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 [0:19]

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 [0:38]

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. Yeah, baby, yeah! And the basic foundational episodes are episodes 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. Some of our listeners, including Karen and Chris, have identified additional episodes that you may consider foundational. And those are episodes 12, 14, 16, 19, 21, 56, 82, and 184. And you probably should check those out too because we have the the finest podcast audience available. Top drawer, really top drawer, along with a host named after a hot dog. Lighten up, Francis. But now onward, episode 286. Today on Risk Parity Radio, we will just be catching up on our backlog of emails, as usual.

Mostly Voices [1:48]

And so without further ado, here I go once again with the email. And?

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:57]

First off, an email from Kyle. Kyle! And Kyle writes, hello Frank, thank you for your work with the Father McKenna Center.

Mostly Mary [2:09]

As a formerly homeless person who struggled with things earlier in life, that work means a lot to me. I made a small contribution to your Patreon as a token of appreciation. Luckily, I can now say that things are going very well for me. I can now plan for a thriving future as opposed to simply trying to survive the present. For someone in their accumulation phase who is using a 457 plan with a fairly limited number of funds available, what are your thoughts on allocation? Let's assume that there are the usual target date funds, various small, mid, and large cap funds, several international funds, and one muni and one total bond fund. The plan also offers an option for a self-directed brokerage through a different institution, as long as the base account maintains a certain minimum balance. Would it be best to just lean into large caps or spread among small, mid, and large? The other idea which I find interesting is funneling everything to the self-directed account and putting 100% into SPY or VOO Assuming the self-directed option fee schedule isn't prohibitive. Thank you again for your work with the needy, as well as the very enjoyable and informative podcast that you produce.

Mostly Voices [3:27]

Sincerely, Kyle. I want to hold you every morning and love you every night, Kyle. I promise you nothing but love and happiness.

Mostly Uncle Frank [3:38]

Well, Kyle, thank you for writing in and thank you for your support of the Father McKenna Center. For the three or four of you who do not know, this podcast does not have any sponsors, but it does support a charity, the Father McKenna Center, which serves homeless and hungry people in Washington, DC. It's kind of a unique organization in that it is affiliated with a high school, and Gonzaga High School, I believe, is the only high school who has a program for homeless people on its campus. But although our operations are small, this does make us more efficient in using the resources we have in serving the population we serve. Because a large proportion of our resources are the space provided by the Gonzaga High School. And then we have an army of volunteers from the high school to help us with the work we do. And I greatly appreciate the fact that you've told us that you were once in that situation yourself.'Cause I've also had family members who were homeless at one point or another. And when you're in that situation, it's just hard. Life is just a lot harder. When you don't have a fixed address, it's more difficult to communicate with the rest of the world. It's more difficult to become reintegrated with the rest of the world. And although I don't believe that anyone becomes a success in life alone, you should be commended for making the decisions and taking the steps to get yourself out of that condition. Because some people make it out of that state and some people don't. And I'm sure you can probably point back to various turning points in your life that made the difference. And part of it was being presented with an opportunity or a hand, and then part of it was you making the decision to take advantage of the opportunity and to step up and do what you needed to do to get along with your life. All we know is some get the spark and say, I'm going to change my life.

Mostly Voices [5:41]

I'm going to change my health. I'm going to change my relationship with my family. I'm going to change everything. And if it starts with an apple, if it starts with a walk around the block, if it starts with a book, if it starts with a journal, whatever it starts with, I'm a candidate. I'm ready to go and change my life. I invite you on that Journey. Once you look back on it, you will never turn back. You'll never go back to the old ways. And the old language and the old neglect. Never.

Mostly Uncle Frank [6:07]

And so you shall earn your reward here. It's the only reward I have really to offer in this podcast, which is if you donate to the Father McKenna Center and you tell me about it, you get to go to the front of the line with your email. And that's why you are first today. Yes. Now getting to your question. So you have a 457 plan. These are both some of the best plans and the worst kind of retirement plans that are offered. What's good about them is that you can access them pretty much as soon as you leave that job. There's no restriction on your age. What's usually bad about them is most of them tend to have high expenses and a limited number of funds, as you mentioned here. And they're like 403 plans in that way in that the kind of institutions that usually offer these kinds of things are usually public institutions that farm out essentially their retirement plans to various insurance companies and other organizations who are all too happy to take on the plan and push their products for a fee.

Mostly Voices [7:20]

Always be closing.

Mostly Uncle Frank [7:24]

And that is an endemic historical problem that is attached to these things because they predate the whole 401 plan and go back to a time when the typical thing being offered by an employer was actually a pension and not some kind of defined contribution plan. Anyway, a lot of this comes down to the costs of your various options. The easiest solution would be to simply take whatever they have in terms of an S&P 500 fund or similar and use that as your primary vehicle for accumulation. The self-directed brokerage option, it's actually the better option if it is cost effective. And I don't know what kind of fees or restrictions they have on that. But if that gets you into somewhere where you have, say, no fee trading and you can buy or sell any ETF you wanted, which would be the ideal situation, that would be a better option. On the other hand, if this self-directed brokerage option carries a lot of fees and you have to pay transaction fees or other things, then it probably is not that useful because you certainly don't want to be paying a fee every time you buy or sell something, given that you'll be buying all the time as you put more money into the program. So if you were staying within the offered funds, I'd be looking for the least expensive ones. and starting with that S&P 500 or similar. If there are a mid-cap and a small-cap fund, I would first look at the expenses that are associated with that and wouldn't necessarily use it if they're higher expenses. I'm not sure that a blended mid-cap or blended small-cap is actually of that much more value than the S&P 500 fund. It's not wrong to use those sorts of things, but I'm not sure that it adds very much to the overall performance. What you really would want to do if you could do it is go over to the self-directed account, assuming this is not available in the regular account, and have half of your allocation in a S&P 500 or total market fund or large cap growth fund and then the other half in a small cap value fund like VIoV or AVUV. And just to illustrate these things, I put them in Portfolio Visualizer and it gives you data back to 1972. So I ran a straight S&P 500 against a 60/20/20 that's large, mid and small, and then a 50/50 portfolio of your S&P 500 and a small cap value fund. And you'll see that the mixed 60/20/20 did better than the straight S&P 500 fund, but that the 50/50 split kind of blew the other ones out of the water in terms of overall performance since 1972. But you should also be mindful that none of this really matters that much until you've actually accumulated something significant in your portfolio. And by significant, I usually mean something like $100,000. Because before you get to those kind of levels, your contributions greatly outweigh any gains or losses you're going to have from the investment returns. and it's only when you see the gains or losses on an annual basis exceeding your annual contributions is that when you can really see compounding beginning to take off. So it's almost never wrong just to take whatever low cost index fund is available and go with that and then make modifications later. Because you also will have the opportunity to invest in accounts outside of this plan, say an IRA or an ordinary brokerage account. and then you can put the things that are missing from the 457 plan into the IRA or the ordinary brokerage account and diversify that way. Because you really do want to treat all of your assets as one big portfolio for the most part. So typically what you would do is you would invest in your 457 or other retirement plan up to whatever matching you might get in that plan. if you get one, then go over and fill up an IRA, because that gives you the greatest flexibility of investments, and then you go back and fill up the rest of the 457, assuming the fees are not too high. In any event, all of the methods we've been talking about will get you there, and which combination of these funds will perform better than another one in any given decade is kind of a crapshoot or the roll of the dice. So, for instance, in the past 10 or 12 years, you would have been better off with that straight S&P 500 fund, but over the course of decades, you'd be better off having some small cap value in there. The trouble is we don't know what kind of decade we're going to have next. We don't know.

Mostly Voices [12:16]

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

Mostly Uncle Frank [12:21]

So, you need to be thinking in terms of, well, if this is going to be sitting in there for 20 or 30 years, what's my best choice. You may wish to go back and listen to episode 208, which is my Wizard of Oz themed advice for beginning investors, and take a look at the link to the Michael Kitces article about the four phases of saving for retirement that is in the show notes for that. I think that's a very simple but valuable article so you can kind of see where you are in the great scheme of things. Hopefully all that helps. Thank you for your generous support of the Father McKenna Center and thank you for your email.

Mostly Voices [13:07]

I swear by the moon and the stars and the sky. I'll be there, Cal. I swear like the shadow that's by your side. Cows, really gotta be there. Second off. Second off, we have an email from Blake. And the subject of this email is leverage times leverage times leverage, oh my.

Mostly Uncle Frank [13:35]

You can't handle the gambling problem. And Blake writes.

Mostly Mary [13:44]

Hi, Frank, I've built a portfolio using leveraged ETFs in an attempt to maintain diversification while maintaining higher risk and returns. since I'm still in my accumulation phase. My goal is to have equity-like returns with more balanced exposure to various regimes. It's been running for about a year, and I've noticed the risk profile seems a bit low because of the large allocation to DBMF and VIXM, likely. Recently, I've built a return and risk calculator that inputs 2023 return, risk, and correlation assumptions that JP Morgan publishes and learned that my expected risk and compounded return are only 11.5%. and 6.23%, respectively. I've since massaged the weights a bit to come up with the below new weights, which look better for the long run at 15.7% Vol and 8.8% return. Do you have any thoughts on how I should go about transitioning between the two portfolios while minimizing market timing risk? Alternatively, perhaps you'll say I have a gambling problem and recommend that I leave the casino. Ooh, how convenient. I like the simplicity of capital efficient ETFs like NTSX and RSBT, but I don't feel they have enough kick for someone aiming above a 60/40 benchmark. I realized the leveraged funds have high fees, so I did adjust down the returns of the capital market assumptions by the amount of fees to make the returns meaningful. I'm also assuming an institutional borrowing rate, but feel that should be okay since the ETFs are utilizing futures under the hood.

Mostly Voices [15:27]

Here's what I'm doing and planning on doing.

Mostly Mary [15:33]

Ticker, TMF, current nominal 13.7%, proposed nominal 23%. Ticker, SPXL, current nominal 5.3%, proposed nominal 8%. Ticker TNA, current nominal 3%, proposed nominal 4%. Ticker EURL, current nominal 4.1%, proposed nominal 8%. Ticker EDC, current nominal 4%, proposed nominal 4%. Ticker DRN, current nominal 4.1%, proposed nominal 4%. Ticker DBMF and TFPN, current nominal 46.8%, proposed nominal 38%. Ticker PDVC, current nominal 6%, proposed nominal 4%. Ticker UGL, current nominal 2.5%, proposed nominal 2%. Ticker VIXM, current nominal 9. 4%, 4% proposed nominal 5%.

Mostly Voices [16:50]

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Mostly Mary [16:53]

Thank you, Blake C. P.S. Now a Patreon member.

Mostly Uncle Frank [17:01]

Well, before we get to your questions, I'd first like to also thank you for being a donor to the Father McKenna Center through the patreon support page and that's the easiest way to access that page on the support page at www.riskparityradio.

Mostly Voices [17:29]

com but that is also why you get to go to the front of the line just behind Kyle for your email and now getting to that email you know what we have to say about these kinds of portfolios here don't you you have a gambling problem but I do appreciate The effort

Mostly Uncle Frank [17:33]

and experimentation.

Mostly Voices [17:37]

Hearts and kidneys are Tinker Toys. If you can stomach the ride for it. I'm talking about the central nervous system.

Mostly Uncle Frank [17:44]

Now, I think the way to first analyze this, and this is really the approach you should take to any portfolio that has a whole bunch of things in it, is to look at the macro allocations for it. What are in the stocks? What are in the bonds? What are in the other things? and then look at also the leverage in that context. And when you are using leverage, you do need to gross that up to its effectiveness. So if you have something that's at 8% nominal, that counts as 24% when you're adding all this stuff up. And when I add up all your stuff, I see you have an effective exposure of 84% in stocks. 69% in long-term treasury bonds, and then 51% in other things that includes 38% in managed futures, 6% in gold and commodities, and 5% in a volatility investment. And that totals up to 204%, which is a lot of leverage. Well, you have a gambling problem. Now, one way of looking at this is to do the algebra to pretend that it's a hundred percent portfolio, in which case what it looks like is 41% in stocks, and that includes your REITs, 34% in bonds, and then 25% in the other alternative investments, which are mostly your managed futures. Now, to me that seems to suggest you might be a little bit light on the equity exposure there, that you may want to get it up closer to 50%, but you may not depending on how the, all of these things work together. And I have not attempted to analyze them as a group like you have. So that also being said, this does not appear to be an unreasonable overall allocation for a highly diversified portfolio like this. Now looking at the transitions you are proposing, if you look at the numbers, basically what you're doing is selling some of the alternative assets and buying more of the stocks and the bonds. That's what it comes down to on a macro allocation basis. Now if you're going to make the transition you're suggesting, I don't see any reason not to just do it all at once. But on the other hand, I don't see any reason not to do it in stages if that is more comfortable to you or you prefer that. What I think is more important is that you come to a conclusion that this is what you want to be holding for a long period of time. Because the real danger with these kind of things is jumping back and forth between various kinds of portfolios. I don't see much market timing really going on here though in terms of necessarily buying things when they're high. The mixture of Stock funds you have, some of them have performed really well, like the S&P 500, but other ones have not performed very well at all, like the real estate. I'm talking about performed recently. And the bonds have obviously performed poorly, so in effect you'd be buying those low. The rest of these exposures are pretty flat on the year. I think you might want to revisit the use of VIXM, that volatility fund. I've really not been happy with that as a long-term exposure in a portfolio because I think it probably requires you to have some other kind of rebalancing mechanism to use it effectively and sell it when it spikes. I would consider other ideas for investing in volatility, including that fund BTAL we've talked about, and also go back to episode 226 where our good friend Alexei, the dude of bonds, has proposed several other ways of investing in volatility that you might find interesting or useful. The dude of bonds. So that being something you want to look at more closely before pulling the trigger on this. I should also say that I have not investigated the nature of these leveraged funds you propose using and whether they have any decay issues or not. I'm still frustrated that there is no leveraged small cap value fund, but I'm sure somebody will put one out there eventually the way things are going. Anyway, I'm always intrigued by my listeners' experimentations.

Mostly Voices [22:20]

I'll have the smiley face breakfast special. But could you add a bacon nose? Blessed bacon hair, bacon mustache, 5 o'clock shadow made of bacon bits, and a bacon body. How about if I just shoved a pig down your throat? Fine, but the bacon man lives in a bacon house! Even if they aren't something I would probably do with any significant portion of my assets.

Mostly Uncle Frank [22:45]

Oh, to be young again and have the time to be taking such risks. I'll be very interested to see how that all plays out.

Mostly Voices [22:53]

I can't wait to start poohing through my garbage like some starving raccoon.

Mostly Uncle Frank [23:01]

So please do email again, maybe next year. And thank you for your email. Release thorns.

Mostly Voices [23:09]

Last off. Last off.

Mostly Uncle Frank [23:12]

We have an email from Matt. And Matt writes, Hi, Frank.

Mostly Mary [23:20]

Want to start by thanking you for all the great information on your podcast and to the posts you reply to on Facebook. It's been very helpful. I was hoping to get your thoughts on our situation and whether we should consider going with an advisor or not. Because of your podcast, I have started looking into alternative investments. We have all our accounts at Fidelity and we have the free use of a certified financial planner which has been an amazing benefit. Because of that relationship with Fidelity, they referred us to Lido for alternative investments. I have met with Lido a couple times now and they have made the attached recommendations. Our situation is as follows. Me, 42-year-old male, and spouse, 51-year-old female. Twin boys, 17 years old, going into senior year. One will be going to college and we have 529s to pay for this. Home paid for, worth $450,000. Retired last year after selling our business. We currently have about $3.34 million in invested assets. The current mix is 65% stock, 25% bonds, 10% cash, two-thirds in a brokerage account, and one-third in retirement accounts. Our goal is to maximize the safe withdrawal rate while limiting volatility based on risk parity style portfolio. Lido fees are 1% AUM plus 0.5% to 1.25% for the alternative investments charged by the firms that they are through. LeTo believes they will beat my current portfolio by 3% return after fees using the proposed allocation. Nominal 5.4% return conservatively on current portfolio versus 8.4% using LeTo proposed portfolio. They believe my current portfolio allows a 3.9% safe withdrawal rate versus their portfolio allowing a 5.8% safe withdrawal rate. Both feel high to me since we have 50 plus years of retirement ahead, but maximizing the safe withdrawal rate is the goal. My biggest concern with what they are suggesting is that I am unable to replicate on Portfolio Visualizer, so I cannot see how accurate it is. I know your podcast is all about do-it-yourself investing, but I have struggled putting together a portfolio that is comparable. I would prefer to not pay fees, but I also want to make sure I'm maximizing return where possible. I also want to make sure I am not chasing something that isn't real and just hyped to acquire an AUM fee. I'm not sure if this fits neatly into a podcast clip or possibly a more in-depth conversation, but thought I would send it over and see if you would be willing to share your thoughts. I have a lot more info but didn't want to send too much in case you aren't able to help. Again, thank you for all you do and I hope to hear back, Matt.

Mostly Uncle Frank [26:33]

Well, Matt, it looks like you're in good shape there with what you've accumulated and what your situation is. And this is an interesting question as to what the process should be for evaluating an RIA. And let's talk about how to do that phishing as opposed to just giving you phish. The most useful thing about RIAs, people that are registered advisors with the SEC, is they are required to file certain documents with the SEC that detail what they do in an organized way. And I will link to what Ledo has filed with the SEC in terms of what's called their brochure. It is Part 2A of Form ADV in SEC registration speak. And this tells you all kinds of things about their investment philosophies, things they use to invest, fee structures, and all that stuff you really want to know but is not often presented up front, if you will, if you go visit somebody's website. What you learn from reading this is that this appears to be a kind of conglomerate firm started in Los Angeles that has acquired various other firms and has offices across the United States in 33 places. It says, Lido utilizes an integrated wealth management approach to help our clients achieve their financial goals while aiming to reduce market risks and manage volatility. To that end, Lido employs select assets for our clients that are intended to be less correlated to one another, which can include a combination of fixed income, equities, cash, foreign securities, American depository receipts, real estate debt, hybrid offerings, and alternative investments such as liquid and non-liquid alternative investments and non-liquid fixed income investments through certain And the hybrid offerings generally include merger funds, long short commodity funds, structured notes, covered options, and other hybrid mutual funds. So we're talking about the kitchen sink here. And they lay out five different strategies, core equity strategies, what they call cap and cushion, a fixed income strategy, and alternative investment strategies, and the Lido companies strategies. and they have a number of direct affiliates and other affiliates that they put assets at it looks like. One of those is a mutual fund that they run. It is called the Oakhurst Strategic Defined Risk Fund ticker symbol OASDX, which seems to be a long short fund. And I did go look that up on Morningstar. Honestly, I couldn't see much special about it. Moving along on this brochure, it looks like they have about $13 billion under management as of the end of 2022. And then we get to their fee structures. Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my! Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my! Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my! Looks like they do an AUM of 1. 25% on assets under 2 million, 1% on assets over 2 million. There are some alternative fees for different things that they have acquired through merging with another firm. In addition, there are fees for this mutual fund OAS DX that amount to 1.68% It's pretty high, I would say. There are promoter fees, asset reporting fees, fixed management fees, client consultation and financial planning fees, other fees and expenses. And then there may be mutual fund and ETF fees in addition to ASDX. They also have a set of funds called the OCM funds. I'm not sure what that includes, but they are described here. and there will be conflicts disclosures about those, alternative investment fees that they charge, and I won't go through the rest of these, but there's a whole list of them that you'll want to go looking through. Here's some more description of this OASDX fund. OASDX typically invests in a portfolio of securities that are representative of or designed to replicate but not intended to match the S&P 500 index. OASDX's investments include ETFs that seek to track the performance of the index and simultaneously use options on ETFs in combination with US Treasury or other fixed income securities to enhance OASDX's potential returns during up markets while seeking to limit losses during down markets. It says it writes call options as well, and it's permitted to utilize put options to lower the overall volatility of its investment portfolio. So you'll want to read that entire brochure in detail and then use that as a basis for asking further questions of LeTo about what they're actually doing. As I mentioned, I don't see any particular reason to think that this fund OASDX is special in any way, but I could be missing something. And that's clearly not all that they are doing, although it does feature prominently in this brochure. Now getting back to your email, you say that Lido believes they will beat my current portfolio by 3% return after fees using the proposed allocation nominal 5.4% return conservatively on a current portfolio versus 8.4% using Lido proposed portfolio. Okay, I'm not sure what the basis of that belief is and it could be a number of things. Basically it could be one of three things and there's only one of them that I actually trust. One of the ways people do this is by creating a back test where they say, well, if we would have invested in this looking backward in hindsight, these would have been our results. Those are usually kind of worthless because they're curve fitted. Anybody can put in a whole big data set and look at it and say, from this data, this would have been the best strategy or a good strategy for this set of data. Because hindsight is always 2020. The other thing they may be doing, or the second way of projecting this, is to have some kind of crystal balls where they say we think this asset is going to yield this in the next 10-20 years. This asset is going to yield this. This asset is going to yield that.

Mostly Voices [33:49]

As you can see, I've got several here. A really big one here, which is huge. This is the one that I tend to use more often. I have a calcite ball and I have a black obsidian. One here.

Mostly Uncle Frank [34:09]

I don't find that terribly useful either.

Mostly Voices [34:13]

Now you can also use the ball to connect to the spirit world.

Mostly Uncle Frank [34:16]

Because again, it's based on their crystal balls. And what we know about people's crystal balls is they're always wrong, particularly if they're based on something like valuation metrics or the other common things people are using these days. So the only thing I would really take as valid for something like this, because it's a complex thing, is if they've actually achieved these returns and they are comparatively better in the same period with your alternative. So I would want to see something showing where they actually invested this way 10 years ago, what were the results of that, and then compare that to whatever alternative that you would think you would want to be using or be able to test against. And if they can't do that, and I would suspect they cannot, but ask them, if they can't do that, then I probably wouldn't waste my time with this because it's expensive. And so in my mind, it has to be demonstrably much better than simpler or less expensive alternatives. So what I would be doing is taking this brochure, going back in there with this information, and then drilling down and asking them, What is the basis for these assertions they're making about future returns?

Mostly Voices [35:36]

I want you to be nice until it's time to not be nice.

Mostly Uncle Frank [35:44]

Overall, I would say I don't have a lot of confidence in this. To me, this is kind of the old world of RIAs with these kind of proprietary systems.

Mostly Voices [35:56]

Now, the crystal ball has been used since ancient times.

Mostly Uncle Frank [36:00]

I think the new world and where these things are going is RIAs that can use these more efficient ETFs that we now have available to invest in things like managed futures and other things. So I'm talking about the people like the Corey Hoffsteins in the world, resolve asset management, simplify, RIAs that would be able to use those sorts of newer ETFs to construct something that is probably similar to what Lido is doing, but a lot less expensive and does not involve their proprietary mutual funds or products. So you're not getting that conflict of interest where you have the same person managing an investment, also profiting from the investments they're making on your behalf. I just think that that's a bad setup. So just going back and reading again from your email, My biggest concern with what they are suggesting is that I'm unable to replicate on Portfolio Visualizer, so I cannot see how accurate it is. I know your podcast is all about do-it-yourself investing, but I have struggled putting together a portfolio that is comparable. I would prefer to not pay fees, but I also want to make sure I'm maximizing return where possible. But also want to make sure I'm not chasing something that isn't real and just hyped to acquire an AUM fee. And I say I do share those concerns and hopefully if you can take this brochure and go back and ask some more of those questions, you can satisfy yourself one way or the other. I'm doubtful and dubious, but I'm always doubtful and dubious that any of these folks can really outperform and overcome the large fees they're taking out. Usually the best that they can do is pay for themselves, but that's not much of a benefit to the customer if they are reaping all the benefits of whatever strategy they are using in terms of fees. Now you also wrote that you were wanting to make sure you maximize return where possible. I think that's more of an important goal in your accumulation phase if you're actually going to be living on this money maximizing return is important, but it's not going to be the priority. I think the priority should be maximizing your ability to use the money or in terms of a projected safe withdrawal rate. Because if you just wanted to maximize return and you didn't care about the money itself or spending it, we're just going to leave it all to somebody else. You just leave it in a 100% equity fund or Warren Buffett's 9010 S&P 500 short-term treasury bond allocation. But those sorts of things, while they do maximize return, they do not maximize your ability to actually use the money. They're appropriate for people who aren't going to spend much of the money anyway and are going to leave it to somebody else. That's the fact, Jack! That's the fact, Jack! I think my most important advice here though is to just take your time, that there's no reason to rush into anything here. You have a reasonably diversified portfolio sitting there at this point. So I would go ask more questions of this firm and then go interview others. And in all cases there, your process should be see what they have to say, take their presentation, then go get their brochure, read through that, their other SEC filings, and then go back and ask a lot of questions about the source of their projections if they're making projections and what conflicts or other fees they might have that are embedded in this investment strategy such as having their own mutual funds and that sort of thing. And I would be rightfully suspicious of anything that I couldn't really test or evaluate myself.

Mostly Voices [39:59]

It's all the same to you. I'll drive that tanker.

Mostly Uncle Frank [40:06]

Because some of these milk shakers have really big straws.

Mostly Voices [40:11]

And I have a straw, there it is. That's a straw, you see. Watching. And my straw reaches A crows through and starts to drink your milkshake. I drink your milkshake. I drink it up.

Mostly Uncle Frank [40:39]

And their interests may not be aligned completely with your own. Because only one thing counts in this life.

Mostly Voices [40:48]

Get them to sign on the line which is dotted. Hopefully that helps.

Mostly Uncle Frank [40:52]

You know where to find me if you have follow-up questions. No more flying solo.

Mostly Voices [41:00]

You need somebody watching your back at all times. And thank you for your email.

Mostly Uncle Frank [41:05]

But now I see our signal is beginning to fade. If you have comments or questions for me, please send them to frank@riskparityradio.com That email is frank@riskparityraider.com or you can go to the website www.riskparityraider.com, put your message in the contact form and I'll get it that way. Just a couple of announcements. First, I'll be on hiatus again this weekend, so there will not be a podcast, but hopefully I'll return next week, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Like some starving raccoon. I will try to get the website updated over the weekend because we also have month-end distributions. Second, we are moving into our large fundraising event for the year for the Father McKenna Center, which is our annual walk for McKenna that will be held at the end of September in Washington, DC. So if you are in the area, you are invited to come. I have already made a donation from all the Patreon people, so we'll get Risk Parity Radio on the t-shirt. And if you are a patron and want a t-shirt, please send me an email. I was able to get eight of them for our donations, and I think I'll have a couple of mediums, some larges, and some extra larges. And if you're a patron, I'll give you one whether you can walk or not. If you want to support the walk directly, I will put that link in the show notes. And thank you for your support. If you want to support me in another way and you haven't had a chance to do it, please go to your favorite podcast provider and like, subscribe, give me some stars, a follow. That would be great. Mmmkay? Thank you once again for tuning in. This is Frank Vasquez with Risk Parity Radio. Signing off.

Mostly Voices [43:04]

He's for the mind, he's for the soul, made all the way for the

Mostly Mary [43:26]

Leo. 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.