00:24:18

(someone): diversified industrial companies their utility companies utility company has very stable cash flow it's very predictable business. If they've been paying i think con edison has been paying a dividend for decades business model doesn't really change that much so these are these are companies with. for the most part, you know, very stable businesses that you can predict the earnings and therefore predict the dividends.

00:24:42

(someone): You see, I've seen this, I've seen this on different blogs. It doesn't need to outperform the index as long as it provides a solid dividend. That's all I care about is the yield. How should someone that is trying to build a portfolio, what is a balanced approach to a statement like that?

00:24:56

(someone): Yeah, you've touched on, on a important point about dividend growth investing. There is evidence that you do your research and you follow the strategy very diligently over many years that you can beat the market. My personal experience, I am not trying to beat the market. I am concerned about building this income stream. I originally really started to invest this way so that I could build an income stream to cover my expenses from between the time I retired until age 59 and a half when my retirement accounts are available. So a lot of us are really not concerned about beating the market. And I know that sounds Strange to growth investors or index investors. We're more concerned about this income stream that comes from the dividends than we are about being in the market. It's hard to beat the market, no matter what strategy you're going to deploy. I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to build a very consistent and predictable income stream that supplements my regular income.

00:19:27

(someone): Because what I was looking for and thinking about is, What is my overall portfolio going to look like and how can I dampen overall the volatility? And the way you do that is by your overall diversification of a portfolio. So what I learned from Ray Dalio is you probably want to have at least five things in your portfolio. He calls that the holy grail of investing, having five uncorrelated asset classes in your portfolio, at least five. And he gets like 15. So we're talking about some stocks, some kind of bonds, some REITs or real estate, some cash. And then there's a whole bunch of other things you could put in there. You can put some gold or precious metals. You can put in preferred stocks. You can put in maybe you have some of these other alternative investments in lending platforms or P2P platforms or other things. But those are just small components. But the idea was let's have a group of things that as a group perform pretty well and are much less volatile. My goal was to make my portfolio about half as volatile as a total stock market portfolio with only giving up one or two percent in terms of the expected returns over time. And so that was what I was trying to create. And the way these bonds played in this portfolio was I needed that thing that was going to go up when the stock market went down, I was looking for max diversification for my bonds. And that was the purpose that I had for my bonds. I didn't care about the income. I didn't care about stability in that case.

00:21:11

Brad Barrett: So Frank, these long-term treasuries.

00:33:06

(someone): It has a negative correlation with the stock market of negative 0.47 on the negative one to one scale. It is up year to date 22 percent. And then we have EDV, which is this even longer duration product. It tries to capture more of a 25 to 30 year duration. And that fund is negatively correlated, again, around negative 0.5. And it has gone up 30% in this environment. So just going through that list, you can see bonds are way more diversified than stocks are. If you went and put a whole bunch of stock funds in there, they're all going to be between 0.6 and 0.99 correlated with the rest of the stock market. Right. And as they say, and in bad environments, the correlation goes to one and they all go down together. And and basically you see that's what what happened, which is typical. So if you're really looking at trying to diversify your portfolio and Rick Ferry made a really good point in your prior podcast that getting a bunch of different stock ones, that's really not diversifying a portfolio, you have to have completely different asset classes, whether they're, you know, bonds or gold or REITs or some other, other thing that performs differently. Uh, just as a, as in the normal course, that's where you're really going to get your diversification, uh, out of your portfolio.

00:34:37

(someone): Right. And I want to look at the other, the other half of this guy. I think it's important for context. Like right now, someone's like, wow, long-term treasury is up 22%.

00:43:07

(someone): So there's, there's so many different, uh, different angles that you can look at is, is, is actually really quite complicated.

00:43:12

(someone): That poses an interesting question. Cause I imagine one of the variables would be, well, what money are you drawing down on, which we haven't really talked about for an individual that has 60, 40 bonds. Are they drawing evenly from their stocks and bonds? Are they drawing from bonds because bonds are less volatile. And I guess, depending on, you know, what your decision is there, I'm interested in your input. That would also impact which one of the vehicles that you're going to have this money parked in as well, because the rest of them are just, you know, they're staying in the course. Right.

00:43:35

(someone): Right. So, I mean, again, there are many different angles to look at this. So, first of all, your 60-40 portfolio might now have become a 55-45, right? I mean, your stocks are down, your bonds are up. So now would be, for example, a good time to diversify. And so now would be a good time to rebalance your portfolio. So you would then withdraw from the asset class that is up the most. So now bonds are overvalued. So you take it out of your bond allocation. And the other question is, well, what if I don't want to take money out of my Roth yet, but I have to take money out of the assets that are in the Roth, but I want to keep the Roth untouched for now. I want to keep that for later. What do I do then?

00:55:26

(someone): And so you could see that that is why most risk parity style portfolios in that time period were down a maximum of 20 percent if they were well constructed. And then you get a rebalancing opportunity because you sell the bonds when they're high and then buy the stocks when they're low and everything's glorious. It's true, though, that in the past three months, we've seen in bonds a very bad performance, particularly in long term treasury bonds. It's been the worst performance in three months since 1980. for those funds. And then this is why you want to be well diversified because what was doing well and what typically does well when those bonds are doing poorly are small cap value funds. So the small cap value is up, you know, 30, 40% at the same time, the long term treasuries are down 14%. And that's what happens in these kinds of portfolios. I think that what is jarring about that is people really want to have all of their stuff going up at once. But if you really want to get a diversified portfolio and the hallmark of a very diversified portfolio is you will see things moving in different directions at different times. And it does take a little bit of just getting used to. It's hard for whatever reason for people to wrap their heads around that. But that's that's fine. We're all we're all learning and figuring this out.

00:56:56

Brad Barrett: And, and Frank, that's what I wanted to follow up with. So many people in our community are heavily concentrated in low cost index funds. And then maybe like somebody like me, like, oh, I'll diversify, I'll get some real estate.

00:23:47

(someone): So in terms of how much do I have in my portfolio, these sorts of things, it's around 25 percent. I wouldn't recommend more right now. It's up to around 35 percent because they've appreciated so much. I'm going to be rebalancing out of them. But that's that's sort of the role that they play. And I feel like I didn't answer part of you. No, no, no.

00:24:09

Brad Barrett: You answered everything. Uh, so what's interesting before you said that you have bonds to, they lower your volatility and lower the return slightly. But just a minute ago, you said these particular bonds are highly volatile, but I think what you were saying before, and I just want to clarify from my own understanding of this is it lowers the overall volatility on your entire portfolio, right?

00:24:34

(someone): Yeah. Yes. That's, that's the idea that you can have things with high volatility in your portfolio if they're different and they move differently than the other things in your portfolio, because that will, will balance out and give you a lower volatility overall. And that's, that's what it really means to be diversified.

00:24:55

Brad Barrett: Right. So this is the overall, the Ray Dalio concept of having totally uncorrelated asset classes.

00:25:02

(someone): Yeah, it's what he calls the risk parity type model that you may have read about in different books. This was the basis for the Tony Robbins portfolio in that book that he wrote.

00:39:01

(someone): The one that seems to be the least correlated is based on the S&P 600 small cap value index. And so an ETF like VIOV, which is a Vanguard ETF, and there are several other ones that follow that same index. But if you took that and you put it in that correlation analysis, it comes out at 0.77. And that's a low correlation for two stock funds. If you put in one of those international funds, it's going to be over 0.8 and maybe even over 0.9, which means they're totally correlated. So if you wanted a basic two-fund portfolio, that was your stock portion. If you put a large-cap growth fund and a small-cap value fund, those are good as just a very basic, okay, I want to cover the whole market and I want some diversification here. where you see this performance is interesting in that the large cap, and people are seeing this now because there's more reflation or inflation in the economy recently. And so small cap value stocks have been dogs for 10 years.

00:40:14

(someone): That's a very long time to be a dog when you're a believer in small cap value.

00:40:17

(someone): And then all of a sudden in the past six months, they're up like 70%. So they've gone a little crazy. And historically also, people look back to the 1970s as a really bad time for stocks. And the stocks did not perform well for most of that decade. But small cap value stocks actually, after the recession in 1973-74, for the next 12 years, they went up every single year. And you couldn't say that of most of the stock market. It is a diverse sector of the market.

00:33:02

(someone): has what's called a volatility match to it. If you have something that's that volatile, and what I mean by that volatile, it's 10 times more volatile than the stock market. You just can't put too much in there. It's like 1% or 2%. Otherwise, it just dominates the performance of the portfolio. But it is possible to construct different portfolios where you have the key factors being the stock funds and the treasury bond funds, and then looking at sort of a basket of alternatives. Now, one thing I didn't talk about was the different kinds of stocks that you can put in.

00:33:41

(someone): Well, that's great. Cause I was actually going to tee you up for this question from Andy and he says, you know, thanks for the live event, Frank, what percentage of stock portfolio would you recommend investing international stocks? And I just want to kind of reframe that just a little bit in terms of like, if we're looking at this through the lens of diversification. Like it's probably important to figure out what is the goal here. Right. So in terms of like, if we're saying, all right, we have this stock, you know, let's say we have a total stock market index fund, but you know, should we get a world fund or should we tilt towards international? It's a slightly different conversation than what we're discussing, which is a different form of diversification. Really? We're looking at correlation.

00:34:21

(someone): Yeah, and that is actually the way I look at all of these things. So let's take international funds.

00:28:50

(someone): What does that mean in an elevator pitch or a speech for someone that's hearing this for the first time risk parody?

00:28:57

(someone): This is a style of investing or a style of portfolio that has been around since the 1990s. It was pioneered by Ray Dalio and then all kinds of different people jumped on it and have written all kinds of articles about it in the past 20 years or so. And it's really been something that hedge funds have been doing for a long time. But we now have the opportunity to do that as do-it-yourself investors because we have all these ETFs that are specifically designed for different assets and we have no fee trading and we have more options than you did 20 years ago. But the main print on a risk parity style portfolio is finding assets that are uncorrelated or negatively correlated and combining them in such a way to reduce the overall risk of the portfolio.

00:29:46

(someone): So you said finding assets, what are the basket or bundle that we're just generally looking at? Like as we're picking what to put in our basket, are there common themes that we see? So stock index funds, maybe stocks, bonds, different types of bonds. Like what's the a la carte menu here?

00:30:02

(someone): Yeah. Usually you have your main driver of returns is still going to be stocks. And you're, you may have between 40 and 60% in that. As the most diverse thing from that, you're usually looking at treasury bonds and often long-term treasury bonds. And you only need maybe 20% in something like that. You don't need 40% in those kinds of bonds. They're volatile and they're very diverse, but a little goes a long way.

00:53:57

(someone): They cover whatever the purveyor of that thought should go in a total bond fund. The second problem you have is bonds are positively correlated with stocks and they always have been. And particularly if you go out to junk bonds or what's called high yield, those are 70% correlated with the stock market. So you're not getting any diversification out of something like that at all. And you're not getting much diversification out of other corporate bonds, even the high quality ones. So what that leaves you with is really focusing on treasury bonds for diversification. And this is why, for instance, if you ask Paul Merriman what's in his portfolio, all of his bonds are treasury bonds. They're all treasury bonds because they are the most diversified from the stock part of it. And so when you are thinking, I don't use corporate bonds at all, I might use them if they paid a higher yield than they do, but I can't see the risk reward right now. But if you look at the treasury bonds, just the treasury, they have been uncorrelated with the stock market. And you can go back to last year. This really comes out front and center when you have a stock market crash. So when the stock market went down last March of 2020, 40 percent, Long-term treasury bonds were up 25 to 30 percent. And so you could see that that is why most risk parity style portfolios in that time period were down a maximum of 20 percent if they were well constructed. And then you get a rebalancing opportunity because you sell the bonds when they're high and then buy the stocks when they're low and everything's glorious.

00:19:56

(someone): In proportion to that $50,000 of your net worth, that's a decent amount of money that you can redeploy into other assets, you can buy other things, and that will naturally lower your percentage of that any individual holdings. Conversely, if you're on the other end of the pool, and let's say you are lucky enough to have a million dollars, and half a million of that is in Bitcoin or Tesla or whatever, That's a different equation because that thousand dollars that you're adding to your portfolio any month is essentially 1% of the value that you're impacting your net worth in any given year. So you do also have to keep that in mind. In general, the higher the percentage that your future contributions are, I think the more risk tolerant you should be with the percentages and the lower the impact those future contributions are, the more worried about this kind of thing you should be. So that's just one more nuance I wanted to throw out there.

00:20:47

(someone): No, I love that because you're actually giving, as Brad was saying, there's two different ways to rebalance. You can rebalance by selling. You can also rebalance by thinking about what do you want to do a future contribution. So now you're at that fork of the road and you make the decision around which approach you take by really looking at, well, will it have an impact? So as this is relatively early on your investing journey, it's a smaller overall piece of the pie generally. Why incur the taxable event? If you don't have to, if you decide to incur the taxable event, then you probably want to be aware of where the capital gains brackets are and just familiarize yourselves with those rules so that you can do that. And as tax optimized away as possible.

00:28:20

(someone): One of the more important tools in Portfolio Visualizer is actually the asset correlation tool. If you go to www.portfoliovisualizer.com, it's over on the right. What that tells you is you can go in there and put in your different funds or stocks, and it's a numerical measure of diversification is what you get there. So when people talk about diversification, I think we often talk about it very too loosely. It's not a narrative or a or a different naming of things, but you actually want to put a number on it so that you know how much diversified is this thing from that other thing. Because if you want a diversified portfolio, you don't want having them all close to one. It's measured from negative one, which goes the opposite way, to positive one, which goes the same way. So I did go through, in preparation for this call, a bunch of common funds and what their correlations were to the total stock market. Go for it. Yeah. Just so you can get a feel for how different bonds are. Different bonds do different things. So from the most correlated kinds of bonds are with the stock market. Those would be your junk bonds. Those are bonds issued by corporations of a low credit quality. And so because they're a low credit quality, they pay high interest, relatively high interest. And those are the kind of bonds somebody would buy if they were only interested in the income. They just wanted the income from the bonds. Those are highly correlated with the stock market about, it's a 0.85 correlation with one being the highest.

00:46:28

(someone): The book of Jack is Common Sense Investing by Jack Vogel. And chapter and verse from chapters 18 and 19 where he discusses this. And what he says in there and what has been proven over time is that what matters the most in constructing a portfolio is those macro allocations. Is it 50-50 stock bonds, 60-40, 80-20? And then you can expand that out to if you have other alternatives, you know, is it 50, 30, 20 is for depending on how many different total asset classes you have. But what he's saying is that any 6040 portfolio is likely to perform over 94 percent the same as any other 6040 portfolio. What it's telling you is that by spending all your time fiddling with the stock funds is not really going to change your likely performance that much. It's getting those macro allocations down between the very different asset classes that is really going to drive what your portfolio is. So think about 100% equity portfolio. Basically what this is saying is, if you grab a bunch of reasonably diversified stock funds and compare that to just VTSAX, the odds of them having similar performances over the next 10 years, it's higher than 90%. And the difference here, and this is what people don't like to hear, is it's more likely to be random. What it means is we are kind of stuck. If you try to over-optimize based on the past in particular, in the recent past, you're likely to have something that actually doesn't perform as well as something that is just kind of basic and covers the bases as far as that portion of your stock portfolio that's in stocks. The caveat, this is I'm not talking about stock picking.

00:26:44

(someone): Maybe some people take an 80, 20 stocks to bonds or a, you know, 70, 30, 60, 40. There's various levels of, you know, how you're structuring this just in terms of our percentage, where is it actually going? But I really like looking at it through the lens of diversification, but being very cognizant that I'm not trying to do diversification, right? I'm not trying to own eight different index funds that have slightly different managers, but all go in the exact same direction. I'm not trying to do something where I think I'm diversified by having this kind of really complex memporial, but really they're all just going to do the same thing. And I'm just kind of muddling up and making it harder for me to focus on what my goals actually are. So Brad, in your case, you have this, you know, 80% broad strokes, broad market, get the fees ridiculously, ridiculously low. And then with the balance, you know, you're focusing on real estate. You are diversifying into real estate. It's a good diversification tool. Uh, it's not 100% correlated with what the market does. It has its own ups and downs and things that's susceptible to, but it's not 100% correlated. And some people choose things like 10 year treasuries and government funds and bonds and that sort of things. And this is where it gets kind of interesting. Just in the example that we chose right now, if, if your primary tool. Was like, and this is actually the preeminent, most popular, safest, you know, investment tool out there. If you want to invest, but you want to be safe.

00:04:30

(someone): Like, you know, that that's the one. And so someone that is potentially accumulating, they're trying to build wealth as quickly as possible. And they're like, why would I want something that's not correlated with something that I have that that's doing well, like help me play that out and talk about uncorrelation, how it might affect an individual investor's path to financial independence.

00:04:47

(someone): Well, I think you said some magic words there, which you said is accumulating, because you probably don't need these negatively correlated assets if you are in your accumulation phase, because you are trying to build a large portfolio. You're going to invest mostly in the best things that do that, which happen to be stock funds, at least as we commonly know. and you are willing to take on lots and lots of volatility because you don't plan on using that money soon. Where this matters is when you get to FI or you're getting close to it, or you've accumulated a big portfolio and you're just getting nervous about it. And so you want a portfolio that essentially has the highest safe withdrawal rate that you can have for that portfolio, particularly if you're drawing down on it. And that number, I mean, we throw around the 4% rule, but that's based on one simple portfolio of stocks and treasury bonds from the 1990s. Every portfolio has a different safe withdrawal rate. And they're not all wildly different. It's not like you're going to have one that's 10 percent and one that's zero, but they're all clustered, say, between three and five and a half percent.

00:06:08

Brad Barrett: Frank, how do you, can I just interrupt? How do you calculate that with any degree of certainty?

00:36:19

(someone): But wait a minute. For the previous three years if you look at the return in the late nineties. Ninety seven ninety eight and ninety nine i think it was the return for this broadly diversified portfolio. What's about four percent a year instead of twenty percent a year. So there is no magic way the best magic that i think people can can create is to up front. Decide what asset classes have a history of success i didn't figure that out the academics figured that out. And remember they explained that better return came from taking more risk this is not a free lunch. What you put together so many pieces and so many parts of the world. That all that matters is what the market as a whole does except now you don't you're not just relegated. To the group of stocks that are large growth companies, like, like you mentioned, if you look at the S and P 500, about 50 companies are driving that index. And those 50 companies are probably going to become very overpriced at some point. And when the market corrects, it's going to be something of a bloodbath for people who just didn't see it coming. I see this broadening of the. Diversification of asset classes. Of course you gotta make sure you buy him right but that doing that is reducing the risk not just the risk of the market going up and down but that emotional challenge that we have that keeps us staying the course.

00:38:05

(someone): Paul, there's so many aspects to what you just talked about that I want to dive into a little bit further. The first one that I wanted to talk about is the value stocks, or as you described, the out-of-favor stocks.

00:14:07

(someone): In that case, it has a broad swath of high-quality bonds, but Vanguard itself decided this is going to be the mix for this fund. And since the bond world is so much more varied than the stock world, really, each bond fund, you probably want to look inside it to see what's actually there, particularly if it's advertising itself as a total bond fund or some large aggregate something or other. Before you go into something like that, you'd want to look and see what the description of it and take the hood off and look at what it says. Because these things, at any brokerage, I went to Fidelity to find out what was in the total bond fund for Vanguard. It's just there, and you can get this information very easily. But it's what you want to do, particularly if you're going to go into more specialized bonds with different characteristics.

00:15:02

(someone): You know, I have a strong bias for simplicity, uh, with everything I do, just my brain can only handle so much. So my perfect world, like my 60, 40, you know, allocation would look something like, you know, 60% VTI total stock market. And then 40% would be just the total bond fund done two funds. It's over. And so if you were going to test that thesis out, you know, like, all right, well, bonds are there to smooth the ride. So I don't have to endure a hundred percent, you know, all the volatility that a hundred percent stocks would look like. And then we take a look at what happened in this. On this current market, 2020 March, 2020, you would think that, okay, as the stock market goes down, the bonds, my index bond fund would kind of tow the line or hold the line. And.

00:41:50

(someone): So Scott trenches book set for life. That is a fantastic manual for anybody that's just getting started on their financial journey. Love that book.

00:41:59

(someone): So, um, so just kind of a long winded way to say that there's kind of a lot of ways to skin these cats and it, and it does depend on how much time you want to spend really looking at, at all of this stuff. But there are, you go to the portfolio charts, uh, for instance, the, um, The author of that site has created something called the Golden Butterfly, which is one of these kinds of portfolios. And you can look and see how that performed. And he also has a recent blog post there looking at all the different portfolios on the site and seeing how they performed during this financial crisis. So you can see the difference of how they went along and then look at each one. But I think you get a nice perspective as to that there's more out there besides stocks and bonds and there are good reasons why you might want to have a few of those things. You don't mean to overload yourself, but those things will help you smooth out your portfolio and will give you higher protected safe withdrawal rates than your standard stock bond combinations.

00:42:58

(someone): Yeah, Frank, that's great. I just wanted to, I wanted to just get your thoughts on something real quick. So going back to kind of one of your initial setups for this, you know, the three reasons for bonds are stability, income, or diversification, maybe, maybe all of the above or some combination there, but those are the three different reasons you would want to hold bonds.

00:06:09

(someone): And it goes from things that are a lot like stocks and perform a lot like stocks to things that are completely the opposite, that generally go up and sometimes substantially when the stock market goes down. And so looking at that, then I started thinking about, well, what are the different purposes of these kinds of bonds? And ultimately, after mulling this over and thinking about it for a long time, there are really three purposes, I think, that you have for bonds in your portfolio. One is stability. something that's not going to move very much when your other things are in chaos. Another one is income, that you actually want to draw income off of these things. And then the third one is diversification. And when I say diversification here, I mean specifically having something that goes up when your stocks are going down or is negatively correlated with your stocks or your other holdings.

00:07:07

(someone): So this is great, Frank, and I want to kind of talk about, you know, your original thesis was tested and didn't do what you wanted to do. So you iterated based on your research in current times. And we'll come back to that in a second. But before we even do that, a stock versus a bond, when you own a stock, you own a piece, probably a very small piece of ownership of a company, a publicly traded company. Contrast that with what, what is a bond? What are we talking about here?

00:07:31

(someone): A bond is a debt instrument. So you owe the right for somebody to pay you. So if a company issues a bond, you own a right for the company to pay you for that bond.

00:25:02

(someone): Yeah, it's what he calls the risk parity type model that you may have read about in different books. This was the basis for the Tony Robbins portfolio in that book that he wrote. But if you read Principles by Dalio or if you looked at other things, and there are, I've done a lot of research on this, there are precursors to this that go back to the 1970s, something called the permanent portfolio, which was invented by a guy named Harry Brown. which was 25% gold, 25% long-term treasuries, 25% stocks, and 25% short-term treasuries. And it worked very well in the 1970s, but it had a lot of issues because things like gold are really volatile, and you don't want to have that much gold in the portfolio. It just ends up dominating the thing. and creating a weird functioning thing. But the idea that you could combine all these different asset classes has been floating around for a long time. It's only been more recently that we have free tools on the Internet that you can go and experiment and see how One of these kinds of portfolios might've performed over the past 50 years.

00:26:13

(someone): Frank, what are the, uh, what are the free tools that you can use to check out how these would have worked in past scenarios like 2008? And I guess now I guess would be something you can look at post-mortem as well. What are those free tools?

00:26:24

(someone): Yeah, the, there's one called portfolio charts, uh, www.portfoliocharts.com. It was created by a guy named Tyler. Who's an engineer a few years ago and.

00:42:55

(someone): The beauty of the index owning them all is you are guaranteed to own that 4%. And unfortunately you're also guaranteed to own the other 96. What we don't know and nobody does is what return. Well, all those people together produce, and if in fact they don't produce a very good return, it's very likely that we're going to have low inflation too. And if we have low and face inflation, you don't need a 10% return. You may only need a 7% return. So it's, it's a whole bunch of moving forces and the fewer moving parts we have. The more likely we are to succeed, let our portfolios have 12,000 moving parts, but don't make me deal with 12,000 companies.

00:43:53

(someone): That's exactly it. And what I wanted to point out, and I want to talk really explicitly about the ultimate buy and hold portfolio. In my mind, one of the things that's crystal clear is that this doesn't deviate. This isn't different than the. kind of the path that we've laid out of the advantages of index fund, rather it fixes maybe a perceived weakness of the way that maybe VTSAX is structured. You're making the case with the ultimate buy and hold portfolio that we, or this path is not as diversified as it could be. And so to fix that, and please come through and fill in the gaps here, but to fix that, we're going to make sure that we don't just own a ton of the already really big companies and then a little bit of everything else, but you want to own 12,000 companies. You want to own everything, right?

00:44:35

(someone): Yes. Yes.