YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Milgram

lines on the record: 113
first: 2025-08-05
most recent: 2025-08-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It is. I mean, there's no other way to understand it in that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Again, I go back to, we see this expressing itself in the political sphere because people are looking for some kind of outlet, some sort of expression of this frustration because they feel it in their everyday lives and their businesses and how they go about work. So these companies just have fewer resources. They have less to stand on. And so they have less bargaining power.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think market power, so the middle market companies typically don't serve the end consumer. They typically serve the larger public company. So those larger public companies which have pricing power with their customer, who tends to be the end consumer, also have pricing power over their supply chain. So they're pushing costs, they're pushing financing down onto those middle market companies while taking that margin.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who owns them? It's a mix. It tends to be smaller sponsors families, some individuals. These are companies that a lot of the management teams have grown up inside the companies, maybe their families that control them, maybe not. If they do have professional management teams, oftentimes these are not management teams that went through the GE training program. As a consequence, they're making intuition-based decisions or pattern recognition-based decisions. They're not relying on what you and I might think of as data-driven decision making. Your second question was,”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On Jim Kramer, and he's screaming about it's a bye, bye, bye. But we also understand that when you go home at night and you're thinking about the world, you have this feeling that things are tough.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Less room for maneuvering, less room for error. Companies do also tend to have Structurally constrained or more difficult balance sheet. Middle market tends to access bank finance rather than, let's say, broadly syndicated loans or private credit, which will have more flexible covenants and characteristics to the credit agreements. So it's a tighter, less flexible capital structure they're starting with. When we look at cash flow in those two areas, we see net profits after tax in the public market, strong, persistently growing. When we look in the middle market, we see that that net profits after tax is down almost 200% over the measurement period. So that is consistently negative over the past two years. It's a troubling place for the middle market. Like I said earlier, there's this nagging feeling that everyone has that there's trouble in the economy. What we do in that data set is put some numbers to that. We can illustrate to people, look, we understand what you're seeing in the ticker tape economy. We understand what you see when you turn.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Place to exist Margins in the middle market Also much, much, much narrower So if the public market Average has a mid teen starting EBITDA margin.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is very true when you have to make that contractual payment. Is I'll say generally speaking non negotiable. To a point where you have to make a hard decision about do I need to restructure or can I persist? We looked at the data set over time. We've seen a few important characteristics. The middle market Essentially, it deteriorates every year Just gets worse and worse and worse. Now we compare that data versus”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or four years. Those three or four years post COVID, what we've seen is a real decline in the earnings power in the US middle market. We look at a lot of factors, we look at EBITDA, we look at margins, we're looking at Pure cash flow. We're looking at leverage and liabilities. importantly we focus on Interest coverage The end of the day, companies can remain insolvent for a long time. First boss on Wall Street used to say nothing so focuses the mind like a coupon payment.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a great data set that gives us a good insight into a broad section of the US middle market. A good friend of mine ran a company called Rapid Ratings. Rapid Ratings does credit counterparty risk assessment For the Fortune 500. So they'll assess the supply chains, the vendor relationships, trade relationships of large companies. They're their... Vender relationships and other supply relationships and create a financial health score. Then that Fortune 500 company uses to determine terms of trade and how they're going to deal with that supplier or trade counterparty. We worked with them taking that anonymized data. winnowing it down to the US middle market. And for us, that's companies between $100 and $750 million of total enterprise value.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start with Marvelgate, we focus on the middle market. And the reason we focus on the middle market is A, it's one third of US economy. And by the way, over time, it has represented something north of two-thirds of all restructurings, bankruptcies, et cetera. So it's the area of the most, let's say, action. It's also the area of the economy. People know the least amount about. The companies there don't file publicly their financial statements. They typically aren't listed on stock exchanges. So the only people who really have an insight into how the middle market is doing are individual lenders to it, to individual companies or individual owners of individual companies. And so a lot of the talk about the middle market tends to be anecdotal. It tends to be self-referential. It's inferred.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For people to understand. But when we say K-shaped economy, it immediately resonates with people because they see it themselves. They feel it in real time. They understand intuitively that there are those who are having fabulous success, but they also understand that there are people and companies that are just not getting their piece of the pie.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the same time, they have this internal notion that there are other parts that are just worse than it seems, that there's a nagging slowness or a nagging underperformance to the economy in broad areas. They can't quite put their finger on it because they look at CNBC and Bloomberg and they read the Wall Street Journal and there's green arrows in the ticker tape economy. companies and those wealthy individuals who have access to capital who have access to resources and can drive unbelievable profits and great outcomes. But there's a broad part of the economy. And I think we see this in the political sector being expressed pretty acutely. Broad pieces of the economy that are just dissatisfied with their earnings power, with their ability to benefit from the promise of the American economic system. That discrepancy, I think, is really hard.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's a notion we talk a lot about with investors and with the companies that we invest in. Everybody in the US economy at least has this underlying sense that there are some parts of our economy that are doing exceptionally well.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source