria Global Value ETF | SA · STK | Positive | The satellite deep-value fund and, he says, unusual: "there's not a lot of funds that concentrate that heavily in deep value." Top-down by country — rank ~45 countries on CAPE plus cash flow, dividends and book, take the cheapest 12–15 (high-single-digit to low-double-digit CAPEs "remember the US is 42 today"), then the top 10 stocks from each market's top 30 by market cap, rebalanced once a year. Launched 2014 and spent six years losing to the US; "still wicked cheap compared to the US." | 43:35 |
| BLDG | Cambria Global Real Estate ETF | SA · STK | Positive | Offered as the real-assets fix for the third of his "three biggest mistakes" in a traditional US allocation (US-only, market-cap weighted, no real assets): "we have global REIT ETF, BLDG, which is I think a five-star fund… Having a great year. REITs are a little bit surprise to me in this year, but they're putting up some pretty great returns." | 38:14 |
| GAA | Cambria Global Asset Allocation ETF | SA · STK | Positive | The buy-and-hold end of Cambria's four allocation ETFs — a global allocation you "just buy it and are done," and one half of what TRTY combines. Presented as core, not satellite. | 34:42 |
| GMOM | Cambria Global Momentum ETF | SA · STK | Positive | The trend end of the same universe: momentum-driven, can be concentrated and can go "100% in cash and bonds." Current positioning is exactly what you'd guess from what is trending — "equities, some sectors, a smattering of commodities" — and it exits if things roll over. He flags trend-following as the allocation he is "probably the most afield on from a traditional allocation." | 35:06 |
| VAMO | Cambria Value & Momentum ETF | SA · STK | Positive | "An interesting satellite fund for the nervous nellies that want equity exposure but want to be hedged" — it can hedge 0/25/50/75/100% of the book with futures. Currently 50% hedged, "because the broad market's expensive but going up," which is the fund-level expression of his yellow-light macro call. | 36:50 |
| TYLD | Cambria Tactical Yield ETF | SA · STK | Neutral | He likes the vehicle but not the asset class it invests in: "one of my hills to die on is there's not enough yield in fixed income." TYLD is the tactical/trend approach (paired with a value sibling that only moves into risky bond sleeves when spreads are wide enough); the two currently have "not a whole lot of overlap because relative to T-bills, there's just not enough yield in these fixed income markets." He adds a contrarian rate call: "it feels like rates could and should go higher, which I think would surprise a lot of people." | 32:32 |
| TAIL | Cambria Tail Risk ETF | SA · STK | Neutral | Insurance, and priced like it: the fund "sits in 10-year bonds and then buys a ladder of puts on the stock market. Not surprisingly, it's down this year because US stocks are doing great. But if and when we have US stocks do poorly, it's a pretty good solution." Framed as a choice for someone who explicitly wants to "bet on the market going down or puking," not a core holding. | 37:10 |
| ENDW | Cambria Endowment Style ETF | SA · STK · FA | Neutral | A recently launched, deliberately aggressive allocation strategy — leveraged to 140% gross, targeting "Yale endowment style returns," roughly 70% equities / 30% fixed income / 20% real assets / 20% alts. His own framing carries the caveat: "awesome portfolio, but it's going to have some juice to it" and "will be volatile at some point." One of Cambria's earlier 351 conversions. | 35:43 |
| FAIL | Cambria Foreign Tail Risk ETF (closed) | SA · STK | Neutral | Historical — the one fund Cambria actually closed, and he explains why: the intended buyer didn't exist. "Almost no US investors own foreign stocks," and those who do "think they're screaming cheap because they've gone nowhere for 15, 20 years and they don't want to hedge them"; anyone wanting to hedge foreign beta just shorts more-expensive US beta instead. He states the general policy for context — funds are not closed for small assets or a bad five years, only when the reason is structural. | 24:07 |
Read this table with the conflict in view: every ticker above is a Cambria fund Faber manages, discussed in a webinar whose purpose is to solicit contributions to the November 351 exchange — the "View" is his stance in this conversation, and it is a manager talking about his own product line. SPY, QQQ, ACWI and EFA come up only as reference indices/fee comparisons and Berkshire, Nvidia, SpaceX, Home Depot, Enron and CMGI only as illustrations of concentrated positions, so none get rows. Two further 351 conversions he lists by garbled letters ("GOO and USU") are left in the transcript rather than turned into tickers. Research: SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis (GEX has no page until the November launch; FAIL is closed).
A jargon-free summary of what each fund actually does and why he argues for it. Remember the frame: these are his own funds, described in a sales webinar. (Plain-language companion to the table above; renders on each ticker's consolidated page.)
GEX is a brand-new fund launching in mid-November 2026. It buys roughly the largest 500 companies across the ~45–50 investable countries in the world, but — and this is the whole point — it does not size them by market value. A normal global index fund automatically puts the most money into whatever has already gone up the most, which is usually whatever is most expensive; Faber calls this "the market cap link" and GEX is built to break it. The fee is 0.25% a year, which he notes is cheaper than the standard global index ETF (ACWI) and very cheap for anything non-cap-weighted.
The reason for the webinar is how you can get into it. Under a rule called a 351 exchange, you can hand your existing shares over as the starting portfolio ("seed") of a new ETF and receive ETF shares back, without that swap counting as a sale — so no capital-gains tax bill on the day. That matters for someone sitting on a huge, long-held winner they're afraid to sell. Two limits apply: no single stock you contribute can be more than 25% of what you put in, and your top five can't be more than 50%, so you need roughly 11–12 different names (broad index ETFs like SPY count as their underlying holdings, which helps). And it is a deferral, not an escape — you still owe the tax whenever the fund eventually sells those positions, and Faber is blunt that the eventual bill will likely be bigger, just later.
TAX deliberately buys US companies that pay little or no dividend. That sounds backwards until you follow the cash: a dividend takes money out of a business, hands it to you, and — if you hold the stock in a normal taxable account — the government takes a slice before you can reinvest what's left. If your goal is simply to grow the pile, that round trip is pure leakage. A company that keeps the cash, or buys back its own shares instead, achieves the same thing without the toll booth.
Faber calls this his favourite idea and his worst marketing idea, and he's right about the marketing: there is an enormous culture built around dividends as "passive income," and a fund that promises fewer dividends is a hard sell. Right now the drag is small versus the S&P 500, which yields only about 1%; the real comparison is against high-dividend funds, which historically paid 6–10% and taxed their holders accordingly. It remains one of Cambria's smallest funds, though he believes the concept eventually becomes a $100bn category.
"Shareholder yield" is Faber's alternative to dividend investing. A company can return cash to owners in three ways: pay a dividend, buy back its own shares, or pay down debt. Shareholder yield counts all three together — and crucially counts buybacks net of new shares issued. That last bit is the whole edge: a firm can announce a 5% buyback while quietly handing management 7% a year in new stock, so its real return to shareholders is negative. Most dividend funds never look, which is why he argues they miss the biggest channel — buybacks have exceeded dividends for over twenty years.
SYLD is the US version, launched thirteen years ago, and its ten-year record sits in the top decile of its category (some measures top 5%). It ignores style boxes — any size, any sector — with a cap so it can't concentrate more than a third in one sector. He positions it as a straight swap for a plain US stock fund rather than an exotic add-on.
Same machinery as SYLD — buy the companies returning the most real cash to shareholders through dividends, net buybacks and debt paydown — but applied to developed markets outside the US. It also just passed its ten-year mark in the top decile of its peer group.
It sits at the intersection of two of his arguments. First, American investors own startlingly little foreign stock, which he thinks is a mistake in itself. Second, foreign markets are far cheaper than the US on long-run valuation measures and have quietly beaten the S&P for two straight years. FYLD is his way of owning that gap without buying whatever happens to be the biggest company abroad.
The emerging-markets member of the same three-fund family, and the one that most recently crossed its ten-year anniversary — also top decile over that decade. It applies the identical net-cash-return screen to companies in developing countries, agnostic to size, sector and country, with caps to stop any one country or sector dominating.
In his core/satellite framing, this is a building block rather than a bet: if you already hold a generic emerging-markets index fund, he suggests swapping it out for EYLD and getting a portfolio tilted toward companies that actually hand cash back, rather than one tilted toward whichever emerging company is largest.
TRTY is a one-ticket portfolio that blends two opposite philosophies in equal halves. One half is a plain buy-and-hold global allocation across stocks, bonds and real assets — you own everything and sit still. The other half is trend following: it only holds what is currently going up, and when markets roll over it sells and can sit almost entirely in cash and bonds. The idea is that the buy-and-hold half keeps you invested through the years when trend gets whipsawed, and the trend half gets you out of the way of a genuine bear market.
The disclosure that carries the most weight here isn't a performance number: it's Cambria's largest allocation fund, and Faber says plainly that TRTY is "what I do with most of my money." Whether that reassures you or simply tells you the manager is his own biggest customer is the reader's call — but he did put it on the record.
Most value funds pick cheap companies. GVAL picks cheap countries. Cambria ranks about 45 national stock markets on long-run valuation — chiefly the CAPE ratio, which averages a market's inflation-adjusted earnings over ten years so a single boom or bust year can't distort it, cross-checked against cash flow, dividends and book value — then buys the cheapest dozen or fifteen, taking ten large stocks from each. It rebalances only once a year and sometimes makes no trades at all.
The resulting basket sits at CAPE ratios in the high single digits to low teens, against the US at roughly 42, and countries usually only get that cheap after falling 50–80%. Faber is candid about the cost of this discipline: the fund launched in 2014 and spent its first six years being beaten by an American market that "creamed everything." The bet is simply that starting valuation eventually asserts itself — the same claim as his CAPE-40 statistic, applied in reverse.
GAA is the plainest thing Cambria sells: a single fund holding a spread of global stocks, bonds and real assets that you buy and then leave alone. No timing, no hedging, no trend signals. In his core/satellite map it sits at the passive end of the four allocation funds, and it is one of the two halves that TRTY blends together.
The role it plays in his argument is as the baseline — the "own everything, globally, and don't tinker" portfolio that his more active funds are measured against and combined with.
GMOM is the mirror image of GAA over the same global menu of assets. Instead of holding everything permanently, it holds only what is currently trending upward, and it is allowed to become very concentrated — or to move entirely into cash and short-term bonds if nothing is working. That last permission is the point: it's designed to step aside in a sustained downturn rather than ride it out.
He gives an unusually transparent read of its current book: guess what's going up, and that's what it owns — "equities, some sectors, a smattering of commodities." He also concedes trend following is where he departs furthest from a conventional allocation, so a buyer should expect it to look strange at times relative to a standard portfolio.
VAMO owns stocks chosen on value and momentum, but its distinguishing feature is a dial: it can hedge anywhere from 0% to 100% of the portfolio using futures — effectively taking out insurance that cancels part of its own market exposure when conditions warrant. Faber describes it as a satellite holding "for the nervous nellies that want equity exposure but want to be hedged."
What makes it worth noting today is its live positioning: it is currently 50% hedged, and his stated reason is exactly his macro view — "the broad market's expensive but going up." That is the yellow-light call expressed as a position rather than an opinion: not out of the market, not fully in it.
BLDG holds real-estate investment trusts (REITs) from around the world — companies that own income-producing property and pass most of the rent through to shareholders. Faber brings it up as the fix for the third of the three mistakes he sees in typical American portfolios: no real assets at all, meaning no property, commodities or inflation-linked bonds.
That fits his inflation view — if "all roads lead to inflation," you want to own things rather than lend money at a fixed rate. His comment on it here is straightforward and includes a note of surprise: a five-star-rated fund that is "having a great year," with REIT returns better than he expected in 2026.
TYLD is Cambria's trend-based bond fund: it moves among the different slices of the bond market — government, corporate, high-yield, different maturities — owning whichever are trending up, and stepping away from those that aren't. A sibling fund does the same job on a value basis, only moving into riskier bonds when the extra yield genuinely compensates for the risk.
He likes the funds; he does not like the asset class right now, and says so repeatedly — "one of my hills to die on is there's not enough yield in fixed income." Compared with simply holding Treasury bills, nothing further out on the risk curve pays enough, which is why the two bond funds currently hold barely overlapping positions. He also makes a call almost nobody else is making: rates "could and should go higher," which would hurt existing bondholders. Read together, that's a reason to treat this as a tool he's holding in reserve rather than a recommendation of the moment.
TAIL is portfolio insurance. It parks its money in ten-year US Treasury bonds and spends a small amount continuously buying "put options" on the US stock market — contracts that pay off only if stocks fall sharply. Like any insurance policy, it costs a little every year and pays nothing in a good year. This has been a good year, so, as Faber notes without spin, it is down.
His framing is honest about what it is for: if you specifically want to "bet on the market going down or puking, that's a pretty good choice," and it becomes valuable if and when US stocks do badly. It is a hedge bought deliberately, not a fund to own for growth — and it makes most sense alongside the CAPE-44 worry rather than instead of being invested.
ENDW is a recently launched fund that tries to replicate the aggressive, diversified mix a large university endowment runs: roughly 70% equities, 30% fixed income, 20% real assets and 20% alternatives. Those add to more than 100% on purpose — the fund uses leverage to run about 140% gross exposure, meaning it borrows to hold more than the money invested in it.
Leverage cuts both ways, and Faber says so directly: "awesome portfolio, but it's going to have some juice to it" and it "will be volatile at some point." It is name-checked here as one of Cambria's earlier 351 conversions rather than pitched, and the volatility caveat is his own, which is why it sits neutral here rather than alongside the funds he actively argues for.
FAIL was the foreign-stock version of TAIL — insurance against a crash in international equities — and it is the one fund Cambria actually shut down. The story is a useful lesson in product-market fit rather than a live idea. Cambria originally planned four tail-risk funds covering US stocks, foreign stocks, long-dated bonds and corporate/junk debt; the bond one was overtaken by events when rates went from zero to five, and the corporate/junk one may still launch when credit spreads are thin enough to be worth insuring against.
FAIL died because its buyer didn't exist. Almost no American investors own foreign stocks in the first place; those who do consider them already cheap after fifteen or twenty flat years and see no reason to hedge; and anyone who does want to hedge international exposure tends to short the more expensive US market instead. Faber notes for context that Cambria's policy is never to close a fund for small assets or a bad five-year stretch — only when the reason is structural, as here.
Summary & timestamps derived from the public YouTube video (transcript in transcript.txt) for personal study. This was a product webinar by the manager of the funds discussed — treat every stance as promotional. Not investment advice. © Cambria Investment Management / The Meb Faber Show for source material.