B (3:29)

Yeah, I mean, so it's, it's a funny book. So first of all, true story. There's only, only two people appear on the COVID of both of my, my books and it's Josh and myself. So anyway, yeah, Josh, you're the man. You are truly one of the kindest people in the industry endorsing both of my books. But this one is very different from the first one. The first one was sort of like wonky macroeconomics. You know, a lot of people know me for like my macroeconom background, which is kind of weird because I'm not even an economist. I just kind of explain a lot of bullshit because there is so much BS in our industry that I felt compelled to, to debunk a lot of it. More. More so for my clients to understand, you know, what is and what isn't important. But this book is super different. This book is really, I titled it your perfect portfolio because the, the main thrust of the book is that there isn't actually a perfect portfolio. And the book is really like an exploration of lots of different concepts, lots of different strategies, lots of different styles. And the main goal of the book is to help people find a portfolio that works for them. And so the, we kind of. I go through kind of like the first part is basically 10 essential principles that I kind of frame as like the building blocks of how to assess what is a good portfolio, how to start thinking about all this in a really practical way. And then I go through like 20 plus strategies where I kind of. Some of them are really boring, some of them are more intricate, but I break them down. I kind of operate like a third party analyst and I just sort of sit back and I say, hey, this is the origin story of this strategy. This is how it's done over time, this is how it works, and this is who it might be good for.

A (5:07)

This is, let's give people, let's give people like a list of what some of those strategies are because they've heard the names of them and I bet they would love to just, you know, be able to see that sort of shorthand explaining where these Things came from. What are the strategies that you write about? So it.

B (5:24)

It ranges. I mean, I cover the full gamut, kind of. I tried to cover a really diverse group of strategies. So I cover the. Chapter one is the Warren Buffett strategy. Chapter two is just. It's titled why not 100% stocks? Which is kind of a play on a. A famous paper by Cliff Asness talking about why you shouldn't be 100% stocks.

A (5:42)

But I actually talk about that sounds like my portfolio.

B (5:45)

Yeah, I actually talk about why maybe. Maybe you should be 100% stocks in certain parts. Chapter three is the T, Bill and Chill portfolio, which is basically like the cash management portfolio. So for people's like, either like liquidity needs, maybe it's your bank account. I talk about 60, 40 factor investing, risk parody, the permanent portfolio, the Boglehead three fund portfolio, the. The William Bernstein no brainer. I talk about income strategies, trend following, endowment portfolios, retirement planning. So I try to cover, like, the full gamut. There's a little bit of something for everybody in here. It. I try not to focus on. You know, one of the. The early complaints I've had is people don't like that I didn't get into, like, really, really intricate strategies and. Which was intentional. I try not to make anything too complex because I want this to be applicable for anybody, and I want it to be able to be achieved in a really sort of relatively simplistic way where you don't have to get brain damage over trying to build a portfolio for yourself.

A (6:45)

Yeah, look, the most important thing the book accomplished to me when I went through it is like, okay, people. So I try to put myself in the shoes of, like, a reader, not myself, because this is what I do for a living. But like, a regular reader gets this book, and they say, yeah, I don't know enough about portfolios. And perfect. Sounds good. I would love to know what the perfect portfolio is. Okay, so they buy the book. They can categorically finish a chapter and say, okay, now I get it. This is why everyone says 60% stocks, 40% bonds. Moving on, what's next? Risk parity. Oh, I keep hearing people say that term. Now I know exactly what it is, how it works.

B (7:30)

Yeah.

A (7:31)

And so somebody going through your book, they don't have to read it. Like, it's a book from start to finish. They can almost just be like, what's a term I'm curious about? Oh, let me read a chapter on that. And immediately they know. Look, they're not gonna be on Twitter debating other Quants, but they will have like, they will have like a grasp on what the concepts related to that strategy is. And I mean, someone's got to do it. I'm glad you did it.

B (8:03)

Yeah. And I, and I lay out exactly how to implement the strategies too. So. Because some of these are, are pretty like risk parity, for instance, like actually doing a DIY risk parity portfolio. I mean it can get, you can get really effing complex, especially if you do it the way that Ray Dalio really envisioned it. I mean he would use like 15 uncorrelated instruments, which, you know, first of all, finding 15 uncorrelated instruments consistently is, I don't even know if that's possible. It's hard enough to find like, you know, stocks and bonds aren't even, it's hard to find when they're consistently uncorrelated. So like, you know, layering in 13 more, I don't know how anybody would do it, but I showed kind of a really simplistic way to do it. So. And there's, but there's elements of this too that are like, you know, some people will pick up certain chapters and like, like the Boglehead 3 Fund portfolio. I mean talk about like the simplest, most boring thing in the universe. I mean it doesn't get much simpler than just three funds that are basically mean. It's really a two fund portfolio because it's basically global stocks and then bonds and that's it. And you just buy and hold, rebalance, you know, whatever. And so some of these are going to be like really almost amateurish for some people, whereas some others are like, like the endowment portfolio is another one that like you almost need like a team of people managing an endowment portfolio because you've got private equity, you got public equities, you got like different components moving on in the fixed.

A (9:24)

The good news, the good news is that nobody actually needs to do that. So.

B (9:27)

Yeah, well, and it's funny because like I kind of allude to that in the book where I, I lay it all out. I go through exactly, hey, this is how this works. This is how you could do it. And, and I write like this is a lot. This is probably way too much for your average person. And so, you know, you can get, and that's part of it is that like I'm trying to break down a lot of the behavioral aspects of this stuff too. Because you can, when you start getting into portfolio construction, you try to start getting like overly cute with it all and you know, you get sophisticated Enough where you can start thinking like, oh, well, now I need to like layer in some, probably some, some short aspect to my long portfolio. And then I need to like, you know, what if I added a little bit of leverage and you, you could start really like making things significantly worse by trying to be overly fancy with it all. And so a big part of the, the book's message is that, is that perfect is the enemy of the good actually. And that finding a portfolio that's just good enough for you is probably gonna do much better for you in the long run than trying to constantly make everything perfect all the time. Cause it's not gonna be perfect all the time. That's part of the message.

A (10:31)

One of the things that people rightfully complain about is they diversify themselves. They take the advice of the experts and then we get into a period of stress and all of those supposedly non correlated asset classes or styles or strategies, they sort of now all of a sudden converge on one and you go from being diversified in a normal period of time into a bear market where correlations shoot up. And all of a sudden it's like, well, I thought I was doing this right. And you don't have to look far to find a really visceral recent example. 2022 was a horrible year for growth stocks, terrible year for value stocks. If you were a stock, you probably went down. And bonds had their worst year. I read somewhere since the Revolutionary War, horrific period, US Bonds. So talk us through what you say to the person that says, yeah, diversified until it matters and then nobody is.

B (11:46)

Well, that's part of it. You know, I, I talk about how, you know, especially gosh, I mean, with, with stocks and bonds. One of the common themes that I talk about a lot is you've got to think in time horizons with these things because you know, you're going to go through these events. Like 2022 or 2008 was kind of the same way where stocks and bonds, you know, got correlated in a lot of ways across different segments of the, the two markets. And you, if you don't think in time horizons or you think especially in very short time horizons, owning just stocks and bonds is not going to be good enough for you. And so I try to communicate that to people that hey, if you, if you run into these periods where inside of say an 18 month period, you expect everything to like the stock and bond markets to be totally uncorrelated, you're not going to be diversified enough in your portfolio. And so I present all these other portfolios where like for instance, the permanent portfolio is one that you own long term treasury bonds, you own gold, you own a cash component and then you own a stock component. It's basically four quadrants and the idea is that it's a, it's sort of an all weather portfolio where each of these four quadrants is protecting you from some sort of specific environment where stocks are growth oriented. The, the cash is, is more of like a recession proof thing. The, the long term bonds or deflation hedges and the gold is an inflation hedge. And so there's a, there's sort of an instrument for every season inside of that. So it's truly like an all weather environment or all weather sort of portfolio. And the, the kicker though with that is that you own so many different types of instruments inside of a portfolio like that that even in a year like 2022, you're going to feel more diversified than you are in something that's just pure stocks and bonds. The kicker is you don't necessarily just own cash flow generating instruments. So I'm a little bit critical of like an all weather portfolio to some degree because from a, from a cash flow generating perspective, the person who owns that thing, I mean there's been periods where that portfolio goes through sort of lulls for, for periods where because maybe you're under, you're so underweight stocks or you're, you know, in the 2010s when, when commodities and cash, you know, cash is earning zero and commodities don't do well, you know, 50% of that portfolio is basically sucking wind. And so you know, again that's, it's its own time horizon problem where when you start introducing these other diverse fires in, you have to be patient with those things too. And so you know, my favorite chapter, or one of my favorite chapters in the book, I should say, and the truly, truly uncorrelated strategy in the book is the trend following strategy. Where the, the trend following strategy is basically are CTAs. These are guys that, it's sort of a go anywhere strategy. And these guys are finding, they're trying to find small trends that turn into really, really big trends. And so in the current environment a great example is something like silver. Where these guys, a lot of CTAs are, are way overweight silver and, and like precious metals right now. Because what happened is these things have been trending. They find a trend that's in place and the goal is to find exactly what's going on right now where a lot of these CTA funds are going bonkers because primarily because they're way overweight precious metals where they find a small trend and it turns into a great big trend. And that's kind of like the holy grail for, for trend followers is finding things like that or the inverse is finding something like 2008 where when the stock market starts to trend down, they'll get, they'll get short the market. So it's a go anywhere. So it can be a long short. They're kind of, they kind of don't care whether they're long or short in a portfolio. They're just trying to find a trend that turns into a great big trend. And when they capture these great big trends, these things become uncorrelated in a way that is nothing like the stock and bond markets. And so these things, they've become really popular in the last, really the last five years. Primarily they went through a little bit of a heyday after the GFC because the, a lot of them performed were just lights out in like 2008 into early 2009. But then they went through their own as well.

A (15:43)

They better have been.

B (15:44)

They went through like a 10 year lull though where a lot of those funds sucked wind for, for a really long time. And so again, it's a different, it's a different behavioral mindset when you're owning these truly alternative diversifiers where you got to realize those things too are going to go through their own time periods where some part of your portfolio is going to look bad. You know, our buddy Brian Portnoy said that, that the good diversification is learning to hate some part of your portfolio all the time. And that's super true. I mean the, if you like all of your portfolio all the time, the odds are you're going to run into a period where when things go haywire, you're going to hate the whole thing. And it's going to, it's going to, it's going to shut you up probably.

A (16:25)

This is like, this is what, what? One of the highest. 1. This is one of the highest functions of the modern day financial advisor is being the buffer in between a client. Just saying, I'm going all into whatever's going up right now. Yeah, like the, the advisor is sort of the, sort of like the angel sitting on the, the investor's shoulder. And yeah, I say reminding them like, hey, this is going to go wrong at some point and you need to have other asset classes and other strategies in place to offset the damage. It's only a matter of half of.

B (17:04)

Our, I think half of our job is slapping Hands out of cookie jars. You know, it's just people that are undisciplined who are constantly opening the cookie jar and we're like, I'm like, I put together a diet plan for you and you know, I'm, I'm sorry to like be, you know, walking behind you at 3am in the morning when you're in the pantry. But you know, go back to bed, get the hell out of here and you'll stay. Stick to the plan.

A (17:27)

Yeah, I, well the other, the other thing is, you know, and we talked about, we talked with Jeremy Grantham last week, Michael Batnik and I. Yeah, great interview. So thank you. So he was long during some of these big bull markets and people think he's a perma bear. He just wasn't long enough. And like that comes with the territory of having hedges on or having diversification away from the big bull market or trying to play a bull market, but in a safer lower beta way. Like any, anything you do that alters your portfolio away from the regular market beta, at some point you are going to have to explain it to the end investor in such a way that they get it and they allow you to keep going. And if you have hedges on or alternative asset classes that are so erratic and so inexplicable or underperform for so long that they become like a landmine for the actual relationship, guess what? That ain't the perfect portfolio. Like a portfolio that a client can't live with for five years, it's not perfect. Even if on paper it says this is optimized. All you did was create a situation where someone's about to sell out of something at the bottom.

B (18:53)

Yeah, and I talk about that a ton. That two big thrusts of the book is not just understanding yourself so knowing what your own behavioral biases are, but understanding the instruments for what they are too. And knowing that, you know, when you're buying, for instance, a trend following strategy, you're basically buying the, the trading acumen of someone who is, you know, trying to basically time the market in the short term. And you got to accept that these things are, they're going to be erratic at time, they're going to be hyper volatile times and they, they might go through really long periods where they functionally just do not work. And so you've got to be really careful with something like that. Whereas when you own something like a Treasury bill, it's a totally, totally different type of instrument where you're owning something that fundamentally has a different time horizon, it has different Essential ingredients inside of the way it's going to operate. And so when you go in and you actually understand what the, the instruments are that you own, you can then also start to compartmentalize these things across different time rises where you kind of know, like I know exactly what a T bill is going to do over a one year period. And when I look at the stock market, I kind of know, okay, if I own the stock market for certain time periods, 5, 10, 20 years, I know that that thing's probably got a high probability of generating positive real returns over those time horizons. I have no idea what it's going to do inside of a 12 month period, a 24 month period. And so again, so much of this is understanding the instruments for what they are and being able to apply that to your own behavior in a way where you build something that is really behaviorally robust, where you know you can stick with it, because you kind of know, okay, the stock market does screwy stuff inside of a 12 month period. But I know that if I hold this thing for five years on a rolling basis, the probability of negative returns is super low.

A (20:45)

Not just hold, but, but add to it. Can we do some macro stuff with the time we have left?

B (20:51)

Yeah. Yeah.

A (20:52)

All right, you ready to put the pragmatic capitalist hat back on and take off the discipline funds hat? All right, a couple things. First, depending on which article I read or what time of day it is, I either believe we are on the verge of a great depression or we are living in one of the most robust economic growth environments of all time. It just feels like it is harder than ever to take different sources of anecdotes and or data and come up with an all encompassing way of thinking about the environment. Part of that obviously is the K shaped nature of the economy with huge winners and huge losers. We understand that part of it. And then part of it is just this very bizarre circumstance we're in where the housing market has sort of been frozen by the interest rate situation and yet automobile sales have held up. You have people not going into retail stores, but doing tons of travel. Like there are just so many, there's so many bifurcations in every segment of life. It's really hard to just say a solitary sentence that pulls everything together into one cohesive narrative.

B (22:17)

And you can't, I don't think you can distill this like people want to distill this into some sort of really overly simplistic narrative. And it's usually political.

A (22:27)

I want to. That's what I. That's what I want to do.

B (22:29)

Depending on which side of the aisle you're on, you want to probably, you know, say, oh, things are, are booming and great, or if you're on the opposite side, you probably want to say, nah, things are terrible. They've never been worse. And I don't know, there's, there's a little bit of truth to, to both of those narratives, because like you said, I mean, like, the one that, that I tug on a lot is the housing market, because the housing. Housing is just so important to everybody. And, and I think that, like, when you look at things like consumer sentiment, for instance, I think that, I mean, I talk to a lot of young people, and I think anyone who's under the age of 40 who didn't buy a home before COVID they feel they're like, legitimately pissed off about what has gone on over the course of the last five years because they're renting. Their rent is going up every month, it seems like, and they see mortgage rates that are impossibly, you know, unaffordable. And prices in the real estate market haven't really budged. They, they went up 50% during COVID and then they didn't really come down. They've kind of just flatlined for the most part for the last, like, three or four years. And so these people are pissed, and I think rightfully so. And I think that's driven a lot of the sentiment in the, the economy that the housing market has. You know, economically it's been really sluggish, but for the people who aren't in housing already, these people feel like they're on the outside looking in. And so there are. Yeah, and they, and they are. I mean, and it's, it's really like I've. I've kind of tried to model this out where, like, if you look at, like, I think rents and prices will converge increasingly over time, especially as wages slow down, because wages is really, that's like the, the main thing that drives housing prices over time and affordability. And so as wages come down, I think the prices in residential real estate have to sort of lag. And so rents. The bad news is for renters, renters are probably going to experience increasing shelter inflation over the course of the next five, 10 years. But that's the problem is that I could see this going on for five to 10 years where residential real estate is sort of flat or sluggish for like five to 10 years. Rents just creep up and eventually it converges. And the narrative will slowly start to change and we're probably going to get a Fed chair who's going to, you know, cut rates a lot. Mortgage rates probably come down, mortgage rates probably adjust a little bit over time and get more and more affordable. But it, this is going to continue. And that's the thing that kind of is, is crummy about like my forecast or my view going forward is that I, I don't see any quick fixes to any of this stuff. And so, and then you've got the opposite end of the spectrum where like anybody who is in anything related to AI or anybody who's utilizing AI in a really creative way is on like the opposite end of the spectrum where they're living through this like microcosm of a boom that is like transformational in like unheard of ways. I mean, I almost on a daily basis now I'm communicating with people who are like, hey, I made an insane amount of money in Nvidia stock and I don't know what to do with it now. Help me out. And those people are on like the opposite end of the spectrum where again, it's kind of like a, you know, the haves and the have nots, where the people who were in these assets in the last few years have experienced like transformational wealth. Whereas everybody else who, who you know has been, God, if you've been like way underweight technology or if you've been scared and out of technology for the last like five years, again, like, you're, you're super frustrated, right?

A (25:54)

I don't know what you do. I don't even know what you do now. Like if, if you look, we were taking calls from people in 2012, 2013, as the stock market was getting back to its old high, 2007. And we had people, that's 12 years ago, people telling us, I can't buy now. The market's at the high now. Most of them we were able to convince, like, that's not a reason not to invest. These are people that sat in cash after the great financial crisis for years because they were so obsessed with not buying the top again. And I totally understand that. But like, think about how long this has been going on for. If you have not been long, NASDAQ and growth stocks since the new high in 13, you're now it's a decade and a half and you will never get that time back. Like, we will absolutely have bear markets and corrections, but the odds of seeing the market back to where you decided to sit out, I think are very low. And it just, it's, you're locked, you feel like, you just feel like you're standing outside the window and you're looking inside and everyone else's life is materially better. And you thought you were being conservative, you thought you were being, you were doing the safe thing, but you did the opposite. You took a huge risk not investing.

B (27:17)

One of my favorite stats of all time is if you bought the exact tippy top of the Nasdaq bubble in 2000, you've earned 8% per year since then.

A (27:29)

So to this day.

B (27:30)

Yeah, to this day. So like to now the kicker there is that you, you didn't break even for 15 years. So you know, you went through this like traumatic 15 year bear market where, and God, it's even worse in real terms. I mean if you adjust it for inflation, it's, it's probably like a, probably felt like a. Yeah, it was even longer. It was like a 17, 17 and a half year bear market in real terms. And so yeah, you suffered especially in real terms for, for a long time. But if you held on and you had the proper time horizon in perspective again, like I always tell people, like, yeah, but technology.

A (28:06)

But hold on, let's pause there because like the reality is nobody invests like that anyway. Like nobody, nobody in at the top of any bull market historically shows up and says, okay, here is all the money I will ever have to invest. I hereby choose today to like, like anyone that, anyone that was unfortunate enough to have put a lot of money into the market at that historic peak, it's been 25 years, chances are they've also bought at other points in time. They didn't just sit there waiting to get back to even.

B (28:41)

And this is one thing why you can't just like, you can't like cherry pick like all the best performing stuff, you know, like the, the financial media loves to do that where, you know, you see articles all the time where it's like if you had invested in Microsoft stock in 1989 or whatever it is, you know, and it's like, yeah, I mean if you cherry pick the very best performers, of course. But that's again like the whole point of like, I wouldn't you agree that like right now with all the craziness going on, whether it's like the geopolitical nonsense, the disparity in valuations or whatever, like today the argument for diversification to me is so much stronger than maybe any point in my career. Right?

A (29:19)

Like a, like a stronger argument to not be fully invested in One specific.

B (29:24)

Yeah, don't be, don't be concentrated because you're like, man, your, your short term risks right now are like, they're crazy. Whether you're, you know, like the, the Peter Schiffs of the world will tell you just be, be only in gold and silver. And you know, like we all, we all have to now admit that Peter Schiff has been massively right. Which is probably, probably one of the worst things going on but, or one of the most hilarious things going on. But like the person who's following that advice, man, their sequence of return risk in the next like five to ten years is insane. But the same thing's probably true of people who are like way overweight. Technology right now, where, I mean the technology sector could do some crazy, crazy stuff in the next five to 10 years, we have no idea. And so, yeah, like, I think that the argument for diversifying across styles and strategies and you know, doing lots of different things is more compelling now than it's been, I think.

A (30:17)

Yeah. With the cat. With the caveat that it's, it won't be the most fun.

B (30:22)

Yeah.

A (30:23)

At certain times you'll look, you'll, you'll see one asset class, whether it's gold or it's, whatever it is, just double or triple. And you'll say, why AM I only 8% in that? And I should be 80%. And that's.

B (30:35)

Yeah.

A (30:36)

You have to, you have to know in advance. So our saying at our firm is, you know, we're talking to clients all day and we say like diversification means never having to say you're sorry.

B (30:49)

Yeah.

A (30:50)

And always having to say you're sorry. That's just, that's just what it is. Like you, you have to know in advance. That's what it means. The alternative is, that's so important. Put all your chips on, on, on red 31 and, and pray.

B (31:04)

You could do that too. You're setting, you're setting really realistic expectations. So I me, I write about this in a section in the book that like you got to go into all this having really realistic expectations because if you go in with like, you know, like dreams of I'm going to, I'm going to be able to mimic a portfolio that is reflected like the Mag 7 in the last 10 years. Like good luck to you because you know that's, that's going to be really hard to replicate and it sets a threshold of expectations. It's just so unrealistic that, you know, when you go into this with more practical expectations and it's one thing I did in the book, actually, was I presented everything in real terms and I did that intentionally to actually to make the numbers look lower than what are kind of the fantastic numbers we sometimes hear about. Because you hear things like, oh, the stock market does 10 a year and it's like, well, no, actually, when you back out, what your real, real return is going to be back out, inflation back out, your, your financial fees, back out, your taxes. Because the taxes are the biggie, actually, in all of this. Like, your return is going to be like 4% or something after all that is backed out. And so the numbers are way, way lower than people think. And I did that very intentionally because I was trying to set really realistic expectations for people.

A (32:15)

Colin, let's, let's. John, let's show everybody the book again. All right, so, Colin, this is now available from Harriman House and it's in bookstores. It is on Amazon. What's the coolest thing that you heard from somebody who read the book or what's the best piece of feedback you've gotten?

B (32:38)

Oh, man, I've gotten a ton of emails from people. The best one was from an older person who said that they've been trying to DIY this stuff for years and years and they never felt comfortable with it. This elderly guy who he, he said that he finally feels like he has peace of mind because he solidified a portfolio that he feels super, super comfortable with. So it's cool, it's awesome to hear from people get emails like that from people who say, like, hey, this actually had like a really big impact on my life.

A (33:12)

That's awesome, man. Well, I, I wish you all the best with it. We're going to link to it here. And if you have not read a book about portfolio management or these strategies you keep hearing about sound like they're jargony and you would love to learn about what they actually mean and how they work. This is it. This is the book. It's called the Perfect Portfolio. Your Perfect Portfolio, Cullen Roesch. Available everywhere. Cullen. We'll talk again soon, my friend. Happy New Year. Great see you.

B (33:49)

Sa.