transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:05] Your Guides to a Really Great Financial Future.

Speaker 2:
[00:08] Tom and Don are Talking Real Money. Hi everybody, I'm Don, that's Tom. This is the Talking Real Money Podcast. And as always, we're going to share a little information about something in the financial world that we found interesting or stupid, or helpful, or inane, or whatever. It's just something that we thought you should know about and usually avoid. Because most things that we talk about are things that people want you to do, not for your benefit, but for theirs. And here's another fine example of a really ridiculous idea that will gain some traction for a while because it's got the buzz phrase in it, but is probably not a good idea for you. And that is using artificial intelligence as a means by which to play the stock market. Do we like it or do we not?

Speaker 3:
[01:11] This one really rubs me the wrong way because it's such a blatant attempt to face off against Robin Hood, which has been the leader in dumb ideas. Sorry, Robin Hood.

Speaker 2:
[01:27] Dumb trading, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[01:27] Dumb trading and getting all excited about a win. Do they show fireworks when they show a loss too? This is a company called Public.

Speaker 2:
[01:36] No, they show a hand coming up out of a grave, reaching you down into the earth.

Speaker 3:
[01:41] Or reaching into your wallet, taking money out. Public is rolling out a feature that allows customers to use-

Speaker 2:
[01:48] The general public?

Speaker 3:
[01:49] The general public. There's a company, privately held brokerage firm, of course, that's going to allow you to use AI to automate your investing tactics and execute trades. Boy, does that sound good. AI agents, they say, can be employed-

Speaker 2:
[02:04] I don't have to do the work anymore?

Speaker 3:
[02:05] No, they will buy protective puts should oil spike, hedging against potential stock losses, automatically sweep customers' cash into higher-yielding assets like bonds. They could put a 20% stop-loss order. They could- all kinds of wonderful things. And here's the really great part of all this. You come up with the ideas. That's right.

Speaker 2:
[02:27] I thought they came up with the ideas.

Speaker 3:
[02:28] No, they just execute your amazing ideas. The guy who runs the place says, you're building all this code, essentially, that's running your account under the hood. This is a way that they can go after, as I see a forementioned Robin Hood, and I guess even Betterment does this stuff. They're calling it create customized indexes, because there's so many parts of the market that are not utilized as indexes. So what happens here is you type in the strategy or the investment thesis, then you refine it with parameters with a series of follow-up questions that they provide. They're going to ask you, what about this? What about that? Including which accounts the agent will trade from, which assets to buy or sell, and whether the trade will be one-time or recurring. You're getting this so far?

Speaker 2:
[03:13] Okay.

Speaker 3:
[03:14] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[03:14] So you come up- I'm still not sure how this is doing something for me, but okay. Well, my idea-

Speaker 3:
[03:20] Yeah, your ideas. But give me an idea. What would be an idea for a trade that you- I mean, a market that you think you could trade and take advantage of the inefficiency?

Speaker 2:
[03:29] But I think most younger people would be thinking, well, right now they'd be thinking, give me a way to trade AI.

Speaker 3:
[03:36] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[03:37] Give me an idea that's going to- for example, a family member who will remain nameless, who occasionally buys stocks in his play money account, just bought stocks in four different companies that build data centers.

Speaker 3:
[03:53] So they're not looking for the gold, they're selling people the methods to go mine the gold.

Speaker 2:
[03:59] They're the ones at Sutter's Creek. They're the Suttlers at Sutter's Creek. They're the ones who are selling the pans to the guys who are mining the gold and the shovels. So they're likely...

Speaker 3:
[04:13] That's a great trade.

Speaker 2:
[04:14] Actually, maybe that's a great trade.

Speaker 3:
[04:16] It's a great trade, because those are the people, by the way, in all of these speculative enterprises, that generally end up making money, the rest of them generally not.

Speaker 2:
[04:24] Yeah, if you want to buy gold, buy the gold mining stock.

Speaker 3:
[04:26] Exactly, yeah, which you and I own, right? We don't speculate on those.

Speaker 2:
[04:30] We do among 10,000 other things.

Speaker 3:
[04:32] Yeah, a lot of ideas. So, you come up with this great idea. By the way, maybe we should test that great idea out, the AI infrastructure trade.

Speaker 2:
[04:41] Oh, no, this is a family member's checking that out for us. Oh, okay. We'll find out how it does.

Speaker 3:
[04:47] And then you hire these people and they ask you more questions and you build this master investing thesis because, you know, people are really good at that.

Speaker 2:
[04:58] So now that you've done the thesis, you have a master's in investing?

Speaker 3:
[05:03] Apparently so. Then you give them your money and...

Speaker 2:
[05:07] Oh, well, that's the most important part of the whole equation. You give them your money.

Speaker 3:
[05:13] Hand it over.

Speaker 2:
[05:14] All right.

Speaker 3:
[05:15] So they don't have to reach in your wall and take it. So you give them the money and then they go to work trading all this. They look at this, I imagine, moment by moment.

Speaker 2:
[05:25] So they're bopping in and out.

Speaker 3:
[05:26] So they're all kidding aside, they can do that more efficiently than you can or I can.

Speaker 2:
[05:31] Of course they can. No, literally, they can because they don't need to take a nap or have lunch.

Speaker 3:
[05:40] Or feel a change or feel out. That doesn't feel good.

Speaker 2:
[05:45] I'm going to do this instead. They take the feeling out of the process of trading.

Speaker 3:
[05:51] I love this quote from the CEO of Publix. It can only do what you tell it to do. There are no hallucinations. Now, there may be after you look at what the effect of the trade is.

Speaker 2:
[06:02] It's AI. If it does what you tell it to do, you could be hallucinating.

Speaker 3:
[06:10] That's what I'm saying. You may be later when you review all this. You put the idea in there, it figures out how to trade away on this idea. That's wonderful. By the way, they say they've tested the AI agent on eight Series 7 practice exams from the Securities Training Corporation, a qualification test for entry level brokers, and it passed them all. The tool is already available to you.

Speaker 2:
[06:36] Wait a minute, the Series 7 is just roped memory. I remember taking the Series 7. I know. What Dean Witter did at the time was they spent six weeks cramming knowledge into our brains so that we could pass the stupid test and then we immediately forgot it all. I don't remember 90% of the Series 7, I don't.

Speaker 3:
[06:57] Exactly. So they've tested this. So this is back testing, Don. This is making sure that you're not doing anything that's too risky. They're joining Robinhood, which I forgot this. They rolled out a feature, among other idiotic things that they did, that can build and execute trades based on text prompts and breakdowns, portfolio performance. They'll do all that for you. I don't know how much they charge you for all that, and I don't suggest it, but they will do all that for you. This is part and parcel of the whole idea that you have these great ideas, but you just don't know how to execute them. You just don't know how to take advantage of that great idea that no one else has. Oh, say for all the hedge funds that trade with the money, et cetera, et cetera, are traditionally actively managed, mutual funds or whatever. This is, I just love this quote again from the CEO who will remain nameless. He says, this is the very beginning of how you will see behavior shift. I don't know what that means.

Speaker 2:
[08:04] I was just gonna say, I have no idea what that means.

Speaker 3:
[08:06] I don't think he knows, but it sure sounds good. He says it's gonna essentially remake the world of wealth management and investment advice, because you have these great ideas, these theses, and you're going to hand them to the AI, the brain, and the AI is gonna trade your way to Nirvana.

Speaker 2:
[08:24] Yeah, and here's what's really interesting about the way Public is set up. They're basically saying, well, we're not making the trades, we're not giving advice, we're not doing anything. We're just acting as a trading agent. You give us the parameters, we'll make the trades, therefore, we're not responsible. That's what all that means. We bear no responsibility for your trading stupidity. That's on you. So they're not really doing anything for you except maybe automating the button pushing.

Speaker 3:
[08:57] Well, and can you tell by what they're going to charge? They're gonna charge per trade, they're gonna charge per chat bot. I mean, what are they charging?

Speaker 2:
[09:07] Well, it's probably gonna be, with whoever is doing the brokerage platform, I'm sure they're hiring that out, although they claim they are. They're gonna, it's just gonna be spreads. Because if you can get people to trade, move stocks on a rapid fire basis, those spreads, which can, you know, are just for rapidly traded, although they're probably dealing with lightly traded stocks, so the spreads are bigger. They're cents on the dollar, but when you trade, you know, 20 or 30 times, those cents add up to a dollar.

Speaker 3:
[09:40] Well, remember, we looked at this once and we did a piece long ago on Robinhood, and the order flow, the amount of money they were making on this was in the hundreds of millions. It was a big number, right? People think, I'm not paying them anything. Oh, yes, you are paying them something. By the way, you know, someone else you're paying when you do a lot of trading is the US government. There's going to be taxes on all of this, so beyond the cost, there's taxation, of course.

Speaker 2:
[10:06] Well, there's that, and then there's the general problem with this and things like Robin Hood. They're designed, they're not designed to give you an edge or to help you make more money. They're designed like a video game or a television show to engage you, to draw you in, because the thinking, and this is based on fact, you engage somebody enough, they'll use your platform, they'll make you money, lots and lots of money if you keep them engaged. And that's what public's all about. It's about keeping people engaged. It's not going to provide you with any kind of an edge, and they don't even claim to. They don't even claim to. It's really nothing more than a button pushing machine. That's all.

Speaker 3:
[11:01] But let's make sure that we go back and talk about this in a more general notion, because there are people that do this for a living. They do it every day. They run things like hedge funds that I mentioned.

Speaker 2:
[11:16] And by the way, I want to add this to these people, these professionals, Tom. This is something we don't talk about very often. Professionals often get their edge by gaming the margins. And in layman's terms, we could call that cheating a little.

Speaker 3:
[11:36] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[11:37] And that's a fact. I mean, come on. Stephen Cohen, poster boy for cheating. He's blood guilty to doing it.

Speaker 3:
[11:46] Yeah. Couldn't trade anybody else's money for like, what, eight years, and now he has a family office. He's managing the money. So, okay. So those people have done that. And what's the track record of that? Well, the only real known track record we know is when Warren Buffett made the bet, the S&P 500 versus an aggregate of hedge funds. And guess what? The S&P 500 did better. We also know many studies, not just one, the majority of day traders lose money. And this is what this is. This is your ideas. This is your hunches. This is your, oh, this has got to work because they lose money.

Speaker 2:
[12:23] I just talked about this in a Friday Q&A podcast, the day traders. There were studies done in, I believe it was Brazil and Taiwan. There were really, really robust studies of day trading. And they found that about 1% of day traders made money.

Speaker 3:
[12:51] 1%?

Speaker 2:
[12:52] About 1%. In one study, they found that most of that 1% in Brazil, I think it was Brazil, made, they made money, but it was less than minimum wage for the amount of time they spent doing it. Wow.

Speaker 3:
[13:07] Okay, let's go on with that. So what about the traditionally actively managed mutual funds?

Speaker 2:
[13:14] That's Spiva territory.

Speaker 3:
[13:16] Yeah, how do they do when you just compare just owning the market? How do the really smart people with all the advantages, all the money, all the research, all the knowledge about companies, all the people they can call that are going to usher you in for a tour of their building, being a publicly traded companies, how do the traditionally actively managed mutual funds perform versus a buy and hold approach to just owning the market?

Speaker 2:
[13:44] Funny, just about a month ago, the latest Spiva study, the Standard & Poor's Index Versus Active Scorecard came out, and it found that in 2025, the number of large cap US equity funds that underperformed just buying the S&P 500 for one year, when you think they might actually stand a chance of outperforming in a single year, 79% underperformed.

Speaker 3:
[14:16] Sounds like eight out of ten.

Speaker 2:
[14:17] Seventy-nine percent. And the farther out you go, the more years you go out, the worse the track record becomes. Not the better, the worse, the larger the number of funds that underperform the indexes. And this is across the board in every category.

Speaker 3:
[14:38] It doesn't matter the type of stock. So now, do you believe your ideas, your hunches, will, even with the help of AI, trading those hunches will do better? Now, AI can do, I think, really great things. Air travel, workout routines, whatever it is. There's all kinds of great stuff that AI does, but I would not recommend you hire them as your stockbroker. And I don't recommend you hire any stockbroker, but in this case, I'd stay a long way away from you.

Speaker 2:
[15:09] Oh yeah, this is really interesting. I'm just looking at those large cap funds because that's a fair comparison to the S&P 500.

Speaker 3:
[15:15] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[15:16] And as I said, it was 79% over one year, right? Over 10 years, it's over 85%. Over 20 years, it's 93%.

Speaker 3:
[15:31] So we're over 9 out of 10. Yeah. So remember, you've got to pick those 10 before the 20 years.

Speaker 2:
[15:38] Right.

Speaker 3:
[15:38] Not after.

Speaker 2:
[15:40] Right.

Speaker 3:
[15:40] After, anybody can pick them. So yeah, these are great ideas, as we like to say. Wall Street have 20 other ones every week.

Speaker 2:
[15:49] They're constantly cranking out new ideas because they want you to buy in to whatever it is they're doing. And we're just not going to fall for it. And we're going to get accused of being Luddites and old fashioned and slow to change. We keep hearing it. You guys admit that you're slow to change. Yeah, we're slow to change because you better prove it. It's as if we are both from Missouri. I'm sorry, Missouri. Show me. Show me the money. Show me Tom's questions on pieces of paper.

Speaker 3:
[16:27] Keep sending them in.

Speaker 2:
[16:28] Not papyrus, actual trees.

Speaker 3:
[16:31] talkingrealmoney.com. Steven writes us from Auburn, Washington. Don and Tom Roth conversions two to three times a year up to the top of our current tax bracket as part of our current financial plan, which we built with a financial advisor a few years ago. I have had the practice of making these conversions only twice a year. Would it make sense to do these three or four times a year to dollar cost average, especially with so much volatility in the markets? I appreciate your insight and all you do for us. So Roth conversions three or four times a year. A lot of work for one thing.

Speaker 2:
[17:05] No, no. And here's the thing. I want to remove the idea, this dollar cost averaging idea from everyone's psyche.

Speaker 3:
[17:14] I think you should go back and talk about what a Roth conversion is first. Then you can remove the idea.

Speaker 2:
[17:18] All right. Roth conversion is where you take your regular IRA.

Speaker 3:
[17:22] Traditional.

Speaker 2:
[17:23] Traditional. And the one that you got a tax deduction for.

Speaker 3:
[17:27] Correct.

Speaker 2:
[17:27] And tax deferral. And you convert that into a Roth IRA, which will never ever have any taxes on it going forward. But you pay the taxes on all the money you take out of the IRA that you convert to the Roth.

Speaker 3:
[17:40] And you want to make sure two things. Number one, you don't want to bounce yourself into a higher bracket when you do that, because remember, this is income.

Speaker 2:
[17:44] And he said that, right?

Speaker 3:
[17:45] Oh, he didn't say that, but we're saying that. Number two, you want to make sure you have the cash to pay that. You do not want to pay it out of the retirement account of which you're converting. So that would be a couple of things to pay attention to. The question on the table is not that. The question is, should I be doing this one time a year, two to three times a year, three to four times a year, because there's a lot of volatility in the market?

Speaker 2:
[18:07] Okay, and again, I'm going to go back to my big brain theory, that we have this big brain and it sits around sometimes and gets bored and tries to think of new ways to do stuff.

Speaker 3:
[18:17] It watches bad documentaries on Netflix.

Speaker 2:
[18:19] Yeah, it gets bored and it watches documentaries on Netflix. World War II documentaries on Netflix.

Speaker 3:
[18:25] Lots of those.

Speaker 2:
[18:26] I think we both run out of World War II documentaries.

Speaker 3:
[18:28] I know I have. You know this comes out, so what are you doing?

Speaker 2:
[18:32] The reason I think there are so many World War II documentaries is because there was a lot of film back then. You don't see as many Revolutionary War documentaries. I see George Washington, Black and White. You're lacking the action. You don't have video. Do you know there was no video of the Revolutionary War?

Speaker 3:
[18:52] The explosions weren't as big in the Revolutionary War either.

Speaker 2:
[18:54] No, they weren't as big either.

Speaker 3:
[18:55] A thousand pound bomb being dropped.

Speaker 2:
[18:57] Now look at them. Anyway, back to my point.

Speaker 3:
[18:59] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[19:00] The overthinking thing. Please banish this idea of dollar cost averaging from your psyche in every case except one. There's no such thing as dollar cost averaging out. There's no sense in having money in a pool somewhere and then slowly dollar cost averaging it in. That's timing the market. You're doing that today.

Speaker 3:
[19:23] You're doing that. You're dollar cost averaging in.

Speaker 2:
[19:25] No, no, no. That's from earnings. I'm getting to that.

Speaker 3:
[19:27] Oh, okay. Pardon me.

Speaker 2:
[19:29] I said there's only one case.

Speaker 3:
[19:30] Jumping ahead.

Speaker 2:
[19:31] Jumping. Oh, you jump ahead?

Speaker 3:
[19:33] It's shocking.

Speaker 2:
[19:35] There's only one case. You dollar cost average because that's the way you earn money. You earn money on a regular basis and so dollar cost averaging is a very effective way of forcing you to invest all the time. You just do it when you get it and you take advantages of the ups and downs of the market. And if you're in the accumulation phase and the market goes down, you should be cheering.

Speaker 3:
[19:57] Hooray! More share prices at a lower price. More shares at a lower price.

Speaker 2:
[20:02] But otherwise, you're kind of trying to time the market. You're saying, well, I've got it in cash. I'm going to put a little in now and a little in later because I think it's one of those concepts should just be gone. Yeah, it should be gone. And it makes no sense for Roth conversions. Convert when you convert. Because you're playing, you're swimming against the current.

Speaker 3:
[20:23] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[20:23] Generally speaking, markets go up more than they go down. So if you delay, if you do it on January 1, odds are you're going to pay less in taxes. Odds are that if you do it on December 31, in most years, not in all years, that's the problem. But you're swimming against that current.

Speaker 3:
[20:47] In about three out of four years, yes.

Speaker 2:
[20:48] Three out of four years, you will have a, generally speaking, you'll have a higher tax liability at the end of the year than if you did it at the beginning. So what you're doing is you're giving up a whole year of that tax-free growth. So no, it doesn't make sense.

Speaker 3:
[21:03] Yeah. Plus, as I said, that's a lot of work, three or four times a year.

Speaker 2:
[21:07] So harder work, less money. Oh wait, no, that's just a no-on-vote count.

Speaker 3:
[21:13] If you're interested in that, we have employment here at Appelow Wealth. We'll talk to you about it, sorry. Tim writes us from Cranford, New Jersey.

Speaker 2:
[21:21] I think none of the managers actually listen.

Speaker 3:
[21:23] Thank goodness.

Speaker 2:
[21:25] Do they listen? Do we know?

Speaker 3:
[21:26] Yeah, there's a few people that every once in a while say, hey, did you really say that? And I say, no, I didn't say that.

Speaker 2:
[21:31] And it's usually Tom, right?

Speaker 3:
[21:32] They go, I blame you generally, as you know.

Speaker 2:
[21:35] Did he really talk about a show about orgasms last podcast?

Speaker 3:
[21:39] I was trying to boost our ratings a little bit. Hello, Don and Tom. Thanks for taking my question. Please opine on X, D, I, V. X is an X-ray, D is in Don, I is in Indiana, V as in Vermont.

Speaker 2:
[21:54] I love the fact that he used the word opine.

Speaker 3:
[21:57] Yes. Well, you don't hear that enough. They call it a no-dividend S&P 500 fund. My understanding is the fund buys S&P 500 funds, like VU, and sells them the day before the X dividend date, and then buys it back or a similar fund to avoid getting the dividend. Theoretically, results in tax efficiency could make sense for someone who's trying to keep their annual income low, especially for Irma purposes. Please don't confuse this with XDIV, the trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange, which has been around longer and shows up often on internet searches. XDIV, an ETF that is tax efficient.

Speaker 2:
[22:35] The Round Hill S&P 500 no-dividend target ETF.

Speaker 3:
[22:40] There you go.

Speaker 2:
[22:41] It's only been around for a few months.

Speaker 3:
[22:45] Oh, okay. So this is new.

Speaker 2:
[22:46] So it's brand spanking new. Now, how has it done so far? Well, it's in the S&P 500. It's lost money. Does that tell us anything? Heck no. But you're trading one tax for another. Although, wait a minute, because it's an ETF, if they're taking capital gains, they may not be distributing those capital gains because they can keep them inside the portfolio. Oh, I hadn't thought about that.

Speaker 3:
[23:19] Huh.

Speaker 2:
[23:20] It's not expensive. It's really not. It's a fund of funds.

Speaker 3:
[23:27] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[23:27] So what they're doing is they're buying the State Street Spider, the S&P 500 fund, which has an expense ratio of two basis points. And they're adding six basis points for them. And then they've just created a computer program that basically sells pre-ex dividend data and then buys back post-ex dividend.

Speaker 3:
[23:58] Then you don't get the dividends to pay tax on.

Speaker 2:
[24:01] You don't get the dividends, but the dividends get... Here's the thing about dividends that people don't understand. Dividends gradually get built into the price of the stock over the quarter.

Speaker 3:
[24:10] Most people forget that.

Speaker 2:
[24:11] Yeah. The stock price rises by the amount of that dividend, and then on the date they go ex-dividend, they pay out that dividend, the stock price is reduced by the amount of that dividend. All the market movement is separate from that, but that's generally how this works. So in theory, you're not losing the dividend.

Speaker 3:
[24:32] However... This feels like a gimmick to me.

Speaker 2:
[24:34] It feels massively gimmicky.

Speaker 3:
[24:36] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[24:37] They're not expensive. Oh, gosh. You know what?

Speaker 3:
[24:43] This would be the thing. I would have to look at this case by case to see if it really was going to help you when it came to paying the Medicare surcharge. Irma, for example. That would have to be a one-off to look to see if it's really going to matter or not. And if it was, then maybe.

Speaker 2:
[25:02] Yeah. I'm all over the place on this one. I really am all over the place on this one. Yeah, because you're relying on that price appreciation, which isn't absolute. It's kind of supposed to be there, but we don't know that it's there. And what it also does is it, it creates potentially some tracking error.

Speaker 3:
[25:27] Well, it's going to have tracking error, no question.

Speaker 2:
[25:29] Yeah, it's not going to track the S&P 500 perfectly, and there are costs to trading too, that could exceed, I don't know that they will, I'm saying could exceed the meager tax benefits that you're going to get in, unless you're just in a killer tax bracket.

Speaker 3:
[25:48] Remember when you referred earlier to something like we're sort of-

Speaker 2:
[25:51] Overthinking it. We're overthinking it.

Speaker 3:
[25:53] Adopt things and doing that. Maybe we should just wait a year, see what happens a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[25:57] Maybe we should wait like five.

Speaker 3:
[25:58] Okay, five years. Call us in five years.

Speaker 2:
[26:00] Gimmicks. I don't generally, I'm opposed to gimmicks because they tend to be good for the person who created the gimmick more. And again, here's the other thing. Over and above the S&P- We forgot about that. Your expense ratio is four times higher, even though it's very low, four times higher than the S&P 500. So you're losing in trading costs, you're losing in the tracking error potentially, and you're losing in the higher expense ratio.

Speaker 3:
[26:34] This is something that, again, and I already mentioned this, I would have to look at it case by case to see if it was really going to save you on Irma. If not, no way, because, again, the tracking error would be the bigger one for me.

Speaker 2:
[26:46] Well, and we can't tell that because we won't see what the tracking error looks like for a couple of years.

Speaker 3:
[26:50] Yeah, you'd have to look at it for a while. So I wouldn't run out and get this, like I wouldn't run out and get a lot of things, but maybe we could look at it down the road.

Speaker 2:
[26:59] And I want to know where people are getting these ideas. Where, you should tell us. I read on such and such.

Speaker 3:
[27:06] Yeah, this was on CNBC, guarantee.

Speaker 2:
[27:08] This was on CNBC?

Speaker 3:
[27:09] Probably, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[27:10] Okay, here's the best way to avoid-

Speaker 3:
[27:12] I just said that.

Speaker 2:
[27:12] Oh, you don't know. Then I wish people would tell us. But here's the best way to avoid these new ideas. Stop watching CNBC or Fox Business.

Speaker 3:
[27:20] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[27:21] Solves so many problems right there, because most of the- nobody reads financial mags anymore. They're all dead, except you.

Speaker 3:
[27:30] I still read them all. I love them.

Speaker 2:
[27:31] In paper problem. Do you get the paper version?

Speaker 3:
[27:34] No, I don't get the paper. Well, Bloomberg doesn't do it anymore.

Speaker 2:
[27:37] Oh, they don't do the paper version anymore?

Speaker 3:
[27:39] No, which I hate because I loved it. Oh, you love your paper. I still read the Wall Street Journal every day, paper cover to cover.

Speaker 2:
[27:44] Do they still make that?

Speaker 3:
[27:45] They still make that. The trees are loving me for that. I want to mention something, though, before we end this wonderful podcast, and that is the following. In the first quarter, if you owned US stocks, you lost somewhere around 7%. Somewhere around that. In the first quarter, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[28:01] Now, we don't know how you've done so far in the second quarter.

Speaker 3:
[28:03] No, but I will mention this. If you bought a diversified portfolio, US., international, emerging, small, blah, blah, blah, you broke even. If you lost-

Speaker 2:
[28:15] That's a big difference, by the way.

Speaker 3:
[28:17] Big difference. Here's the thing. Not that we're any smarter than anybody else, but you need to know how your portfolio is allayed. In other words, is it properly diversified? And you know what? We do that free. We actually look at your portfolio, we'll do kind of an x-ray on it, tell you how diversified you are, how much you're paying others, how much risk you're taking.

Speaker 2:
[28:36] And Tom looks so good in that lead apron when he does that x-ray.

Speaker 3:
[28:40] God, let's not go there.

Speaker 2:
[28:42] With the gloves.

Speaker 3:
[28:45] Why don't you do it?

Speaker 2:
[28:46] It reminds me a lot of Dexter.

Speaker 3:
[28:48] That's very similar, actually. But you can do that, and here's how you do it. You just go to talkingrealmoney.com, click on Meet an Advisor. And it's not like we're not going to call you and say, we need to move all your money today to here. No, we actually do the review. You actually get an hour with an advisor, and we're going to tell you, here's the good, here's the bad, here's the ugly, and things you should pay attention to.

Speaker 2:
[29:12] This is a clear example. You should be thinking about two going forward.

Speaker 3:
[29:15] Yeah, so anyway, take advantage of that. And also, yeah, keep typing questions.

Speaker 2:
[29:20] Wow, it really helped. And darn it, you didn't try and sell me anything. No, that's not what we do. We don't need to. We're doing fine. It actually works. It's so funny how well karmic marketing, as I like to call it, yes, succeeds, continues to work. You just do the right thing for people, and the right thing gets done for you. I mean, we at Vestry and now at Appella are very successful, and we're successful by doing the right thing.

Speaker 3:
[29:55] Try that American business.

Speaker 2:
[29:56] Could we be far richer if we sold indexed annuities?

Speaker 3:
[30:00] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[30:02] Would I sleep as well? Even though my Apple Watch says I sleep terribly, but I feel like I sleep fine. So what does it know? Anyway, you got questions for us. We love answering them on our podcast. You can do it in a number of different ways. You can go to talkingrealmoney.com and type your question at the Ask A Question button. You can record it with your microphone like this. You can use your phone and dial 855-935-8255 and ask a question. Any of those ways, we're going to get you on the podcast and we're going to try and help you do that thing that you really need to do, that it's hard to do and that's manage your money better because here's what we do. We spend all of these shows Talking Real Money.

Speaker 1:
[30:52] The opinions and views expressed on this podcast were current on the date recorded. Opinions, estimates, forecasts, and statements of the financial market trends that are based on current market conditions constitute our judgment and are subject to change without notice, including any forward-looking estimates or statements which are based on certain expectations and assumptions. Although information and opinions given have been obtained from or based on sources believed to be reliable, no warranty or representation is made as to their correctness, completeness, or accuracy. Information presented on the podcast is not personalized investment advice from Appella Wealth. The views and strategies described may not be suitable for everyone. This podcast does not identify all the risks, direct or indirect, or other considerations which might be material to you when entering any financial transaction. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and profitable results cannot be guaranteed. We hope you realize that the information provided on Talking Real Money is for informational, educational, and hopefully enjoyable purposes only. The podcast is not trying to get you to buy or sell any financial products or security. Instead, the program is provided as a public service by Appella Wealth, a fee-only registered investment advisor. Please see Appella Wealth's ADV Part 2A on our website for information regarding Appella's fees and services. Appella Capital, LLC, DBA, Appella Wealth, is an investment advisory firm registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm only transacts business in the states where it is properly registered or excluded or exempt from registration requirements. Registration with the SEC or any state securities authority does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Appella does not provide tax or legal advice, and nothing either stated or implied here should be inferred as providing such advice. Thanks for listening, and please visit talkingrealmoney.com for more information and important disclosure related to performance of any specific index or fund quoted in this podcast. And the lawyers get richer.