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- [00:00]
Ben Felix
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:02]
Joel
Guaranteed Human where do you see your career in 10 years? What are you doing now to help you get there? The sooner you start enhancing your skills, the sooner you'll be ready. That's why AARP has reskilling courses in a variety of categories like marketing and management to help your income live as long as you do. That's right.
- [00:20]
Matt
AARP has a bevy of free skill building courses for you to choose from because the steps that you choose to take today will help you to love what you do in the future. That's why the younger you are, the more you need AARP. Learn more at aarp.org skills if you've.
- [00:37]
Joel
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- [01:00]
Matt
That's right. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free@LinkedIn.com howtomoney then promote it to use LinkedIn jobs new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's LinkedIn.com howtomoney to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.
- [01:17]
Joel
Hey, it's Joel and Matt from How2Money. I was just in Seattle, Matt, and honestly, it's one of the greatest cities in the world, particularly in the summer one run by the water. We hopped a ferry across Puget Sound. Just an unforgettable trip.
- [01:29]
Matt
That's what struck me. What seems normal to a homeowner. It can be the thing that makes a guest trip really special.
- [01:35]
Joel
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- [01:52]
Matt
Find a co host@airbnb.com host welcome to how to Money.
- [01:56]
Joel
I'm Joel, and today I'm talking becoming a rational investor with Ben Felix. Okay, so as a guy who's 6ft 6 inches tall, always a little disconcerting to stand next to someone who's taller than me. I'm not used to looking up at people, but I'm not in the same room with Ben Felix today and I'll gladly deal with that discomfort to chat with him. He's 6 foot 11, he's a former basketball player, unlike me, and he's one of the clearest voices in finance and investing today. Ben is the co host of the Rational Reminder podcast and he runs a killer YouTube channel full of thoughtful evidence based investing advice. He's a cfa, he's a cfp, and basically an Alphabet soup of credentials after that. But more importantly, he helps regular people understand the why behind their investing decisions. So Ben, thanks so much for being here today. I appreciate it.
- [03:04]
Ben Felix
Oh, thanks for the invitation and for the very kind introduction.
- [03:08]
Joel
So my first question. I'll get to that first. Then I have another question about your height. But we drink a craft beer on the show. Most of the time. We spend outrageous sums, some people would say on good craft beer. We're still being thoughtful about our investments for the future. What do you like to splurge on that some people might also think is a little outrageous?
- [03:26]
Ben Felix
Probably things related to health and physical activity. Like I have a pretty expensive mountain bike which I had to have custom made because of my height. As you noted, I don't shy away from spending money on good food. I don't actually drink any alcohol, so I don't spend money on that. Yeah, stuff related to health I have. I don't know if people will know what these are. I have Normatec boots, which are like these airbag boots that you put on after you play sports to help you recover more quickly.
- [03:53]
Joel
Oh, I have seen those.
- [03:54]
Ben Felix
Yeah. Yeah. So I'm 38 in a couple weeks here. So when I play a basketball game the next day I'm more sore than I used to be. But the airbags or the Normatec boots help. So I don't know stuff like that. Health related, physical activity related stuff I'm more than happy to splurge on.
- [04:11]
Joel
How often do you get asked about your height and whether or not you played basketball? And does it always happen when you're at the grocery store? Because that's when it always happens for me.
- [04:22]
Ben Felix
If I'm out in public or in a place that I'm not, usually I get asked pretty close to 100% of the time about my height. If I'm in a place where I know everybody, I don't get asked. But yeah, anytime, in a new location, grocery store, whatever, out in public. It pretty much happens all the time.
- [04:40]
Joel
When you get asked though, at least you can be like, yeah, I was a great basketball player. When I get asked, I Can be like, not really. And so it's even more shameful, I think for me. Your first degree, Ben, was in engineering? Yeah. Do you think that's had an impact on how you think about money and investing, kind of taking that engineering mindset into how you think about finances?
- [05:00]
Ben Felix
I think so. I remember when I first came from engineering into finance, I did an mba, I went to Northeastern University in Boston actually, and then came back to Canada to do an MBA in finance. And I started that program, wasn't really far into it yet, hadn't taken too many finance courses, and I started doing an internship at a local investment company. I remember being shocked really at how unscientific a lot of the work was. When I came from this engineering background where everything's scientific and evidence based, it took me a while to figure out that there is a way to apply that type of thinking to financial decision making and investing. But, yeah, I don't know if I would have arrived at that place as quickly if I had not come from an engineering background.
- [05:48]
Joel
Why do you think the approach to money is often so unscientific? Why is there less engineer mentality when it comes to finances? Typically, yeah.
- [05:58]
Ben Felix
Well, a lot of it has to do with uncertainty. It's really hard to say what is optimal in investing. Whereas in engineering, you can engineer something with a pretty tight tolerance. You can use scientific principles and test things, and we can pretty definitively say, yes, this is the optimal way to design this whatever aircraft part or something like that. It's not that simple with investing because there's so much uncertainty. You can always find a stock that's performed better than the market, or a fund manager who's performed better than the market. Which makes it really easy to say, well, hey, this thing is better. That's what I should invest in. But that unfortunately does not predict how something's going to do in the future. I think that leads to a lot of really difficult, difficult pieces of information for people to interpret. Because I can say it's really hard to beat the market. But then someone can say, well, no, this fund manager beat the market for the last 20 years. What do you mean? I think that type of information just makes it hard for people to really understand what the evidence about investing says.
- [07:02]
Joel
It's like, well, look at Warren Buffett, Ben, come on, don't you get it right?
- [07:05]
Ben Felix
I made a video on that because that comes up so often. Exactly. That's the kind of thing, those anecdotes make it really hard for people to believe what the evidence says so it.
- [07:16]
Joel
Seems to me that in recent years conversations about investing have become more normalized like it used to be. That and I still think in some ways money is a taboo topic. But especially when it comes to investing, there's just been a lot more interest and Gen Z seems to be more like fluent when it comes to investing. I think the pandemic was part of that stimulus tracks and just kind of general democratization of investing apps. Some of that's good, some of that's bad. But like if someone were to ask you why they should be investing, what would your response be?
- [07:50]
Ben Felix
Man, it's a way to put your money to work. Maybe that's a cliche thing to say, but when you invest in something that has a positive expected return, it takes a huge amount of the load off from how much you need to save to fund your eventual future where you don't have to, where you're not working, your retirement, if we want to call it that, your financial independence. If you don't invest, if you just hold cash, for example, the amount, the proportion of your income that you need to save to fund your eventual financial independence is much, much higher than if you're taking your savings and investing in something with a positive expected return like the stock market. That's the biggest thing I think, is that it helps to grow your wealth for the future. There's other stuff too. If you're not investing, there's a good chance you're actually losing money to inflation. We at least need to combat that. But I think the biggest thing is taking some of that load off, some of that savings burden off so that you can live your life today and let your money grow by investing in positive expected return assets for the future.
- [08:54]
Joel
Maybe some of the silver lining of the insane rate of inflation we've seen in recent years has been helping people understand the reality that inflation exists and maybe pushing us more towards investing. Like, I don't know if there is a silver lining that might be it.
- [09:10]
Ben Felix
Yeah, I mean if you look at look through history, the biggest risk to long term investors has really been inflation. Like it's been that that's what has caused retirement portfolios to fail more often. As opposed to poor stock returns. It's really poor real stock returns adjusted for inflation. And it's been more high inflation than low stock returns that have caused a lot of that pain.
- [09:34]
Joel
Speaking of inflation, I feel like that's something we hear more and more concerns. Affordability is the top issue politically and it's one of the top issues. Instead of talking about the weather, you just talk about how high prices are now. When you just run into someone randomly out and about. As an advisor, what are maybe some of the biggest questions and concerns that your clients are currently bringing into meetings Right now?
- [09:55]
Ben Felix
Right now it's not so much about inflation. I think everyone's aware of that. Everyone knows that prices of stuff have gone up. Everyone also knows though that asset prices have gone up. Like, yes, inflation's been high, but the stock market has also been nuts. So that's not coming up as much. The thing that's coming up most right now is concerns about an AI bubble. Now, I'm not saying that we are in an AI bubble. I'm also not saying that we're not. I can't predict what's going to happen in the future, but that's what's coming up most often. As you know, market returns have been so good, stock prices, particularly for a handful of stocks in the US are so high and they're also such a large proportion of the market. I'm really worried about that and what that's going to mean for the future of my portfolio. That's probably the conversation that we're having to have with people most often right.
- [10:38]
Joel
Now when you talk about savings rates. Across the world, Americans typically come up at the bottom of the pile. We don't have a very high savings rate on average. I think how to money listeners would be highly advanced in that regard, saving a decent chunk of their income. If you were to talking to a client and they were like, like, okay, I can agree that I should be investing and it makes sense. I need to grow wealth for my future and that just saving it isn't going to cut it. What should the average savings or investing rate be? What should people be shooting for? Do you have advice on that? Is there like a rule of thumb?
- [11:15]
Ben Felix
There are rules of thumb. I don't think that there is a universally ideal savings rate. People love rules like just do this. But I don't think it, I don't think savings rates are one where we have those. There are ones that are decent, like 10% of your net income. That comes up a lot. I think that's a pretty useful guideline. There are of course more extreme versions too, like 50% of your income. If you want to reach fire financial independence, retire early. I think the main issue with either of those rule of thumb approaches is that any or any universal prescription about a savings rate is that everybody has a different financial situation, everyone's got different goals, They've got different preferences. There's a concept in economics called utility. I don't want to get too jargony here, but I'll try and explain what that means. It's basically a way to quantify the satisfaction that you get from something. In economics they say utility, and that means it's a way to put a number on how much satisfaction you're getting from a thing. In this case, from spending, spending money. Again, some jargon here, but I'll talk through it. Spending money tends to have decreasing marginal utility. That means that the additional satisfaction that you get from more spending tends to decrease with each dollar of spending. I'm going to build on this and hopefully it makes sense, but it's an important concept. More spending, less marginal utility. But the satisfaction that you get from lower levels of spending is really high. And that's the spending that you're paying your rent or your mortgage, you're buying groceries, you're treating yourself to whatever, a coffee or a meal out from time to time. That spending has really, really high utility, much more so than buying your whatever second Lamborghini. That's the concept of decreasing marginal utility of spending. Then the other important related topic here is something called time preference, which is basically like all else equal, it's better to have what you want now rather than later. And even more so when we account for the fact that you don't know if you're going to be alive in the future. Which is kind of a dark thing to think about, but it's a fact. Now, economists can model all of this stuff quantitatively to figure out exactly how much someone should be saving over time based on their specific circumstances, goals and preferences. And I think what gets really interesting here. So we talked about, or I mentioned, the 10% or 50% of your income, rules of thumb. But when economists take this concept of utility and model it out, model out the optimal amount of saving for people in different circumstances. Some of that research actually shows that young people should not be saving at all due to the marginal utility of spending today when they're young and when they've got a lower income.
- [14:07]
Joel
Is that the paper from. Was it from Yale? Was it James Choi that wrote that paper about.
- [14:12]
Ben Felix
No, this one's not James Choi. It's. I can't remember the author's names. It's in the Journal of Retirement. I can send it to you. But it says it's something about how this life cycle model shows that young people shouldn't be saving at all, which is so interesting.
- [14:28]
Joel
As someone who sees the impact of time in the market. And when I think about the dollars I invested when I was 21, 22, 23, they were harder to part with because I had less money. But I was creating a habit. And I was also. The return on those dollars invested at a really early age is far superior than dollars that I'm going to invest in the next decade.
- [14:53]
Ben Felix
Totally. That's the trade off that people have to balance and that's the trade off that this utility based model is trying to balance. It's showing that, hey, even though what you just said is absolutely true, the habit thing I think is important. I'll come back to that in a second. Even though what you just said is true, compounding is important. Time in the market is important. But the utility gains that you're going to get from that early consumption when you have relatively little income are actually going to outweigh the utility you'll gain from the compounding that's going to fund your future spending, at least when you're younger. And then eventually you do have to save probably a higher proportion of your income to catch up. But when you're doing that, you probably have a higher income, at least based on this, on this model. And for lower income people. It's also interesting because government pensions are going to cover a lot of their future spending. So Social Security in the US Canada pension plan and old age security in Canada, so they may not need to save that much either. So again, those sort of rules of thumb, 10% of your income, they're not going to make sense for everybody. Now, the habit thing I think is really important because while everything that I just said is true in an economic model, if people listen to this podcast and say, oh, well, I'm a young person, I don't need to save at all, they might just never start saving because they never built the habit.
- [16:09]
Joel
That's a real risk.
- [16:10]
Ben Felix
Yeah, it's a real risk. So I don't know, I think building that habit to save early does make a lot of sense and it might lead to a little bit of budget discomfort. But if that means that you're actually going to save for the future later as well, it's probably worthwhile. So, yeah, it's a little bit more nuanced than here's the rule of thumb. I think people do have to think about the utility or the satisfaction that they're going to get from spending as opposed to saving today. But they also have to trade that off with their desire to build wealth for the future. So we don't use save 10% of your income, we use a full financial projection model where we can show if you don't save now, here's how much you have to start saving later to meet your long term goals and then people can make decisions based on that information. As opposed to a rule of thumb which I would call a pretty blunt instrument for a pretty important long term decision.
- [17:04]
Joel
Does part of that projection have to deal with people, their desire to maybe switch careers and earn less in the future? They're like, yeah, I'm working this job and yeah, I'm making great money, but my goodness, I don't want to be doing this forever. If I save and invest more now, I feel like I can take my foot off the pedal a little bit and be comfortable earning less in the future.
- [17:26]
Ben Felix
For sure, if that's what somebody wants to do. If someone says they don't love what they do, but they're making a ton of money, then that becomes more of a financial independence retire early type conversation. Or a coast fire conversation where it's like, hey, how much do you have to build up in savings now so that you can chill out later but still earn some income, but chill out and not keep the pedal to the floor? We definitely have those conversations. We also have conversations with people who absolutely love what they do and don't envision retiring ever. So there's again, very different conversations that would lead to very different savings rates.
- [17:59]
Joel
I saw this recent survey. It found that millionaires value their therapists more than their financial advisor and that a decent chunk of them are thinking about firing their advisor. What do you think that says about the financial advice industry as a whole?
- [18:14]
Ben Felix
I mean, I can tell you that that's where things are going more toward those types of conversations as opposed to picking the right stocks or investment funds or whatever. I think that was the historical value proposition of financial advisors that, hey, we're going to identify the best stocks or we're going to pick the best fund managers. The evidence continues to mount though, that that approach to advice is probably not productive and probably making people worse off rather than better. One of the things that I like to say kind of tongue in cheek, but also pretty seriously, is investing is a solved problem. We know what good investing looks like, at least in broad strokes. Even if we don't agree on every little detail, we know that broad diversification matters. Low costs matter. Tax efficiency matters. Asset allocation matters. Again, not everyone's going to agree on precisely what the optimal portfolio looks like. But in those broad strokes, okay, if you can get that at a really low cost, you're way ahead of most people. Now you can get that at a very low cost using index funds on your own, in a brokerage account or through a robo advisor. That kind of does some of the legwork for you, but for a really, really low fee. So that service, like good quality investing, has been commoditized. It's available at a super, super low cost. And again, we know that it's really hard for people to beat the market. And I don't think that anybody should be paying for the attempt to do so because the evidence is so overwhelming. The financial advice industry knows all of this. And the model has really gone toward what I would call wealth management, which is the integration of financial planning and investment management. And a large component of that is behavioral, like the therapist type function. I mean, there are even professional designations for financial advisors now that are, it's called financial therapy credentials because it's so widely recognized that this is becoming such an important part of what we do. As a practitioner, I can tell you that a lot of the conversations that we have with clients are a lot closer to a therapy session than to what you would imagine a financial advice session would be like. Because so much of a financial decision is emotional. It's about trade offs, about trade offs between now and the future. And it's about how to deal with money and relationships. That's all really important. I think it kind of follows from that that financial advice has shifted. It is in the process of shifting. A firm like pwl, we use low cost investment funds, but we do focus on financial planning, focus on having really, really close relationships with their clients, which again leads to that therapist type relationship in many cases, as you're talking through important financial decisions. I think that's great to hear that people who are not getting that type of relationship from their financial advisors are considering parting ways. And I think that they should. But I think that there is still a model that works. I know from our firm specifically, we have grown a ton since I've been here for 12 years. And we've grown a ton and continue to grow. So there's, at least for what we're doing, quite a bit of demand for that more, I guess you could call it holistic approach. Yeah, I guess there's other stuff too. People make mistakes when they're left to their own devices. They get nervous, they get distracted. They want to invest in AI stocks or in gold or whatever has gone up recently. And having a sounding board or a person to talk to I think can be pretty valuable from that perspective as well.
- [22:03]
Joel
I mean, that's what. There was a Vanguard study many years ago about the value of a financial advisor. And they found the average person with a financial advisor experienced much greater returns, not necessarily even because they were invested in the hot new fund, but because of the behavioral coaching that they received from their financial advisor. So a two and a half, I forget if it was two and a half or three point percentage better returns, but it was significantly better returns for people who had a financial advisor versus people who didn't.
- [22:33]
Ben Felix
Yeah, I don't put too much stock in that Vanguard study. I think they oversell it. But in principle, I think that it's generally correct. And I know again from my experience as a practitioner, we have a ton of conversations with people who, when some asset has gone up recently, like it's AI right now. It's been, you know, cannabis stocks in the past, crypto, what else was there? Clean tech. Like all these things happen and all of a sudden asset prices in some sector of the market go up. And then a lot of investors are like, oh, I want to invest in that. And so they come to us and talk about it and we usually explain to people why it probably does not make sense to do that. And that usually ends up saving them a whole lot of money. Because people want to invest in stuff after it's gone up, not before. And usually there's some level of reversion to the mean and prices come back down. So I think that matters. The other thing we see is when markets go down, some people do get very nervous. Every market decline is unique. But it's also not like market declines have been happening for hundreds of years. As long as we have data for asset prices, there have been just extreme asset price drops that happen from time to time. So that part's always the same. They usually recover. It's more likely to have a recovery than not after a big decline. But everyone feels different because it's happening for a different reason. I mean, Covid is such a good example where we all lived through that. And that was crazy. The world was shutting down. We're looking around like we have no idea what the future is going to look like. And so again, in that case, we had conversations with people who were like, I really don't feel comfortable, I want to get out of the market. And we would have conversations about, listen, this is what has happened in the past when crazy things have happened in the world, and here's what we think we should expect. And as we all know market recovered and staying invested was the right thing to do, as it typically is. So those are those behavioral things, which is not quite the therapy idea. Like that's a different type of behavioral coaching that happens with financial advice, but I think it is super valuable. And then one other thing that I would mention here is owning stocks is hard for some of the reasons that I just mentioned. They're volatile. They go up and down in price a lot from day to day, which makes them hard for some people to own. To the extent that an advisor can make someone more comfortable with a riskier portfolio, and there are academic papers on this that could offset a lot of the cost of advice, which is kind of a weird thing to think about. But if, if you would have been in a portfolio of 50% stocks and 50% bonds, but with the guidance of an advisor, you feel comfortable being in a, I don't know, 70% or 80% stock portfolio that can be really, really valuable in the long run.
- [25:21]
Joel
That's a good point. There's a lot more I want to get to with you, Ben, including I want to talk about alternative investments. As those become more popular, what role do they play in our investing portfolio? We'll get to that and more right after.
- [25:39]
Matt
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- [26:05]
Joel
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- [26:30]
Matt
That's right. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free@LinkedIn.com howtomoney then promote it to use LinkedIn jobs new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's LinkedIn.com howtomoney to post your job for free terms and conditions apply. Man, this is always the busiest time of the year. Yes, it is my favorite time of year. I love it. But the calendar gets pretty full between travel, trying to think of the best Christmas gifts, hosting friends and family. It can be really easy to lose sight of your financial goals because your spending is a bit out of control. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch, rated Wall Street Journal's Best Budgeting App of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or on your phone. And right now, just for howto money listeners, monarch is offering 50% off your first year.
- [27:26]
Joel
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- [27:56]
Matt
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- [28:05]
Joel
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- [28:46]
Matt
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- [29:16]
Joel
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- [29:28]
Ad Voice
All right, we're.
- [29:29]
Joel
Talking with Ben Felix talking about rational investing. Ben, let's, let's talk about how someone builds a portfolio maybe that they can stick with over the long run because it's easier, it's cheaper than ever to invest, right? Whether that's through your 401k at work, a lot of people automatically opted in, whether that's through a low cost brokerage firm, whether that's through one of the newfangled online places like Robinhood or M1 or something like that. But it's also easier than ever. The easier thing is good, but in some ways it can be bad because it can be easier to take on outsized risks or go all in on the hot AI stock because you saw someone tweet about it. Does that worry you? For DIY investors and especially for younger investors, it's easier to get in, but it's also easier to make a big mistake.
- [30:13]
Ben Felix
Yeah, I think ease of access is great. Making investing more accessible to people is great. But I suspect, and I've got reasons to have these suspicions, if you looked at a cross section of DIY investing accounts, my hunch is that it's a bit of a disaster. I think that we know what good investing looks like, but I don't think that's what a lot of people do. I think that the brokerages are partially to blame, maybe more than partially, because they incentivize or gamify taking wild risks, using option strategies, all this kind of stuff. If you're a novice investor who doesn't know any better, doesn't spend a ton of time reading about this stuff, and your brokerage is saying, well, hey, you can trade options now. I think that's if you don't know why you shouldn't do that, you might do it. The evidence on that shows that people tend to not do so well when they trade options. I agree with you that easy access to financial markets is incredible. And we're living in this golden age of investing where you can buy the market, you can buy all of the stocks that exist in the world basically, or a very Close approximation for a very low cost and you can do it super easily in a nice user interface. All that stuff is incredible. But yeah, I think that there's also a lot of room for error and there's a lot of incentive for some of these platforms to induce people effectively to make errors because they're profitable for the institutions.
- [31:58]
Joel
Do you worry too that maybe even just think about how well the stock market's done over the past 15 years. And 2022 was one of those outlier years where not so hot but overall even corrections have felt like a blip. It's like the COVID correction was. It lasted, lasted. It was so short term.
- [32:17]
Matt
Yeah.
- [32:18]
Joel
How do you behaviorally for investors has that left them maybe unable to deal with a meaningful or a prolonged correction that might be coming in the near future that they just assumed that they're. That stocks are just a far better version of a high yield savings account that just continues to add money?
- [32:35]
Ben Felix
I do worry about that. I think that you're right. There's a whole generation of investors who have basically seen stocks go up and when they've seen them go down, they've recovered really, really quickly, which is not what always happens. If you look back through history, there can be declines that take quite a long time to recover from, especially when you account for inflation. So if we have one of those, which I can't say that we will, if history is any guide, there probably will be another prolonged decline. Yeah, I think that it could be difficult for some investors to stick to whatever strategy they have and remain invested. I think if you're properly diversified that helps a lot. I would worry more about people invested in single sectors that have gone up. Like Maybe it's the Mag 7 or AI stocks or whatever, which similarly they've done really, really well for a really long time and haven't had a whole lot of big corrections, especially not long lasting ones. But there have been cases where, and I'm not necessarily drawing a parallel here, although there are some parallels. But if you look at the dot com era where tech stocks and US large cap stocks more generally had a crazy run and then dropped and then didn't really recover for 12 years, that's plausible. Again, I'm not predicting that. I'm not saying that the current market is exactly like that. I think that there are meaningful differences. But that's a tough period to live through as an investor. And we just, as you mentioned, we have not had one of those for basically a generation of investors.
- [34:14]
Joel
How can someone prepare themselves? Let's say they are a lot of DIY investors listening to to the show who are like, I'm trying to stay diversified, keep it low cost, keep putting money in like clockwork every paycheck. I'm not necessarily planning on hiring a pro to help coach me through it. How do I, like, get prepared so that when or if something terrible happens in the markets, a prolonged downturn, like my portfolio looks like it's cut in half, God forbid, how do I make it through?
- [34:44]
Ben Felix
Yeah. So I think that the preparation starts now and it's really being diversified. That is famously called the only free lunch in investing. I mentioned not being all in one sector. I think being all in one country probably doesn't make sense either. I know a lot of US Investors and a lot of international investors only invest in US Stocks, which is the market that's done the best over the last 20 or so years. And that's, you know, that's a tough place to be if that one market. And I know it's a big market, I know it's special in a lot of ways. I know it is itself diversified. I understand all of that. But it is possible, and it has happened historically for one market to have a prolonged period of low returns. And again, I'm not saying I think that's going to happen to the US But I think that investors have to be prepared for the fact that it could happen. How do you prepare for that? Well, you diversify your portfolio. You own stocks outside of the U.S. i think that's really the best way to prepare for it.
- [35:48]
Joel
You're Canadian. I'm guessing you're not 100% exposed to Canadian stocks because you live in Canada. But a lot of US Investors are, in some ways you can understand it as the economic powerhouse of the world. When you look at returns over the past 20 years and just the investing environment of the United States. I mean, even like Jack Bogle famously was like, yeah, you don't need international exposure. And you can understand the rationale for that. But do you think, do you think that the US Investors like, what should allocation look like and what does diversification look like when you live in a country that has also produced such massive economic prosperity and value for investors?
- [36:33]
Ben Felix
Yeah. So the US has been a great place to invest. Don't get me wrong. I think having some level of home country bias is reasonable for a lot of interesting reasons. I think owning stocks in your local currency is not a bad thing. The tax treatment of local stocks, local to whatever country you live in, tends to be Better. I know in Canada, for example, it's more tax efficient to own Canadian stocks than non Canadian stocks. There's tax efficiency, cost efficiency tends to be lower to own stocks in your home country. Another really interesting one, and Eugene Fama, who's a Nobel laureate economist, he talked about this when he was on our podcast. When he said this, I had not heard this argument before, but I think it's very interesting, which is that in times of turmoil, of global turmoil, geopolitical conflict and war and all that kind of stuff, foreign investors don't tend to get treated very well. Owning stocks in your local country, from that perspective, can be a lot safer. There's another interesting reason to own or to overweight home country stocks relative to the market. This is a thing that pretty much every country, I think it probably is every country. If you look at how local investors allocate their portfolios, having a home country bias is extremely common. I think it's pretty much ubiquitous. You can look at that and say, well, people are making a mistake, which is maybe true to an extent if it's extreme. But you can also look at it and say maybe there's some economic rationale for why people are doing that. I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle here in Canada, we do allocate about 30% of our portfolios at my firm. And a lot of investment products also do this. About 30% or roughly a third of the portfolio is in Canadian stocks when Canadian stocks are about 3% of the global market. So it is a big overweight. But it's what we do and we think it makes a lot of sense. There's a couple academic research. There's one academic research paper, one paper from Vanguard that suggests that that level of home country bias in Canada is reasonable for the US it's obviously different because the US is 63% of the global market cap. A home country bias might be 70% or 75% or something like that. But I do still think having diversification beyond that outside of the US is important.
- [39:06]
Joel
We're seeing more alternative investment options for investors, which I think is just another potential hurdle to overcome. Often it just like seems super sexy. Oh, you can invest in wine or whiskey or art. Like there's all these ways to invest in these really cool ways, or little sliced up bits of real estate deals on different websites. How do you. And it seems like alternative investments are set to become more widely available even inside of retirement accounts. Is this a fun investing outlet for people or is this something that they should avoid? Completely. I'm just, I'm curious where you fall on investing outside of the stock market.
- [39:45]
Ben Felix
Yeah. So alternatives like there's collectibles like you mentioned wine and art and all that kind of stuff. The big one though, and the one that is being considered for US Retirement accounts is, or I don't know, maybe that legislation's passed. I'm not sure. I don't follow the US Market as closely, but that's private assets. So private equities and private credit is what they're trying to put into U.S. retirement accounts. I've spent a lot of time looking at these products and reading the literature on these products. I don't think that the juice was worth the squeeze. There's a couple arguments in favor of them. One is that they perform better. The other is that they're imperfectly correlated to publicly traded assets. On the correlation point. I think the big problem is that they do have a low correlation. If you go and look at a private equity fund and compare it to a public equity fund and say, are they correlated? They're not going to look correlated. But it's not because they're materially different assets. It's because the private equities aren't traded. They're not valued every day like public assets are. When you adjust for that, when you de smooth the returns of private equities, they're going to look a lot more similar. Fundamentally, they're still stocks. It's still the same thing. They're just not priced. They're not priced daily. Private credit is similar. When you benchmark these things against risk appropriate public securities, they don't tend to be very compelling. So you can show, yeah, hey, private equity over some periods has done better than public equity. But that's not because it's special, it's because it's taking more risk. And so if you compare it to riskier public equities, a lot of that outperformance tends to go away. So those two arguments, correlation and outperformance, I don't think they're very strong. And then the other big issue in private markets for you know, someone who's listening to this podcast and for a lot of investors is adverse selection. Private markets are pretty small. Like if you look at how much of the overall market is investable private assets, investable private assets is pretty small. There's lots of non investable stuff like the dry cleaner on your street or whatever, like you can't invest in that. But investable private equities, pretty small. And there's a Lot of people that want to invest in them right now, although that's declining a little bit. But for the last, whatever, five or ten or so years, that asset class has really picked up steam. And the problem is, if you're a typical investor listening to this podcast, you're probably not at the front of the line to get an allocation to the best private fund managers. You're probably at the back and you're probably not even in the line for the best fund manager. So you get the allocations to funds that nobody else wanted. That's the adverse selection issue.
- [42:36]
Joel
Sloppy seconds of a sort.
- [42:37]
Ben Felix
Sloppy seconds, that's right. So that's problematic for obvious reasons, but even more so in private markets, when you look at the dispersion in returns between the worst and best funds, it's massive, Massive. And so even if we can look at the data and say, hey, on average, private assets have done well, maybe they've even done a little bit better than public markets, depending on the benchmark and the time period. But you can't invest in an index in the way that you can with public markets. You can't invest in the private market. You can invest in a fund or maybe a couple of funds if you have enough money and you take a ton of manager risk there, where there's a good chance, especially if you're listening to this podcast, just a normal person, there's a good chance you invest in one of the not so good private funds and that can be really damaging to returns. And then the other thing, and this one's brutal, and I don't know if it's appreciated enough, is liquidity or illiquidity. A lot of these things are illiquid just by their nature. If you invest in a fund and the fund goes and invests in a private company, you can't just go and sell a private company tomorrow if you want to. And so what can happen and what has happened is if investors want their money out of these funds, the fund manager will and can say, no, sorry, the fund's locked and you don't get to get your money back out. That's like if you're a really long term investor and you understand the risks, it's not the end of the world. But for most people who may need liquidity and may end up realizing, oh shoot, I actually did need that money, it's not so nice to have it locked up.
- [44:14]
Joel
So sounds like a lot of issues with investing outside of public markets. And then when you look at even some of the websites where people can directly invest. Like the fees can be incredibly high and the returns, man, the way they make them look on the front page can look incredible. But you dig a little bit of deep, a little bit deeper. And especially real estate falling on hard times, man, just to see all of the individual investors who are like, I feel like I need some real estate exposure. And so they're going to these websites to feel like they've got part. And it seems like this brilliant move to have diversification. I heard Ben talk about diversification. I should probably have some real estate exposure in my portfolio and it ends up like completely biting the dust, eliminating all their capital or at least at the minimum providing paltry returns. And the thing that's baked in for good is the high fees. Even if you do have solid returns that you have to overcome in order to compete with what's happening inside of your low cost index fund.
- [45:15]
Ben Felix
Man.
- [45:15]
Joel
I didn't.
- [45:15]
Ben Felix
Yeah, so when I'm talking about returns, I'm talking about net of fee. Returns tend to be, you know, call it similar to public markets, but that's net of, you know, by some estimates like somewhere between 5 and 7% that you're paying to the manager in order to get those returns that are similar ish to the public markets. So yeah, there's a paper on this. I don't remember the full title but it refers to private equity as the billionaire factory. And it's basically showing that, hey, private equity investors have gotten roughly the same returns as public equity investors. But private equity fund managers have become exceptionally wealthy because they actually performed really well before fees. But the managers extracted all of that value for themselves and the fund investors were left with not much, if any value added.
- [46:07]
Joel
Basically, we're in the wrong line of work. We should be.
- [46:09]
Ben Felix
You want to be a GP investor?
- [46:10]
Joel
We should be fund managers. Got more to get to with Ben. We're going to talk about investing versus debt payoff if you want to be a smart investor, which takes precedence. We'll get to that and more right after this.
- [46:28]
Matt
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- [50:16]
Ben Felix
Oh man, that's a question that's super complicated to answer properly, but I'll try. It's like in theory, the optimal portfolio for the average investor is the market. That means owning all assets. The theoretical market portfolio is everything, everything that can be owned. And the idea is that all assets get priced such that their weight in the market portfolio for the average investor is optimal based on the preferences and needs of the average investor. You can infer from that. Okay, the average investor. It's not feasible to invest in literally all assets, but total market index funds give us a pretty good approximation of all tradable assets, at least the ones we would want to invest in. Now technically private assets are included in the market portfolio too, but for all the reasons we just talked about, I don't think that they need to be there. For most investors, we start from there. If you're the average investor, you should just own the market, which you can do through low cost index funds. Okay, great. What if you're different from average? That's where you could be in a different portfolio. That is not a total market index fund portfolio. But that's where it gets a little bit complicated, where it's like, okay, if you're not exposed to the same non portfolio risks as the average investor, so say you've got safer human capital or more of your wealth in financial assets and not exposed to non portfolio risks, then you can maybe take a little bit more risk in your portfolio than the average investor, which might mean tilting toward riskier parts of the market. I kind of mentioned that or alluded to it when I was talking about private equity as well. If you look at all the stocks in the market, there are stocks that are riskier and have higher expected returns and stocks that are safer and have lower expected returns. When you own the market, you own all of those things, typically more of the safer stocks because they tend to be more valuable. But if you want to be, or if you're in a position where you can be different from the market portfolio, then you can tilt towards some of those riskier stocks to hopefully increase your expected returns. How to do that and which stocks to tilt toward and all that kind of stuff that gets super nerdy super fast. And I think for most people, like we talk about this quite a bit on our podcast, but for most people, like for most people listening, it's probably too, too nerdy. It's been, it probably complicates things more, more than it's actually worth.
- [52:41]
Joel
What are your thoughts on target day funds as like a one stop shop investment choice? They become more popular. We're seeing more people funnel assets and to those saying, I think I'm going to retire in probably like 2060, maybe I'll just 100% shove my shovel, my money, every paycheck into one of those with Vanguard or Fidelity or something that's, that's low cost. How do you feel about those?
- [53:02]
Ben Felix
Yeah, so if it's a good low cost target date fund, I think that there are much worse things that you could invest in. I don't think they're optimal, unfortunately. If that's what you're going to invest in, you're never going to think about it. And that's going to keep you invested. That's great. If it makes you behave well, that's great. But there's a decent amount of research showing that they're probably not optimal for long term investors. They're probably not taking enough equity risk, which kind of like we talked about earlier with a financial advisor, convincing you to take a little bit more equity risk. If a target date fund results in you taking less equity risk than maybe you should have or could have, the cost of that in the long run can be significant. It could be really, really high.
- [53:48]
Joel
Is that particularly true for investors in the first decade or two, like in their 20s and 30s? Is it that there's too much bond exposure for younger investors inside of those target date funds?
- [54:00]
Ben Felix
It's not even just in the first 10 or 20 years, the whole glide path, it continues to get more and more conservative with a higher allocation to bonds over time. And the cost of that, even for a retiree, can be pretty significant. You have to remember a retiree, a typical retiree, has 20 or more years to live in retirement and over horizons like that, stocks, while they're more volatile, they historically at least, have not been. They've been really good at maintaining purchasing power. And bonds have, even though they're less volatile, been less good at maintaining purchasing power. That's why I guess the main issue with targeted funds is you probably could have higher expected returns and a better expected outcome all the way through retirement by taking a little bit more risk than what a target date fund would prescribe. However, if it's like you don't like thinking about this stuff, which probably isn't true for people listening to this podcast, but if you really just want to invest in something and never think about it again, and I think this is an important and the idea of the target date glide path is comforting to you because you feel like whatever, it's going to adjust as needed over time. Therefore you don't have to think about it. There's a lot of value in that. So I think there could be better allocations, but behaviorally I think they're incredible tools.
- [55:19]
Joel
Speaking of behavior, there's the question that comes up all the time when someone's trying to make progress with their investments, but they're also trying to do other good things with their money. Pay off debt, let's say. How do you think about that perpetual question of paying off debt versus investing more? It's obviously pretty clear cut if you've got high interest rate credit card debt, but it's less clear cut when you were talking about, oh, I've got my student loan, it's at 6.5%. How do you help clients and people think through that conundrum?
- [55:47]
Ben Felix
Yeah, I think a lot of it's behavioral because we can go and model out this is the optimal debt pay down strategy that's going to maximize your wealth. But usually when we do that, people will say, nah, I don't want to pay it off, or they'll say, no, I really don't like debt, I just want to pay it off as soon as possible. I think when you're on the cases where you're kind of on the verge where it really makes obvious economic sense, where you're in a position where it's could or could not make perfect economic sense to pay off debt. I think a lot of it comes down to behavior and preferences where some people just really don't like having debt, they should pay it off. Some people are totally comfortable with it and if it's economically beneficial to keep it, they should probably keep it. But it's again, super individual and more based on, I think, preferences than economics at that point.
- [56:31]
Joel
What would you say is maybe the simplest but most underappreciated habit that leads to better financial outcomes for people?
- [56:40]
Ben Felix
Yeah. So on the assumption that you've set up your investment strategy in something that's good, and I know good is hard to define, but say it's a portfolio of low cost index funds, maybe it's a target date fund, whatever. It's a good low cost evidence based strategy that you are comfortable with. Once that is set up, I don't know if it's a habit or an anti habit. But not looking at your investments, not checking them every day, is a really, really important behavior for investors to practice. There is evidence that more frequent checking leads people to take less risk, which is not great. Maybe important to mention that risk is in investing. Taking the right kinds of risk is a good thing. Taking the wrong kinds of risk, which I would say like picking an individual stock or picking one crypto token, that's the wrong kind of risk. Taking the risk of the stock market, investing in a diversified portfolio of stocks, that is a good risk. You want to take that to build wealth in the long run. People who check their portfolios more frequently will tend to take less of those good kinds of risks because they're a little bit more nervous. That's a big one.
- [57:50]
Joel
All right, last question. Humans were emotional beings. I'm thrilled. I love emotion. Crying in a good movie this time of year, getting together with family and friends. Laughter. Emotions are wonderful. Your podcast is called Rational Reminder. You're keen on rational thinking. What role should or should emotions play in our investing habits? Or like, should they even play a role at all?
- [58:13]
Ben Felix
Yeah. So I don't think you can ignore your emotions. Like I just talked about the debt preferences thing. Some people have strong feelings about debt and they should use that as a guide when they're making a decision. But I also don't think that you can let your decision, your emotions make your decisions for you, so you can't ignore them, but they can't dictate your decisions either. The reason that we called our podcast the Rational Reminder is that we wanted to be explaining what a rational person would do. Basically, like, what is the economically optimal thing for someone to do in a certain situation. Once you understand that, I think you can make an informed decision based on your feelings about what you want to do, but you need to understand the trade off that you're making in order to make a good decision. If you don't understand the trade off, the economic trade off that you're making and purely make decisions based on feelings, I think that can lead to bad outcomes.
- [59:03]
Joel
Ben Felix, this has been an awesome conversation. Thanks for joining me. Where can my listeners find out more about you and your podcast?
- [59:10]
Ben Felix
Probably just a Google search or whatever, an AI search at this point. I guess my name Ben Felix and you'll find my podcast, my YouTube channel. I'm on other social media too, but those are the main ones.
- [59:21]
Joel
Alright, we'll link to it all in the show notes up on our site as well. Ben, thanks so much for taking the time.
- [59:25]
Ben Felix
Thanks so much for the invitation.
- [59:27]
Joel
Okay. Wow. Talking with Ben Felix is, it's amazing the reference material he has stored in his brain, different studies about investments or the impact of financial advisors, even the vaguard study I brought up and he's like, yeah, that's not my favorite. The amount of knowledge he has and the way he's able to disseminate it to normal folks is impressive. So was so glad to have him on and his podcast really. And the work he does, it gets down into the nitty gritty. So if you're the kind of person who's like how the Money feels like 101 to me, I'm ready for 301. Well, Ben's podcast, his YouTube channel is well, well worth digging into. Just a treasure trove of intelligence, help you understand investing at a much deeper level. Man. My big takeaway from this one was I like what he said, the anti habit of not checking your portfolio. And it's one of those things like as you start to invest more and you feel like you're doing the right thing and you're excited to check on your progress. Well, the more you log in, the more likely you are to make changes or to maybe feel like you can rest on your laurels. I mean there's all sorts of reactions you can have from checking your portfolio, that many of them which are not helpful and probably maybe it's a good idea. And now's a great time to set a calendar reminder, right, to check in once every six months. And maybe the goal is every time you check in on your portfolio, you're ramping up your contribution amount. Whether that's like adding a little bit to your monthly Roth IRA contribution, or you're ramping up your 401 contribution by 1 percentage point or something like that. I don't know exactly how you want to do it, but I love the idea of having a calendar reminder so that it's never on your brain. Like, maybe I should just jump in there and check out my investments, what's going on? Or I feel like the market was ripping last week. Let me see where I'm at. Or market wasn't doing so great. Wonder how much money I lost. And just avoiding that sort of emotional response. Or like, you think, you know, logging in more often is going to create more emotional responses. And what Ben is preaching, what he's all about, is for all of us, not dislocluding emotion from how we invest, including it in the proper way, but thinking about, well, what would the rational approach here be? And I do think the rational approach, or what's going to help us stay rational for longer, is just putting those numbers in front of our face less being pleasantly surprised the next time we log in that not only have our contributions, but also market returns have increased our net worth. And it's a wonderful thing to see. But I do think having our finger on the pulse all the time can lead to some potential bad decisions. And that's something that's really important when we're talking about, you know, being an investor and staying in it for the long haul. That's going to be a really. It's going to allow us to do that in a crucial way. So I hope you found this podcast helpful. I hope it allows you to think about your own investing and how you plan on handling the bumps in the road that are sure to come, whether that looks like hiring an advisor because you realize, oh, man, that sounds like that's what I need. I need somebody to kind of hold my hand because I don't think I would be able to stomach a massive portfolio drop. Or whether you're like, no, that means I need to put my investing thesis down on paper and I need to post it somewhere in my house so that I know why I'm investing, what I'm investing for, and that I'm staying the course even when things do get difficult. And by the way, if you are looking for an advisor, howtomoney.com advisor is a great place to turn. Thanks as always, for joining me on today's episode. We'll see you back here on Friday for a fresh Friday flight. Until next time, best friend out. Got a rental on Airbnb or vrbo. What started as a side hustle might now feel like a full time job, but it doesn't have to. With Lodgify as your co host, you can make more money and stress less.
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- [65:32]
Ad Voice
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- [66:45]
Ben Felix
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [66:47]
Joel
Guaranteed Human.