Mostly Voices [0:00]

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

Mostly Mary [0:18]

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

Mostly Uncle Frank [0:36]

Thank you, Mary, and welcome to episode 84 of Risk Parity Radio. Today on Risk Parity Radio, it is time for our monthly rant because we have a policy here at Risk Parity Radio.

Mostly Voices [0:52]

I want you to be nice until it's time To not be nice. Well, how are we supposed to know when that is? You won't. I'll let you know.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:05]

So let's get to it. This month's rant is about mindless diversification. Mindless diversification and outdated advice. Unfortunately, this kind of thing persists like a bad penny. It keeps turning up in what we see on the internet in various articles. I'm going to link to an article in the show notes. I'm not going to announce who wrote it or what site it's on. It's directed at Millennials, I'll tell you that. What's not important is the site or the author.

Mostly Voices [1:56]

What's important is this is common to see and it's bad. Stand, it's gone. It's gone. It's all gone. What's all gone? The money in your account. It didn't do too well. It's gone.

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:08]

Urging mindless diversification and providing inaccurate information.

Mostly Voices [2:12]

Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [2:16]

Now, this article is called Building a Diversified Bond Portfolio. It was written last month, April 7th, 2021. And let's just go through a few of the problems here. Okay, the first part of it, he writes, Everyone has heard you need to diversify. You hear about it for your portfolio as a whole, diversify in stocks and bonds. There are even some handy, simple calculations to figure out how to do it. Subtract your age from 100, and that is how much you should invest in stocks. Let's just stop right there. Guy wouldn't know majesty if it came up and bit him in the face. That notion comes from the 1990s. And we know for at least eight or nine years that that's a bad way of constructing a portfolio. You don't just take a number and subtract your age. That has nothing to do with your financial circumstances. It has nothing to do with when you were going to retire. It has nothing to do with anything. So don't do that. It's bad advice.

Mostly Voices [3:13]

That's not an improvement.

Mostly Uncle Frank [3:17]

And the next thing he says, if you're thinking about adding bonds to your portfolio, you should also be diversifying your bonds. Now think about that. You want to diversify your whole portfolio, right? So how does diversifying one part of it and ignoring that against the other part help you? It doesn't. Hello. Hello, anybody home? Huh, think McFly, think. It causes you to have a bad process to do bad things. Because while you're diversifying your bonds in a vacuum, you're not comparing those to see whether what you're picking there is diversified from the stocks you already picked over on the other side or anything else you have in that portfolio. You do not diversify pieces of a portfolio. You diversify the whole thing. You look at it all together. It's one thing. You hold the whole portfolio. You don't hold three different portfolios. One of stocks, one of bonds, one of other things. You hold one portfolio and all those things better work together.

Mostly Voices [4:18]

Never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected.

Mostly Uncle Frank [4:21]

So that is just wrong. You should not be diversifying your bonds in a vacuum unless your entire portfolio is made out of bonds. Geez. Next misconception on the next page. He says, Just like investing in stocks when one class of debt goes down, Others usually rise. Well, that's wrong. That's not how stocks work. Stocks all go down together. They're all correlated. Come on, man. It should say unlike stocks, when one class of debt goes down, others usually rise. Because in the bond world, you have negatively correlated assets. You have bonds that are correlated with stocks. You have bonds that are not correlated with stocks. So that is true in the bond world that you can find things that go up and down on a seesaw. And some of those are correlated with the stocks and some of them aren't. That is not true for stocks. And if you think that's true for stocks, you don't understand diversification. You really don't.

Mostly Voices [5:21]

You keep using the word. I don't think it means what you think it means. All right, next page. Next misconception.

Mostly Uncle Frank [5:29]

We are also at an all-time high in bond prices, especially US Treasuries. No, we're not. We're not at a whole time high. We were at an all-time high last March of 2020. That's when we had an all-time high. And why did we have an all-time high? We had an all-time high because there was a stock market crash. And when the stock market crashes, the value of the treasuries goes up. Think McFly, think. And when things return more to normal, the interest rates on those bonds has returned to almost the same level as it was at the end of 2019. That's how it works. Stock market crashes, treasury markets, bonds go up in value. You sell those, you buy the stocks. Treasury bonds are not at an all time high right now. They were, but they're not now. That's not how it works. The next thing he writes, so it can be insinuated that US treasury prices will fall over the short to medium term. Really? You have a crystal ball? Danger, Will Robinson.

Mostly Voices [6:34]

Danger, danger. A crystal ball? Danger, Will Robinson.

Mostly Uncle Frank [6:39]

Danger, danger. She sound like this.

Mostly Voices [6:43]

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

Mostly Uncle Frank [6:50]

You could have been saying that at the end of 2019. And he would have been dead wrong because the stock market crashed and the bonds went through the roof. Wanna take your chances on being wrong again? You could ask yourself a question.

Mostly Voices [7:05]

Do I feel lucky? Well, do you punk? Forget about it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [7:13]

And then he says, if your portfolio was invested 100% in US Treasuries, your portfolio would decline in value. Well, nobody's gonna have 100% in US Treasuries. That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.

Mostly Voices [7:27]

And this is another reason why you don't look at the bond portion separate from

Mostly Uncle Frank [7:31]

the stock portion. Am I right or am I right or am I right?

Mostly Voices [7:36]

If your portfolio, your real portfolio,

Mostly Uncle Frank [7:39]

is stock-based and your treasury market securities are declining in value, chances are the stocks are increasing in value because they're negatively correlated. That's what that means, the stocks go up. When the bonds are going down, your portfolio is not declining in value. Your portfolio is increasing in value. It's just not increasing in value as much as 100% stock portfolio because you don't want to take all that risk. Think McFly, think. So again, this is compartmentalizing something that should not be compartmentalized. You don't look at your bonds in a vacuum and worry about them in a vacuum. You think about what the purpose of them is in your portfolio and pick the ones that serve that purpose and only those ones that serve that purpose. Yes! Think McFly, think! And then he writes, With interest rates being so low, you want to focus on bonds with short maturities. That way, if rates do rise, you are not holding a debt that will drop in value. So basically, he said, why don't you just put it all in cash? Why don't you just put it all in cash and call it a day? If you go all the way down to the short end of the spectrum, all you'll have is a big pile of cash, and all that is is going to drag your portfolio. You should not be worrying about holding a debt that will drop in value if it is there to diversify other things that are going up in value, namely all those stocks in the rest of your portfolio. Geez, if you're going to have a diversified portfolio, some things are going to go down when other things are going up. That's what a diversified portfolio Portfolio actually means real wrath of God type stuff. So if you're only focused on bonds with short maturities, it will just be a cash drag on your portfolio. It's just the same thing as holding a pile of cash. So you're not going to have something that goes up when the stock market crashes. You won't have anything that has increased in value substantially like a long-term treasury bond. All right, and then he just takes this scattershot approach. This is how I would diversify my portfolio. Nine percent in short term US, nine percent in short term other, 18% in municipal all, 10% in TIPS, 18% in medium term all, 18% in long term US, 18% in foreign all. There's no justification as to why these things are picked. This is mindless diversification, just grabbing at a pile of stuff on the shelf, figuring, I don't know what I'm doing. I'll just take every one of them. And maybe something will work out for me. Yeah, well, maybe it won't.

Mostly Voices [10:19]

Expect the unexpected.

Mostly Uncle Frank [10:23]

Maybe your foreign bonds are going to be correlated with your stocks and go in the tank with them. Maybe the TIPS are going to do that too. Maybe you should have looked at a correlation matrix to see what's going on. If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball. Maybe you should use the data that's available instead of writing ignorant articles like this one. This is not good advice.

Mostly Voices [10:44]

Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. And may God have mercy on your soul.

Mostly Uncle Frank [10:55]

And then he concludes, with these funds, and he lists some funds, you can quickly and effectively build a diversified bond portfolio, a useless diversified bond portfolio that is not diversified as well as it should be, from your other stocks. It's not serving any particular purpose, at least we don't know what purpose it's serving other than being diversified from itself, which is pretty darn useless. But it's these sorts of things that we need to get past because we should know better by now. This kind of thinking is 20th century thinking. It does not account for all of the research that's been done. You are correct, sir, yes.

Mostly Voices [11:39]

About correlations between these things.

Mostly Uncle Frank [11:42]

Why does Paul Merriman say only use treasury bonds? You think he's an idiot? You think he would do something like this? I don't think so. What this does is violate two core principles that we have here at Risk Parity Radio. One is the simplicity principle. You don't just go and take a whole bunch of different things just because there's a whole bunch of different things available. More stuff is not better. Everything in your portfolio needs to be performing some purpose and you need to know what that purpose is. You need to know which are your growth assets. You need to know how you diversify from those. You need to know what is income. You need to know what is stability. There's no thought in this. This is mindless diversification. Complication is bad. Complication for complication's sake is just bad. More complicated meant is not better. And then the other principle it violates is the Holy Grail principle, which is our main risk parity principle, what we add to investing, which is you need to look at the correlations of all of your assets and try to make them as least correlated as possible while still serving the same purposes you need them to serve and keeping within your risk range. But there was no effort or thought in the process this person used. Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son. He did not compare any of these funds to any of his stock funds. He pretended like they were all somehow different just because they were bond funds and not stock funds. That's not how you measure diversification or correlation. That's not how any of this works.

Mostly Voices [13:44]

It's a number. Go find the number. Go to Portfolio Visualizer.

Mostly Uncle Frank [13:48]

Find the number. It's not hard.

Mostly Voices [13:51]

If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.

Mostly Uncle Frank [13:56]

Everybody who considers themselves to be advising people about finances ought to be able to find a correlation number and understand and articulate which asset classes are correlated or uncorrelated from other ones. And if you can't do that, you need to go back and do more Homework and learn your job.

Mostly Voices [14:16]

You can't handle the truth.

Mostly Uncle Frank [14:27]

All right, that's enough ranting for the month. Time to be nice again. And now for something completely different. Or at least a little bit different.

Mostly Voices [14:39]

I'm intrigued by these how you say emails.

Mostly Uncle Frank [14:42]

First email we have today, and we still are more than a week behind, but I'm working on it. This one comes from Craig D. Craig D. says, Thanks for sharing your hugely valuable research. Well, thank you, Craig D. I appreciate the kudos. All right, next one is from Falco. And Falco writes, hi there. I just listened to an earlier episode of your podcast where you mentioned that the aggressive 50/50, which is one of our sample portfolios, www.riskparadioradio.com has a much higher annualized return than a total stock market. Would this then not be a good portfolio also for an accumulation phase? Thanks for your response here. Love the thinking around asset correlations. There's really not too much content around this over here in Europe. Everyone just talks about the stock market, not much else. Falco. Well, I'm afraid everybody just talks about the stock market on this side of the pond as well, simply because there is a fixation and a misguided idea that by fiddling around with more in different stock funds you're really going to get different results when we know from our macro allocation principle that your results are likely to be 90% the same unless you're taking a bet on a specific concentration into an asset class. But getting to your question, the answer is maybe. In theory, yes, the aggressive 50/50 should perform better than a total stock market fund, at least from the data that we have. But it only goes back to 2009. So we really don't know due to a lack of a long-term performance metric. The drawbacks of that particular portfolio is it's not as diversified as some others. It doesn't have any gold, doesn't have any commodities, it doesn't have any focus on small cap value stocks in it. So I would suspect that that portfolio would actually do pretty poorly in a environment sort of like the late 1970s when the assets I just mentioned were the ones that did the best and large cap growth stocks and bonds didn't really do that well. So I can't say that this in the future is going to perform better than a total stock market. It just has over the lifetime of it itself, which has only been since 2009. You need to remember that this 50/50 portfolio is kind of like a 50% stocks, 50% bonds portfolio, which would be a traditional retirement portfolio, but it's on steroids. So it performs as if it was 232% of an ordinary portfolio. And that's why, in theory, it should perform better than a plain old vanilla 100% stock portfolio in theory. All right, our third email is from Wes H. And actually it was two emails. The first email and then a correction on the second email. I'll just kind of summarize the first part of this, he was asking how the sample portfolios are rebalanced. And then he realized that was discussed in episodes 32, 43, 48, and also a bit in 65, which has in the show notes a Michael Kitces article specifically about rebalancing. So just to cut to the chase on this, we've gone with annual rebalancing for the first four portfolios in the sample portfolios. That's the All Seasons, the Golden Butterfly, the Golden Ratio, and the Risk Parity Ultimate. The reason we've done that is that is kind of a standard way of rebalancing. And when we read the Michael Kitces article, it said that you really don't get any better performance by rebalancing standard portfolios more than once a year. And they compared three months or six months or shorter periods. And so in order not to generate unnecessary transactions, which could result in taxes and just unnecessary management, we went with that standard year for that. It's interesting. I know in recent interviews of Bill Bengen, the founder of the 4% rule, he said he thinks it may be the case that rebalancing should be done even less than that in a multi-year time frame. But there's no real studies about that that I'm aware of that would show what would be an optimal time frame for that. The other way of rebalancing that is discussed in the Michael Kitces article is by doing it on rebalancing bands. And we decided to do that for our two experimental portfolios. So we picked a band close to what Kitsis recommends, which is a 20% band. And by a 20% band, what that means is if your fixed allocation or projected allocation for a asset class is say 25%, and it moves, and so your portfolio ends up being 30% that allocation, or it goes down and it ends up being 20% of that allocation, that is a 20% deviation because 20% of 25% is 5%. And so you add that to the 25 to get 30, you subtract from the 25 to get 20, and that is the band that you want that allocation to stay in. And when it goes outside that band, then you rebalance the whole portfolio. So you look at that for each asset. So we use this for our aggressive 50/50 and Accelerated Permanent Portfolio, we're using a band of 7.5%. In practice, that's only really going to get triggered by one of those leverage funds that tends to move that much, and they both have been rebalanced, and one of them has been rebalanced twice since inception. So those may rebalance or likely to rebalance more than one time a year. And that seems to work better for more volatile portfolios, having that band structure as opposed to doing it annually. And so that's why we chose that method for those portfolios. The other question Wes has is the main question I have about your rules for handling distributions in cash and also with respect to withdrawals. It's not completely clear to me from the podcast so far from the portfolio policies on the webpage. My guess is you have all distributions from the investments deposited in cash, i.e. not reinvested. For the portfolios that don't have a cash allocation, I think you take monthly withdrawals from the cash first before selling investments. Doesn't that potentially cause some problems in that you might only need to sell a very small amount of an investment when the cash mostly covers that withdrawal? What about the portfolio that does have a cash allocation? I know you normally sell the best performing asset to take a monthly withdrawal. And so how does that work when cash might be higher than its allocation due to a distribution? Would a portfolio without a cash allocation ever get rebalanced because of cash accumulation? Okay, let me just explain how this works for these portfolios. Let's start with the one that does have a cash allocation. That is the Golden Ratio Portfolio. Six percent of that started out in a money market, which is effectively cash. So for that one, management is very easy. We take out a distribution from that cash every month and we leave everything else alone. And then when the portfolio is a year old, we will rebalance everything to put it back and so the 6% will go back into the cash. The cash is being bled down, even though there are some distributions, it does not keep up with all of the, I should say, even though there are some dividends and things coming out of the other components of this portfolio that go into the cash. It doesn't cover all of the distributions. So that's a very simple way of running something like this. And that is probably the way you are going to run your retirement style portfolio because you will have probably at least a year in cash. And whether you take that out at one point or just have it managed, that is a common way that people will manage a portfolio if they don't have more than one year of cash. Eventually, you do need to replenish that obviously, either from the income of the other things in the portfolio or by selling something. So the way that the other portfolios work is that we first look and see whether they have accumulated from dividends and other income, whether they have accumulated enough cash to make the monthly distribution. If there is enough money in there, then we take that as the distribution and we're done. If there is not enough money in the cash bucket at the time of the distribution, then we are going to sell essentially the best performing asset or enough of that to make a distribution. Now to make things simple, we always sell enough to make the distribution, even if there's other cash available. So if there is $30 in cash available and we need to make a distribution of $46, we would still sell $46 worth of whatever was the best performer and then make the distribution leaving that 30 in there until enough income accumulates that we can just make it out of that cash portion. So there is really no particular magic to this. It could be done in a variety of different ways and there's no way to tell that one way is more optimal than another when we're talking about monthly distributions anyway. I think in practice if you're running a retirement style portfolio you probably don't want to be doing monthly distributions the way we're doing them. I think we're doing these at sample portfolios more for illustrative purposes that You probably want to do that quarterly or even annually, and it'll just reduce the number of transactions that you have to deal with and reducing transactions and making the thing simpler is generally the better strategy for tax reasons and just for your own mental health. And then finally, Wes writes, thanks for putting all this out there. I've learned a lot from it. Wes, P.S. I gather you are in the Boston area since you mentioned Walden Pond, I think on one podcast. I'm in Waltham. Maybe there can be a Boston area Risk Parity Radio meetup once things are back enough to normal. Well, I actually do not live in the Boston area, but I do have a son that is going to college there. So if you see a young man wandering around with a Risk Parity Radio vest on, you'll know that's my kid. We did go visit Walden Pond there on a nice October day. last year, along with going to the Minuteman National Park and hiking around there for a while. It's a very pleasant place to be in the fall, and I would highly recommend it, along with anything to do with Emerson and Thoreau. All right, next email is from Justin Jay. Justin Jay writes, hi Frank, I'm a big fan of your show. Thanks for your work. I first heard you on Choose FI, and I'm working my way through your episodes. I started at number one, and I'm not up to about 20 or so. I'm now up to about 20 or so. I'm really happy to find your podcast. I've been big into investing personal finance for a while. And honestly, when you get to a certain point that 99% of what you hear is just repackaging of what you heard before. But your perspective has been a truly new perspective. I'm in the accumulation phase for about another 10 years, but I'm really learning about the principles of risk parity investing. as I transition to decumulation in retirement. Thanks for your help exposing me to these principles. I'm putting these principles in practice partly by moving away from all-in-one bond funds, good idea, and trying to be more strategic about choosing my bond funds more specifically. Another good idea. What I'm focused in on is negative correlation or looking for assets that zig when others zag and then selling off those negatively correlated bond funds when they are high in order to buy equities when they are low. Yup. That would be great. Given that a question, what are your thoughts on EDV? That's an extended duration bond fund from Vanguard or other extended duration bonds versus long-term bond funds like TLT for this purpose. I see it standard deviation is higher, but I'm pretty good at not panicking when things are down. In fact, I see that as a buying opportunity. Is there anything I may not be thinking of though? I just sold off my corporate bonds. I don't need or want the income from them right now and they aren't negatively correlated enough for my primary goal with fixed income. And now I have a choice, EDV, TLT, or maybe something else. Any thoughts? Sure, yeah, we actually use EDV in the Risk Parity Ultimate Fund and it is a useful thing to have to use either because if you want to, for instance, tax loss harvest some TLT, you can turn around and buy the EDV. The EDV is kind of like TLT with a little jolt of steroids in it. So it tends to be a little bit more volatile, but it does move in the same way and kind of does the same things. There are a couple of caveats or things you should be aware of with it besides being a little bit more volatile. It makes larger distributions in capital gains at the end of the year, which can be substantial. And so this probably something, if you're going to hold it, you want to hold it more in retirement accounts, because you'll see that these big distributions come and then you need to pay taxes on them. They're mostly capital gains we're talking about, but you need to be aware of that. The other thing about it is it's not as liquid as TLT. you can usually get prices on TLT within a penny anytime you want to trade it. EDV is not traded that much. And so you really need to make sure you put in limit orders because the spreads can be wide. They can be, you know, 30 cents at a time between the bid and the ask on it. So beware of that. But I think it's a fine fund to use. It's a Vanguard product. So the expense fees are low and it's been around for quite a while and so I wouldn't have any hesitation on using that as long as you take into account what I've told you about the liquidity and the distributions. All right, the next email comes from visitor 507, the mysterious visitor 507. And the mysterious visitor 507 is from Horseheads, New York and writes, I really enjoy your podcast. Thanks for the education on the deeper topics of portfolio construction. You have said that one shouldn't rebalance too frequently. Can you elaborate on that reasoning? Does rebalancing inside a tax protected account mitigate the concerns? A portfolio of volatile, uncorrelated assets superficially seems ripe for frequent rebalancing to capture a little bit of the daily price swings. Thank you. Oh, and we have a name here. It's Matt H. He's the mysterious visitor 507. All right, thank you for that email, Matt. Yes, this goes back to what I was talking about in the answer to the earlier question, that I would go listen to episode 65, the last seven or eight minutes of it in particular, where I talk about this article from Michael Kitces, and I linked to it in the show notes, talking about their analysis about optimal rebalancing strategies and that for most ordinary portfolios, the annual rebalancing seems to work just fine. And it's obviously better from a tax perspective that you're not buying and selling more often. I agree with you that the more volatile a portfolio is, the more likely it is to benefit from rebalancing more frequently. But if you're going to do that, I would go and use that one of those band structures. instead of rebalancing it on a calendar. Because I think, and the Kitsis article kind of confirms that, ultimately that's probably the superior way to do your rebalancing. You could in fact use that same band structure on a standard portfolio and maybe it wouldn't even rebalance once a year, but those are basically the two best options. All right, the next email is from Brian G and Brian G writes, hello, Frank, I just wanted to say thank you. I've listened to many of your podcasts and recommended you to my dad and friends nearing retirement. I absolutely plan on utilizing your advice when I get closer to retirement. And I believe your words of wisdom have given me a clear path and much earlier exit for mandatory work with increased withdrawal rate. I thoroughly enjoy everything you say and your teachings resonate with me. I have one question. You may have covered this in an episode, but I could not remember. My wife is not financially literate and has very little desire to understand money. How would you set things up for a spouse who is not a numbers person nerd like I am in case of an early death? I have health problems. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Brian G. Well, thank you for that email, Brian. And I'm, I'm Sorry about your health problems. This question goes more to my legal hat, I think. I'm not a trust and estates lawyer, but I would get a trust and estates lawyer to help you with this. What you are essentially want to do here, if your wife is not going to be managing your investments when you're gone, is to set up a trust and you can talk to the lawyer about whether you want to do it while you're still alive and get it up and running, The other way to do it is to create the will, which will then transfer these assets into this trust that will spring into life, essentially, when you're gone. Now, just creating the trust obviously does not create management for the trust. And I think you are going to want to find either somebody in your family that you trust that could capably manage this in a way you instruct. and you can write out your instructions somewhere for this person. You would put them in the will or the trust documents as specifically what you want. The other way of doing it and maybe the better practice long term would be to find a financial advisor who is willing to take on this. Somebody who is probably in a small shop or on their own and you can talk to a few different people and find somebody who essentially is just going to follow some instructions and make some trades in accordance with what you've already written in this trust document to keep control over what is actually going on. And they will be paid, obviously, but you should be able to negotiate a lower fee than a financial advisor might charge simply because they are not having to do any work other than do the transactions in accordance with your instructions that are already in the trust and will documents. If I was looking for somebody to do that, you know, I would ask friends and family first. Hopefully there'd be somebody in the local area. Although the other place I would probably look is in the XY Planning Network, which you can find online. It's something that Michael Kitces set up. that is basically an organization for financial advisors to belong to, and then you could interview a few of them and pick one that suited your needs. What I really would avoid though is anybody who works for one of the large retail organizations because they're not going to be allowed to do what you want them to do, and in addition, They're probably going to charge too much. I think you want to be dealing with somebody that is very individualized for this purpose. And the other thing you might do, and what I've done, is to write out what my instructions would be for these portfolios, just so everybody knows and can see it, even if it's not in a will or trust document, it's good to write that thing down in an investor policy statement that can also be instructions for somebody to manage a portfolio in the way that you would have wanted. And now one final email for your entertainment.

Mostly Voices [36:11]

I'm funny how? I mean funny like I'm a clown, I amuse you, I make you laugh. What do you mean funny? Funny how? How am I funny?

Mostly Uncle Frank [36:19]

This one comes from a person I shall not name, whose initials are KC. But KC writes, hi Frank, I hope you're well. I'd like to propose a person that I will not name to the Risk Parity Radio podcast. Here is his bio. This person is involved with a public company and is involved with precious metals. I'm paraphrasing here. And it evidently is a fast growing company in that sector. On the podcast, this person could talk about perspective on risk given the stock market's current untethering from reality and the historical crashes that have followed periods like this one we're living through now, and how zero trade fees and platforms like Robinhood have changed their landscape and specific suggestions and strategy to value investing. And then they interview is referenced. Would you be interested in having this person on your show? Happy to connect you two. And the answer is no way, man.

Mostly Voices [37:28]

That's not an improvement.

Mostly Uncle Frank [37:32]

As you heard, the idea of this person would be they would come on with a crystal ball. If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball. And try to tell us what was going on in the markets. And you know how we feel about crystal balls here. Danger, Will Robinson.

Mostly Voices [37:47]

Danger, danger. That's really not what I do. Shut it up, you!

Mostly Uncle Frank [37:56]

So I don't think that would be a good use of my time, his time, or your time. Forget about it. And I should remind everyone that I'm really not set up to take guests here with my limited technical capabilities. Man's got to know his limitations. I'm only really capable of being somebody else's guest on their own podcast, not on my own. It happened once. But now I see our signal is beginning to fade. Thank you for all these emails. They raised some interesting issues and I hope I was able to address them appropriately. I have another pile of them and we are working through them. If you haven't heard an answer to yours, I will get to it. I am just going through the ones that I received on May 4th. May the 4th be with you. Everything that has transpired has nothing to do with my design. If you would like to send me comments and suggestions, you can send them to the email frank@riskparityradio. com that's frank@riskparityradio.com or you can go to the website www.riskparityradio.com and put in your message into the contact form and I will get it that way. I have now exceeded 50,000 downloads as a podcast and I want to thank you all for making that happen. I thought it would take more like five years instead of eight or nine months to get there. If you haven't had a chance to do it, go over to Apple Podcasts and leave the podcast a five-star review. 'Cause every little bit helps. That would be great. Mmmkay? Thank you once again for tuning in. This is Frank Vasquez with Risk Parity Radio, signing off.

Mostly Mary [39:53]

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.