Episode 263: A Tribute to Harry Markowitz with Alex Potts & 7 Steps to a Better Portfolio with Edward Goodfellow

24:42Life's short. And Harry was great about that. He would have a soiree every year where he would invite a handful of friends and there would be 50 to 75 of us. And he had the head of the symphony in San Diego that he and Barbara were benefactors for. And he would bring a piano player and the head of the symphony. And sometimes they'd bring someone else. And they would just do kind of a little show for people. And we would have great conversation and eat while he would feed us. And just, it was really amazing. And it was just joyful, right? But he made that time to do that. So those were a few of the learnings that I was just incredibly fortunate to pick up from Harry.

25:23And hopefully for those listening, it's helpful. Alex, that was a sensational tribute. Thanks for sharing these stories and adding some life to an incredible life that was well lived. So thanks for joining us. Yeah. Thanks again. Thanks for all you two do too. We are all lucky in the community to have you two and help and curate just this amazing learning. So thank you for that. And thanks for the opportunity. Thanks, Alex.

25:52So this week we're going to focus on the book, Seven Steps to a Better Portfolio, written by a fellow Canadian financial advisor, Edward Goodfellow. This is an excellent book, completely jammed with great information, resources, links to other information. And it's also full of all the best quotes from giants in our industry, many of whom we've had the chance interview on this podcast. Edward is a financial advisor based in Victoria, BC. He's a CFA charter holder. He's also a CFP and holds the CPA designation. Edward's also an associate faculty member at Royal Roads University where he teaches corporate finance and investment management.

26:31I actually had the chance to have lunch with Edward earlier this spring in Victoria and he told me about his book and that it was coming out this summer. So as soon as it came out, I downloaded it, gave it a read and invited him on. So with that, let's go to a conversation with the author of Seven Steps to a Better Portfolio, Edward Goodfellow. Edward Goodfellow, welcome to the Rational Reminder podcast. Ben and Cameron, it's an honor to be here. Well, it's great to have you and congratulations on the release of your new book. Thank you very much. Labor of Love. No doubt. I can't imagine how much time and effort you put into it.

27:04Why did you write the book? Part of it's therapy. And part of it is, I think, being in the retail investment industry for 30 years, being a teacher for 20 years. We're aware there's an enormous amount of information. There's an enormous amount of people giving advice, endless people giving advice. There's endless investment products. So I thought, well, we need a process and structure to manage all that. And then I built the book around the idea of several questions, which is we're all trying to make a decision in everything. And we're trying to make the best decision to improve the odds of an outcome.

27:36So investing really comes down to a few decisions. What is our decision around return? What is our decision around odds? What is our decision around time? And what is our decision around cash flow? So risk and return we'll discuss throughout this podcast, but I thought I'd just focus on a few of them for a second. Time. Time is constant for everyone watching this podcast. Five years from now, we'll all be five years older. That's a definite absolute. barring death. 10 years from now, we'll be 10 years old. So what decisions can you make today to improve the odds of an outcome? Because time is constant.

28:13The next thing is odds. Everything we do is related to odds. Driving to work is odds. Crossing the street, you look both ways. You're trying to improve the odds of successful outcome. And then cash flow. In investing, we can make it very complicated. But I like to think of every portfolio is 100. and there's three stages in your life. Stage one, you're saving money. You're saving$5 a year. That's cashflow in. Then there's the period in the middle where you're not saving any money. You're not spending any money. That's period two. And then number three is you're spending money. Now you're spending$5 a year.

28:50So your decisions have to relate around those different phases of when you need cashflow. Who did you have in mind? Who was the target audience when you wrote this book? I think, again, I'm the same age as Cameron. We grew up in a very interesting time where there was a lot of information and it changed. It changed from Louis Rookizer to Jim Cramer to things yelling at us on YouTube. So when I wrote the book, I thought, what if I just gave people a framework? And I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm saying this is a great starting point. So the average investor needs a framework to hold onto, a guideline, a decision-making guideline to deal with all this, as I talked about earlier, this endless information, this endless advice, and this endless investment products.

29:36How do you decipher and make a better decision? Edward, you mentioned in the book that portfolio management is math and emotion. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Basically, when you think about managing your money and you build your portfolio, math is how you should build your portfolio. Emotion is why you don't. Emotion is where you get steered off the direction. Math will improve the odds of a successful outcome. That's in everything we do. Math will improve the odds of a successful outcome. Emotion will give you more randomness and excitement. And that's part of the problem. Because you're investing this$100 and you've got to make sure you got it right.

30:16So in that$100, you allocate. And every time you take something out or put something in, you've changed the structure of the portfolio. Did you do that because of math or did you do that because of emotion? So always focus on that. Your ultimate goal is to give yourself the best odds of an outcome, which is why math would be the best way to look at managing your portfolio. What are the four questions that people should consider prior to investing? Question one, why are you investing? You're investing because you want to return. So, okay. So this is a great question. Question number two is, where do returns come from?

30:54And people say, well, stock market, buying, selling, trading, profitable companies. No. The origin of return is risk. Risk is what you take. And I'll explain that in just a second with the Uncle Bob and Uncle Steve story. Third question is, well, what is risk? Risk is the variability or the degree of uncertainty of an outcome. and it's in everything we do. Now, the fourth question is, how do you capture the return, whatever it may be, in this ever-evolving landscape? And I use the word evolving because markets are just a pricing mechanism reacting to news. So it's an ever-evolving landscape based on new information.

31:36Manage the risk in an ever-changing landscape, economic landscape, because the economic landscape is changing. We didn't know COVID would hit. We didn't know that Russia would invade Ukraine and we didn't know inflation would be this rapid. So how do you do that? So that's the essence of the book is how do you capture return, manage risk to improve the odds of an outcome? And I just wanted to say, there's another little bit I want to touch about is Uncle Bob and Uncle Steve. So the best way I'd explain my students about risk is this. Let's assume, Cameron, your Uncle Bob says, I want to borrow$10 ,000.

32:09You say, okay, Uncle Bob, I kind of like you. I'll lend it to you at 10%. Uncle Steve comes to you and you say, hey, I want to borrow$10 ,000. Uncle Steve, I'm going to lend it to you at 15%. You have defined risk and required return. You have made a decision. And this is fundamental to everything in the book and in finance is that risk is what your perception is. Because people always say, Edward, when you do these models, where did you get K? Where did you get risk for return from? I said, I didn't. It came from us as a market. The market prices in risk based on expected outcomes. And the word expected is critical because we don't know if Uncle Steve or Uncle Bob will pay us back.

32:54We have made an estimate that they will. Can you talk about the investment personalities that people should watch out for on their investing journeys? The best way to look at personalities or look at the risk of personalities is ego. Because people will be fearful, will be confident, they'll be crying wolf, they're always worried, they follow memes, they follow Jim Cramer. But I think the real risk for everyone is confidence. So if you listen to a really confident person predicting the future, you realize that they're not good at that. I can tell you what I'm going to do next weekend, or I can predict what I'm going to do next fall when I have a trip or something like that.

33:34But let's try to predict the stock market. Let's try to predict an economic event in a way that we could benefit from it and do this consistently. So the problem with personalities is sometimes the confidence creates a big problem. The confidence you want is the confidence in process and structure. You go to a doctor. He's not confident that he's going to work magic. He's confident that the tools he has and education he has and science he has will improve the odds of an outcome, not the other. How should investors respond to what they hear from, and you refer to them as influencers, what should they do?

34:06Well, the investing world is reality TV. And so do you take advice from selling sunset? That's the problem. I would say that now influence is one thing. If your Aunt Mary says you should go to school, that's a different story. That's an influence. But influencers are trying to push upon you their views. And you have to ask yourself, are their views valid in the mountain of information, how material is what they say. So the number one thing is to say, well, I'm not going to let this bother me. I'm not going to let this influence me. In fact, just to remember that most of the investment media is reality TV.

34:42I would say that in a lot of cases, they're not even trying to sell you their views. They're trying to buy your attention with whatever they're saying. The substance of what a lot of, I think, YouTube influencers say is not even the point. The substance of what they're saying isn't even the point. They just want your attention. What do you think investors can do to deal with all of the media noise and extreme views that get expressed by financial market commentators? That's why I wrote the book. The book basically gives you a framework. And again, I'm not saying the book's perfect, but it's a great starting point.

35:15If you follow the steps, it gives you something to hold onto. So when someone says to you, when we were kids, Cameron, it was Bigfoot and Elvis, right? Now it's much more scarier items. But when someone says something, you have to put it into a framework. Does that make any sense? Is it possible and probable? It is possible that these terrible things may happen, but is it probable, right? So you have to filter it out is what I'm saying. How do you categorize the different types of risks that investors need to deal with? Okay. In the book, I went through all these different types of risk, active management risk, valuation risk, speculation risk, and so on.

35:52But I think the key is to understand what is risk in investing. So the whole idea that in investing, we're trying to predict the future, or we're trying to accept the market. So passive is accepting the market. Active is predicting the future. So you've got to say, when they're active, what risks now do we face? Do we face valuation risk. What do you do? Because inactive, all you're doing is guessing the future. And can anyone predictably guess the future better than anyone else? The answer is clearly no. We are the market. We are the group, right? So the key to all the different risks is be aware they exist, determine how much they impact you, and how much you can manage them.

36:36Because it's all about managing those risks. You see them, you know they're there. How did you benefit from it or manage it. Can you talk about the risks specific to the choices made by investors? The question is, what did you base your decision on? Was there substance behind that decision? Was it a practical, logical, well-thought-out decision, or did you just make it? So that the risk really is you made the wrong decision. And the risk is how material is that error in that decision-making? So I keep referring back to the seven steps. If you said, I'm going to allocate, I'm going to diversify.

37:09I'm going to use dimensions of returns. I'm going to follow financial science. I'm going to manage my emotions. I'm going to manage my choices. I'm going to manage my costs and taxes. That actually eliminates many of these risks. And so the big issue is you can better manage your decisions by focusing back on that framework. You alluded to this already, but what role should expectations and predictions play in an investment plan? Well, the key word there is investment plan. You can predict what you're going to do next summer or anticipate what you're going to do. But no, when you think about it logically, can you out-predict somebody else?

37:44No. You're not investing because you're just basically picking who's going to win the baseball games this weekend. And you can do it with great confidence. But why don't you just rather think of it, I'll just bet that capitalism works. I'll just bet that markets work. And I'll be passive and semi-passive. On the active side, you're taking a tremendous amount of risk guessing the future. Can you talk about how the investment strategy changes over the life cycle? Well, this goes back to cash flow and the ability to tolerate risk is that when you are at the stage where you're saving, it would be prudent to accept more risk because you're seeking a higher return and you can accept the volatility in that life cycle.

38:24So say from age 20 to say 50, you've got some opportunity there to accept risk. And then at a point where you want to take risk off the table, you've got to increase your fixed income as a risk reductor. And as you enter the phase where you're drawing down, it becomes a liability stream. Like in pensions, you're trying to manage this need for$5 a year for infinite periods of time. What should people consider in determining their risk tolerance? Well, it's willingness, ability, and need. This is one of the interesting things about investing. So let's say someone walks into their local bank and they're having a bad day and they decide, I'm having a bad day and I don't trust the news.

39:03So they come in and the person writes down, oh, they're really worried about the market. So they put down as low risk and the person's like 30 years old. So the problem, you got to stop and think, wait a minute, it's not how I'm feeling that day. But when it comes to risk tolerance and I'm thinking about cash flows and returns, I've got to say, what is my willingness to take the risk? Right. which I need to understand the bigger picture. What is my ability to take the risk? And do I have a need to take the risk? Because obviously with higher GICs, I've had many clients come to me, they buy GICs for half their portfolio.

39:37Why? Because they don't need to take the risk. How do you think investors should evaluate the performance of their strategy once it's in place? Well, I'm obviously a passive, semi-passive person. So I would always use the standardized benchmarks. However, you have to understand why you're going to have tracking error. And tracking error is a result of when markets perform, let's say, the premiums don't show up. And I'll explain that later. But the idea is that you created this portfolio on day one. And on year five, you look at it and say, well, what's happening? You should try to at least track what the benchmarks are doing.

40:13And these would be the standardized benchmarks we can get off any software program as a risk and return proxy. And then the idea, of course, is to can you slightly outperform it? We'll discuss that later. So how do you describe the difference between active, passive? You also say semi-passive and also asset class investing. Okay. Active is just like it sounds. I'm guessing tomorrow's baseball games. I'm guessing an outcome. It's active. I mean, do a lot of research. I think about it a lot. It's basically actively trying to outperform a market outguess. Passive, on the other hand, is I'm just going to buy the market.

40:51I trust the market. It's less expensive because you don't have to put all the research in. There's less trading and there's less taxes. Now, semi-passive is what I call, and I use the term thinking index. The idea is that you start with a passive benchmark and you say, well, given how we viewed Uncle Bob and Uncle Steve, would I be rewarded to have a few more Uncle Steves in there paying me 15 %? So maybe I can tilt my portfolio to higher expected returns based on how we price assets. And it's how we interpret risk. It's how we price assets. The pricing assets will help us determine what should we take off the table and what should we put on the table.

41:35And I'm talking about slightly altering that passive benchmark. That's why I call it a thinking index. All right. So we've been talking about this book that's called the seven steps to a better portfolio. We haven't actually gotten to the seven steps yet. So let's go there. Can you take us through the seven steps? Okay. The seven steps go this way. This book came out of a course I taught at Royal Roads University, and we would study pension plans. And in BC and Alberta, it's currently BC, we're very lucky. We have BC Pension Corp. We have BCI, which manage pension plans for us. So we have a lot of information to start with.

42:06So the first thing you do when you look at the seven steps, and I learned this obviously from the pensions, is allocate around the world. It's a very large world, is an ever-changing world. It's an ever-changing economic landscape. So the first step is allocate, and I call it the seven buckets. The first bucket is global fixed income. The second bucket is Canada. The third bucket is the United States. The fourth bucket is international developed. The fifth bucket is emerging markets. The sixth bucket is the special other bucket, should someone want to go that way, other meaning other types of investments.

42:38And seventh bucket is global real estate. So allocate around the world. It's a good way to start. I'm not sure what's wrong with it. I like it. It's going to work. The odds are it's going to work. Step number two, diversify. So you decide to invest in Canada. The best way to do that is use a market or an index as the primary approach. And diversification means that you've taken the 11 sectors. Now, we'll call it 10 because we'll remove real estate, put that separately. And you want to be allocated across those or diversified within those 10 sectors to remove stock-specific risk. The third one is dimensions of returns.

43:15This is one of my favorite discussions because it flows well with accounts because we understand cost of capital. When I talked about Uncle Bob and Uncle Steve, Uncle Bob, you said, I'll lend it to you at 10%. Uncle Steve said, no, I said, Uncle Steve, I'll lend it to you at 15%. So you've defined their cost of money or their cost of capital. And you've defined your expected required return. So what's interesting, though, is that you know, in theory, higher risk assets should produce higher returns. But it only works in the law of large numbers. Otherwise, it's too difficult. So the third of the seven steps is diversify or focus on higher expected returns.

43:58So they're in the appendix of the book, and they're discussed at length in the book. Focus on small stocks have higher risk. they should, in theory, have higher expected return. There's a caveat to that. You've got to understand, you've got to own thousands of them or hundreds of them. Value upperforms growth. And I call it the irony of growth in Appendix 4. You would think that growth would upperform value, but the problem is the price you pay for growth. And the price you pay determines future expected return. And the third one is profitability. I'll explain that later. And step four is my favorite.

44:29it's about financial science or academia. It gives us a vast body of knowledge to make better decisions. It tells us how things work. It makes planes work. It makes medicine better. It makes school better. It makes our lives better. And so in financial science, it binds one, two, and three steps, one, two, and three, which is the financial mathematical science with five, six, and seven, which is the behavioral finance. So I like step four is all about the science. Step five is strategy risk. Strategy risk is you. You're the one who's going to make that decision as you go through life. And you're going to make those decisions based on information.

45:07You've got to manage yourself and you've got to manage the people who are telling you to do something different. So strategy risk is basically making sure you don't have a poor strategy to begin with, because don't forget, you're going to wake up in five and 10 years. What decisions did you make today to improve that strategy. And then sixth is investment choice risk. That's just trying to narrow in on some of the things that people do that they shouldn't do, that they don't necessarily alter the strategy, but they start making decisions they shouldn't make, like active management or crypto or something like that.

45:40You've got to manage that little craziness they might have. And the seventh step is cost and taxes. Let's maybe talk about a few of them. Why is global diversification is so important? Well, it's an ever-changing global market in terms of you look where consumption is and savings is. Now, obviously, the United States is the dominant place, obviously, because of the legal and accounting system, but it's an ever-evolving market, right? And if you look at India and China and so on. So now you're sitting here today in 2023 saying, well, where's the market going to be in three, five, 10 years? You don't know.

46:12So if you allocate around the world, you're going to be there if it happens. And it rotates. You You can see in the year of the 2000s, it was international and emerging. And then for the next decade, it was the United States. And we don't know what the next decade will be. So you want to allocate around the world. It's the best way to manage risk and capture future return. Can you talk about why diversification within markets is important? Well, you want to manage the stock-specific risk or even sector-specific risk. So you want to diversify across investments and across sectors to manage risk.

46:43And again, to capture higher expected returns. Edward, how do you explain to clients why you think it's important to focus on higher expected returns? Well, as the Uncle Bob and Uncle Steve story, they're there. Let's just start with the market portfolio. You have a market portfolio, which is cap-weighted. And so the large cap is the top and the small caps at the very bottom. And there, it's market cap-weighted. If you know that small stocks produce higher returns, why wouldn't you overweight small stocks? So you know that overpriced growth stocks don't actually produce outperformance relative to value.

47:20So you should tilt towards value. How did you deal with client conversations on higher expected returns for the long stretch that we're kind of still in, depending on how you measure it, where higher expected returns did not translate to higher realized returns? Well, the math didn't change. The academia didn't change. Uncle Steve is still paying you 15%, let's say, a thousand Uncle Steves. But we get anomalies in the market. And anomalies occur because something happens we didn't expect. In the 90s, it was the internet, and that drove up technology stocks. And in the last five years, it was cloud computing.

47:57Cloud computing and gaming transformed the technology industry. So out of the blue came these incredibly unexpected returns for these companies, It's the FAANG stocks, which then drove up growth stocks. And that was an anomaly. And that's what markets are. They're random. But over time, I still think it's over time, we'll see that higher risk stocks, cheaper stocks, value stocks will outperform over the long run because that's how we as humans price assets. But we made an anomaly because we had a higher expected thing. So let me explain one thing. So the price of a stock is expected cash flow.

48:38And expected cash flow has growth in it. And the bottom is expected risk. So you price a stock. Something happens. They have astronomically high growth rates. You thought they'd grow at 5 and they grow at 15. You think, well, wait a minute. So the cash flow went up. And at the same time, you love the stock. You love the FANG stocks. So the risk went down. So as risk goes down, asset prices went up. And that produced this outsized returns, which distorted cap market indexes, which distorted returns. So people then say to you, Edward, there's a problem. Why is this working? And I say, no, it's working fine.

49:16Just let it work itself out. Because as I say in Appendix 3, growth is not infinite. Unless you're selling to another planet, you can't keep growing at that rate. And something's going to happen. And in the book, I talk about Netflix and Meta or Facebook, and they had their day of reckoning. They can't grow because competition shows up or they have employees leave or consumers change their patterns. You've been in this industry a long time. How is financial science different from the type of research that an active manager would do? Well, financial science is where you study how something works and you learn to benefit from that.

49:56And active investors are guessing the future. They're going to use what they think is science to guess the future. They're going to use technical and fundamental analysis. And they're going to say, we can predict something. But they can't. On an aggregate level, nobody can outpredict someone else over the long term. So active management is what we want because it sounds good and people are predicting the future. Passive management is saying, no, we're going to use academia and we're going to capture what the market bears and we're going to use that to our advantage. You mentioned strategy risk earlier.

50:26Can you talk about how investors should manage strategy risk? Well, I always like to say in the book, you are the risk. So you've decided to carry on a strategy. And if the strategy is well-structured, well-designed, easy to execute, the risk really is someone's going to tell you it doesn't work, which actually just answers your last question, which is, okay, guys, the premiums didn't show up. What are you going to do about it? right? Well, no, the strategy is to design a diversified market-based portfolio tilted towards higher expected returns. That's the strategy. So the strategy risk then is, well, I don't believe that anymore.

51:06You should believe that. That's how markets actually work. So over time, this all falls through because markets are just us. We are pricing the risk just like we do with Uncle Bob and Uncle Steve. So the key to strategy risk is if you really believe and understand why your strategy should work. Don't deviate from it. All these people are going to tell you you shouldn't do this or you shouldn't do that. Just follow your strategy. What do people need to be aware of to minimize costs and taxes? Let's look at costs. In the book, I talk about you're managing an apartment building. Why do you have costs?

51:38Costs because you have to hire somebody or use different vehicles. You should always try to minimize your costs. Obviously, if you're passive and semi-passive, you have a huge advantage. Now you've got to get advice. Then the same thing about advice. Is the advice going to give you better odds of an outcome? So you always look at costs as, am I going to put the puck in the net? Is this person going to give me an odds advantage? Then I'm willing to pay them. From a tax point of view, the beauty of a semi-passive approach or the seven steps is as you grow your portfolio, you're not making big changes.

52:11You're not changing the asset mix a lot or the allocation a lot. So you're not triggering capital gains. So let's hypothetically say you invested$1 million. And in 10 years, the rule of 72, you doubled your money, you're in 7.2%. The market value is now$2 million. But along the way, the cost base, the ACB of this portfolio, might have gone up to 1.2 because you did some rebalancing. So you have this$800 ,000 embedded gain, and you haven't paid it. Because if you pay those taxes, that reduces the value of your portfolio. So you didn't. Now you turn around at the end of 10 years and you draw$5 ,000.

52:47At the same time, now you're slowly recognizing these capital gains over this timeframe. You actually have more money to deal with, which gives you a higher compounded return. The three of us are advisors in this business, and you mentioned minimizing costs. How do you articulate the value of financial advice? It's odds. Does a person provide better odds of an outcome? When you decide to do something, is the cost that you're paying going to improve the odds of your outcome. So when I look at advice from my doctor or from my mechanic, what are the odds? What am I paying for? I'm paying for them to improve the odds of an outcome.

53:28So the problem in the financial world is people play on the game of, I can predict the future. That's a terrible way to look at it because I don't know what that is. The odds are actually not very good. And so we overpay for people we believe are the wizard of odds. And so you've got to be careful of that and manage that. What was your biggest takeaway from sitting down and putting all these thoughts into a structured format? I personally thrive in a rules-based systematic process and structure. I do that. I raised my daughters. I teach part-time at university. I got through the UFI, the uniform final exam.

54:00I like processes and structures. They make me accountable. They give me assurance. And as long as I have a really, really good plan in place, I have a better odds of A, completing the CFA or the CA or raising my children. And it's not a perfectly formatted approach, but it gives me a guideline and a process and a structure to deal with issues as they arise. The three of us, and I'm guessing most of our listeners pretty much agree that learning about this stuff is important. However, a ton of information is conflicting that is out there. What is your advice to people that are just trying to figure this stuff out and have a good experience.

54:38We are very stressed as a society, basically. I'd say that investors are probably more stressed now than they've ever been because of this overwhelming about information. But if you hold on to, and if you look at the seven steps, the middle core is academia. So every time you're not sure of something, go back to saying, well, what does science say? Science says allocation works. Science says diversification works. Science has identified the dimensions of returns. This is beneficial. Science has told me from a behavioral point of view, I have to manage myself. I can't eat potato chips. I shouldn't ride a motorbike.

55:15Science has told me I've got to be careful with investment choice risk. I shouldn't go down to black moguls. I shouldn't do that because that's going to get me in trouble. And then science has also told us that costs and taxes matter. So it's good to have this framework to build upon and to fall back on when you're faced with all this information and all these questions. Final question for you, Edward. Any final thoughts for our listeners? Odds are everything. Managing the variables to better control the odds is everything else. The idea is that you're about to invest your money or are investing your money or trying to make an investment decision.

55:51Do you understand the odds? But most importantly, do you understand and the variables you control. And the seven steps are seven variables you control. They're actionable, tangible tasks that you control. If you focus on what you can control, you can better manage what you don't control to improve the odds of a successful outcome. Awesome. Edward, thanks for coming on. Congratulations again on your book. Thank you very much for having me. All right, let's go to the after show, Ben. Thanks to Edward for joining us. Great to have him on. Also great to have Alex, great friend of the show and someone I've gotten to know over the past few years.

56:30Just a great guy. Always a helpful ear when I've got questions about stuff in the business. And he's so connected and he's so gracious with his time. Can you imagine having that kind of experience with Harry Markowitz though? Harry and everyone else, when we were talking to Alex, and he's not name dropping for the sake of name dropping, but just as he's telling stories, the names that are included, it's just like, man, he hangs out with some pretty cool people. Yeah. Pretty cool story. Why don't you give us some of the reviews we got? Yep. So we got two new reviews. Our review numbers. Remember we had an arbitrary goal of hitting a thousand reviews, which we've now surpassed.

57:07And I don't know what it's like, I can't remember what it's at now, but it's well above that. We always appreciate them. 1067, but who's counting? Oh, 67. Okay. Okay. It's at 71 now. I just can't remember it was 1171 or 1071. So Bartita from Canada titled their review, Shared and Relistened. And they said, the highest praise I can give a podcast is that this is the only podcast that I've shared with friends. It is also the only podcast that I have gone back to listen to from the beginning. Wow. That's a lot at this point. I do not listen as soon as it hits my phone, as I wait for a time when I can pay attention, this podcast has influenced my investing more than any other.

57:50Very, very kind words. And then Joseon Daimo from the United States says, erudite podcast. And their review is, I learned. It's great. It's awesome. It's a great review as much as we can ask for. I had a lot of people reached out on LinkedIn the past couple of weeks. I'm just going to Kind of go through these quickly. Well, both of us heard from Rowley in the UK, who enjoys listening to the pod very much. Joshua from Taiwan expressed his appreciation for the RR and thanks us for transforming people's lives. Heard from Steve in Toronto, who will be at the live CFA event this fall in Toronto. Kevin from New York City has been a loyal follower for years and thanks us for the exceptional educational and insightful content.

58:35Reese from Charleston says he gets a lot out of it. and from Alex, A-L-I-X in New York City says, I really appreciate the mix of theoretical, academic, and practical topics. My background is in organizational change management. So the recent episode of James Troy really resonated with me. I really appreciated the view on how real behavior diverges from academic advice, even with economists. I enjoyed some of the recent foundations episodes, as well as the deep dives on advanced topics, which remind me how broad this space is and push to continue learning. Pretty kind. Also, a nice post on LinkedIn from Andrea in Brussels, who reposted our upcoming live event on finding and finding a good life, which will be hosted by our colleagues, Jacqueline Cessero and Nicholas Donovan.

59:22He stated, in the last two years, nothing has been a bigger personal impact on my life, both personal and financial, than a rational reminder. He also considers the work on finding and funding a good life, the very best of the work done here. Just a heads up, we'll be having live events like that event every two weeks for the rest of the year. So you can follow us, we retweet this, or you can follow the company on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, you can follow the rational reminder. It's all kind of reposted all through the different communities. Yeah. People should check those out there. We had the last one that I checked in on, And they had, I think, over 90 attendees in the webinar, more than that?

1:00:05We had over 100 register, I think 60, over 60 attended. Okay, okay. That must have been an outdated number then. Yeah, so lots of people came though, and people seemed to get a lot of value out of it. And other PWL employees attended, and the feedback that I heard from them was that the presenters, the PWL people that presented, just absolutely crushed it. So that's cool to see that people on our team are killing it doing that kind of presentation. There's also a woman in wealth series that's running too, which people might want to check out. Anything you want to mention from the community? Well, I kind of mentioned it in the introduction that story of the DIY investor that decides to look for advice.

1:00:45And I thought that was just absolutely fascinating. Other than that, the community has been more active recently. There's a couple of a threat on housing really picked up and a thread on what people have changed their minds about with respect to factor investing. One of the moderators started that thread and it's become quite a lively discussion. So I posted a bit in there asking people their thoughts on low volatility because our upcoming episode with Pim Van Vliet, I kind of posted some of his stuff and said, is my buy-in being changed or have I just been swayed by a good conversation with Pim?

1:01:19But there's lots of good stuff in that thread. Awesome. So speaking of the community, we have meetup and events coming up. So in September, we're at the Future Proof Conference, and we're hosting a breakfast on the morning of September 11th. If you're interested, reach out to us at info at rationalreminder.ca. We're also doing a live recording at Future Proof on Tuesday morning, the 12th at 9am on the social audio experiment stage. Hal Hirschfeld will be joining us. So if you're going to that conference, come on by. on September 21st in Toronto, we're also recording another live episode at the CFA Society Toronto Annual Wealth Conference.

1:01:59Did you know, Ben, that, I know I told you this earlier, but the CFA Society Toronto is the largest CFA society in the world with over 11 ,000 members. I'm surprised by that though. I would imagine like NYC would be the largest. Maybe there's different societies. I don't know enough about it. Those are your peeps. anyways we're recording an event that day at the at the event and we'll be hosting listeners at a meetup in toronto afterwards that's on september 21st and from there i'm heading to salt lake city so if anyone's around the night of the 22nd or 23rd that might want to organize a meetup i'm happy to show up if there's any interest in salt lake city again drop a note to info at rationalreminder.ca In the store, there's still a few Talking Sense cards available.

1:02:49If you're a teacher and you teach this kind of material and would like a deck, reach out and we'll be happy to send you a complimentary deck. Also super excited to announce that James Grubman has agreed to come on the podcast later this fall. His book, which I think we've alluded to, we haven't done a review on yet, A Stranger in Paradise, was fantastic. So I invited him on earlier this spring for that and he said, well, wait for my new book that came out called Wealth 3.0. So it came out, I think Thursday or Friday last week. I went through it on the weekend. It's a fantastic book. So I dropped him a note and he's agreed to come on.

1:03:22So that's awesome. For sure. Anything else, Ben, that you want to talk about? I know you got a new bike. I don't think we talked about your bike yet, have we? Maybe not. Yeah, I got a bike. It wasn't so easy to find because I'm kind of tall, taller than most people. What's the frame size? Do you remember? I don't know. It's not a size because I had to get it made to my measurements. It's made to order. Okay. Yeah. Not a standard size, but a large. Where do you go and how often do you go? Are you a road rider or are you in the woods? No, it's not a road bike. It's a mountain bike. I live close to mountain biking trails, so I just bike on over the trails and yeah, lots of fun.

1:03:59I've fallen off a few times though, so I got to be careful. No way. The trails I go on are pretty hardcore and I haven't been into this kind of biking in probably 20 years. So yeah, I should probably pace myself. Are any kids into it yet? They can all ride bikes, but they're not doing mountain biking yet. So you're not going out with one of them yet? Not yet. Not yet. It's super fun though. I find that anything that exercises your leg muscles, for me personally anyway, like if I do squats or if I go for a real aggressive bike ride, I sleep so much better. I don't get that with anything else. If I do upper body weights or light cardio or heavy cardio, I don't get that.

1:04:36but if I do like heavy leg muscle, just destruction, I knock right out. Anything with good sleep is worth being aware of, that's for sure. I think so. Awesome. All right. Well, everybody, thanks for listening. Have a great week.