Opening Quotes And Welcome

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 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. And the basic foundational episodes are episodes 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. Yes, it is still in my memory banks. We have also created an additional resource, a collection of additional foundational episodes and other popular episodes.

Voices [1:07]

We have top men working on it right now.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:14]

Top men. And you can find those on the episode guide page at www.riskparodyradio.com. Inconceivable. We'd be helpless without him.

Voices [1:36]

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:41]

Because other than him, it's just me and Marion here. I'll give you the moon, right?

Voices [1:46]

I'll take it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:48]

We have no sponsors, we have no guests, and we have no expansion plans.

Voices [1:53]

I don't think I'd like another job.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:55]

Over the years, our podcast has become very audienced focused, and I must say we do have the finest podcast audience available.

Voices [2:05]

Really top drawer.

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:07]

Along with a host named after a hot dog.

Voices [2:10]

Lighten up, Francis.

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:14]

But now onward, episode 493. Today on Risk Party Radio. Which means we'll be doing our weekly portfolio reviews of the eight sample portfolios you can find at www.riskparty.com on the portfolios page. And yes, it was another ugly week. Unless you like commodities, of course.

Voices [2:44]

I'm an oil man.

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:47]

But before we get to that.

Charity Donations And Community Spirit

Voices [2:49]

I'm intrigued about this. How you say emails. And First off.

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:57]

First off, I have an email from Lee. What kind of training, son? Army training, son!

Voices [3:06]

Army training, sir!

Mostly Uncle Frank [3:07]

And Lee writes.

Mostly Queen Mary [3:09]

I made a small donation, $100, to Fairfax Casa, since this is the most useful podcast I listen to. The best, Jerry. The best. I listened to an unhealthy amount at two times the speed. I love this charity. I was an adoptee, so my donations go to that organization. I was deployed a few times with the U.S. Army and watched tons of movies, bootlegged DVDs, so your clips resonate and bring back poignant memories.

Mostly Uncle Frank [4:29]

First, thank you for being a donor to Fairfax Casa. As most of you know here who have not been living under a rock.

Voices [4:36]

I've officially amounted to check you squat.

Mostly Uncle Frank [4:42]

We are currently raising money for Mary's charity, which is the Fairfax Court Appointed Special Advocates who work with foster children. And we're doing that in March and April in particular. There has already been an outpouring of support by so many listeners. And Mary has been overwhelmed by your generosity, if you hadn't heard it in her voice, as I have been too. And you do get to go to the front of the email line for donating to Fairfax Casa. I will put the link in the show notes. But please do mention it in your email and I'll move you to the front of the line.

Speaker 17 [5:19]

Yes!

Mostly Uncle Frank [5:20]

I'm glad you're enjoying the clips. That's a love 'em or hate 'em kind of thing.

Voices [5:26]

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

Mostly Uncle Frank [5:32]

But us people of a certain age do resonate with certain things, especially from the 1980s and 1990s, I think.

Voices [5:40]

That's the fact, Jack! That's the fact, Jack!

Mostly Uncle Frank [5:45]

We do plan to keep this free and unsponsored. It is a retirement hobby for me. And I don't know if you've heard our business model. I'll play that for you.

Voices [5:57]

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 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. I mean, she would have she truly would have thought I was insane. Okay? It seems to fly in the face of so many things.

Mostly Uncle Frank [6:29]

And I'd like to maintain that spirit here. So we have people like Justin of Risk Parity Chronicles, who is also a fabulous contributor. We have Luke, our volunteer in Quebec, who's helped us out so much with our website. Parce que vive le Quebec, but sharing sophisticated information for free with other people who are interested in the same thing is important to me. I think it's one of the good things about the internet that kind of gets lost or has gotten lost in the past couple decades. There have been so many other contributors to these kinds of efforts. And for do-it-yourself investors, I think we're all going to be better off if we share a lot of things and share all the free resources that are available now for us, like test folio and portfolio charts. And while there are pay portions of those things, most of the things that we actually need are still free there.

Voices [7:28]

What's going on? Why are why are people doing this? Why are they why are these people, many of whom are technically sophisticated, highly skilled people who have jobs? Okay? They have jobs. They're working at jobs for pay, doing challenging, doing sophisticated technology technological work. And yet, during their limited discretionary time, they do equally, if not more, technically sophisticated work, not for their employer, but for someone else for free.

Mostly Uncle Frank [7:55]

And that's very important to me because I do frankly get annoyed at what goes on in a lot of personal finance these days, which is people showing up from hustle culture, trying to repackage free information and sell it to people. That's unnecessary, and I frown upon it.

Voices [8:16]

Forget about it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [8:18]

So we're always just going to keep this as a retirement hobby and focus on raising money for charity. Because you know, it really does not cost very much to produce a podcast. At least not the way I do it.

Voices [8:33]

This is pretty much the worst video ever made.

Mostly Uncle Frank [8:36]

Anyway, if anybody else is creating free resources out there that might be interesting to this audience, please do send them to me and I may mention them if they seem appropriate. Because I think this is the best way that little online communities are actually formed.

Speaker 17 [8:52]

Well, me and the Lord. We've got an understanding. We're on a mission from God.

Mostly Uncle Frank [9:00]

So we will continue on in our silly and unsponsored ways.

Voices [9:06]

You're not going to amount to Jack Squad!

Gold Substitutes And Investor Bias

Mostly Uncle Frank [9:11]

Thank you for your donation. Please mention it the next time you write in with an actual question. And thank you for your email. Second off, we have an email from Leo.

Voices [10:06]

Leo! You're gonna die.

Mostly Uncle Frank [10:09]

And Leo writes.

Mostly Queen Mary [10:11]

Hello, Frank. Thank you so much for your work on the Golden Ratio Portfolio.

Voices [10:17]

A number so perfect. Perfect. You find it everywhere.

Mostly Queen Mary [10:22]

I really like the principles and strategies behind this portfolio. I was wondering if there's another asset that can be used instead of gold in the 16% allocation slot. My hesitation is that with the recent run-up in gold, that it may be overbought and maybe overdue for a correction in the not too distant future. The crystal ball can help you. Could utilities go on that slot or something else? Thank you again for your research.

Voices [10:55]

The golden ratio. Yeah, that's what happens, man. Yeah, that's what happens.

Mostly Uncle Frank [11:17]

So if you were waiting for that correction, you missed it.

Voices [11:21]

And it's gone. Poof.

Mostly Uncle Frank [11:25]

There was a little one, I think, in November. But I think you really need to change your mindset here. And not just about this portfolio, but about any portfolio. Because what we're doing here is investing for the next decade or two or three. We're not investing for next year. We're not investing for next month. We're not even investing for the next five years. And so given that our purpose is long-term investing and not short-term investing, we're not looking at what any asset did in the past six months, one year, or even five years. That's not how you should be looking at investing, at least if you're a long-term investor. Because we expect all the assets in these kind of portfolios to have good and bad years, in which case we will be rebalancing them against each other. And that's the point of holding diversified assets. If we thought one was going to do better than other ones based on some recent performance or anything else, we would just invest in what we thought were the good ones. But you know what that would require. And so what you are asking is whether you can use a crystal ball to determine in the short term whether you should abandon one asset for the next two decades for another asset based on what happened recently. And the answer is no, you shouldn't be doing that. It's not a good process.

Voices [13:00]

Forget about it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [13:02]

Now, in direct answer to your question, can utilities be substituted for gold? The answer is no, not over the long term, because utilities have a positive correlation with the rest of the stock market. It's usually somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6, but it could be more or less in any given year. And utilities sometimes have a positive correlation with bonds because they are interest rate sensitive often. Gold does not have a positive correlation with either stocks or bonds, which makes it kind of unique. And it can't be replaced with something like utilities. The only thing you could potentially replace gold with would be another asset that also has no correlation with stocks or bonds in general. That would be something like managed futures. Now, you could have a portfolio that had utilities and gold or managed futures in it, and that might work. And we do discuss the use of utilities explicitly, a whole episode about that. It's episode 27 that you should go back and listen to if you're thinking about using utilities in one of these kind of portfolios. They can be quite useful sometimes. If you're looking for other particular assets, go to the episode guide page at www.riskperior.com. And there are a bunch of episodes where we just talk about specific assets. So particularly before, I had a lot of emails to answer. But if you bring up that list, you'll find a whole bunch of different assets that we talk about explicitly and which episodes that are the corresponding episodes for those. And you can check those out at your leisure. But I have to tell you, whenever I get a question like this, it's because the person has a pre-existing bias against whatever the asset is. Because it doesn't really matter how the asset performed. It's just used as an excuse not to get that particular asset. So with respect to something like gold that's performed well recently, people will say, Well, I shouldn't invest in that. It's performed well recently. I'll wait for a pullback. Then you'll hear another person or even the same person say something like, Well, I'm not going to invest in bonds. Look how poorly they've done recently. They've really done badly the past five years, haven't they? I would never invest in something that has done badly in the past five years. Both of those statements are pretty irrational, actually, because either you're a momentum follower and you want to follow what's doing well, which, by the way, doesn't work very well. In fact, it's the reason that amateur investors tend to underperform their portfolios because they tend to follow the hot thing. But then equally problematic is refusing to buy things that are not doing well. Because they're not doing well. And that's the opposite problem.

Voices [15:46]

You're too stupid to have a good turn.

Mostly Uncle Frank [15:48]

But the list of kind of idiotic or irrational reasons that people will not want to invest in something is just is endless. With respect to gold, I hear recent things like, well, it's got really high volatility some days. That one day it went down 10% in January. We can't invest in something with a really high volatility in one day. It's like, well, are you not going to invest in the stock market either? There was a day in 1987 where the stock market went down over 20%. And are you a long-term investor or are you a trader? The same person I hear saying that also claims to be a long-term investor. If you're a long-term investor, why do you care about the day-to-day volatility of any particular asset? Uh what? It makes no sense. It just shows a bias against the asset without any real basis for the bias.

Voices [16:47]

That's not an improvement.

Mostly Uncle Frank [16:49]

The truth is, over long periods of time, gold has about the same volatility as the stock market.

Voices [16:54]

Yeah. Didn't you get that memo?

Mostly Uncle Frank [16:57]

It does have an interesting quality that it tends to have higher volatility when it's going up, as opposed to the stock market, which has higher volatility when it's going down. But none of that matters if you're a long-term investor. The other thing I hear frequently about gold is a cherry picking of the data. They'll say, Well, you know, it peaked in 1980, and then it went down after that. And we would never want to invest in something that would have a bad decade. And it's like, well, you invest in the stock market. It sounds like you're trying to sell annuities. That's the way annuities are sold or have been sold until recently. An annuity salesman will take the stock market at the end of 1999 and use that as a basis to compare their product to, because obviously the next 10 years were really bad and the stock market went nowhere and had a return of zero. But you can always cherry pick data to come up with a conclusion. So if you ever hear anybody just pick some date out of the blue and say, well, it hasn't performed this way since this date, or it's performed really well since this date. And that's not a basis for investing or not investing in something. It's just part of a litany of common fallacies that people often have. Somebody who is really thinking about assets and thinking about what they might be used for, who's like a level four investor, is what we call these people, is somebody like David Stein, who was a professional institutional investor before he left that world. There's a very nice interview of him just on the White Coat Investor last week. I'll link to this interview in the show notes. But Jim Dolly asked him, is there anything you changed your mind about in the past decade or so? And he said, Well, I definitely changed my mind about gold, because when I was an institutional investor, I was always saying, Well, it doesn't have a yield, uh, it doesn't have a return, we shouldn't invest in this. But then when he actually studied it and saw what it was actually being used for, which is as a kind of insurance against monetary dislocations and other negative economic or geopolitical events, he said he changed his mind in 2012 and adopted gold as part of his portfolio. And that's what good investors really do. They reanalyze things, they change their mind when it's appropriate. They don't get stuck in the foolish consistency of their own past or what they've said in the past. And they don't adopt the kind of fallacious reasoning that I talked about just before I talked about David Stein. I thought that was an interesting interview. It kind of followed the levels of investors we've talked about recently here. Because David Stein is a level four investor, whereas Jim Dolly is more of a level three kind of investor. And I think around minute 17, if you listen to this interview, Jim asks David whether he considers himself a boglehead. And David says, It depends on what you mean by that. If you're asking whether I think it's a good idea to hold rigid two or three fund portfolios, the answer to that is no.

Voices [20:02]

Not gonna do it. Wouldn't be prudent at this juncture.

Mostly Uncle Frank [20:05]

Because that's not really matching investments or portfolios to a real purpose, just following some kind of formula like that. But if you're asking whether somebody should use the most efficient funds they can find for whatever purpose they're trying to serve, he said he agreed with that. So they concluded he was a boglehead in the broad sense. Which I would actually go along with. Shirley, you can't be serious.

Voices [20:32]

I am serious, and don't call me Shirley.

Mostly Uncle Frank [20:34]

But that was a very interesting conversation between a level three investor and a level four investor. And then if you go to the end of the podcast, which is not on the YouTube channel, but it's on the regular podcast, Jim makes a comment about level two investors who are always looking for shiny objects, and he says, so many people write in and they're asking me what I'm investing in, as if knowing what I'm investing in is going to help them or solve their problem. And what he identified there was a characteristic of level two investors, because besides chasing shiny objects and magic investing buttons and thinking that advisors have them, what level two investors commonly do is go around soliciting opinions. So looking at what this person is invested in and what this person is invested in, what this person invested in, and basically assessing kind of the popularity of something and using that as a basis to decide what to invest in. And that's just a bad process because it's devoid from any analysis or understanding of why somebody might be investing in something or not and what the purpose is. And what it's really attempting to do is just avoid learning about investing and substituting opinion solicitation for that. But financial media and financial services play to that kind of decision making process.

Voices [22:00]

One thing counts in this life. Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.

Mostly Uncle Frank [22:05]

But you can understand why Jim Dolly, as a level three investor who focuses on efficiency and accumulation, gets annoyed with level two investors who are not talking about investing at all, but popularity contests as a substitute for learning about investing.

Voices [22:22]

Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through lifestyle.

UK Investing Currency And Bond Choices

Mostly Uncle Frank [22:26]

Anyway, I've been digressing here. So I'll stop. I'm hoping you're still listening to this, Leo. Please do check out episode 27 about utilities and investing in utilities funds as part of a portfolio. And thank you for your email. Next off, we have an email from Tony.

Voices [23:15]

I'm Tony Montana, a political prisoner from Cover.

Mostly Uncle Frank [23:20]

And Tony writes.

Mostly Queen Mary [23:22]

Hi, Frank. I'm an investor from the UK. Will this change the allocation mix as I deal in the pound sterling?

Voices [23:30]

And I want my human right now.

Mostly Uncle Frank [23:33]

Well, Tony, the answer is yes, it probably does in some aspects. First, if you don't listen to it already, I invite you to listen to the podcast Many Happy Returns, which is run by a couple of advisors in the UK. And if you want to hear something interesting, listen to the interviews they've done of Tyler at Portfolio Charts, which I'll see if I can link to in the show notes. Because he talks about things like the golden butterfly portfolio and then some research that he's done about worldwide portfolios and what might work best in different countries and things like that. Portfolio Charts does allow you to change the country of selection. And so I think you should go and use that if you don't already. What his long-term analysis has shown that you probably want more gold if you are an international sourced investor. But I think that has a lot to do with the fact that if you are not using the world's reserve currency, you have more currency risks inherent in what you're doing. And a couple other observations that if you're outside the US, you definitely need to have a large allocation to U.S. markets because it is so dominant of world markets. And most of the large tech companies are headquartered in the U.S. And so, in order to capture the allocation to the Mag 7, you have to invest in the US. I think most international investors intuitively know that and tend to allocate at least half of their allocation to the U.S. and then spread it out over other countries. It still is true that everybody's got a home country bias, including people in the U.S. It's just that investors in the US can kind of get away with it because so much of the world's stock markets are dominated by U.S. markets. But if you're not in the U.S., you really can't get away with that sort of thing, and you want to have a more globally diversified portfolio. The other thing to consider is what kind of bonds to use in this portfolio. And this is a difficult question that I've contemplated for quite a while now. And I used to think maybe you should just stick with the bonds in your own country because they're in the same currency, so at least you know you've you're getting that. But as time has gone on, I think my thinking has shifted. And no, I don't have any grand analysis to show you about this. But the truth is that, you know, when there's world crises and people are sort of battening down the hatches, they tend to go buy more US dollars. And if they're buying bonds, they tend to buy more US bonds. And so, in terms of a diversification from stocks and other things, I think you'd probably be better off with mostly US dollar denominated bonds in your case. I don't think it'd be wrong to have some of both, but in terms of what the purpose of for these bonds is in a diversified risk parity style portfolio, having them in dollars is probably going to be advantageous in any big global recession type scenario. Because it's also true that if the US economy catches a cold, oftentimes the rest of the world's economy catches the flu, in which case the US dollar-denominated bonds are going to be a better choice for that. So after those observations, though, I don't think this is going to change the global or macro allocations to assets in these kinds of portfolios. I think they're probably still going to be similar, but I would check out that research by Tyler at Portfolio Charts where he did a multi-country analysis of various kinds of portfolios for safe withdrawal rate purposes, which I will link to in the show notes. Because it was a lot of work by him and it's very useful for people who are in other countries. Anyway, sorry I can't give you any more specific recommendations than that, but hopefully it helps some. And thank you for your email.

Voices [27:43]

Last off.

Mostly Uncle Frank [27:46]

We have an email from Samuel. And Samuel writes.

Mostly Queen Mary [27:54]

How can you depend so heavily on asset correlations when those correlations can vary so much over time?

Voices [28:01]

Real wrath of God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling.

Mostly Queen Mary [28:11]

For example, TLT's correction with VOO, as I recall, varies from negative 0.5 to 0.5.

Voices [28:18]

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass terrium.

Mostly Uncle Frank [28:24]

Well, good question, Samuel. And this goes to where do correlations come from?

Voices [28:34]

Pure energy.

Mostly Uncle Frank [28:40]

I think there is a misunderstanding amongst most of the investing public, particularly level two or level three investors, who tend to listen to the financial media and get this idea that correlations are somehow random.

Voices [28:54]

You know, I got friends of mine who live and die by the actuarial tables, and I say, hey, it's all one big crapshoot anywho.

Mostly Uncle Frank [29:01]

Or that they go one way for 40 years and then go a different way for 40 years, and there's new paradigms out there and crystal balls and things like that.

Voices [29:11]

As you can see, I've got several here. Um, a really big one here, which is huge.

Mostly Uncle Frank [29:19]

The truth goes to the four quadrant model that we use. Now we've talked about recently a number of episodes. And the idea here is that the performance of various assets depends on the macroeconomic environment that you are in. Meaning, are you having low growth and low inflation, in which case you're having a recession? Are you having high growth and high inflation? Or are you having a combination of those things? And different assets perform differently in each of those quadrants. And so, in some quadrants, stocks and bonds are positively correlated. Those tend to be the high inflation environments. Once you start getting inflation over 5% or rising inflation steeply, like in 2022, you get positive correlations between stocks and bonds. When you tend to have moderate inflation, say like in the past three years or so, you tend to get correlations that are close to zero. And so recently, stocks have been going up for the past three years or so, where bonds have been kind of going nowhere. That's a zero correlation. So when do you have negative correlation? You have it at a very specific time, and that time is when there is a recession. When stocks are going down because there's a recession, bonds are going up. And how do we know that? Well, it's not magic. We don't need crystal balls.

Voices [30:45]

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

Mostly Uncle Frank [30:49]

We just look at the data since the 1950s. And there's a paper I've cited to before. I'll cite to it again. Go to the appendices in it. It's on page 53 of this paper. It's about volatility and treasury bonds. It has an awful name. It's by a researcher named Claudia Moissa, and they've updated it, I think, since the past five years or longer. But basically, what it shows is that every time there is a recession, you get a negative correlation between treasury bonds and stocks. Every time. And that is when we care about it, and really the only time we care about it, because the only reason we're holding these treasury bonds in our portfolio to begin with, is because we want them to go up during a recession when everything else is going down, because then we're going to sell them and buy more stocks when the stocks are low. So if you understand where correlations actually come from, and when the negative correlation manifests, then you'll see why we hold treasury bonds, and that we are not concerned that they are sometimes zero correlated and sometimes positively correlated. Because when we want them to be negatively correlated is during a recession, and that's the only time we expect real negative correlation between stocks and bonds.

Voices [32:24]

That is the straight stuff, oh funk master.

Mostly Uncle Frank [32:27]

Because otherwise the correlation can float back and forth. So I understand that but most people don't know this, that this is not well known in the financial media, and that most financial media pundits and frankly advisors don't know this, don't understand it, and get it wrong, or don't understand where correlations come from. But just because a lot of people don't know this does not mean that you or I can't learn it or know it or do the research or have done the research or just look at it. So now that you have the answer, you have the research, you've learned something new, so be like David Stein was in 2012 when he realized that you should hold gold in the portfolio, and you'll realize that treasury bonds and stocks are negatively correlated when it matters, which is during a recession. And there aren't any crystal balls that say otherwise. So hopefully that helps. Please do check out that paper, which I'll put in the show notes again. And thank you for your email.

Voices [33:32]

And now for something completely different.

Market Backdrop Before Portfolio Review

Sample Portfolio Performance Rundown

Mostly Uncle Frank [34:11]

But in fact, all the markets are giving up whatever gains they had in the first two months, and the major markets are going down. Going down every week, it seems like. Now moving to our sample portfolios, first one is all seasons. This is a reference portfolio that's only 30% in stocks. It's got 55% in intermediate and long-term treasury bonds, and the remaining 15% in golden commodities. It's down 2.26% for the month of March. It's up 2.57% year to date and up 26.45% since inception in July 2020. Moving to these more bread and butter kind of portfolios. First one's golden butterfly. This one's 40% in stocks divided into a total stock market fund and a small cap value fund. 40% in treasury bonds divided into long and short, and the remaining 20% in gold. It's down 3.8% for the month of March. It's up 3.54% year to date, and up 65.20% since inception in July 2020. Next one's a golden ratio. This one's 42% in stocks, right 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 6% in cash and a money market fund. It's down 3.88% for the month of March so far. It's up 2.78% year to date and up 58.69% since inception in July 2020. Next one's the risk parity ultimate. Not going to go through all 12 of these funds, but it's down 4.3% for the month of March. It's up 2.39% year to date, and up 43.09% since inception in July 2020. Now moving to these experimental portfolios. Don't try this at home. These all involve levered funds and are very volatile and are showing it right now.

Voices [37:50]

Well, you have a gambling problem.

Mostly Uncle Frank [37:54]

First one's the accelerated permanent portfolio. This one's 27.5% in TMF, that's a levered bond fund. 25% in UPRO, that's a levered SP 500 fund. 25% in PFFV preferred shares, and 22.5% in gold. It's down 7.43% for the month of March. It's up 0.86% year to date, and up 24.49% since inception in July 2020. Next one's the aggressive 50-50. This is the most levered and least diversified of these portfolios. It's one-third in leverage stock fund UPRO, one-third in levered bond fund TMF, and the remaining third in ballast and a preferred shares fund and an intermediate treasury bond fund. It's down 8.23% for the month of March. It's down 4.28% year to date and down 5.91% since inception in July 2020. Next one's the levered golden ratio. This one is a year younger than the first six. It is 35% in a composite fund called NTSX, that's S P 500 and Treasury Bonds levered up 1.5 to 1. 15% in AVDV, that's an international small cap value fund. 20% in gold, GLDM, 10% in KMLM, that's a managed futures fund, 10% in TMF, it's a levered bond fund. And the remaining 10% in UDOW and UTSL, which are levered Dow and Utilities funds. The Levered Utilities Fund is one of the few things that was up on Friday, in addition to oil. But it's down 5.92% for the month of March. It's up 4.65% year to date and up 25.44% since Inception July 2021. And moving to the last one, the Opter Portfolio. One portfolio to rule them all. This is a return-stacked kind of portfolio. It's 16% in UPRO, the levered SP 500 fund, 24% in AVGV, which is a worldwide value tilted fund, 24% in GOVZ, that's a Treasury strips fund, and the remaining 36% divided into gold and managed futures, which are holding it up to date. It is down 6.16% for the month of March. It's up 4.17% year to date and up 34.41% since inception in July 2024. And that concludes our portfolio reviews. Getting uglier every week now.

Voices [40:23]

What does Matt Damon say on that Bitcoin commercial? Fortune favors the brave! My dad said he listened to Matt David and lost all his money. Yes, everyone did, but they were brave in doing so.

Mostly Uncle Frank [40:33]

But when something like this happens, usually there's a period where people just kind of sell everything and sit there, at least until there's some clarity as to what's actually going to happen next, and then people start buying the things they think will do well in that environment.

Voices [40:46]

We can put that check in a money market mutual fund, then we'll reinvest the earnings into foreign currency accounts with compounding interest, and it's gone.

Mostly Uncle Frank [40:55]

But we'll be doing what we usually do, which is do nothing. Nothing, huh?

Voices [41:01]

I would relax all day. I would do nothing.

Rebalancing Watch And Staying The Course

Mostly Uncle Frank [41:06]

We almost had a rebalancing event for the levered golden ratio portfolio, but gold did not quite get to 25%, which was the threshold we were looking at. So there won't be any rebalancing of that this month. And nothing really to do but watch and wait. And with that, I see our signal is beginning to fade. As I've been mentioning from time to time, we will be going to the Economy Conference in Cincinnati next weekend. Hopefully we'll have an episode before then. And I'll be doing a presentation twice at two breakout sessions, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. And we'll also be having a little gathering on Friday at the Solaire Hotel in the main bar dining area on the reception floor. It'll be at 3 p.m. We will be giving away a few door prizes. And I'm collecting some trivia questions about Risk Perry Radio to use for that purpose. With the help of the Gemini Artificial Intelligence bot. I keep telling it to go back and get some better ones.

Voices [42:08]

The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.

Mostly Uncle Frank [42:26]

This will all be risk parody radio podcast trivia, by the way.

Voices [42:31]

Watch out for that first step, it's in juicy.

Mostly Uncle Frank [42:35]

So I hope to see some of you there.

Voices [42:50]

That's a lot of entertainment. Two dollars or two dollars.

Mostly Uncle Frank [42:55]

But in the meantime, if you have comments or questions for me, please send them to Frank at RiskPardyRareo.com. That email is frank at riskpertyrear.com. Or you can go to the website www.riskperdyradio.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, maybe some stars, a follow, a review. That would be great. Okay. Thank you once again for tuning in. This is Frank Vasquez with Risk Purdy Radio. Signing off.

Voices [44:00]

I want to dance my life away. You make me feel like dance. I want to dance my life away. You make me feel like dead sick. I want to dance my life away. You make me feel a side dead.

Mostly Queen Mary [44:16]

The Risk Parody 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.