Podcast

Roxanna Islam, head of sector and industry research at VettaFi, says that cautious retail investors have been looking for safety and yield and that while closed-end funds have traditionally filled that bill, investors in ETFs that buy closed-end funds have been avoiding a lot of the struggles by turning elsewhere to invest.

Robert Bush, director of closed-end products at Calamos Investments, says that with risk-free money from bank accounts and Treasury bonds at high levels -- and with leverage costs up in response to those higher rates -- investors can have a lot of choices for good income without ever considering closed-end funds.

Duncan Farley, manager of the BlueBay Destra International Event-Driven Credit Fund -- which Morningstar places at the very top of its peer group over its five-year existence -- talks about how special situations are plentiful in the current marketplace...

John Cole Scott, president of Closed-End Fund Advisors -- and the chairman of the Active Investment Company Alliance -- returns to The NAVigator noting that the discounts on muni funds have continued to get wider.

Colin McBurnette, senior portfolio manager at the Angel Oak Funds, says that while high-rate and high-inflationary conditions have made a lot of investors worry about the housing market, those conditions -- along with wide spreads and low housing stocks creating an imbalance in the supply-and-demand dynamic -- have created real opportunities in the space.

Mitchel Penn, managing director of equity research at Oppenheimer and Co., says that higher interest rates and stubborn inflation have impacted business development companies in terms of both defaults and leverage, but he notes that BDC executives have taken steps to minimize the impacts.

Veteran money manager David Tepper, president of Tepper Capital Management, looks at four of the oldest closed-end funds -- Adams Diversified Equity, Central Securities, General American Investors and Tri-Continental -- that he has owned for decades, but which remain relevant and effective today, and which are trading at attractive discounts now.

John Cole Scott, president, Closed-End Fund Advisors -- chairman of the Active Investment Company Alliance -- discusses portfolio construction and the many factors that go into a diversified safe and solid separately managed account with closed-end funds and business-development companies as the primary focus.

In a bonus episode of The NAVigator, John Cole Scott, president of Closed-End Fund Advisors and the chairman of the Active Investment Company Alliance, discusses the historic level of deep discounts he is seeing in closed-end funds, and how that translates to buying opportunities now.

Christian Munafo, chief investment officer at Liberty Street Advisors -- which runs the Private Shares Fund -- says that the perceived higher risks in challenging environments like the one we are facing today often lead to attractive opportunities...