Voices [0:00]

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little mind, 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 Queen 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.

Voices [0:49]

Yeah, baby, yeah.

Mostly Uncle Frank [0:51]

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 finest podcast audience available.

Voices [1:26]

Top drawer. Really top drawer.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:30]

Along with a host named after a hot dog.

Voices [1:34]

Lighten up Francis.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:37]

But now onward, episode 462. Today in Risk Party Radio, it's time for our weekly portfolio reviews of the eight sample portfolios you can find at www.riskparty radio.com on the portfolios page. And yes, we also have to talk about monthly distributions for November.

Voices [1:59]

Show me the money! Jerry, you better yell! Show me the money!

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:04]

Which is going to involve selling a lot of gold. That's what happens when something goes up a lot.

Voices [2:11]

I love gold.

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:15]

But before we get to that.

Voices [2:18]

I'm intrigued, my dear. How are you saying? Email.

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:23]

And first off. First off, we have an email from Jess. Jess from Alaska again.

Voices [2:32]

Sweet mother of Abraham Lincoln, the prospector! You wanna meet you!

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:37]

And Jess writes.

Mostly Queen Mary [2:39]

Hey Frank. I was listening to your latest podcast and was shocked and thrilled to hear you answer my question from way back.

Voices [2:46]

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

Mostly Queen Mary [2:52]

I decided I didn't have to choose among Vanguard, Schwab, and Fidelity. I could set up small test portfolios on all three platforms and check out the UIs and limitations myself.

Voices [3:03]

Yeah, baby, yeah!

Mostly Queen Mary [3:05]

So I went back and listened to the two bigger pockets money podcasts you were on in July. They were even better the second time.

Voices [3:12]

The best, Jerry. The best.

Mostly Queen Mary [3:14]

I do love your perspective on investing and spending on things that are meaningful and avoiding hoarding since I have a strong intention to spend down and give away my nest egg and die with as little as I can manage.

Voices [3:44]

Yes!

Mostly Queen Mary [3:45]

So, I did use Fidelity in the Golden Ratio portfolio you suggested.

Mostly Uncle Frank [3:51]

The Golden Ratio.

Mostly Queen Mary [3:54]

It was a rush since I have literally never set up an asset allocation before. I am really appreciative of the support. Really excellent learning experience made much easier by you and Mindy. Nanu! Nanu! It would have probably not happened at all without you.

Voices [4:12]

I don't know how much value I have in this universe, but I do know that it made a few people happier than they would have been without me. And as long as I know that, I'm as rich as I ever need to be.

Mostly Queen Mary [4:21]

Now, I wish I had done it earlier since VUG is already up $50 per share since July. All my best, Jess from Alaska.

Mostly Uncle Frank [4:31]

Well, we just heard from Jess in episode 460 a couple episodes ago. And thank you for writing in again, and thank you for being a donor to the Father McKenna Center.

Voices [4:42]

Yay! Oh Bullseye! We're part of a family again!

Mostly Uncle Frank [4:48]

Beginning to see how this works, I do get to all the emails eventually, because thankfully this podcast is still small enough that I can answer all the emails, at least the ones that aren't junk emails, trying to become a guest on a podcast that doesn't have any guests. I get a lot of those too.

Voices [5:07]

Always be closing. Always be closing.

Mostly Uncle Frank [5:13]

But more importantly, you've learned that you can go to the front of the email line by donating to the Father McKenna Center, as you have done here.

Voices [5:21]

You can do it!

Mostly Uncle Frank [5:23]

As most of you know, we do not have any sponsors on this podcast. We do have a charity we support. It's called the Father McKenna Center and it supports hungry and homeless people in Washington, D.C. Full disclosure, I'm the board of the charity and I'm the current treasurer. But if you give to the charity as Jess has done here, you get to go to the front of the email line. There are two ways to do that. Actually, Jess seems to have found a third way, but uh the main ways to do that are you can go to the donation page, the Father McKenna website, which I'll link to the show notes, or you can become one of our patrons on Patreon if you go to the support page at www.riskperiator.com. You can sign up for that there. Either way, you get to go to the front of the email line, but just make sure you mention it in your email so I can duly move you to the front of the line. Did you see the memo about this? But now let's get to your email. I'm really glad you were able to act on what you saw in that Bigger Pockets Money podcast and create your own test run of a risk parity style portfolio. I hope you're also taking withdrawals out of it because that's part of the fun and part of the learning process. There is this kind of myth out there that having a brokerage account is advanced or hard, or having more than a simple one-to-three fund portfolio is too hard for most people. In fact, it's just not too hard. It's unfamiliar. But you can familiarize yourself with it with a relatively small amount of money. And there's no reason anybody who is at least mildly curious about do-it-yourself investing should not be having a brokerage account and doing experiments with small amounts of money. That's how you learn.

Voices [7:21]

Now, kids, in my next part of my talk, I'm gonna be laying some heavy concepts on you.

Mostly Uncle Frank [7:28]

As I've railed on many times before, this idea that we need to worship some god of simplicity out there because we're too stupid to manage our own assets without going psycho or something like that. The name's Francis Sawyer. Any of you guys call me Francis, and I'll kill you. It's just wrong, and it cultivates a form of learned helplessness. Where you start believing that everything is too difficult, so you don't even try. That's no way to live a life, either in your investing life or another life. Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, sir. It may be a place to start something, but it's certainly not a place to end something.

Voices [8:24]

I must complete my bust. Two novels, finish my blueprints, begin my beginning. Hey, GIMA, most of you always talk in rhyme. If I spoke prose, you'd all find out. I don't know what I talk about.

Mostly Uncle Frank [8:35]

And I'm glad you're also appreciating that just saving and investing money is not much of a purpose unto itself, as Morgan Housell says in his recent book, The Art of Spending Money. If you think that's your purpose, then basically all you have is an accounting hobby that you really need to focus these activities of saving, investing, and spending money to some higher purpose that does not just involve accumulating more and more money until you're dead. And I talked a couple episodes ago about the identity chapter in that book, which I think is the most important chapter in that book, and that you need to be careful about choosing your identity because it may affect your ultimate happiness and satisfaction with life. And the examples of a bad identity to pick in his mind were things like I am a saver, but they could also be identities that are specific to a particular career or a particular kind of job or activity or something like that. You may have those identities and you probably should have multiple identities, but in my mind, the best kinds of identities to pick eventually and overall are the identities that are related to relationships. Because we do know from the five regrets of the dying and all kinds of literature that ultimately having good relationships is one of the keys to living a fulfilled life. And so if you want to have good relationships, you may consider choosing identities that are related to being a good friend, a good parent, a good spouse, a good community member in whatever community that you belong to. Because those kinds of identities are likely to lead you to more satisfaction in life than things like I am a saver or I am a lawyer or something like that. Because if you have relationship-based identities, then you can use your finances to enhance those sorts of things, and the finances do not become the identity or the purpose as unto themselves. Getting back to your portfolio, yeah, I suppose it would have been nice to have bought VUG or gold earlier this year. But that's the way things go. There's always going to be something going up and something going down in this kind of portfolio, at least almost all of the time. The last few months have actually been kind of unusual, particularly September, where just about everything was going up. That does happen sometimes with one of these portfolios, but it's not normal. Usually over the course of a year or a few years, you will have assets in these portfolios that look fabulous and some of them look terrible. And that is how you know you're well diversified. Because that's what diversification means, that different things are performing well or poorly at different times, and that you really want to have a multi-year or decade-long perspective on all of this. It's interesting if you look at something like the Golden Ratio portfolio going back 30-some years, and you can do this analysis on testfolio, you can see the history of all of the assets for the past 30-some years. And I think there's only one year where nothing was up in the portfolio. I think that year was 2018, which everything was pretty much flat. What you learn from that is that by having a well-diversified portfolio, you're going to have something that is going up even in the worst years, and you can take from that while the other assets recover. And in some years like this, just about everything is going up. Both of those situations are unusual. They're on the ends of the probability spectrum, but it does happen, particularly when you have a weak dollar like we've had this year. That tends to make everything priced in dollars look a little better than it otherwise would. Anyway, having a little test portfolio does allow you to see that in sort of in real time, these assets going up and down and performing differently at different times. But that is how we learn. So congratulations again for taking action on this, and I hope to hear more from you in the future. I'm glad you're enjoying the podcast. I'm glad you become a donor. And thank you for your email. Second off, we have an email from Phil.

Voices [14:16]

Phil? Hey, Phil? Phil? Phil Connors? Phil Connors, I thought that was you.

Mostly Uncle Frank [14:24]

And Phil Wright's.

Mostly Queen Mary [14:26]

Thanks for the podcast. The question I have is about asset swapping cash for tax efficiency. And am I missing something? To be clear, for example, you don't need an extra $5,000 in the checking account earning 0.02% interest.

Voices [14:42]

Always money in a banana stand.

Mostly Queen Mary [14:43]

My solution has been move $5,000 to taxable brokerage and buy X. Sell X equivalent in IRA and cash goes to money market or whatever. Reverse as needed respecting TLH. It seems really obvious to swap around cash with taxable/slash deferred accounts other than cash that has to be immediately available, bail, pizza guy, prescriptions, etc.

Voices [15:06]

All of our precious bodily fluids.

Mostly Queen Mary [15:09]

My process has been keep a reasonable balance in your checking account, for example, Fidelity CMA, and have something around as needed. Keep the bulk of your cash, emergency is way overplayed, in a tax-deferred account. It's so easy and fast to move funds around, I don't understand why most of the advice I hear is keep cash in a HYSA or CD or some other taxable vehicle.

Voices [15:32]

Stupid as stupid does, sir.

Mostly Queen Mary [15:34]

Is it a least common denominator situation? Ease of explanation? Time for the idea to sink in? I don't know. The explanation in previous podcasts and RPC video about asset swapping was good. The only downside I can imagine is if capital gains are significant, it may feel better to not be taxed on a much higher gain. Setting up and monitoring my own sample portfolios has been fantastic. I started investing out of college and work plans in the mid-90s. The first defining moment in my investment understanding was reading Bernstein's Intelligent Asset Allocator in 2010-ish. The second was discovering your podcast. Thanks. I know you don't want a second job. Please keep it up, Phil. You don't want any jobs.

Mostly Uncle Frank [16:21]

It's not that I'm lazy.

Voices [16:23]

It's that I just don't care.

Mostly Uncle Frank [16:25]

Well, thank you for writing in again, Phil. And thank you for being a donor to the Father McKenna Center, which is why your email has also gone to the front of the line, along with Jess this time. So let's talk about asset swaps. I know you understand what they are, but this seems to be a very underused tool in personal finance.

Voices [16:53]

And we have the tools, we have the talent.

Mostly Uncle Frank [16:57]

And what it really is, is a way for you to move assets in and out of retirement accounts and taxable accounts without actually moving any money in or out of the account. And the way that it works is you are essentially selling, say, assets in one account and then buying them in the other account to equalize out your overall portfolio, but effectively moving it from one account to another. Now I realize that explanation sounded confusing because this is not that conducive to explaining orally or on a podcast. It's easier if you do go look at that video that Justin of Risk Parity Chronicles prepared for us, and I will link to it again in the show notes, but it shows you exactly how to do an asset swap between two accounts. Didn't you get that memo? And I think what you're doing makes a whole lot of sense, particularly if you have a lot of money in a taxable account that is paying a lot of ordinary income. I ran into this with another listener who had sold a property, and so they ended up with several hundred thousand dollars in cash that they had just put into money markets or some kind of savings because they were still figuring out what to do with it in the next year. But what they realized after a year is that had thrown off a whole lot of ordinary taxable income and was extremely tax inefficient to be having that sort of asset in the taxable side of their investments. And so I pointed out that you could avoid all those taxes if you essentially did an asset swap. Instead of holding all this cash in your taxable side of your account, why don't you buy stocks or something that only throws off very limited income that is qualified income and maintains capital gains? And then what you do is you go over to your retirement account, you sell some of the stocks that are in there, and you buy all of this cash. You put it in short-term bonds or something similar in the retirement account. That way you still have the same asset mix, but all of that income, instead of appearing in your taxable account and being taxable that year, goes into your retirement account, which can be reinvested, but you're not paying taxes on it while it's sitting in there. You only pay taxes on it when it comes out. And that makes a whole lot more sense than paying these tax bills in your taxable brokerage account, because it also plays into timing that ultimately you want to be taking money out of those retirement accounts when the rest of your income is low. And the rest of your income is not going to be low if you have piles of things generating ordinary income in a taxable account. Now, I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze if you're only talking about $5,000 that you're asset swapping, but it's not wrong to do that if it doesn't take much effort. The way you squeeze my lamina, I'm gonna fall out of It is sufficient to say that the higher your marginal ordinary income tax rate is, the more valuable the asset swapping technique is going to be for you in your everyday lives, in addition to being a way to tax optimize your retirement portfolios. So I think your process for cash management is quite a good one. And thank you for sharing it with us.

Voices [20:32]

It cuts whack.

Mostly Uncle Frank [20:45]

And Mindy Jensen has done by setting up a sample portfolio so you can learn how to manage it and just see how it works. I honestly didn't think that would be that great of a learning tool. It would be more of a pain for most people, but I've learned that it actually is quite a good learning tool and that many people benefit from it, and it's easier to get a feel for how this works by simply doing it as opposed to just reading or hearing about it. Let's do it. I probably should have known that because that is what Mary and I tell our trial practice students in our law school class. That is, you're going to remember and appreciate something by doing it, getting up and doing it, as opposed to just reading about it or hearing about it.

Voices [21:41]

I do it. I love to do it. I just did it and I'm ready to do it again. Don't tell me you don't do it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [21:50]

But I'm glad you and Jess have told me about that so that I can incorporate it into future recommendations as to how to get into this. I'm glad you're enjoying the podcast. Thank you for your suggestions on cash management. Thank you for your donations, and thank you for your email. And Scott Wrights.

Mostly Queen Mary [22:52]

Howdy, longtime listener, haven't donated yet. Yet. Check out the July twenty ninth, your money your wealth podcast with Beth and Rip. It's the first one and it won't take you long to confirm your latest rant. It could be the worst one yet regarding hoarding and overaccumulation. Have a great day.

Voices [23:46]

Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Yes, morons. Really?

Mostly Uncle Frank [23:53]

And I use as an example of that the show Your Money, Your Wealth, which is run by a couple of AUM financial advisor types.

Voices [24:04]

I drink your milkshake. I drink it up!

Mostly Uncle Frank [24:12]

And so Scott is also referring to their episode that came out on July 29th with another example of these types of callers. And I won't belabor it, but it is pretty ridiculous when people call into these shows and they say they basically have eight or ten million dollars or something like that, and they wonder if they can spend $100,000 in retirement. Shirley, you can't be serious. I am serious, and don't call me Shirley. Because they clearly know the answer to that question. And I do keep wondering, though, whether the advisors on that show select these people, or that it's just a happenstance that almost all the people that write into that show are grossly oversaved.

Voices [24:56]

What's with you anyway? I can't help it. I'm a greedy slob. It's my hobby. Save me.

Mostly Uncle Frank [25:03]

What I have observed though is that a lot of these advisors who have shows, especially the ones that are paid through AUM, that's assets under management that take a percentage of your money every year. It's usually around 1%. So if you have a $5 million portfolio, you're paying these people $50,000 a year to allegedly do something for you. But what I've observed, they set really low performance bars for themselves, and are often saying things like people in their 60s should only be taking out 3% of their invested assets, and that's the kind of plans they put people in. I have to tell you, if you're one of those people, that's really not good enough for the 2020s, and the world is going to catch up with this gouging, frankly. It's gouging and charging people lots of money for a mediocre plan because psychological hand holding is only worth so much.

Voices [26:00]

Aw, you're such a good boy. Yeah, you're so good.

Mostly Uncle Frank [26:07]

Even the financial advisor community at large, if you go to someplace like ThinkAdvisor, you'll see people like David Blanchett, who's famous in the field and has written a lot about the retirement spending smile and many other things. He's been saying for at least a few years now that the target for your basic retirement portfolio ought to be spending 5%, that that really ought to be the target. So if your plan only allows your client to be spending 3% in retirement, I'm talking about just somebody in their 60s like I am now, you're really just not doing a good enough job to be paid that amount of money.

Voices [26:44]

You had only one job.

Mostly Uncle Frank [26:46]

And I can tell you, as a consumer of this stuff that gets marketed to all the time, that's just not good enough.

Voices [26:54]

That and a nickel get your hot cup, a jack squat.

Mostly Uncle Frank [26:59]

I mean, I can do this myself and take five percent. If I was gonna pay somebody one percent or something like that, at least I would think I'd be able to be taking four percent out, but three percent? Come on.

Voices [27:11]

Do you think anybody wants a roundhouse kicked to the face while I'm wearing these bad boys? Forget about it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [27:18]

Then I see people who charge by the hour saying the same thing. And I was just listening to Rick Ferry on the Excess Returns podcast a week or two ago. And they asked him point blank, I mean, what do you tell your clients, an average client, how much money they can take out of their portfolio? And he hemmed and hawed around it and really didn't want to answer the question. But eventually they pinned him down and he said 3%. And he was talking about leaving the same amount of money you started with to your heirs. So that shines it up a little bit. But I can tell you the kinds of portfolios we're using start with a 6% safe withdrawal rate on a 30-year basis and on a forever basis are at 5%. So if you're saying that people can only take out 60% of what we can do ourselves, that's not good enough either.

Voices [28:10]

Forget about it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [28:12]

I'll link to that in the show notes, it's at the end of that podcast. But I feel like, yeah, maybe that was good enough ten, fifteen years ago when financial advisors first started using lots of index fund-based portfolios. But that's just not cutting it today. So if that's what you have to offer, you either need to charge a whole lot less, or why don't you just up your game as far as what you're recommending. Of course, you may have to stop worshiping a god of simplicity out of one side of your mouth and talking about tips ladders out of the other side of your mouth. Because yeah, that kind of thinking does lead you to these kind of 3% safe control rates. Anyway, I don't feel too much like ranting today. That's enough of a rant on this. You can go back to listen to episode 441 if you want to get the uh full meal deal on that. That's what I'm talking about. But I'm glad I'm not the only one that listens to these things with these grossly oversaved people and wonders why they were writing it at all. But as Morgan Housel says, their identity is to have an accounting hobby.

Voices [29:17]

Ha ha ha!

Mostly Uncle Frank [29:19]

And maybe we should try to do better than that with what life we have remaining.

Voices [29:25]

Death stalks you at every turn! Grandpa? Well, it does! There it is!

Mostly Uncle Frank [29:33]

Death So thank you for bringing that to our attention, and thank you for your email. Now we are going to do something extremely fun. And the extremely fun thing we get to do now is our weekly portfolio reviews of the eight sample portfolios you can find at www.riskperior.com on the portfolios page. We're also going to talk about our monthly distributions for November. But just looking at how these markets have performed this year so far, starting with the SP 500 represented by the fund VOO, that's up 17.47% for the year so far. The Nasdaq 100, represented by QQQ, is up 23.51% for the year so far. Small cap value represented by the fund VIOV continues to lag. It is only up 3.04% for the year so far. And gold continues to be the big winner, even though it is off of its ridiculous highs. Well, it's still at ridiculous highs. I love gold.32% for the year so far. Which means we've been selling it and continue to sell it. I think the last time we bought gold in most of these portfolios was in 2021. When I looked back and looked at the Golden Ratio portfolio, we started with $1,600 worth of gold in that portfolio. We've sold $1,000 worth of gold in that portfolio, and there's still over $2,000 worth of gold in it right now.

Voices [31:17]

And that's the way uh uh I like it, Casey and the Shunshine Bund.

Mostly Uncle Frank [31:23]

Now, does that mean you should run out and chase gold because it's gone up?

Voices [31:27]

No, Mr. Bund, I expect you to die.

Mostly Uncle Frank [31:31]

Because what's funny about these portfolios and about assets in general is the time you actually want to be buying them is when everybody hates them and nobody cares.

Voices [31:43]

That is the straight stuff, oh funk master.

Mostly Uncle Frank [31:46]

And we saw this with respect to gold. We had a listener three years ago saying, Why are you doing that? Isn't that a foolish consistency? This thing's never gonna perform again. And that is just rank silliness.

Voices [31:59]

That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.

Mostly Uncle Frank [32:04]

One thing you should learn from listening to other amateur investors is that they are terrible at predicting the future and they fixate on what has happened in the last three to ten years and try to predict from that.

Voices [32:20]

My name's Sonia. I'm going to be showing you um the crystal ball and how to use it or how I use it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [32:27]

And they are usually wrong.

Voices [32:31]

Wrong!

Mostly Uncle Frank [32:32]

Until three years ago, it was gold as a terrible asset. Today its bonds are a terrible asset, and small cap value is a terrible asset.

Voices [32:41]

You can actually feel the energy from your ball by just putting your hands in and out.

Mostly Uncle Frank [32:46]

Well, if you look at the history of this, the first year of these portfolios, small cap value is actually the best performer out of all of the assets. And you don't know what is going to be next. But that's the point of holding a whole bunch of diversified assets that you don't know.

Voices [33:04]

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

Mostly Uncle Frank [33:10]

So stop trying to predict things and just hold a variety of assets, even the ones that have been performing badly for the past five years or three to ten years or whatever metric you're using. Learn something from George Costanza when what you do seems to result in bad results, and the typical behavior of amateur investors is to chase things that have done well in the past one to ten years. That is the typical behavior. If you do the opposite, you may have good results because events that haven't happened in 40 or 50 years might just happen next year. That's the way this works.

Voices [33:56]

Yeah, I should do the opposite. If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right. Yes. I will do the opposite. I used to sit here and do nothing and regret it for the rest of the day. So now I will do the opposite and I will do something. Excuse me, uh, I couldn't help but notice that you were looking in my direction. Oh, yes, I was. You just ordered the same exact lunch as me. My name is George. I'm unemployed and I live with my parents. I'm Victoria. Hi.

Mostly Uncle Frank [34:45]

So all those retail financial advisors who have been telling you, well, gold hasn't performed well since 1980, so you shouldn't own it, and it did really badly in the 1990s, so you shouldn't own it, and the 1970s are never gonna happen again. Uh guess what? They were wrong. Wrong! And they're still wrong today. Wrong? Wrong! They've just got egg in their face now. Right? Wrong! Moving on. Long-term treasury bonds represented by the fund VGLT are up seven point one five percent for the year so far. Yeah, those are now the least popular asset of these. But just wait till the next recession. Rates represented by the fund RET are up seven point four six percent for the year so far. Commodities represented by the fund PDBC are up four point five four percent for the year so far. Preferred shares represented by PFFV are up 2.68 for the year so far, and managed futures are managing to be up. Representative fund DBMF is up 10.51% for the year so far. Which has gone from one of the worst performers this year to one of the best performers this year in the last six months. Nobody predicted that either.

Voices [35:58]

Don't be saucy with me, Bernays.

Mostly Uncle Frank [36:02]

Now moving to these portfolios. First one's the all seasons. This is a reference portfolio. It's only 30% in stocks and a total stock market fund, 55% in intermediate and long-term treasury bonds, and the remaining 15% in golden commodities. It was up 1.64% for the month of October. It's up 13.28% year to date, and up 22.98% since inception in July 2020. For the month of November, we're taking $34 out of it. It will come out of accumulated cash. It's at a 4% annualized rate, and it'll be $350 year to date, and $2,040 since inception in July 2020. Moving to these bread and butter kind of portfolios, first one's gold and butterfly. This one is 40% in stocks divided into a total stock market fund and a small cap value fund, 40% in bonds divided into long and short treasury bonds, and the remaining 20% in gold, GLDM. It was up 1.49% for October. It's up 16.51% year to date and up 56.04% since inception in July 2020. For the month of November, we'll be withdrawing $50 that is going to come out of the gold allocation in GLDM. This is at a 5% annualized rate. That'll be $511 year to date and $2,812 since inception in July 2020. Next one's the golden ratio.

Voices [37:32]

A number so perfect.

Mostly Uncle Frank [37:34]

Perfect. We find it everywhere. Everywhere. Sacred geometry. This one is 42% in stocks, divided it into a large cap growth fund and a small cap value fund, 26% in long-term treasury bonds, 16% in gold, 10% in managed futures, and the remaining 6% in cash and a money market fund. It's up 2.15% for the month of October. It's up 16.97% year to date, and up 52.01% since inception in July 2020. For the month of November, we'll be withdrawing $49. We always withdraw out of the cash money market fund for this portfolio. At a 5% annualized rate, that'll be $492 year-to-date and $2,754 since inception in July 2020. Next one's the Risk Parity Ultimate, our kitchen sink. We won't be going through all 12 of these funds, but it's up 1.62% for the month of October. It's up 16.39% year to date and up 38.9% since inception in July 2020. We'll be withdrawing $53 out of it from gold for the month of November. This is now at a 6% annualized rate, so that'll be $464 year to date and $2,914 since inception in July 2020. Now moving to these experimental portfolios that all involve leverage funds.

Voices [39:04]

Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave with a bunch of scraps.

Mostly Uncle Frank [39:12]

Don't try this at home.

Voices [39:14]

You have a gambling problem.

Mostly Uncle Frank [39:16]

First one's the accelerated permanent portfolio. This one is 27.5% in a levered bond fund TMF. 25% in UPRO, a levered S P 500 fund, 25% in PFFV, a preferred shares fund, and 22.5% in gold in GLDM. It was up 3.23% for the month of October. It's up 22.96% year to date and up 24.23% since inception in July 2020. For the month of November, we're withdrawing $44, also coming out of gold. It's at a 6% annualized rate. That'll be $433 year to date and $3,063 since inception in July 2020. Next one's the aggressive 50-50. This is the least diversified and most levered of these portfolios.

Voices [40:05]

Look away.

Mostly Uncle Frank [40:06]

I'm it is 33% in UPRO, a levered stock fund, 33% in TMF, a levered bond fund, and the remaining 34% divided into a preferred shares fund and intermediate treasury bonds as ballast. It's up 3.23% for the month of October. It's up 15.47% year to date and up 1.7% since inception in July 2020. For November, we'll be taking $36 out of it, out of the UPRO, the Levered Stock Fund. It's at a 6% annualized rate. It'll be $360 year to date and $3,028 since inception in July 2020. Moving to the next one, this is the levered golden ratio. It has 35% in a composite fund called NTSX, that is the SP 500 and Treasury bonds levered up 1.5 to 1, 15% in AVDV, which is an international small cap value fund. 20% in gold, GLDM, 10% in a managed futures fund, KMLM, 10% in TMF, which is a levered bond fund, and the remaining 10% divided into two levered funds that follow the Dow and a Utilities Index. It's up 2.45% month to date. It's up 23.57% year to date, and up 18.11% since inception in July 2021. For the month of October, we are withdrawing $39 out of it from gold, GLDM. It's at a 5% annualized rate right now. That'll be $373 year-to-date and $1,940 since inception in July 2021. And moving to our last one, the OPTRA portfolio. One portfolio to rule them all. This is a return-stacked kind of portfolio. It is 16% in UPRO, which is a Levered SP 500 fund, 24% in AVGV, which is a worldwide value tilted fund, 24% in GOVZ, which is a Treasury Strips fund, and the remaining 36% divided into gold and managed futures. It's up 2.92% for the month of October. It's up 22.71% year-to-date and up 26.28% since inception in July 2024. It's relatively new. For the month of November, we're taking out $59 out of UPRO, which is a 6% annualized rate. It'll be $576 year-to-date and $836 since inception in July 2024. And that concludes our weekly portfolio reviews and our monthly distributions. I am sure you found that scintillating. As always.

Voices [42:53]

This is pretty much the worst video ever made.

Mostly Uncle Frank [42:56]

But now I see our signal is beginning to fade. If you have comments or questions for me, please send them to Frank at RiskPartyRader.com.com. Or you can go to the website www.riskparty.com. Put your message into 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, and be some stars follow a review. That would be great. Okay. Thank you once again for tuning in. This is Frank Vasquez with Risk Party Radio. Signing off.