In short
Podcast Summary: Afford Anything - Episode #441: How to Invest in a Volatile Market with JD Stein
Episode Overview
- Host: Paula Pant
- Guest: JD Stein, former chief investment strategist at Fund Evaluation Group
- Theme: Investing strategies in a volatile market, focusing on asset allocation, risk management, and decision-making frameworks.
Key Announcements
- Paula Pant celebrates her graduation from the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship at Columbia University.
- Exciting plans for the Afford Anything community after her return on June 1st.
Core Topics Discussed
Investment Philosophy
- Asset Focused: The importance of focusing on asset allocation primarily through buy-and-hold strategies using ETFs and index funds.
- Active vs. Passive Management: While passive investing is encouraged, JD emphasizes that most investors are active in practice due to portfolio overweighting in the U.S. market.
Market Timing and Risk Management
- Identifying Market Changes: Indicators such as valuation metrics and economic signals guide investment decisions.
- Economic Indicators:
- Purchasing Manager Indices (PMIs) as effective predictors of recession.
- The significance of analyzing business surveys for insights into future economic conditions.
Diversification Strategies
- Pockets of Independence: Importance of diversifying outside traditional financial markets to mitigate risk.
- Cash Holding: Emphasizes the strategy of holding cash during market bubbles as a form of opportunity waiting.
Behavioral Finance
- Fear and Greed: Importance of understanding market psychology and its impact on investment decisions.
- FOMO (Fear of Missing Out): Discussing how to navigate investment choices when market sentiments are driven by FOMO.
Retirement Considerations
- Investment Strategies by Age: Younger investors can afford to take more risks, while those nearing retirement should be cautious about their allocations to avoid substantial losses.
Actionable Takeaways
- Portfolio Assessment: List out your current portfolio to understand your asset allocation.
- Return Expectations: Set realistic expectations for what you can achieve based on your investment strategies.
- Diversify: Don’t rely solely on stocks; explore other asset classes.
- Stay Informed: Keep up with economic indicators to make informed decisions about potential market changes.
Conclusion
- Paula Pant reiterates the value of a simple, passive investing approach through broad-based index funds, while acknowledging the nuances of market conditions and personal financial situations. She encourages listeners to consider their individual risk tolerance and investment goals.
Follow-Up Action
- Listeners are encouraged to connect with Paula Pant on social media and engage with future content on investment strategies.
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This markdown summary captures the essence of the podcast episode while organizing the key points and discussions for an easy-to-navigate format.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00So imagine that you manage$33 billion. dollars. What would you say to your friend, your neighbor, somebody like you or me about investing? We're going to find out the answer to that in today's interview. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything but not everything, that every choice you make carries a trade-off. And that means that when you invest, your investment decisions carry these huge trade-offs. Every dollar that you're spending on individual stocks is a dollar that you're not spending on index funds. And even inside of index funds, a dollar that you're spending on some type of an asset class, like large cap, large company, that's a dollar that you're not spending on emerging markets and vice versa.
0:46So where should you focus your money? What choices do you make? Today, we're going to hear some answers to those questions about how to invest, how to deal with volatility, how to deal with overwhelm when you have too many options. How much you should diversify? How much you should optimize? We're going to hear the answers to those questions and more from J.D. Stein, the former chief investment strategist at Fund Evaluation Group, an investment advisory firm that managed$33 billion. His job as chief investment strategist was to develop the group's investment philosophy and investment process. So what is his investment philosophy?
1:29What kind of margin of safety does he hold? How does he hold pockets of independence from the market? Meaning how does he diversify outside of the stock market? How does he handle the paradox of choice? We're going to talk to him about all of this and more. Now, this episode originally aired as episode 95, back when we were a brand new podcast. I'm sharing it today because on a personal note, I – actually, Steve, can I get a drum roll? Thank you. I have an announcement to make. I graduated from Columbia University yesterday. If you've been following along for this past year, you know that I have been completing the Knight Badgett Fellowship in Business and Economics Journalism.
2:15It's a fellowship given to 10 people who are mid-career business journalists. A lot of my fellow fellows have had editorial positions in places like Forbes, the AFP, the BBC. So it was very intimidating to meet them. I often felt like I was the least accomplished person in the room, which is exactly how I like to feel, because that's how you learn the most. And so I spent this past year completing this fellowship with them, learning an enormous amount about macro and microeconomics, about business, about investing, and about how to tell those stories. There's that combination of craft and content.
2:59The craft is how to shape a story, how to write a lead, how to write a nut graph, how to better interview people and develop sources and reach for great quotes and really bring a story to life. That's the craft of it. Then the content is the economics, the finance, the accounting classes where you learn LIFO and FIFO, you know, so that that way when some corporate PR machine sends you a press release that says, hey, look, our profits are up, you can take a look, a direct look at their financial statements and you can say, uh, you just changed your inventory method. So your profits are up on paper, but not in real life.
3:41right that's what we learned to do this year but it's been a heck of a year i put on the cap and gown yesterday and i am officially coming back to afford anything full-time as of june 1st i'm brimming with ideas i'm incredibly excited to come back full-time effective june 1st i'm so thrilled that you've been on this journey with me i have a bunch of photos that i've posted to my instagram stories. So head on over to Instagram at Paula Pant, P-A-U-L-A-P-A-N-T. All of that is to say that for this week's episode, we are sharing one of the favorites from our library. And it's this interview with J.D.
4:22Stein about how you can make better investment choices. So I hope you enjoy it. Again, come find me on Instagram at Paula Pant, P-A-U-L-A-P-A-N-T. Let me know what you thought of this interview, what you thought of the episode, say hello. And I can't wait to be full-time back at Afford Anything, growing this incredible community, starting in just 12 more days. Thank you so much. Enjoy this interview.
4:54Hey there. Hi. Thank you for joining us on today's show. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. I invited you on because your podcast and what you write about is so, and your YouTube channel, which I binge watched this morning, is very heavily based around investing. So let's just jump right in. Can you, in a nutshell, describe your investing philosophy? Sure. It is asset focused. So it's focused on asset allocation, primarily buy and hold. So using mostly ETFs and index funds, but willing to make change. My fundamental view is most passive investors are, in fact, active. And I would say most are active in the sense that they're very much overweight, the U.S.
5:42market versus the global market, whereas the global market's 50 percent U.S. stocks. Many investors are 80 percent U.S. stocks or 90 within their equity allocation. So I'm willing to be active in the sense of of adjusting the portfolio based on, you know, objectively looking at market conditions. So what are valuations? What is the economy doing? And what is the level of fear and greed out there? And we'll make allocation decisions based on that, not trying to time the market two to three times a month, or we're really talking about over a period of years. So when I was a, I used to be an institutional money manager and develop this philosophy there, there we would make two to three changes per year.
6:28For personal investors, you don't even have to make that many because many, Many of those changes were because when you're a money manager, your clients expect you to, one, to predict the future and, two, to make changes. And so I would be managing money in our consultant team. You could tell when clients are getting restless. Well, you haven't done anything in six months. Well, there isn't really anything to do because conditions are the same. So oftentimes we would have to tweak around the edges just so we can make a change and write about it and write about markets. But generally speaking, in fact, I was just talking to a member of my website just before I got on this call.
7:10And we were talking about when you look over the last two decades, there really have only been in terms of major changes in terms of where it would make sense to pull back risk significantly. It was the internet bubble and it was 2008, 2009. So I believe primarily passive makes sense. There are areas, and we can talk about it, where maybe active makes more sense. And occasionally, looking for regime changes with something major has shifted and be willing to change your portfolio to reduce risk or to increase risk when it makes sense. Okay, there are a few questions that this opens up, but what I'd like to start with is how do you know?
7:52because in hindsight, the Great Recession were times when a person might have wanted to shift their portfolio, but that's with the clarity of hindsight. How do you know in advance of that, that you are at a time in which you should make some changes? How do you decide if this is actually the time to make a move versus a normal, cyclical time? There's some criteria you can look at. First is valuations. And so let's go back to the internet bubble. It was clear when you saw the PEs of growth stocks or the stock market in general, but particularly the internet stocks, when everyone had their favorite internet stock, that something was amiss here.
8:38You couldn't time it exactly. But certainly going into to 99, late 99, 2000, it just made sense to not be investing that heavily. And I was just talking to somebody recently that their broker, he lost 80 % in the internet bust because that's the type of stocks that the brokerage community was often recommending. And so you can look at valuations, but you can't look at them in isolation because you point out, well, valuations were pricey two years ago. So what you also need to look at is what the economy is doing, because, you know, valuations get impacted by earnings. And we've been in a period where earnings have been rebounding.
9:23And so even though we've hit all times highs, the actual valuation of stocks haven't gone up so much this year because earnings have rebounded. So you have to look at drivers of the economy. And one of my favorite measures that I look at is something called purchasing manager indices. And these are business surveys done all around the world where surveyors ask business, how's business doing? How's your, what are your hiring plans? What's your inventory like? What about new orders? And they have been very, very good advanced indicators of recessions. And typically they're, they're done. So they scale it.
9:59So it goes from zero to a hundred. So when it's 50 or higher, usually it signals the economy is expanding people and things are going well. When it's, Generally, 48 or below, that has been indicative of a recession. How is this number calculated? It's based on all the surveys they do. So JP Morgan puts together a global indicator. So the global PMI for manufacturing, I think, came in around 53, which is indicative of the fact that the economies around the world, they're in expansion mode as opposed to contraction mode. And these surveys often will show up before, and you could see it in 2008. So in 2008, January 2008, you saw the U.S.
10:44manufacturing PMI was down to 46. And then you saw it globally. So by the spring of 2008, most countries around the world had PMIs below 50, which was a pretty good sign that a global recession was imminent. And in fact, it already started in the U.S. But the markets didn't completely collapse until later that fall. And so markets. So there are some indicators, but you can never get the timing exactly right. But that's not what we're trying to do. We're not trying to be expert market timers. We're trying to be risk managers. And when valuations are high or when the economy appears to be slowing, we want to reduce risk, not get completely in cash, but maybe take some profits.
11:29And you can do the reverse. When everybody's fearful, but the economy by some of these indicators is starting to improve and valuations are cheap, such as they were by spring of 2009, then that's a time to take more risk. But if you recall back in spring 2009, people were still absolutely terrified. And some investors, it took them three years before they went back into stocks. And what were the PMI indicators like in the spring of 2009? They were above 50 by then. They were starting to show improvement. The primary indicator that you look at? That's a primary one. I mean, I try to, I look at a number of them, but that's one that's helpful because it's global.
12:11It's been around a long time and people can somewhat understand. And I also look at their other leading economic indicators. The conference board does one that's been very effective for the U.S. where you just they basically have all these different components that are indicating what the economy is doing. And if that rate of change compared to six months ago is negative, like by contracted by more than three to four percent, that's typically been in the subcomponents are also contracting. That's also been indicative of recessions. and they've just been very, very good indicators to at least manage risk to some extent.
12:50Are there any particular PEs that you use as sort of hard cutoffs, like an S &P 500? Not an absolute. What I'll do is I'll look at it relative to how many, and this is a statistical term, standard deviations is it away from the average. So you have the average PE for the past 20 to 50 years, what standard deviation measures is the range of returns of the observation. So generally, if something is greater than one standard deviation from the average, then it's an outlier. So that starts to cause some concern. When you see what happened in the internet bubble, I mean, it was sort of two to three standard deviations outside of the norm.
13:30Now, the other thing I also look at is I look at the level of fear and greed. And there's surveys that do this? Like, are most investors bullish? Or are they still holding back? And it's not anything like the housing bubble, where it was palpable. People were just climbing over each other to buy a house, right? Or they had three houses. And you could tell, I mean, I could tell as early as, you know, anecdotally in 2004, that something's just not right here. Back 2003, I I remember somebody moved to our town in Idaho from Kentucky and he was going to college. He had made money going to college because he heard that land prices were going up in Florida.
14:14He drove down to Florida and he bought some building lots, sight unseen, and then flipped them. And then he took the money and went to college, went back to school. And so, I mean, you can sort of see, I mean, there's official surveys, but you can see when investors are, if everybody, every taxi driver has their favorite internet stock. something's wrong. And there was. There was something fundamentally wrong in 2000, but everybody thought it was a new era. One of the things that happened, I mean, I don't want to go too far down the topic of how real estate got wonky pre-Great Recession, but one of the justifications that I heard many people use at that time was that people were afraid that they would be priced out of the housing market.
14:59Well, it's this fear of missing out. There's a couple of things you have to look at, though, is because housing, as you know, as a real estate investor, is very specific to the locale. And so it very much depends on inventory and how landlocked it is. Seattle, for example, right? There's only so many places you can build in Seattle and there's some zoning restrictions. And so there, there is the potential of missing out. But fear of missing out is a primary driver of markets. And that's where people get overly zealous or they get fearful that they might miss out. And that can put valuations out of bounds.
15:39But you have to be patient. At the end of the day, I mean, sometimes you just have to say, all right, I might miss this one. And I'm willing to ride it out and not expose my capital. And I'll rent. Or in the case of housing, I'm going to buy the cheapest house in an up and coming neighborhood. Or there's ways you can get around it. But it's a tough thing. Well, the underlying land could appreciate the structure itself. Or the land. And if the land's appreciating, usually it's because there's a limited supply of it because they're not either from a zoning reason or there's something geographical, they're not continuing to subdivide land and turn agricultural into new housing lots.
16:21What should a person do when they're in a FOMO market? If you don't want to invest in stocks because you're or in any asset class because you're worried because you don't think that FOMO was an adequate justification for exposing your capital, where do you put that capital instead? Well, you can leave it in cash. It's okay to hold cash. The most successful money manager I know is a man named Seth Klarman. He runs a hedge fund called the Bellpost Group. And I used to have a private foundation client that had half their money with this manager. And I would go meet with them once a year. And at his core, he was an asset allocator.
17:03He had a very diversified portfolio, but he was willing to hold 40 % cash if there was nothing cheap that didn't meet his criteria. And in the institutional world, holding cash is just considered, or even individuals, is somehow bad because you're losing compared to inflation. But if that's really just dry powder that you're waiting for opportunity, then it's okay to hold cash and just wait. There's nothing wrong with that because eventually there'll be an opportunity because if everything's overvalued, and there was when the housing bust occurred, there was plenty of opportunity. Or in 2009, even with the bond market, non-investment grade bonds, you could make equity like returns because they were yielding 20%.
17:49So it pays to wait when there is clearly a bubble. Now, we're not in a situation right now where we're clearly in a huge bubble. The economy is doing fine. Valuations are a little above average. And it would probably be good if most investors didn't have all of it in U.S. stocks. Non-U.S. stocks are cheaper. And until the economy rolls over, we're not in a situation, it's not anything like it was in 2001 in terms of stock market valuations right now. How do you distinguish between holding cash when assets are overvalued versus simply just having your asset allocation out of whack? Let's say you've got Jack and Jill, right?
18:36Or you've got person A and person B. And let's assume that both of them have 40 % of their portfolios in cash. But one person has that level of cash because they believe that they are, rightly or wrongly, they believe that all available investments are overvalued and that they should wait. The other person, even though the numbers look the same, just does not adequately have a well-balanced portfolio? Well, I think one, when someone decides to hold a lot of cash, I mean, you can't invest based on a feeling. You have to have objective criteria. And it also depends on having realistic expectations of the future.
19:24So you need to be cognizant of why and what are valuations, what's the future expected return, and why am I holding cash? you have to look at more objective criteria what were valuations and you also have to base it on on regret because we can't necessarily predict exactly especially the next six months what's going to happen and so this person that that asked the question i actually answered it on my show that you have to look at how do you decide well if i take my money out of the stock market how will I feel if the market goes up 30 % versus if I keep it in and the market falls 30 %? Because then it becomes, and that's hard to do.
20:06I mean, it really is hard to do, but that's one way to look at it. If you're not going to look at objective criteria, then decide from a regret standpoint, how am I going to feel if this happens?
20:19We'll return to the show in just a moment.
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24:48It depends on your stage in life. Somebody that's in their 20s that has 50 years until they retire or more. Now, purely passive approach might be very, very appropriate because they can ride the market down like a roller coaster and back up because most of the return is going to be driven by how much they're putting in. But for somebody that that is approaching retirement or has a seven figure type portfolio, I believe because I've done it and I've seen others do it, you can make more money adjusting your portfolio based on risk, because all we're really doing is saying, here's the expectation for stocks or for bonds or other asset classes.
25:33And we're making allocations based on those future expectations. That's what really buy and hold passive investing should be. It shouldn't be just, I'm going to buy the Vanguard US stock fund, I'm going to buy the Vanguard bond fund and ignore it. Because the Vanguard bond fund has about a 2 % yield and it has a very high sensitivity to rising interest rates because its duration is so high, which is a measure of interest rate sensitivity. There are other ways you can invest in bonds that isn't as risky that are purely passive just by the standard Vanguard funds suggest. Within that answer, you talked about asset allocation and risk management through the lens of looking at what may happen in the future.
26:22One thing that you said in one of your YouTube videos, and I'm going to paraphrase it because I actually wrote it down because I thought it was fairly insightful. You mentioned the range of potential outcomes and then there is the individual's capacity to deal with said outcome. So something is more risky if there's a wide range of potential outcomes and the harm to the individual caused by that is great. And conversely, something is less risky if there's a narrow range of potential outcomes and the harm caused to the individual is small. And in the world of investing, the potential outcomes are universal.
27:03Everybody who holds the same investments faces the same potential outcomes, but the harm is individualized. So would it not make more sense that a person's risk management be focused on the harm that they as individuals would endure rather than predictions about the future? Well, it should be both. And when I say prediction, well, let me ask. You're correct. So again, somebody that is younger in their 20s, the potential harm from a 40 % decline in the global stock market, which is the average decline during a global recession, historically, it's small because their balance is small and they have a much longer time horizon compared to somebody that's close to retirement, that that 40 percent decline, if they have too much in stocks, could set back their retirement five years or more.
Read the full transcript
28:01And so that's an important component. But when I talk about predicting the future, because I believe the world is unpredictable, I do think there are clues that we can set realistic expectations. So when we're talking about allocations, we need to have, I remember I had an exterminator come to my house once and he wanted to know how much could you earn in stocks before I could even answer. He says, I think it's 80 % a year because he had bought two stocks that went up that much. And that's what his anchor was. We have to anchor to something realistic and bonds are very easy to, and other, some other income strategies, it's easier to predict what the returns are going to be.
28:43Bonds are based on math, generally speaking, especially investment grade bonds. So, I mean, you can have really good predictions of the bond market over the next 10 years. 10 years from now, the U.S. bond market will have returned, as we measure it by the Bloomberg Barclays aggregate, will have returned about two and a half percent annualized. Interest rates might go up, the bonds would go down, but then you're reinvesting at a higher interest rate. And so your total annualized return is going to be pretty close to what the current yield to maturity is. That's just how bonds work. Stocks, I use a building blocks approach.
29:19The primary driver of stocks is their income stream, so their dividend yield. And we can come up with an estimate for earnings growth, which is tied to some extent to the growth of the economy. That's the primary driver of stocks. The wild card is what are people willing to pay for those earnings. And that's why the range of potential outcome for stocks is so much wider. It's not that the world is so much unpredictable. What's unpredictable is human emotion. Ten years from now, are they going to be willing to pay 30 times for earnings because we're in a bubble or are they going to be very, very concerned to be paying 10?
29:55That does impact the return. But I believe it's better to at least anchor to something objective that we can look at in terms of dividends, income, and look at the, come up with some estimate of earnings growth. Because as a real estate investor, that's what you do. You're looking at the cash flow. You can look at, here's my income stream that I'm going to get on this property and come up with a realistic expectation. What you don't know is what will investors be willing to pay for that income stream 10 years from now. But most of the return is going to be the income stream unless you sell it.
30:32And that does impact it. But there's even there, there's a range, right? You're probably not going to see cap rates of two and you will probably never see cap rates of 12. It's going to be whatever, probably four to eight somewhere. Yeah. But I mean, to that analogy, that's why I always tell people, you know, purchase real estate based on that income stream and not based on anticipation of capital gains. Well, right, right. But people, even in the real estate, we talk about potential bubbles, private real estate is very, very pricey when you look at the income streams that people are willing to pay here locally.
31:14So we have a friend that's a builder and he built a student apartment complex in a college town near us. People are so afraid of the stock market that they're willing to take all their individual retirement account and buy a building through their IRA. And there's only a few banks that will lend to buy buildings and through IRAs because they can't get a personal guarantee. So the lending rates are about six and a half percent. And we decided we didn't want to do we bought real estate in the past, private real estate. We just didn't like the headache of managing it. So but here is an opportunity.
31:49Well, we'll lend. So we did the lending on it and our yield on our we got a six and a half percent yield on the note that's secured by the building. He put up 50 percent equity. It's higher than the cap rate that he paid for the building. So his yield was five percent. Now it's before the debt. Like after the debt, he'll be fine because he levered it up. But if he paid 100 percent equity, the amount that he paid for that building was a five percent yield. Well, you know, it doesn't make any sense to pay a 6.5 % interest rate on a five cap. I mean, that's just basic math. It doesn't. Right? But he's coming from the perspective of, I'm terrified of the stock market.
32:27All right, I'm just going to buy this building. Then I don't have to worry about investing. My loan will be paid off in 15 years, and I can live off the rents. And so even then, I mean, I suppose with the leverage, he'll come out okay. It's a strategy. Never do that. That's right. Right. I mean, a deal has to make sense outside of financing. Which, again, gets to the point of when we talk about active asset allocation, look at what the potential return is based on the current conditions and be willing to adjust your allocation and go where there's opportunities. And if there isn't any opportunity, then hold cash.
33:07And by opportunity, that's often outside of the public securities market. Perhaps it's owning a piece of land or a building. Perhaps it's owning some gold. Perhaps it's investing in your education or something, but just have as many return drivers as possible in your investing. Don't just depend on stocks and bonds. There's plenty of other asset classes. Learn about them. And that's where I talk about my investment approach. It's asset class focused. I'd rather spend time learning about new asset classes and coming up with expectations as opposed to researching individual stocks or options or something like that.
33:42because I think asset classes, it's easier to do and you're less likely to get burned. Right. Exactly. And that, what you just said, relates to something that you talk about often, which you refer to as pockets of independence. Right. And that's what those are. Those are things outside of traditional financial markets. For example, we own gold coins. I'm not a gold bug, but I reckon, and I have no, and gold, the other thing to look at with investing is what's an investment versus what's gambling versus what's speculating. Investment is something where there's generally an income stream or there's some objective way to value it, either historical valuation or something like that.
34:26So stocks, bonds, real estate, those are investments. Speculations is where there isn't really a way to value it objectively. And there's some disagreement of whether the return is going to be positive or negative. Most investments, If you buy them right, the expectation is for a positive return. Gold is speculation. There is no way to know what the true value of gold is, but it has been a hedge. People have valued it as something they want to own for millennia. And there's a limited supply of gold. And so I'm comfortable owning gold coins because if, for whatever reason, we have another financial crisis or something horrific happens, which I'm not predicting, I don't expect.
35:08But here I have a pocket of independence. I have some gold coins. I have some Bitcoin because that's just separate. We have food saved up just in case. Some people own ammunition. I don't. I don't have any guns. But these are things and it kind of gets a bad rap. But these are just pockets away from the financial system. So you're not completely tied to these digits that make up our economy. And how do you determine what percentage of your portfolio goes to each of these pockets of independence? Traditionally, you would do an asset allocation and say, all right, here's what I expect to return.
35:44But we don't. So I have about 5 % in gold and Bitcoin, right? Enough to whatever use over a period of years if something bad happened. But there's no right answer. You don't with anything, you don't want to be extreme. And that's where people get into trouble. Primarily investments should be things that generate income. You can have 5 % to 10 % in speculations or hedges, and that seems appropriate. Once you get above that, that seems extreme to me. But there isn't a right answer. It depends on the individual person. But you don't want your retirement to be dependent on speculations, which is why you want to invest, and that typically involves traditional asset classes, both public and private.
36:33We'll come back to this episode in just a minute, but first... Hey folks, let me tell you that drinking and driving is the decision that will change your whole world. Things will never be the same once you get a DUI, because legal fees and time in court are just the beginning. Getting into a crash is another way your world could be irreversibly changed after drinking and driving. Your vehicle may not be the only thing that gets damaged in that crash. You could face a life-altering injury or even death, but you're not the only one who could face those consequences. Your decision to drink and drive could permanently change someone else's world, whether you injure them or leave their loved ones grieving.
37:16The next time you're out drinking, call a rideshare, a taxi, a sober friend, or a designated sober driver. Always plan for a safe ride home. The only decision that will change your world for the better is the decision to call for a sober ride. It's never worth it to drive drunk. Don't risk it. Drive sober or get pulled over. Paid for by NHTSA. Kevin Harlan here. Tomorrow, the NBA on Prime Crew is back as the Emirates NBA knockout rounds continue. The action heads to Las Vegas tomorrow for a thrilling semifinals doubleheader. Four teams remain, but only two will move on. The last two teams standing will then go toe-to-toe Tuesday night, December 16th, in the championship game for a shot at the cup, bragging rights, and a place in NBA history.
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38:50Let's talk about retirement. First, let's define retirement as the point at which you've collected sufficient assets that you're able to stop working for money, such that any future work is optional or unnecessary. By that definition, you retired at 48. Can you tell us that story? Yeah. Well, I was actually 46. Oh, congratulations. I had been an investment manager. So I'd been a professional advisor for about 12 years. We had bought back our company from our parent and had done well. So we took out a bunch of leverage. I got lucky. So we took out leverage and it worked out. All my partners were the same age.
39:35And I just I was sort of in my mid 40s and I felt like really I peaked in the sense that I just sort of I remember speaking at our annual conference because I was our firm's chief investment strategist. And I was on the stage, 500 people in the room and I'm giving my speech. But in the back of my head, you have this dialogue that often happens when you're speaking in public. I'm thinking like this is it at this particular place. place why would I continue to work here and it sort of bugged me because I was already I'd been living in Idaho I didn't have a boss so I'm a partner but there was just this sense that there was something else that I could have more freedom this idea that I have to be connected to at least my cell phone because a client might call and I just felt like it was time that I was no longer growing as much as I could otherwise.
40:28And I'm conservative. And I'd hit my number in the sense that I knew what the valuation, I knew what my 401k was worth. I knew what my IRA was worth. And I had this big nut in terms of the valuation of this private firm. And I knew if I walked away how much my partners would pay me. And I decided I didn't want, you know, what if somebody came along and sued us or something else happened. So part of it was the desire for more freedom. Part of it was realizing that I could leave and not never work the rest of my life. Well, I could. All right. If I had cut back and lived much more frugally, Mr. Money Mustache like, well, we're better than that, but I could be fine.
41:14But what I found as a 46 year old retiree, One, you can't, it's hard to even think about being retired for 30 to 40 or 50 years. It's just, it's unfathomable. And it's stressful to not have any type of income stream other than your portfolio, which is why for most retirees, I think it's helpful if you're still in your 60s, find a way to generate some income outside of your investments. Usually, people do it naturally, but why not figure out a lifestyle business, something that you do that you feel rewarded and you enjoy doing, but that still generates a little bit of income. Because when you're retired and not doing anything, you literally do stagnate and it can affect your health.
41:58So having something, that type of routine, I think is very, very important. That's what I found even as 46. And so I eventually worked in. It took me a while. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do when I was quote unquote retired. And I used to say, tell people I retired. And then I, the people kept thinking, oh, I didn't have anything to do. So they would come up with projects for me. So I stopped using their way to retire, but it takes a while to figure it out. Leaving a job or career is really, it's like getting a divorce is what a friend told me. And I found that's exactly the way it was.
42:28It's emotional, it's draining, and it just takes time to figure out who am I outside of this career or this profession or this company that I've been with, in my case, for 12 years. And it took me a while to figure that out. But eventually you realize, and then this becomes the normal, right? Your normal is not working for anyone, working for yourself. It took me a while to get there, but now that feels normal. But it takes time for people to get used to that. And that's kind of what retirement is. So last question before you wrap up. For the people who are wondering what actionable steps should they take next, particularly in the current environment, where, as we've talked about, probably not overvalued, but probably not in a bubble.
43:13What should the average listener do? The most important thing is to figure out where your portfolio is. In other words, what is your asset allocation in terms of how much do you have in stocks versus bonds? So people have their 401k, and they might have money outside of the 401k, and they might have their IRA, and they have this whole jumble. and in many regards they have no idea what is the overall allocation so they just should get a spreadsheet and just see what it is and i think that's that's an important first step i had a gentleman tell me the other day it took me a year and a half to do that and i finally realized because he explained it to me because he was a psychologist it was not that it was hard mechanically to do it was it was terrifying because he had to face his future that in his case, he was in his 60s and he faced the fact that, you know, do I have enough and I might die and then whatever in the next decade or two.
44:09And that was that was hard for him to sort of pull those numbers together. But I think that's a realistic first step. Figure out what your allocation is on a spreadsheet. And then I think another reasonable step is to sort of anchor what are you expecting to return in your portfolio? And I think if those approaching retirement, I think it's helpful to use different retirement calculators to figure out, do you have enough? Am I saving enough? Because most people don't even do that. And would you go ahead? Oh, I was going that. Would you say that there is a general benchmark for a good model allocation for the average person based on their age or their timeline to retirement?
44:52Yes and no, because there's so many other variables. For example, somebody that has a pension plan, defined benefit plan, they can afford to take more risk in their 401k versus somebody that doesn't or the situation of their spouse or how much savings they already have. So it's hard to do. I show some model portfolios on my site. So my most aggressive portfolio ends up being about 60 to 70 percent stocks. And the most more conservative is 30 percent stocks. But it depends, again, on our definition of risk is what would happen if you're in more aggressive in terms of the outcome. How could that – will that change your lifestyle if the market fell 40 percent?
45:33So I don't think there's a hard, fast rules other than generally younger people that have smaller portfolios can take way more risk than people that are older that are closer to retirement and have bigger portfolios because in their case, a big market sell-off could have a more detrimental impact. Thank you so much. Well, great. I appreciate the opportunity.
46:02Thank you so much, David, for joining us on today's show. What are some of the key takeaways? One of the things that I wanted to cover, and I don't want this to be too real estate focused, but there is something that I wanted to touch on. Many people have many different ideas around rental property investing. And one of the ideas that's out there is this notion that even if a particular property does not give you a good income stream, some people believe that that's okay as long as you're not putting too much cash into the deal. And so the equation is something that's known as the cash on cash return.
46:40And this equation, the way that it's constructed, it rewards people for putting the least amount of cash into the deal as possible. So if you put zero of your own money down, then your cash on cash return is infinity. If you put$1 of your own money down, your cash on cash return is high. If you put 100 % down payment, meaning that you purchased the house in cash, your cash on cash return is going to be low and so on and so forth. So anyway, there are a lot of real estate investors who make their decisions based largely on the cash on cash return formula. And their position is that even if they're not making a good income stream, even if their cap rate is low, as long as they're not putting too much of their own cash into the deal, as long as they're leveraging into it, they're essentially getting something for nothing and eventually the house will be paid off after 15 to 30 years.
47:32And so that's what he and I were talking about. That was when I said, well, that is a way of doing it. That is a approach that exists, but it's certainly not one that I would do. A deal needs to make sense in cash in order to go into it. In other words, never rely on financing to make a bad deal good. In other words, never say, hey, if I paid cash for this thing, this would be a terrible deal. But as long as I take out a loan for it, then it's better. I mean, think about that logically. In what kind of a world is that a good financial decision? Ours, apparently. I guess that's the world we're living in now where we have to rely on leverage in order to make bad decisions have the veneer of good.
48:16But I see that as BS accounting. TLDR, if you would not buy an investment in cash, do not justify buying that investment by taking out a loan. The best financing in the world is not going to turn a bad deal into a good one. So that's one of the points that came up during this conversation that I wanted to emphasize during these closing takeaways. Now, switching gears, the second point that I want to make when reflecting on our conversation is that personally, I'm still not convinced. I'm personally still not convinced that there is a strong enough reason to deviate from a purely passive approach.
48:56And so as those of you who are longtime listeners to this podcast know, my approach to market investing has always been stick with passively managed index funds, Don't try to time the market. Decide on a simple, broad-based allocation. So for example, you might choose one total U.S. stock market index, one total international index, and maybe one bond index. A very, very simple, very broad allocation. And then just stick with that and rebalance annually or periodically, because by virtue of rebalancing, you are necessarily selling off some of the winners and buying more of some of the losers. Rebalancing is inherently a contrarian activity.
49:39And so my approach has always been that as long as you stick with passively managed broad-based index funds in major asset classes and you decide on an asset allocation that is in line with your age and your timeline to retirement and you rebalance periodically, as long as you do that, you'll be set. And there is no reason to make it any more complicated than it needs to be. The more complexity that you add into a system, the more you introduce the potential for that system to fall apart or break down. So a system should be as simple as possible unless there is sufficient evidence to warrant or justify the addition of complexity.
50:23So that's my approach. And David's a similar, really. I mean, you know, he also believes in broad based asset class focused investing. He he doesn't trade individual stocks. He's not a day trader or a high frequency trader. So, yeah, we have some small differences. He believes in a little bit of market timing, but our investing philosophies are more similar than they are different. We are analogous to like one person is a complete vegetarian and the other one is a pescatarian type of a thing, you know, in terms of we're more similar than we are different. By the way, on a related note, so twice a year, I calculate my net worth, typically once in the winter and once in the summer.
51:05And so I just recalculated my net worth a couple of weeks ago. And when I do so, there are a lot of programs that will automatically do it for you. You can link your accounts to various pieces of software like personal capital, and they'll track your net worth for free. But if you sign up for multiple different programs, you'll always get a slightly different number, I've noticed. And beyond that, and perhaps more importantly, there is something to be said for the benefit of manually going through every account and transcribing each number onto a spreadsheet. And the reason for this is simple.
51:43When we are handed information that we don't have to work for, when that information is automated, we are subject to what is known as information blindness. And this prevents us from being able to turn data into true knowledge and then that knowledge into action. But when data is slightly more difficult to acquire and slightly more difficult to process, the human mind tends to internalize it better. This concept is known as cognitive disfluency. And it was written about in a book by Charles Duhigg called Smarter, Faster, Better. This is where I first learned about it. In this book, Duhigg tells the story of South Avondale Elementary School, which was one of the in 2007 was ranked as one of the worst schools in Cincinnati, Ohio, which, by the way, is my hometown.
52:30So thanks to major corporate benefactors like Procter & Gamble, the school had a decent amount of money. In fact, it had almost three times more money than affluent schools in nearby areas. And so the administration used this money to invest in software that tracked all of this data, student attendance, homework, test scores, participation. They had incredible amounts of data and very cutting edge data visualization dashboards. This software would track the progress of every student. It would graph this information on weekly and monthly bases. And it gave all of this data to the teachers. And yet after six years of having all of this data available, schools such as South Avondale were no better in terms of academic improvement.
53:20And 90 % of the teachers admitted that they didn't really even look at the dashboards very often. So in 2008, South Avondale Elementary School implemented a new program in which they mandated that the teachers transcribe that data by hand onto index cards and draw graphs of that data by hand onto butcher paper. As you can imagine, the program was not very popular with teachers, but it worked. It caused a massive turnaround in student performance, and a large part of that was attributed to the fact that as the teachers were transcribing that data by hand, they had time to truly process the information, to internalize it and think about it.
54:07It was, in essence, almost a meditative activity. What I am describing is cognitive disfluency, meaning that if something is disfluent, if it is not easy, if it's not fluent, we may be able to process this information a little bit better. And so anyway, cycling back to what I was saying earlier, twice a year, I calculate my net worth. And rather than using automated software in order to do this, I manually log into every account, look up my balances, and transcribe it onto a cell within a spreadsheet. And as far as my home values go, I manually go to a variety of different websites, including Zillow, Realtor.com, Homesnap.com.
54:54I used to go to HomeFacts.com, but they haven't really been giving much information lately. But I will go to all of those websites, look up the address of every single house, throw away any extreme outliers and then manually calculate the average of the non-outlier numbers. And that's how I estimate the current market value of each property. So calculating my net worth takes like half a day, which is why I only do this twice a year. But it gives me time to process the information, to deeply, deeply process it. It creates that cognitive disfluency. So all of this, this is a very long tangent, but all of this is to say that I tabulated those numbers and I realized that I only keep 1 % of my portfolio in individual stocks.
55:421%. And that's not even 1 % of my total net worth. It's 1 % of my invested portfolio. The other 99 % is all in index funds. Wow, that was an incredibly long tangent to get to that point. But I hope it was educational and entertaining. That was why I could see myself veering, but I ran with it. So back to the original point, look for the common threads. And I think when you hear these interviews with people like David Stein, Andrew Hallam, J.L. Collins, people who've been on the show who've done very, very well in the investing world, as well as people who I would love to get on the show but who haven't been on, such as John Bogle, Charles Schwab, Ken Fisher, heck, Warren Buffett, the very successful investors of our day.
56:28if you look for some of the common threads between that, you know, while their investing philosophies may diverge, if you look for some of the common threads that they all share, and a shooing of individual stock trading and high frequency or day trading is the common thread. As both Philip Fisher and Warren Buffett have said, our favorite holding period is forever. So I will leave you with those takeaways. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast. Please share this podcast with a friend if you enjoyed it and also head to your favorite podcast player, whether that's iTunes, Stitcher, Overcast, however it is that you listen to us.
57:12And please hit subscribe and leave a review. These reviews are incredibly helpful when it comes to helping us book awesome guests onto the show. And I would love to get John Bogle on the show. He's the inventor of index funds and the founder of Vanguard. Man, that would be crazy. Okay, my name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything Podcast. I'll catch you next week.
From the publisher
#441: It’s GRADUATION WEEK!
For those of you who’ve been following along this past year, you know that I’ve been completing the Knight - Bagehot Fellowship at Columbia University.
This week, my family and I are celebrating the countless hours of studying, all-nighters and eye opening experiences, so here at Afford Anything, we’re airing an important episode from our archives.
This episode addresses important questions we’ve been getting from the Afford Anything community, including:
Where do I invest?
How do I diversify outside of the stock market?
How many individual stocks should I hold?
I’m looking forward to returning to the amazing Afford Anything community full-time as of June 1st, and eagerly anticipating sharing everything I’ve learned with YOU!!!! The team has big plans for the next year, so enjoy this episode and stay tuned for future announcements.
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