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BE Bill Eigen On Animal Spirits Podcast

“I don't buy hurricane insurance when the hurricane's in the process of ripping my roof off, like everyone else does. I buy hurricane insurance when the weather forecast is saying there's no chance of a hurricane forever.”

Animal Spirits Podcast · October 2026

“I don't buy hurricane insurance when the hurricane's in the process of ripping my roof off, like everyone else does. I buy hurricane insurance when the weather forecast is saying there's no chance of a hurricane forever.” — Bill Eigen, Animal Spirits Podcast

Fund manager Eigen explaining why he holds a lot of cash and is short credit through credit default swaps while protection is at its cheapest ever. Michael Batnick had asked whether he was waiting for things to go sideways.

Animal Spirits Podcast · 2026-10-12 Listen to the episode → More from Bill Eigen →

Transcript

Animal Spirits Podcast Around 23:48 into the episode
Bill Eigen

Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Batnick

So you are, you are probably not to put trades in your mouth, but you're probably very anxiously licking your lips for this to go a little bit sideways.

Bill Eigen

Well, I love providing liquidity into a marketplace that has to have it. Like I'm the guy, I don't buy hurricane insurance when the hurricane's in the process of ripping my roof off, like everyone else does. I buy hurricane insurance when the weather forecast is saying there's no chance of a hurricane forever. Like you're never going to have one. And insurance against credit protection is literally the cheapest it's ever been. If not anymore, like a couple of weeks ago, it was and we kept adding. So not only am I holding a lot of cash, I'm also for every dollar I'm long, I'm roughly, you know, 30 cents short, a combination of credit default swaps on the investment grade indices, the high yield indices, and then actually a couple of, you know, and I say some individual names as well that I think are very, you know, very vulnerable here.

Michael Batnick

Let me ask you about this. So speaking of credit default swaps, I'm curious, if you look at some of the credit default swaps on hyperscalers, obviously Oracle is sort of in its own thing because it's so exposed. Are people buying that because they really think that there is an X percent chance that…

Bill Eigen

It's a combination of things. When I look at like a meta, do I really think there's a high likelihood that they're not going to be able to pay their bills? Probably not. And same with Microsoft, certainly not. Amazon, all good companies. But what all these companies have done is they've taken on…

Ben Carlson

So it is interesting to think about the fact that many of these tech leaders have never really dealt with debt of this size before, obviously. But what would you put the probability of, if you're looking at this in terms of baselines, what is the probability that they do thread the needle here? And…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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