Mostly Voices [0:00]

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. A different drummer.

Mostly Mary [0:18]

And now, coming to you from dead center on your dial, welcome to Risk Parity Radio, where we explore alternatives and asset allocations for the do-it-yourself investor. Broadcasting to you now from the comfort of his easy chair, here is your host, Frank Vasquez.

Mostly Uncle Frank [0:41]

Thank you, Mary, and welcome to episode 126 of Risk Parity Radio. Today on Risk Parity Radio, it is time for our weekly portfolio reviews of the seven sample portfolios that you can find on the portfolios page at www.riskparityradio.com. But before that, I'm intrigued by this, how you say, emails. And we have three emails today to look at from October. First off, our first email is from Christopher.

Mostly Mary [1:17]

And Christopher writes, hi Frank, I stumbled upon your podcast when searching for investment and financial podcasts on Spotify. I have enjoyed every episode that I have listened to. Thank you for your time and all the material that you produce. I have a few questions and would really appreciate your opinions. Question one. Okay, I like risk parity. What do I do with a company 401k that has dismal options? No gold, no treasuries. It does have some target date funds, but under the hood, those are almost exclusively stocks. And testing the correlation, About 90 to 95% correlated to the market. I don't have any conclusions, but my thoughts are：One, continue contributing enough to the 401 to obtain the entire company match. It seems like foregoing free money is a bad decision. The company matches 50 cents on the dollar up to $4,400, so this would require an $8,800 contribution from me. I max out my 401 so I could use the remaining amount up to the max, $10,700, in my own IRA where I have access to anything I want. Do you think keeping the match is more important than establishing a more grounded risk parity portfolio? Further, how worried should I be if I am not going to touch my 401 for about 25 years? Question two, due to my previously described 401 dilemma, I am very curious how dollar cost averaging influences volatility, risk, et cetera. How does dollar cost averaging compare for a risk parity portfolio versus something like a 70-30 stocks and bonds? Given constant contributions, for example, $1,000 per month, it would seem that the more volatile portfolio to exhibit the most gain following a return to the mean. When considering volatility of a portfolio, how do I properly evaluate for the future contribution of cash? For example, a $500,000 portfolio that I contribute $1,000 a month to for 10 years. That's $240,000 of cash, which is approximately 50% of the current portfolio value. Would I need to amortize my contributions somehow to include them? Is it reasonable to assume that dollar cost averaging reduces volatility? Does dollar cost averaging have the additional upside of buying assets during downturns and therefore increasing gains? Question 3：I recently listened to episode 49 and really appreciate the Bridgewater paper that was included in the show notes. Given the drawdown from the Bridgewater all-weather strategy for Q09 on page 11, it seems that the all-weather strategy suffers from optimizing for approximately 1999 to 2009. Looking at projected drawdowns prior to 1999, it seems as though the strategies are comparable. There are several occasions where the all-weather strategy exhibits more drawdown than the conventional beta. Given this graphic, why should an investor not be skeptical of the all-weather risk parity strategy? Do you think that this graph suffers from bias that is optimized for the 1999-2009 period? If bias is to blame, then how would that drive changes to macro asset allocation and what changes should be made? And of course, I have to ask, if a team of very smart people can't get this right, then how do I avoid being overwhelmed by the problem? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. How will I know which episode to listen to? Cheers, CH.

Mostly Uncle Frank [4:55]

All right, we have a lot to chew on here. We have the tools, we have the talent. Now, your first question pertains to contributing to your 401k. and it sounds like you've got a long ways to go since you mentioned not touching your 401k for 25 years. So where you are really is in your accumulation phase, in your early accumulation phase, and you don't really need a risk parity or retirement style portfolio in your accumulation phase, at least that early on. And the reason you don't need it is because you're not drawing down on the money and you're not going to be drawing down on the money anytime soon. Therefore, you don't care about short-term volatility. Forget about it.

Mostly Voices [5:40]

And by short-term, I mean up to a decade long.

Mostly Uncle Frank [5:45]

You can ride through that. In fact, you should ride through that. So what that means is you should just contribute as much as you can and get those matches and other things. And someone like you should really be a hundred percent equities. And whether you do that in one total market fund or a combination of a total market fund and a small cap value fund or add a couple other ones, that's not really important. The macro allocation principle says what's important is the macro allocations. And in this case, we're talking about a macro allocation of 100% in stocks. So you can start with that and then to the extent you want to or need to develop risk parity components to your portfolio. You can do that later. You can do it in your IRA or your other accounts outside of the 401k. Now, why would you want to do that? There are two reasons. Maybe you're just a conservative investor and you are content with taking a slightly lower return in exchange for not knowing that your portfolio is going to be potentially down for a decade, because the worst thing you can do in investing is panic when things are not going well and sell out of whatever you're doing. So this kind of portfolio would make sense for somebody who feels like they would panic in a downturn. The other place a person in your position might use a risk parity style portfolio is if you were saving separately for an intermediate term goal, so perhaps you are trying to save up for a down payment on a house that you're thinking of, well, 5 to 10 years down the road, I'm going to do that. You could invest that money in a risk parity style portfolio, knowing that chances are if there is a downturn, it's going to be three years or less for your portfolio. And so you'd have some confidence you can get some growth in the intermediate term while not screwing up your overall plans for that. that works best if your time for using the money is a little bit flexible. And that's what my own children do with their intermediate type funds. They put it in a golden ratio kind of portfolio. So get all your matches and get going because it's the saving and investing at this point in time that is the important thing, not the management of returns or management of a portfolio. You just don't have enough in there. to make that a very interesting thing to even mess around with. What I like to say is you can just put it all in one total market fund until you have about $100,000 and then come back and look at it later. That'll take you a few years. And in the meantime, read, learn, because you have plenty of time to modify that portfolio and fiddling around with it now when there's $20,000 or $30,000 in it. is pretty much a waste of your time. So don't do that. Don't get obsessed with that part of investing at this point in time. Don't be saucy with me, Bernaise. All right, now, so you're asking about how does dollar cost averaging influence volatility risk, et cetera. Well, you can really simplify this question. When you were dollar cost averaging, you're simply not putting money into the market. assuming you have the money that's available, you're not putting it in. So instead of having a portfolio with $100,000 invested, you have a portfolio with $50,000 invested. What does that mean? It's going to have half the volatility and half the returns of the $100,000 portfolio. It's that simple. So not investing money and keeping it in cash reduces both the volatility and the returns proportionally. And the comparison there you should be making is thinking about I could have a $100,000 portfolio that's all invested, or I could have this $100,000 portfolio that's $50,000 in cash and $50,000 invested. And if you think about it that way, you can see the obvious conclusion. And that is going to be true regardless of how you slice up the investing of the cash. It just makes your calculations really complicated when you're talking about, well, I'm going from this amount invested to this amount invested percentage wise over this period of time. You could put that all on an Excel spreadsheet and come out with calculations, but it's not that interesting. It's not going to change based on your schedule of putting the money in. And this also ties back into the first question in this way. you can think about your future investments as one big pot of future cash. So if you are 25 years old, you're thinking, I'm going to contribute to retirement accounts, etc. Savings investing for 25 years and I'm going to retire at 50. Suppose that's your plan. Suppose you plan to put in an average of $20,000 a year just for a round number. So that is $500,000 over 25 years and that money is now sitting in an account labeled future cash and you call it future cash because you're not allowed to invest it you're forced to dollar cost average because the money is not available. So what does that tell you? It tells you this that it makes the most sense for you to get as much money out the door and into risky investments like a total stock market fund right away because that first year you're only allowed to invest 4% of your $500,000 in future cash. And so at the end of that year you will have what looks like $475,000, I'm sorry, $480,000 of future cash and $20,000 invested. And so you can see that you are really taking low risk, even totally invested. with those first steps that you take. What you should not be obsessed with is trying to schedule all this out as to what you think you're going to end up with. And I know that's tempting and I know that's what people want to do, but the fact of the matter is five or 10 years into this, you don't know what your returns are going to be in those five to 10 years. You could be way ahead of the game, you could be way behind the game, and there's no way of knowing no matter how many different numbers you put into a spreadsheet or calculator, it's just going to be a ballpark estimate. So accept that. Accept that we live in a situation where we don't know the timing of these things. What we know is that we invest in companies that are trying to make money and other assets that pay returns that we are going to accumulate wealth over time. And this also plays into what dollar cost averaging does. If you dollar cost average through a trough, through a downturn, and then it comes back up to even, you will have made money. The best example of that is somebody who started investing in the stock market at the stock market crash in 1929. Now, the stock market did not return to that level for 25 years until 1954. But if you had invested steadily through that whole big trough for your 25 years, suppose we're on one of those precipices, that person made an annualized return of over 11%, even though at the end of the term, the stock market was in exactly the same place it was when they started investing because they invested through the trough and that's how dollar cost averaging can help you if the markets are performing poorly during the time you're investing. And I suppose finally worrying about the volatility of your portfolio is not really a worry you have during your accumulation phase because your plan is to ride out the volatility. You worry about volatility when you have stopped contributing and you're drawing down on the portfolio and then it becomes a primary concern in terms of how much money you can expect to take from the portfolio. And that's why we have risk parity style portfolios, because they take that into account. In the accumulation phase, your best strategy is to get as much money as you can into the highest yielding assets, consistently yielding assets, namely the stock market, as early as you can, and just wait. the only way volatility would come into play in that plan again is if you were to panic in a downturn, which is the one thing you cannot do with that plan. You can't sell out when your stocks are low. You have to keep investing through the entire period. and that's how it works and how it doesn't work depending on your behavior. Never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected. I am going to link to a nice article from Michael Kitces about the four phases of investing, which are earning, saving, investing, and then investing to preserve your assets because your behavior should be different in these different phases and where it sounds like you are right now is in those first two phases. Think McFly, think! Where the portfolios that we talk about here are most directed are people in the third and fourth phases. All right, as to your third question about episode 49 and this paper Bridgewater All-Weather Strategy, Fourth Quarter 2009. And I will re-link to that in the show notes so people can see it. You did put this graph I note in your email, but I think you've misinterpreted the graph because you have assumed that what's on this page are two comparable portfolios. Wrong! What you should be looking at is first of all, go to page 10 of this where you do see two comparable portfolios. And what I mean by that is those portfolios are designed to have the same returns, both 9.8 in that circumstance. Yes. And when you look at what's on page 10, you see that the risk parity style portfolio has the same return, but it's much less volatile. What you are looking at on page 11 of this is an example where they have added risk probably through leverage to the risk parity style portfolio so that it has similar volatility characteristics to the other reference portfolio they're talking about. I should say, by the way, neither of the portfolios they're talking about is like the ones that are in our sample portfolios. These are different kinds of portfolios, a lot more complicated assets in them. But this is just for illustration. So don't say the all-weather strategy has anything to do with our first sample portfolio, for example. So anyway, looking at page 11, what you see is they've added leverage to the risk parity style portfolio. And so its returns are over 13% compared with the other portfolio that is only at 9.8%. So you're getting a lot better higher returns with the same volatility in that example.

Mostly Voices [17:39]

I did not know that.

Mostly Uncle Frank [17:42]

And that's what you can do in some of these experimental portfolios that we've got in our sample portfolios. Yeah, baby, yeah! If you add leverage to a risk parity style portfolio, you can increase the returns without creating a portfolio that has substantially more volatility or risk than somebody else's standard portfolio. That was weird, wild stuff. So, no, I don't think there's any issue of optimization in particular from 1999 to 2009 because you're not actually looking at the right comparison. Forget about it. Look at the one on page 10 and you'll see that the Risk Parity Style portfolio is less volatile in a lot of different periods and most of different periods over the course of the entire data set which goes back to 1970. If you'd like to see this in other graphical ways, the easiest thing to do is go to Portfolio Charts, www.portfoliocharts. com, and put your portfolios in there and they'll give you a bunch of different graphical representations of returns over time and you can change the asset mixes and things like that. Look at something particular called the Heat Map because that gives you a nice illustration of when particular portfolios had bad years, how long that bad period lasted, and those are in red, and whereas the good periods are in blue, and what you'll see when you put in risk parity style portfolios, there's a lot more blue on those maps than for other kinds of portfolios because they don't have these 13-year drawdowns like some of these standard portfolios have. The money in your account, it didn't do too well, it's gone. And finally, as to finding what episode answers your question, simply go to the podcast page of the website www.riskparriyradio.com, put your name in as a search term. You can search all the podcasts and all the show notes. And since in the show notes I identify the first names of the people sending in the questions, yours will pop up. Just put your name in there and You'll see the episode. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

Mostly Voices [19:59]

I do what I'm told.

Mostly Uncle Frank [20:03]

But thank you for that email. I think it raises a lot of interesting issues that people need to think about as they go forward on their investing journey, particularly as to what part of their investing journey they are in and what they should care about at that particular part of their investing journey. Because what you care about changes over time. And the longer you go forward, the more you accumulate, the more you should be concerned about things like volatility and drawdowns and issues of that nature. Those things are interesting at the beginning, but they're not terribly critical to what you're doing.

Mostly Voices [20:47]

Second off.

Mostly Uncle Frank [20:51]

Second off, we have an email from John B. John B. Reminds me of my days at sea as a youth.

Mostly Mary [21:06]

Well, maybe that was a different John B. Anyway, John B. Writes. Hi, Frank. I've been listening for several months now and love the podcast. Thanks for doing this. One thing I've struggled to understand is how you calculate the monthly distributions. Could you explain that in detail? I'm just not making the linkage between 5% distribution and dividing by 240, for example. Thanks, John.

Mostly Uncle Frank [21:38]

Well, I really like this question because it's very easy for me to answer. Groovy baby! So this is the way we calculate the monthly distributions. For those portfolios that are taking out 5% annualized, that's 5% over the course of a year. Since we are taking distributions out monthly, we need to divide that 5% figure by 12. Now, another way of calculating 5% of a total is to divide it by 20. So whether you take 100 and divide it by 20 and get 5, or you take 100 and multiply it times 0.05, you're still going to get 5. And then you divide that by 12. So if you divide something by 20 and then divide it by 12, it's the same thing as dividing it by 240. And that's where the 240 then comes from because it accounts for not only the annualized distribution, but also the fact that there are 12 months in the year and we're taking out the money on that kind of a schedule. Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave. But if you're using this kind of a schedule, it's nice to be able to just look at what your total is and know easily, quickly, what is your monthly distribution going to look like because you just have that one number that you need to divide in it. and then you don't need to go through the whole double calculation. And that's all that's meant to do is give you a quick way of doing the calculation in one step. Yeah, baby, yeah! And that should bring that one home and put it to bed.

Mostly Voices [23:16]

Let me go home. I wanna go home. Yeah, yeah, well, I feel so broke up. I wanna go home. Thank you for that email. Last off.

Mostly Uncle Frank [23:36]

Last off we have an email from Value Stock Geek and Value Stock Geek writes.

Mostly Mary [23:45]

Frank, thanks for featuring the weird portfolio on your podcast. I listened to many episodes and really enjoyed it. We are aligned on many of our views. My own take on risk parity has really helped me sleep better at night. For much of my investing career, I wasted a lot of time worried about macro forces like inflation, wondering if the stock market is in a bubble, where interest rates are headed, if we're going to have a recession, if the dollar is going to be strong, weak, etc. Sadly, I learned that I am not Stanley Druckenmiller. Risk parity stopped all of that speculation and worry for me. That is why it's so cool that you're spreading the message. I hope it helps cure people who suffer from a similar speculative affliction. Also, I thought you might like this tool over at the Bogleheads Forum. It is an incredibly useful spreadsheet that features returns for various asset classes going back extremely far in history so you can model risk parity portfolios further back than 1970. Anyway, please keep up the great work with the podcast. I think it is doing a lot of good. VSG.

Mostly Uncle Frank [24:51]

Well, thank you for that email. It's very nice to get Messages like this one, and to know that people are listening and appreciate what's going on here. You are talking about the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind. For reference for everyone else, the episode he's referring to is episode 113, where we were asked a question about Value Stock Geeks portfolio and website, and there's a link to that. in those show notes. I'll also try and include the article in these show notes. And I will also include this tool over at the Bogleheads Forum for those who like to collect even more investing tools. I do know that the writer of the Portfolio Charts site uses data that he got some from the Bogleheads Forum and some from other places. So it's incorporated there too.

Mostly Voices [25:51]

We use the buddy system. No more flying solo.

Mostly Uncle Frank [25:55]

Although he does not go back further than 1970. And as for your observation about the failure of the prognosticators with their crystal balls to predict things. My name's Sonia.

Mostly Voices [26:12]

I'm going to be showing you the crystal ball and how to use it or how I use it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [26:16]

Yes, we know what that sounds like. And we kind of heard that sound again this past week when we had been hearing prognostications for a number of months that the Fed was going to make this big announcement about the tapering and then of course everybody would sell all their bonds and we would have this kind of a situation. Dogs and cats living together, Mass hysteria.

Mostly Voices [26:44]

But of course, in this circumstance, the opposite thing happened.

Mostly Uncle Frank [26:48]

As soon as they made the announcement, interest rates began falling again. And so they were exactly wrong this time. Wrong! Wrong! And that's what happens when you look back at some point in the past and say, oh, this happened once when this happened, and therefore it's going to happen again that way. That's not the way the world works. That's not how it works.

Mostly Voices [27:10]

That's not how any of this works.

Mostly Uncle Frank [27:14]

It's a lot more complicated than that. And you don't have a crystal ball to predict it. And neither of those people who are doing those prognostications. Forget about it. They need to just pack it up and take it home, admit they don't know how to do this. Because nobody knows how to do that.

Mostly Voices [27:29]

We don't know. What do we know? You don't know. I don't know. Nobody knows.

Mostly Uncle Frank [27:37]

If you want to try and predict the interest rates, just go look at them. Go look at the bond market because you're not going to do any better trying to read tea leaves or playing with a crystal ball. A really big one here. But thank you very much for that email. And now for something completely different. And of course, the something completely different is our weekly portfolio reviews of the seven sample portfolios. on the portfolio's page at the website www.riskparriyradio.com but as we always do we whip through the markets to see how they did and then take a look at the portfolios the S P 500 was up two percent last week the NASDAQ was up 3.05% it was a good week for stocks gold was also up 1.96% so we were loving that I love gold And this was a week when we also saw the bonds rise after that announcement and they were up 0.88% for the week. That is TLT, that long-term treasury bond fund I'm referring to. REITs represented by the fund REET were up 1. 58% for the week. Commodities were down this week after their big run over the past few months. They've been down the last couple of weeks. PDBC, our representative commodities fund, was down 1.1% for the week. and finally Preferred Shares PFF was up 0.13% for the week. And as one would expect, the sample portfolios all had banner weeks as well since most of the components were up. So we'll just walk through them. The All Seasons Portfolio is our most conservative one. This one's only 30% in stocks and it's got 55% in treasury bonds and 7.5% in gold and 7.5% in commodities. It was up 1.36% for the week. It is up 13.51% since inception in July 2020. And our next portfolio, the Golden Butterfly. This one's 40% in stocks, split into a total market fund and a small cap value fund. 40% in treasury bonds, split into short-term and long-term and 20% in gold. It was up 2.54% for the week. It is up 24.79% since inception in July 2020. And our next portfolio is the Golden Ratio Portfolio. This one's 42% in stocks, 26% in long-term Treasuries, 16% in gold, 10% in REITs, and 6% in cash from where the distributions come from. It was up 2.19% for the week. and it is up 25.45% since inception in July 2020. Moving to the last of our three kind of bread and butter portfolios. This one is the Risk Parity Ultimate, and I won't go through all of the pieces of this one, but it's our most diversified portfolio. And it was up 2.27% for the week. It is up 25.89% since inception in July 2020. 2020. And now we're moving to our three experimental portfolios. The first one is the accelerated permanent portfolio. This one has two leveraged funds in it. TMF, a leveraged treasury bond fund at 27.5%, UPRO, a leveraged stock fund at 25%, and then it's also got 25% in PFF, Preferred Shares Fund and 22.5% in Gold, GLDM. It was up 3.03% for the week and so is up 29.87% since inception in July 2020. And then our most volatile and leveraged portfolio is the aggressive 5050. This one's 33% in that leveraged stock fund, UPRO, 33% in the leveraged bond fund, TMF. with the remaining 33% split into intermediate treasury bonds and preferred shares. It was the big winner this week, 3.54%. I think it's up nearly 8% in the past couple weeks. So it is up 38. 46% since inception in July 2020, which is a good thing because we are withdrawing from this portfolio at an annualized rate of 8% or double what you would normally consider to be a safe withdrawal rate. And finally, our newest portfolio, the Levered Golden Ratio, it's only been around since July 1 of this year. This one is 35% in a composite S&P 500 treasury bond fund called NTSX that is leveraged. It has 25% in gold, GLDM, 15% in a REIT O Realty Income Inc. And then 10% in each of a leveraged treasury bond fund, TMF, and it leveraged small cap fund, TNA, which was up radically last week. And then the remainder is 3% in a volatility fund, VIEXM, and 2% into Bitcoin related funds or crypto related funds. And so it was up 2.86% for the week. It is up 7.66% since inception this past July and is also doing just peachy. Yes! And that concludes our weekly review. All of that information is also there along with the actual printouts of the portfolios on the portfolios page at the website. And now we need to discuss what is now becoming a small fiasco here. We'll call it the NFT fiasco. This is why we can't have nice things. I did receive another email from Kelly about the problem he or she was having with trying to purchase one of these NFTs online. And of course, it's just a lot more complicated than you might think or desire. Mary says it's kind of like trying to go to Dringits bank and get your gold out.

Mostly Voices [33:59]

Hagrid, what exactly are these things? They're goblins, Harry. Clever as they come, goblins, but not the most friendly of beasts. Best stay close. Mr. Harry Potter wishes to make a withdrawal.

Mostly Uncle Frank [34:15]

And does Mr. Harry Potter have his key? But anyway, I did do a little more research as to how to actually buy something on OpenSea using Ethereum. And apparently what you need to do is transfer your Ethereum from where it ordinarily sits into the Polygon network, and then you can do it. And of course they're going to charge you a fee to move to the Polygon network. But you don't really know what it is, so you need to sort of check what it is, because evidently it's a highly variable fee that could be almost nothing or a couple hundred bucks. That's not an improvement. All of this leads me to be that old guy skeptic to say this crypto world or metaverse is not all that it's cracked up to be. At least it's not as easy to operate in that world as it is in plain old dollar land. Meta, meta, meta, meta, meta. We're gonna talk about a metaverse. Meta, meta, meta, meta. I thought I was supposed to be the robot. But anyway, I will link to those instructions that I found. Hopefully some of you will be able to actually go through with those transactions if you so desire. Again, this is an optional thing for charity. I have sold one. Somebody was able to do it. I don't know who bought it, but they bought it and it's off of my books, but there are 19 left there for anyone who wants one and can negotiate the Polygon network. You will find that it is you who are mistaken about a great many things. I should say we also ring the bell for Kelly because he or she being thwarted by the evil polygon did decide to become one of our patreons and that money also goes to the charity the Father McKenna Center. I sit on that board there and so we have Yet another Patreon patron, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for that, as well as the people who will be ultimately benefiting from it. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. But now I see our signal is beginning to fade. I will try not to clutter up too many of these shows with begging for money. But it is for charity. Bow to your sensei! If you have comments or questions for me, please send them to frank@riskparityradio.com that email is frank@riskparityradio.com and that is the best way to contact me. You can also go to the website www.riskparityradio.com and fill out the contact form and I should be able to get your message that way. If you haven't had a chance to do it, please like, subscribe to the podcast, give it some stars at Apple Podcasts, wherever you get it, and that would be greatly appreciated.

Mostly Voices [37:36]

Yes.

Mostly Uncle Frank [37:40]

I should also note that next weekend, Mary and I will be going to the Economy Conference in Cincinnati, which is put together by Diana Merriam, and there are going to be lots and lots of speakers there, and we will have our own little breakout session with yours truly to talk about withdrawal strategies and allocations in retirement. Yeah, baby, yeah! So, if you are in the neighborhood of Cincinnati, you want to drive down there next Saturday, or for next Saturday, check that out. the Economy Conference, and I'll see if I can put another link to that in the show notes. Thank you once again for tuning in. This is Frank Vasquez with Risk Parity Radio, signing off.

Mostly Mary [39:05]

the Risk Parity Radio show is hosted by Frank Vasquez. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only. and does not constitute financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. Please consult with your own advisors before taking any actions based on any information you have heard here, making sure to take into account your own personal circumstances.