The Bridge Ep. 11: Expensive Isn't a Bubble

Sonali Basak, Chief Investment Strategist at iCapital, sits down with Cliff Asness, Co-Founder AQR Capital Management, to discuss why today's "expensive" and "bubble" are not the same thing, and why the difference matters more than most investors think. With pockets of froth across today's market, Asness explains why he sets a deliberately high bar before calling a bubble, and why profiting from a bubble you correctly identify is far harder than it looks.

The conversation moves from there into the mechanics of staying disciplined when markets get extreme. Asness makes the case that quantitative investing is an extension of valuation discipline rather than a replacement for it, that value has evolved beyond simply buying cheap toward paying a fair price for quality, and that crowding has quietly become one of the biggest risks to any strategy as more capital chases the same trades. His core conviction is that the edge is not calling turning points, but in navigating dispersion, respecting the limits of prediction, and avoiding false precision.