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 [0:37]

Thank you, Mary, and welcome to Risk Parity Radio. If you are new here and wonder what we are talking about, you may wish to go back and listen to some of the foundational episodes for this program. And those are episodes 1-3-5-7-10. and nine. One of our listeners, Karen, has also reviewed the entire catalog and has additional recommendations as foundational episodes. Ain't nothing wrong with that. And Karen's recommendations are episodes 12, 14, 16, 19, 21, 56, and 82, in addition to the first five that I mentioned. Now, I realize women named Karen get a bad rap these days, but I assure you that all of our listeners are intelligent, thoughtful, and savvy. Yes! And don't forget that the host of this program is named after a hot dog. That's not an improvement.

Mostly Voices [1:42]

Lighten up, Francis.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:45]

But now onward to episode 192. This will be our last episode of season two of Risk Parity Radio. It's been two whole years since I started doing this. And it really doesn't seem like that long, but I guess it is. Inconceivable! So today we will be doing our weekly portfolio reviews of the seven sample portfolios you can find at www.riskparityradio.com on the Portfolios page. But we also did rebalancing last week for four of the portfolios, so we'll be doing a segment on rebalancing after the reviews.

Mostly Voices [2:29]

Yeah, baby, yeah!

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:33]

So there won't be any emails today, I'm afraid. It wouldn't be prudent at this juncture. But before we get to that, I'd just like to highlight what's going on over at Risk Parity Chronicles. Which is run by one of our listeners, Justin. Young America, yes sir. In a recent episode, one of our listeners pointed out that I had not made a new video tutorial recently for the YouTube channel.

Mostly Voices [3:02]

Will Laddie Frickin' Die?

Mostly Uncle Frank [3:05]

And Justin heard that and offered to make one. And so he has at my suggestion made a video tutorial about the Portfolio Charts Risk and Return Calculator or tool, which is a nice way of comparing your portfolio to those 18 professionally designed portfolios over at Portfolio Charts.

Mostly Voices [3:32]

No one can stop me.

Mostly Uncle Frank [3:35]

So I will link to that in the show notes and I have added it to our Risk Parity Radio YouTube channel as well. And I invite you to check it out because it's really a great example of the kind of business we are running here.

Mostly Voices [3:50]

I got this inkling. I got this idea for a business model. I just want to run it past you. Here's how it would work. You get a bunch of people around the world who are doing highly skilled work, but they're willing to do it for free Free and volunteer their time, 20, sometimes 30 hours a week. Oh, but I'm not done. And then what they create, they give it away rather than sell it. It's gonna be huge.

Mostly Uncle Frank [4:20]

But now getting to those weekly portfolio reviews, it was actually a good week for once out there in sample portfolio land. And looking at the markets themselves, we saw the S&P was up 2.55% for the week. The Nasdaq was up 3.33% for the week. Gold was up too. I love gold. Gold was up 0.94% for the week. Long-term treasury bonds represented by the fund TLT were up again last week. They were up 2.08% for the week. That makes them up over 5% in the last two weeks. REITs represented by the fund R E E T were the big winner last week. They were up 3.51% for the week. Commodities represented by the fund PDBC were down last week again. They were down 0.71% for the week. Preferred shares represented by the fund PFF were up 1.95% for the week. And now moving to the portfolios, the first one is this reference portfolio, the All Seasons, which is very conservative. It has only 30% in stocks and a total stock market fund, VTI, 55% in treasury bonds divided into long and intermediate term, and then the remaining 15% in commodities and gold, PBDC and GLDM. It was up 1.81% for the week. It is down 13.91% year to date and is down 1.21% since inception in July 2020 when we began this podcast.

Mostly Voices [6:06]

I didn't know you were doing one.

Mostly Uncle Frank [6:09]

And now we get to our three bread and butter portfolios that you might compare to a 60/40. First one is a golden butterfly. This one's 40% in stocks divided into a total stock market fund and a small cap value fund. It's got 40% in bonds divided into long and short term treasuries and 20% in gold GLDM. It was up 1.98% for the week. It is down 11.08% year to date and is up 10.60% since inception in July 2020. And despite the bad year we're all having, this portfolio is nearly back to where it started two years ago. It started at $10,000. It's at $9,964, which is after all the distributions that we've taken out over the past two years. And that's a very good performance considering what it's been through and how conservative it is. The next portfolio up is the Golden Ratio portfolio. This one's 42% in stocks and three different funds. 26% in long-term Treasuries, 16% in gold, 10% in REITs, and 6% in cash. It was up 2.29% for the week. It is down 14.45% year to date and is up 8.65% since inception in July 2020. Next one is the Risk Parity Ultimate. I won't go all through 15 of these funds now. There used to be 14, now there's 15, but we'll talk about that when we talk about rebalancing. It was up 2.19% for the week. It is down 17.56% year to date. It is up 4.35% since inception in July 2020. And now we'll move to the experimental portfolios.

Mostly Voices [8:07]

Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave.

Mostly Uncle Frank [8:15]

With a bunch of scraps! Which are seeming to have a renaissance these days. Well, it's going to need to be a much longer renaissance if they get back to anything resembling a decent performance. But anyway, all of these portfolios involve leveraged funds. And the first one is the Accelerated Permanent Portfolio. This one is 27% in a leveraged bond fund, TMF. 25% in a leveraged stock fund, UPRO, 25% in PFF, the preferred shares fund, and 22.5% in gold, GLDM. It was up 4.03% for the week, but it is still down 29.62% year to date and down 4.56% since inception in July 2020. And our next one, The aggressive 5050. This is the least diverse and most leveraged portfolio we have. It is 50% in stocks and 50% in bonds, which translates into 33% in a leveraged stock fund, UPRO, 33% in a leveraged bond fund, TMF, and then the remaining third is divided into PFF, the preferred shares fund, and VGIT, an intermediate Treasury Bond Fund, which act as ballast for the leveraged funds. It was a big winner last week. It was up 4.65% for the week. It was down 36.12% year to date and is down 6.79% since inception in July 2020. And moving to our last portfolio, which is just a year old now. This is the Levered Golden Ratio Portfolio. It is 35% in a composite leveraged fund called NTSX, which is the S&P 500 in treasury bonds, 25% in gold, GLDM, 15% in a REIT called O, Realty Income Corp, 10% each in a leveraged bond fund, TMF, and a leveraged small cap fund, TNA, and then the remaining 5% is divided into a volatility fund, and a Bitcoin fund. It was up 3.34% for the week. It is down 18. 87% year to date and is down 14.34% since inception in July 2021. So it has spent most of its life in a bad environment.

Mostly Voices [10:47]

You're not going to amount to jack squat. You're gonna end up eating a steady diet of government cheese And living in a van down by the river.

Mostly Uncle Frank [11:00]

But speaking of that environment, it does seem to be changing out there, at least for the moment. Although it could be what they call a bear market rally with more pain to come. You never know.

Mostly Voices [11:14]

You can't handle the dogs and cats living together.

Mostly Uncle Frank [11:18]

We have seen interest rates kind of rolling over and beginning to decline, particularly on the long end of the curve. I think the one-year treasury bond is now paying a higher interest rate than the 30-year treasury bond, which is highly unusual, but usually is indicating economic slowdowns and recessions when that occurs. For whatever reason, cryptocurrencies seem to have recovered a lot in the past couple of weeks, although they're still down 60 or 70% or something horrific since the beginning of the year. And those high flying commodities that had been up 40 or 50% in the first few months of the year are now also rolling over and declining just about every week these days. What does this all mean? Well, I suppose we could consult our crystal ball.

Mostly Voices [12:12]

Crystal ball can help you. It can guide you. You can actually feel the energy from your ball by just putting your hands in and out.

Mostly Uncle Frank [12:23]

And what does it say? We don't know!

Mostly Voices [12:27]

What do we know? You don't know? I don't know?

Mostly Uncle Frank [12:34]

Nobody knows! Well, I suppose we shouldn't be surprised by the crystal ball we have here. Forget about it. But anyway, enough of that. Now we are going to do something extremely fun. And the extremely fun thing we are going to do is what we do only once a year for these four portfolios that are on a annual rebalancing schedule. And those are the four basic portfolios：the All Seasons, the Golden Butterfly, the Golden Ratio, and the Risk Parity Ultimate. All of what I'm about to tell you is also reflected on the website in terms of the numbers and what exactly we did. One discrepancy I had is that I got my dates confused and had been planning to do the rebalancing on the 21st, but thought that Friday was the 21st, so we ended up doing the rebalancing on the 22nd. But that's what happens when you're retired. You lose track of time sometimes.

Mostly Voices [13:37]

What would you say you do here? I have people skills. I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand it? But our rebalancing was a day late this year.

Mostly Uncle Frank [13:46]

Hopefully it's not a dollar short. Anyway, going to this first portfolio, the All Seasons. Now this one is 30% in the stock fund, VTI, 40% in the bond fund, TLT, 15% in an intermediate bond fund, VGIT, and then 7.5% each in gold and commodities, PBDC and GLDM. And so we needed to rebalance back to those standards. This portfolio had also been a bit cash heavy because there had been large distributions out of the commodities fund in the past year, which we've actually been using to pay for the distributions. But we've swept up most of that cash and put it back into the portfolio. So in terms of what we actually did with these things, we sold $61 of GLDM, we sold $66 of the intermediate treasury bond fund, VGIT, and we sold $88 worth of the stock market fund, VTI. So those were the better performing things over the past year, and then we ended up buying $6 worth of PDTC, the Commodities Fund, and $347 worth of TLT, the long-term Treasury Bond Fund. It's interesting that we ended up buying some of PDTC, but that's only because it had those large distributions and then recently It's gone down in value over the past month or so as commodities have fallen precipitously. But rebalancing is all about buying low and selling high. Never show any sign of weakness.

Mostly Voices [15:40]

Always go for the throat. Buy low, sell high. Fear, that's the other guy's problem.

Mostly Uncle Frank [15:48]

Which often amateurs have a hard time doing. And the mistake I see amateurs making most often is looking at what has performed well and actually trying to buy more of that or something like it and looking at what has performed badly and trying to get away from that thing. When that's exactly not what you're supposed to do. Hello, hello, anybody home? Think McFly, think. The thing you'll also find with these risk parity style portfolios is that you have more divergence between the asset classes because they are more diverse. And if you have more divergent asset classes, there is going to be more to do when it comes to rebalancing. Now that is a feature, not a bug. Really? And is one of the reasons that these kinds of portfolios tend to perform better in terms of risk reward over time because they are getting something out of the rebalancing that other portfolios of similar assets really aren't getting. There's more buying low and selling high than you'll see in other kinds of portfolios.

Mostly Voices [17:06]

A really big one here, which is huge.

Mostly Uncle Frank [17:11]

Now moving to our next portfolio, the Golden Butterfly. This one has the simplest construction of any of these portfolios. It has 20% each in five different funds. One of them is a total stock market fund, VTI. One of them is a small cap value fund, VIoV. And we have a long-term treasury bond fund, TLT, a short-term treasury bond fund, SHY, and a gold fund, GLDM. In terms of the actual buying and selling, we sold $47 worth of gold, GLDM. We sold $116 worth of the short-term treasury bond fund, SHY. And those have been the best two performers at least this year. And then we sold $84 worth of the small cap value fund, VIOV. which has been down recently, but not nearly as far down as the stock market overall. And then for the buys, we ended up buying $21 worth of the Total Market Fund VTI, and the big buy was $245 worth of the long-term Treasury Bond Fund TLT. You'll know in all of these rebalancings we're buying lots of Treasury bonds. on the long end, and that's because they performed badly recently. But I am wondering if they're at some kind of inflection point, and we just kind of lucked out as to the timing of this rebalancing. But you never want to use subjective measures to do your rebalancing. Fact, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son. Either you put them on a calendar, or you put them on some kind of band structure like we do for the experimental portfolios. 'Cause we want to make this as mechanical as possible and avoid the problems of having to market time. But now moving to our next portfolio that was rebalanced, it's the Golden Ratio Portfolio. This one has 42% in stocks and it divided into three funds. We have a large cap growth fund, VUG, a small cap value fund, VIOV, and those are designed to be the most diversified from each other. And then in this version of the golden ratio, we also have a low volatility fund, USMV, which is intended to perform kind of like the S&P 500 over time, but be less volatile in doing it. Now, I should say these are sample portfolios, and so a more simple version of this portfolio would Simply to be just to use the two funds, VUG and VIOV, large cap growth and small cap value, because those are at the opposite poles in terms of value and growth and make a nice combination in terms of diversifying a stock portfolio in the simplest way possible.

Mostly Voices [20:15]

I'm telling you, fellas, you're going to want that cowbell.

Mostly Uncle Frank [20:19]

You could also put other kinds of funds into this portfolio, the idea being that this is the stock portion of the portfolio in terms of macro allocations, and you want it to add up to 42% in this kind of portfolio. Now going to the next macro allocation, that is the long-term treasury bonds, and that is 26%, and we also put that in the long-term treasury bond Tlt. Now we only use that because it's the most popular and most liquid fund. There are actually cheaper ones out there these days. One is vglt from Vanguard. Schwab also has a long-term treasury bond fund. Well, I'm blanking on the ETF designation right now. And then going down to the next macro allocation that is in gold 16% in GLDM, and again there are multiple funds you could use for that allocation. BAR is another popular one that has a lower expense fee attached to it. Now after those three macro allocations you have 16% left to work with which we generally divide into a 10 and a 6. But that is where You can modify this portfolio to make it more or less aggressive depending on what you're trying to do. In this version of it, we went with a REIT fund for that 10%. We use our EET for that for simplicity purposes. In my own actual portfolio, I invest in individual REITs and hold about 10 of them. You should go back and listen to our REIT episodes. If you want to hear more about that, those are episodes 19 and 21. But I could imagine a different version of this portfolio where that 10% might be utilities, it might be a short-term bond fund, it might be managed futures, or some combination of those sorts of things. But this is a good place to personalize this portfolio. And then for us, we have 6% left that we just put in cash. and this is also done for simplicity purposes and as a sample portfolio that has a cash bucket in it. Because in terms of management for this portfolio, we are following the management strategy where we fill up the cash bucket at the beginning of the year or at rebalancing time in our case, which occurs now, and then we take our distributions from this portfolio out of that cash bucket for the entire year, do not touch the other assets in the portfolio. And so this conforms to what was known as the original bucket strategy. The original bucket strategy was just keep a year of cash on the side and fill it up every three months or every year. Now that idea is morphed into all kinds of horrific and complicated ideas that mess with the overall asset allocations. I recommend that you focus on making your asset allocations how you want them to be for the long term with the idea of maximizing your projected safe withdrawal rate and then deal with these cash management issues on distributions as a separate idea or matter. You don't want to mix those two things together because It causes people to create portfolios that are not in fact optimized for safe withdrawal rates. It doesn't work for me. And then also often complicates rebalancing and complicates how you actually manage the portfolio. We want to keep these things simple and not causing us to have to make ad hoc decisions or market time along the way. about how to manage multiple buckets in a portfolio.

Mostly Voices [24:29]

Before we're done here, y'all be wearing gold-plated diapers.

Mostly Uncle Frank [24:32]

You can use the idea of buckets for labeling purposes, but please don't use it as a mechanism for deciding your asset allocations. Forget about it. Because that ends up being a misguided process and a misapplication of what was originally intended by a bucket strategy. I did see a nice interview of the originator of that idea, the one year of cash, and I will link to that in the show notes if you are interested in that. But anyway, going to what we actually did with this portfolio. We sold $182 worth of gold, GLDM. We sold $24 worth of the REIT, R E E T. We sold $170 worth of the low volatility fund USMV that has actually held up very well under current conditions because it holds a lot of quality and value kind of stocks in it. We sold $156 worth of VIoV, the small cap value fund, and then we ended up buying $17 worth of the large cap growth fund VUG. and buying $210 worth of the long-term treasury bond TLT, which left a large cash infusion for the cash bucket of $306 that we will be using for the distributions for the next year. Now, if you didn't want to have a cash bucket in your version of the Golden Ratio Portfolio, you could easily devote that to other assets.

Mostly Voices [26:09]

Am I right, or am I right, or am I right? Right, right, right. And some people do.

Mostly Uncle Frank [26:17]

But now let's move on to the Risk Parity Ultimate Portfolio where all the action is.

Mostly Voices [26:21]

Fortune favors the brave.

Mostly Uncle Frank [26:25]

Now we use this portfolio kind of as a kitchen sink for experimentation. I wanted to have one sample portfolio that had almost all of the assets that you might consider to put in one of these kinds of portfolios, even if you didn't choose to have all of them. and I didn't want to multiply too many of these portfolios. So in that vein, we do tweak this portfolio every year to modify its allocation slightly, and that's more to just include more asset classes than any kind of strategizing about returns or anything like that.

Mostly Voices [27:05]

My dad said he listened to Matt Damon and lost all his money. Yes, everyone did, but they were brave in doing so.

Mostly Uncle Frank [27:12]

So let me just take you through what's in this portfolio in its new incarnation and talk about what has changed before we get to the actual numbers on the rebalancing. And all of this is on the portfolios page at the website. So this portfolio in its new incarnation is 45% in stock and REIT funds. and all of these are actually the same as before. We have 12.5% in a large cap growth fund, VUG, 12.5% in a small cap value fund, VIOV. Those are the same basic two funds we use in the golden ratio. This one also has 5% in USMV, that low beta fund. Then we have 5% in a Chinese A-shares fund called KBA. and that is an example of a highly diversified international component, which is what you're looking for on your international side. If your main portfolio is a lot of US large cap, you want to make sure that your international is as diversified as possible. And that fund we've chosen essentially invests in the domestic Chinese economy and only has a correlation number of about 0.2 or 0.3 with the US market. We also have 5% in the REIT fund REET in this. I've included that with the stocks because they are stocks. And then we have 5% in the leveraged fund UPRO, which gives a little extra oomph to this portfolio. So basically it behaves as if it was 55% in stocks and not 45% in stocks. with that addition. Now, moving to the bond portion of this, there are only two funds in that. They're both long-term treasury bond funds. One is TLT. We have 15% of the portfolio in that. And then we have 5% in the leveraged long-term treasury bond fund, TMF. And so that portion, although it's 20% of the portfolio, behaves as if it was 30%. due to the leverage there. Next we have 15% in gold, that's in GLDM. And then we're going to have 10% in managed futures and commodities. 5% is going to be in a fund, Com, C-O-M, which is mostly just a commodities fund, but it goes to cash when commodities are going down and goes back into the commodities when they're going up. So it's got a primitive trend following mechanism there. and then 5% is in DBMF, which is a managed futures fund that can invest in both commodities and other kinds of futures contracts like currencies and interest rates. Then we have 10% still left. We put 5% in the preferred shares fund, PFF. It's kind of just ballast there. We have 3% in a volatility tracking fund. VIXM, and then we put 2% in cryptocurrency assets. Okay, now how has this changed from its most recent incarnation? The stocks, bonds, and gold components are the same. We've made a little tweak where we took 5% of what used to be in preferred shares, that used to be a 10% component, not a 5% component, and put that into that managed futures fund, DBMF. We talked about that fund back in episodes 53 and 55. It's been a relatively new fund and we wanted to see how it performed and in particular how well diversified it was from other things. And I'll link to the correlation matrix. It has performed well and is well diversified. And so that is why we've decided to include that in the newest incarnation. And so we added that and reduced the preferred shares fund from 10% to 5%. Now we changed volatility tracking funds. We were in a fund called VIXY, which is a more short-term volatility fund, and we're going to VIXM, which is an intermediate term volatility fund. I did that for two reasons. First, for some tax loss harvesting, and second, because the intermediate term volatility fund seems to perform better in these kinds of portfolios than the short-term fund. The short-term fund, and I think in order to be used well, probably needs its own rules for when you sell it, because you do want to sell that on spikes. during the year because it's so volatile. The intermediate one can be sold on a monthly basis if it's the highest fund and we have used that in another portfolio, the Levered Golden Ratio portfolio to actually pay distributions out of. I'm still not happy with volatility funds generally. They seem to have a negative expectation, but I did want to include a fund like that in this max diversified portfolio. I think VIXM is just going to work a little bit better than VIXY. And then we get to the two crypto funds. Now we were using BITQ and BITW in last year's iteration of this. Neither of those performed very well, not that any of the complex performed very well. So we got rid of those, essentially tax laws harvested them, and we're going to replace those with GBTC, which is a closed-end fund that invests straight in Bitcoin, and ETH, which is a closed-end fund that invests in Ethereum. Now, I don't view either one of those as very optimal either. We still don't have an ETF in the United States in cryptocurrencies that you can invest in. That just holds cryptocurrencies and not stocks or futures contracts. So if you're actually holding any of that, you're probably going to be better off just buying it directly and holding it. We can't really do that in a portfolio that is based on ETFs like these. The drawbacks to these two funds is because they are closed end fund structures, they can trade at a premium or discount to the actual value of what's in them. In this case, we're actually maybe getting a good deal on them because they're trading at maximum discount right now. So the price of GBTC and ETH is about 30% less on a share basis than what is actually in them. If they were to dissolve the funds and distribute the Bitcoin and Ethereum that's in them, you'd actually make 20 or 30%. just off the bat. Surely you can't be serious.

Mostly Voices [34:22]

I am serious. And don't call me Shirley.

Mostly Uncle Frank [34:26]

This trading at a premium or discount is not isolated to just this kind of closed end fund. It is a feature of every kind of closed end fund, regardless of whether it's investing in stocks, bonds, commodities, crypto or whatever. And is one of the difficulties about investing in closed end funds. But typically they do overshoot both on the positive side and on the downside. So we're hoping that because these cryptocurrencies have had such a big crash in the past six months and these two funds have crashed even harder that they'll get more of a rebound if there is a rebound in cryptocurrencies in the next year. But I have to tell you, we've been disappointed in the performance of these cryptocurrencies, not on the return aspect of it, which has been miserable, but the main problem I see with them going forward is they seem to be highly correlated with what you would call small cap growth funds or small cap tech funds or the overall tech sector. And this correlation has developed mostly over the past couple of years, but if it maintains those kinds of correlations, it really makes it less valuable as a holding because if you're just holding more of the same of something else, some stock fund, it's not adding anything in terms of diversification. All it's adding is some volatility and potentially some return, but also potentially some serious losses. It's more like holding one of those leveraged stock funds like TNA. But we are going to keep them in this portfolio for at least another year. Because the asset class is so new, the correlations could change a lot from year to year. Nobody really knows where these things fit in or how they fit in to a portfolio. But if they do continue to have this very high correlation to small cap growth and small cap tech stocks, you're going to want to start including them as part of that kind of an allocation and not treating them as if they were a separate asset class because they're not really acting like a separate asset class. I will link to the correlation matrix for this portfolio, which is interesting to look at and is also linked to on the website. But ultimately, when you are picking assets, particularly these alternative kinds of assets, you really want to focus on whether they are in fact diversified as in having low correlation numbers to the rest of what you have. Because something like DBMF that we're adding has shown a nice, very low correlation to just about anything else, stocks, bonds, commodities, gold, whereas these crypto funds really haven't demonstrated that kind of low correlation.

Mostly Voices [37:19]

You can't handle the gambling problem.

Mostly Uncle Frank [37:23]

But anyway, going through the actual transactions that we did now, I'll just go down the list in alphabetical order. So we sold all of BITQ, which was $44 worth. We sold all of the BITW, which was $39 worth. We replaced those with $91 worth of GBTC and $96 worth of ETH. We had to buy those in complete shares because of their fund structure. Then we sold $67 worth of the commodities fund COM. which had already been throwing off some large distributions to some of the best performers in the past year. We sold $142 worth of gold at GLDM, which was also one of the better performers in the past year. We've been taking distributions from. We bought $33 worth of KB A, that Chinese A shares fund. that had a really bad year last year, but has recovered recently. It is nice to see that those two markets are very uncorrelated, because that's what we're really looking for out of an international fund. We sold $524 worth of PFF, and most of that was so we could buy the DBMF, and so we bought $456 worth of DBMF to add that 5% allocation. We sold $40 worth of the REIT fund RET. We bought $40 worth of the long-term treasury bond TLT. And we bought $204 worth of the levered long-term treasury bond TMF. We also bought $118 worth of the levered stock fund UPRO. UPRO. Now both of those took big hits in the past six months with both stocks and bonds being down. So hopefully we are buying them low and that they will go higher in the future. But again, we are not trying to time that. We are just following our mechanical rebalancing rules.

Mostly Voices [39:37]

Groovy, baby.

Mostly Uncle Frank [39:41]

And for the last few funds here, the stock funds mostly, we sold $87 worth of USMV. That's the low volatility fund. We sold $143 worth of VIOV, the small cap value fund. I could have used a little more cowbell. We ended up not doing anything with VUG because it was within $3 of its allocation. So there was zero change on the large cap value fund there. And then the last fund, VIXY, as I mentioned before, we sold that out. There was $214 in it at the time. $215 actually. And then we are buying $273 worth of VIXM, which will be 3% of the portfolio going forward. And so that was a very long description with lots of numbers. Please check out the website and happy to field any questions about any of this. Yeah, that's smart. Last year the rebalancing episode was one of the most popular. And I suppose people will be listening to it again. I am very happy with the nice audience this podcast has attracted. We have looks like 1100 to 1200 regular listeners. Makes us one of the top 1% of all podcasts in the world, but that's mostly because most podcasts don't have any listeners or very few. But I very much appreciate the relative sophistication and high level of interest that you all out there who listen to this podcast have for this topic and its host with the strange sense of humor that he has.

Mostly Voices [41:28]

You are talking about the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind.

Mostly Uncle Frank [41:32]

But now I see our signal is beginning to fade. We'll pick up again this week with some more emails. I've been stacking up again. If you have comments or questions for me, please send them to frank@riskparityradio.com that email is frank@riskparityradio.com or you can go to the website www.riskparityradio.com and fill out the contact form and I'll get it that way. If you haven't had a chance to do it, please go to your favorite podcast provider, and like subscribe, give me some stars, a review. That would be great. Okay. Thank you once again for tuning in. This is Frank Vasquez with Risk Parity Radio. Signing off. And it's gone.

Mostly Voices [42:23]

Uh, what? It's gone. It's all gone.

Mostly Mary [42:30]

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.