(projector whirring) - Welcome back to Portfolio Rescue. We missed the music today 'cause Duncan's not here and everything's just all over the place. But Bill is sitting in today. Duncan's a little under the weather. Bill Sweet, regular of the show. Remember, we always appreciate your questions, comments, feedback, askthecompoundshow@gmail.com.

Bill, the stock market is up today so everyone in the chat room is happy. - Yeah, I'm feeling good. Ben, the sun is shining. It's 70 degrees in Grand Rapids, as they tell me. It's a good day. - We'll take it. The funny thing is, so the inflation rate is still 7.7% year over year.

Seems bad, right? 40 year, it's still higher than it's been in 40 years or something. And the funny thing is, when we first passed this level in February, I think in February, it was like 7.8%. And the stock market got killed. It was down 2%, the day it happened.

The next day, it was down 2% again. Like three days later, it was down another 2%. Stocks got killed. So we've been, the inflation data gets released on Thursdays when we do this show. We've had a lot of bad days this year. And of course, today, the inflation rate came out and it was better than expected and stocks are up 4%.

The NASDAQ's up 6%. Everything's screaming higher. - Yeah, go back a year ago and inflation printed 7% and investors rejoice, right? - Yeah. - How do you make any sense of that? - This is why it's so funny, because the markets run on not good or bad, but better or worse.

And better or worse than expected, especially in the short to intermediate term. Obviously, over the long term, fundamentals matter. But in the short to intermediate term, if you're confused, it's because better or worse matters more than good or bad. And this, today, was better than expected. And so investors are rejoicing.

I don't know what this means going forward. Maybe we get rugged like everyone else and things go back to being bad again. But for today, we'll take it. It's a nice reprieve. - I'll take it too. I just wish Duncan was feeling better. That's the thing. I would trade the market returns today for a healthy Duncan every day of the week, Ben.

- Yes. - Feel better, feel better, my man. - Yes, all right. Let's do the first question. - Let's do it. Okay, Ben, for the average investor who's looking for a mix of stocks and bonds, should they use a simple heuristic for bond allocation, such as bond percentage, 10 times interest rate, a max up to 50%?

If not, how should they know when to shift to that relative allocation? Another rule of thumb that I'm aware of, Ben, just you subtract, I think, 50 minus your age or 100 minus your age, something like that. - Yeah, that's a John Bloga one. So I want to start this one with this.

So this question was an obvious follow-up to the one last week where someone asked us, how do you know when to change your asset allocation? So the starting question for this one was, how do you know when to, like what to start with at the beginning? And so I want to tell a story here.

Not too long after I started my blog, Wealth of Common Sense, I think it was like 2014, someone reached out to me and said, hey, I'm a retiree. I send out an email newsletter to young people and people who are a little older who aren't really prepared for retirement.

I'm trying to help them. Can I include some of your blog posts? And this was a retired gentleman named John, really nice guy. And I said, sure. And I kind of drew up a email correspondence, friendship with this guy. We became email pen pals, basically. And older guy, and he decided, he said, can I send you my strategy for asset allocation in retirement?

I want to see what you think. And I, sure, let's have at it. So he sent it to me and he called it the four-year rule. So he had his own rule of thumb, right? And it went something like this. And this is for someone who's in retirement. And he said, this is the strategy I use for spending down my assets and setting my asset allocation.

He said, before retirement, I accumulated four years worth of cash that I kept in, money market CDs, some sort of cash equivalent, savings account, whatever. The rest is held in stocks. And then when I retire, if the market's up, I'm taking no money for spending from stocks. If the market's down, I'm taking from the cash portion.

And then if we get back into a bull market, I'm replenishing that cash and getting it back to four years and then sort of going from there and using that as the heuristic, right? And obviously, there's more give and take to that. That's the gist of it. And the thing I liked most about John's strategy is that he reverse engineered the problem, right?

He started with his goal in mind, and then he figured out that's going to lead to the asset allocation. Now, some people could look at this and say, well, that's way too conservative. You don't need that much in cash. Or some people could say, that's not conservative enough. I need more there.

So the point is, it depends on your risk profile. And I was reminded of John's strategy this week for the first time in a while, because sadly, his wife informed me he had an incurable disease and he passed away recently. - Oh. - Really nice guy. Yeah. - Oh no, RIP.

- Anyway, wanted to give him a shout out. One of the nicest guys I've interacted with. And I posted this on my blog in 2014, and I posted his four-year rule. And I still to this day get people asking, can you send it to me? 'Cause he gave me his whole rundown on it anyway.

So anyway, really nice guy. One of the nicest people I've interacted with for all my contacts I've had with people on the blog. So back to the original question about this rule. I've never heard of the rule about multiplying by the bond interest rate. My worry there, it kind of makes sense, I guess.

My worry there is that it's very volatile. So if you did that this year, you start off the year at 10% bonds, 'cause rates were 1% if you're using the 10-year. Now rates are at 4%, you're up to 40%. What happens if they scream higher to six? You go to 60, or they go back to two, you go back down to 20.

It seems like, I guess you're thinking there as you're using valuations, but it's very volatile. So you mentioned Bogle's rule. He said the age that you're at is how much you have in bonds. So if you're 25 years old, you have a 75% stock, 25% bond. If you're 65, it's 35% stock, 65% bonds.

Some people have said you could also subtract 10 or 20 from that using a starting point. It's a pretty decent rule of thumb. I think my way of thinking about this is there's no such thing as a perfect asset allocation for anyone. There's a lot of factors. You have to figure out where you're at in your life cycle.

Are you accumulating assets in your 20s and 30s? Are you mid-life like us? I hate to break it to you, Bill, but we're in our 40s. It's weird, right? - I think about that every morning, yeah, yeah. - We're in the weird stage of life where we've accumulated assets.

So we're doing way better than we were in our 20s. We're making more money. So we have these financial assets, and it stings a little bit when we get into bear market. But we're also, we have a few decades left until we're gonna retire, hopefully. But we're also like, we see this faint little light at the end of the tunnel of retirement.

It's like, oh, it's not like four decades away anymore. It's a couple decades potentially. So you're in that weird balance phase, right? I think that's a strange one to be in. - Yeah, I had an advisor today in our group throughout thinking about retirement. I think it's just 'cause he had a rough week, and I was thinking, man, you're not ever retiring this fancy or the other.

No, but I think back to the question, like what I like about your answer, Ben, like let me throw this at you. It probably doesn't matter what your heuristic is as long as you have something that you can stick with, right, that obviously works for you. So yeah, I don't like that volatile, like using the interest rate, right?

'Cause how do you adjust for inflation, et cetera? But no, I think that's a great answer. - Yeah, it moves around a lot. And like the most subjective factor of all is your behavior, right? 'Cause there are things in your life, whether they're world events or things that happen in your personal life that are gonna impact your behavior in ways that you have no idea, that you just can't predict them ahead of time, right?

And so I think, to your point, that the right asset allocation is the one you can stick with come hell or high water. And this is a pretty good time to understand what that could be. So I always think that like the good strategy you can stick with is vastly superior to the great strategy you can't stick with.

And I just think you just have to figure out what's the one that's gonna give you the highest probability of reaching your goals that also balances out like the emotional and financial strain of seeing losses. - Yeah, I love that. Great answer. - Cool, let's do the next one.

- Awesome. All right, question two for Ben. I am 28. Like many people my age, I got caught up in the SPAC craze of 2021, those heady days of last year. At that time, I thought to myself, I'm young. My Roth IRA is worth about 33,000. I should speculate now while I can still afford to lose a few bucks and make up for it later.

So about half the portfolio goes to SPACs and the other half in ETFs. Fast forward today, I've lost 40% year to date on those SPAC bets. A couple of tickers there in the chart, you can look it up on YouTube. And I'm down about 7% from the cost basis of my ETFs.

So in total, my portfolio is down 23% from cost basis. I've seen stats that you've shared about one year, three year, five year average returns from the market bottom and bear markets. Given them, I won't need the money for a long time. Should I just cut my losses on the speculative side and plow that cash in ETFs?

Not to brag, but I can't continue investing my Roth starting in 2023 due to hitting the income limit. So good for you. That's about $128,000 individuals, about $180,000 joint. I still believe in one of those companies could kill it the next three to five years, but I'm trying to be a level head investor.

Help me, Adam. - All right. I think the first question is like, okay, that's fine. You still believe, but is 50% really the right asset allocation here for SPACs? Not gonna lie that I don't have a 50% allocation to SPACs. That seems a little on the high end to me.

So I think figure out a more reasonable level of what you think the SPAC could be. And you still wanna let these run a little bit if on the off chance that some of them end up doing well. But could you do that from 10 or 20% maybe and not 50% of your portfolio?

Because the whole thing is like the regret minimization framework is how am I gonna feel if I'm wrong and these stocks continue to get hammered versus how will I feel if I'm right and some of these work out. If some of these work out spectacularly over three to five years and you have a smaller allocation, it's still probably gonna be a big help to your portfolio, even if it's more like 10% of your allocation.

But what's the tax stuff here? I know he can't do the Roth anymore because he's making more money, but what's the tax side of things here? - Yeah, I was gonna, my point was actually not gonna be tax related, Ben. It was just gonna be like the losses are the losses, right?

I mean, they're in the rear view mirror, they're done. So like, I think it's this investor problem where we always anchor to our purchase prices if that matters. I think you hit the right point is that do you wanna be this lever to SPACs? Ben, do you have any idea what the market cap is of SPACs?

Like just as a, is that an asset class? Like what do you even call that? I have no clue. - It's gotta be pretty small. So yeah, that's a good point that like the overweight here is enormous. And your point about the losses, stocks are down this year and bonds are down this year.

So this is the kind of thing where if you want to have a get out of jail free card from your portfolio, you could basically start over because you have the losses. So it's kind of like, okay, free and clear. If you had 100% cash today, what would you do?

What would your portfolio look like? And would it still really look like this with SPACs that are down 40, 50%? Would it still look like that? Or are you just using the anchoring bias where you wanna get back and break even? So I think that's the kind of thing where you start and you go, okay, what if I started from ground zero today?

And you can, because you have those losses to use potentially, would you have this same portfolio? And a lot of people probably wouldn't say yes. - Yeah, I think that's great. And 40% SPAC losses, that makes the cryptocurrency position look like a bargain right in the grand scheme of things.

Like FTX investors are calling, they want these SPAC losses 'cause ultimately that is a chance to recover. But no, but I think that's it. And I think you hit the point is that, do you still believe in this investment now? My other thing, Ben, just correct me if I'm wrong here, like you kind of have to be all in on these volatile investments or not.

Like you can't let the like one year of volatility make or break your decisions here because you're just always gonna sell when they decline. Right, and you're always gonna hold when they-- - And if that one year can make or break your decisions, then you're obviously too overweight there.

Yeah, right size the ship. I don't know, if you speculate with 5% of your portfolio and it turns out to be a grand slam, it's still gonna be such a meaningful amount that you're gonna be fine. - Yep, yep. So I would argue, Adam, at age 28, you just paid some tuition to the market to learn a lesson.

And ultimately, yeah, if you still believe in these companies, I would argue now is not the time, but I wouldn't look at the loss that happened and let that drive your decision going forward 'cause what happened is over and the future is not just unknown, it's unknowable. - Yeah, all right, next question.

- So this question from Michael for Ben. A little curious here, a big fan of everything you do. Peloton is a pretty common topic of conversation and I look forward to their earnings. So Michael can be in complete shock to how the stock reads. My question is, what do you think about Netflix buying them, them being Peloton?

No FTC concerns, adding that subscription tiers easily integrated and they can start having workout videos in separate session on their platform. My wife does most of her home workouts based on some YouTube videos and she would be all over this. Am I crazy thinking that this has been overlooked and could be a slam dunk for Netflix?

With love, Michael. - All right, I'm not really an M&A expert here, but Ben's rule of thumb when it comes to all things fitness. Every exercise routine and diet at some point is going to end up being a fad. And that's like the biggest reason I never, I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but that's a bigger reason I never really bought the, thought to buy the stock, even though I really enjoy the product.

I use the product, the Peloton product all the time. And I think that the reason is a lot of people use the analogy that personal finance and staying fit physically is a very good analogy for the same thing, right? They're both simple, but not easy, right? To stay fit, you eat healthy and you exercise on a regular basis.

And then to build wealth, you spend less than you earn and you invest the difference, right? It's simple, but not easy. But I've used this analogy before, it's a great one, but I've come around to the idea that like, I kind of disagree with it now because you can automate a lot of your finances, right?

You can automate your contributions, you can automate your rebalancing, tax loss harvesting. When you make sales, all this stuff, you can automate so much of it and get it out of sight, out of mind, which I think is one of the best ways for the majority of people to invest their money.

Staying physically fit requires you to actually put it, do it day in and day out, right? You have to choose what you eat every day. - You have to put the work in. - You have to actually like get changed in the gym, start working out, go running, whatever.

You actually have to do it. So you have to make all those little decisions. So that's my end of diatribe on personal finance versus staying physically fit. But the wreckage in Peloton stock is just a sight to behold. John, do a chart on of the coming up the drawdown.

So it's like 95% from the high. Show the next one, which is just the market cap, which was close to $50 billion in January of 2021. Now it's more like $3 billion. Just a massive destruction of wealth. My favorite line from Peloton is the former CEO says, "I see this as clear as day.

"This thing is going to be one "of the few trillion dollar companies in 15 years." And he said his board told him to stop saying that 'cause they said eventually you're gonna sound like an idiot and obviously he did. It does feel like they could be a prime takeover candidate because of the technology, they have the recurring revenue.

People pay them, I don't know, it's like 40 or 50 bucks a month for the classes. I guess it would be interesting if Netflix had a Peloton channel. You could watch Netflix at the same time as you're working out. I don't know, this would be a shift from software to hardware for Netflix.

I kind of also think like Apple and Nike make a lot of sense here. But I guess this is kind of one of the fun things about bear markets is you can start thinking about this. Unfortunately, I feel like most of the good takeover ideas that people have never come to fruition, unfortunately.

- Yeah, and good point about bear markets providing opportunity. I just keep thinking of the Lindy principle. Are you familiar with this Lindy thing, Ben? Does that ring a bell at all? - Yes, all the cool kids say it these days. - Yeah, and I think it died. Well, the idea is stuff that lives for a long time, thousands of years is permanent.

So like walking is something that's been with us for all of human history. Beer and wine are good because they've been around for a while. And yeah, that's my thing about any exercise is that it's fats. I think even the subscription service models are just really, Matthew Ball's thing is the repackaged, packaged ideas that comes up with Derek Thompson from time to time, right?

That we're just re-bundling the bundles that were de-bundled a year ago. And it would be really interesting to me if Netflix becomes this new cable service provider. You get your work out there along with everything else. - I do think the biggest problem for seeing some of these takeovers, and we have stocks that are down 90, like there's a ton of stocks down 90% and you go, why wouldn't these companies all just start getting taken over by the war chest of cash that tech stocks have?

Well, all these huge tech companies are laying people off because they think a recession is coming. And are you really gonna buy another company if you think there's potentially another leg down? So that's, I mean, I thought in 2008, we were gonna see a ton more takeovers and mergers from the bank.

I mean, there's a few banks that got taken out, but not nearly as many as I thought at the time. And I think that's just because a lot of people don't wanna sell at the bottom unless they really have to. You have to be forced into it, basically. - Right, right.

But from crisis comes opportunity. - Yeah, not a bad idea though, Peloton and Netflix. I like it. All right, let's do another one. - Okay, question four. My wife is a high-income physician, not to brag, and I make no money and stay at home with our daughter. Our finances are in great shape, thanks to advice from folks like you.

My parents are both 65, recently retired, and live with us in a separate in-law suite. They cover the electric bill and they help out with the baby. Their expenses are fully covered by Social Security. They have about $200,000 in 401ks and about $120,000 in checking. Unfortunately, they know nothing about where to put that money, and they think that they can beat inflation by putting money under the mattress.

How should I propose to allocate their money for them in a simple, low-risk way, 30% stocks, 70% bonds? If I can't explain it in a few sentences, they'll just use the mattress. Sam. - Okay, the other not to brag here is he's got free babysitters all the time. - That's what I was gonna say.

- Right? - It's a dream. - That's why I'm, that's like the one thing you have to have your parents live with you. On the other hand, you got free babysitting. - It's a dream for middle-aged dads, yeah. - Yes, that's the, and kudos to you for staying home with your daughter and letting her wait for it.

- I think that's awesome. - I do too. So, I think giving advice to a family member is 10 times harder than giving advice to like a prospective client in wealth management. You may, I don't know if you agree with me there. It's very difficult because if something goes wrong, they're probably gonna blame you.

But obviously, like your parents need to do something. Right? Maybe. It says they're living with you. They pay the electric bill. That's about it. They're paying utilities. So obviously, their cost of living expenses are low, so they can be covered by social security. What do you do with, in this situation?

I guess now makes it a little easier where they don't have to take a ton of risk if they don't want to because interest rates are now higher. So, do you like tone the water into, you know, just some really low volatile short-term bonds, money market CDs, that stuff, so at least earning something?

- Yeah, that's where I was gonna go. But I guess to hit your point, Sam, if you, I think the first thing is that you would need to sort of gain some trust, right? And ultimately, if whatever plan you give them goes wrong, you've potentially not just lost your in-laws, you've lost, or your parents, you've lost a babysitter.

And so, and a roommate. So nobody wants that. But I think I would move beyond that and just sort of think about this from a financial planner standpoint. I think, like layer one would be, probably want to hire somebody to professionally help them, right? To give them advice. But assuming that they would listen to you, Sam, the thing I would think about is, yeah, I think, Ben, the market's given us a massive gift here this year.

If you go back and look at, let's say, the one-year treasury or six-year treasury, just pick your duration. A year ago, we were talking like 0.1%, right? And today, you can get close to 4% a year of state income tax-free U.S. treasury interest, and the market defines that more or less as a risk-free rate.

And so, you mentioned it at the top, inflation 7%, that stinks. But I would sort of frame this as, the first step for any financial person would be do no harm. And if they're mostly in cash and assuming they're conservatively managed 401ks, I would just start easy. And if you can get 4% from a simple allocation of treasury bonds, I'd start there and then start layering things on top of that, because that would get them to start to think about inflation on the long run and then maybe put a plan in front of them and say, hey, if your spending can't keep up with inflation, your expenses are covered now, what happens when the medical expenses increase, right, in the future?

What happens if we want to take some vacations and do some time? Ultimately, I think that I would sit them down and try to talk about their goals, but I think the market's given us a gift and I would just start with something relatively conservative. Rates are high, why not just get started there?

- Do you think people actually put money under their mattress anymore? I know it's a saying, but is that someone actually doing this? - I don't have kids that have lost teeth yet, but apparently I do need to start thinking about this. There are fairies involved, but I would say no, ultimately.

But it is nice to see yield come back. Like, I get excited right now, right? - Especially for fairies. I know people say like, well, it's still below the rate of inflation, but so what? It's better than nothing. It's so much better. Also, the tooth fairy thing, my daughter lost a bunch of teeth right in a row.

- I'm sorry to hear that. You should have seen the other girl. - Oh yeah, well no, she had the two front teeth gone and just a huge gap. But so she lost a tooth and my wife only had a $20 bill and we forgot, you know? So we put a 20 under there, which is way more than you should.

And the next day she lost another one. So then she expected another 20, right? So. - Thanks Biden. Yeah, there's inflation right at you. Stick it. - I think I may have reused the same 20. - Cost of living adjustments for the tooth fairy are out of control these days.

It's nuts. - Seriously. All right, we got one more question. - All right, question five. We moved our joint account and rollover and Roth IRAs from an advisor to a self-managed account. We are a military family, big shouts, big ups, and our advisor is not able to advise us in the current state we live in.

I'm now managing my rollover IRA and I want to rebalance into a blend of index funds from individual stocks. From many of the stocks, it was easy to sell because they were up. The question I has is what should I do with the others that have had major losses?

I'm not sure if I should hold these for a while and wait for them to come up or just rip the Band-Aid off with 29% losses. I am 40, my husband's 44, so we have a long time horizon before we retire, but with some of the stocks, I'm worried they just might continue to drop.

Dicks, a couple of companies that she mentions. A question comes from Sarah. So Ben, what should Sarah do with her individual stocks? - First, so she's a military family. Any special considerations here because of that? - I mean, just number one, first and foremost, thank you, that's awesome. I mean, the question that Duncan had was, are there advisors that can work with folks in different states, right?

Because ultimately if your advisor is from one home state and it really depends on the advisor, right? We happen to be registered SEC wise. But no, I think that the concerns and sort of tribulations, the challenges that face military families are very similar to everybody else. Hopefully there's a military pension involved, but ultimately I give Sarah a lot of credit because she's thinking long-term and she's looking to invest for the future.

So I think that advice would stand military or not. And I give her a lot of credit for thinking about that. - Right, but I think like, again, if you know that you have a portfolio that you wanna get to someday, the ripping a bandit off makes the most sense to me, especially in an environment like this, and especially if you're using tax deferred accounts.

You know, in the back of our heads, we're always thinking, well, what if I'm selling Amazon that was down 90% or whatever, and it's come back to be one of the greatest stocks of all time? There's always going to be that in the back of your head. But I think if you have a portfolio that you wanna get to, I don't see the need to wait, unless you're thinking through something like taxes or costs or something like that, that is gonna be prohibitive.

And if it's not, then I think you just do it because the longer you wait, the better the chance of something potentially going wrong. And I think that this year's a great example of, I'm always preaching the benefits of diversification, but this year shows if you have concentrated investments in the wrong area of the market, and you got in at the wrong time, you can be crushed.

I mean, certain people are sitting, certain people feel their portfolio is like a depression right now, right? - Yeah, yeah. - It could be down 60, 70, 80% if you put all of your money in the wrong stuff, whereas the market itself is down, the Dow is down 7% this year, the S&P is down 15.

You know, that diversification is, especially in times like these, I don't think you can calculate how much better it makes people feel. - Yeah, the key to me was companies I've never heard of, right? So if you have a stock or a company in your portfolio that you've literally not taken the time to research, it probably has no place in your portfolio.

Sarah mentions in the question, just clarified it reading it through, that she's looking at a role of IRA, right, Ben? So within an IRA, if you sell a stock, a company at a loss, there's no tax effect. So like the only reason you would hold something in an IRA would be if you expect long-term growth.

And I would say for a Dick's or one of these companies that she mentions, or you mentioned Amazon, Ben, if you have a diversified index fund, you're gonna enjoy the future appreciation of a company like that, especially a company that has a large market cap. So I would just, again, the losses are in the past.

They're done, they're over with. You can't do anything about them. So like, don't let that dictate your decisions going forward. What's the portfolio you want? How do you wanna make this stick? And I think a blend of index funds is a fantastic way to go for any investor, military or not.

- And we've gotten questions like this a lot recently, obviously, and it just shows how quickly the sentiment has changed from a couple of years ago of people wanting to be, "I wanna be in triple lever to this and I can handle it," to, "No, now I've seen individual selection." I think that this is a lesson sometimes that you have to learn.

Like, sometimes people will scold you and say, "You shouldn't take so much risk when market's growing up." And that's the last thing that you want to hear because you're seeing everyone else get rich and you have FOMO and all these things. And I think if you, this is the time to understand and learn your risk tolerance.

Maybe some people can have a concentrated portfolio and can have 50 or 60% of their portfolio in this. And if you can handle that and you can do the work and you understand these stocks, that's fine. But if you're someone who's just kind of willy-nilly, like, "I liked these stocks and I put money in them because they were going up," and you don't have a plan on the other side for when am I gonna sell them and when is the business turnaround and what's the difference between a good business and a good stock, or potentially now a bad business and a bad stock, this is your out.

This is the time to reassess and understand, "Okay, this is my true risk profile. And now I actually understand. And I'm gonna build a portfolio that I can stick with through bull markets and bear markets and not just when things are going up." - Yeah, and the data on your side.

John, can we pull up the chart that I put up? Yeah. So this is a study. It was a 25-year sample period, '83 to 2007, where some gentleman from Blackstar Funds, they renamed him a couple of times to Longboard, they're still in existence. But this chart is burned into my brain.

And they took a look at not just the stocks in the Russell 3000, but every stock that had been in an index, in that index for a 25-year period. And you can see the distributions of returns here relative to the index. Only 36% of the universe of stocks outperformed the index during that time period, with fat tails on either side.

So just in a random sample in a Burton Malkiel, monkey throwing dart scenario, you pick 100 stocks, the data show that about two thirds of those are gonna perform the index. And this to me is the triumph of indexing, that you don't have to pick the winners and losers.

It doesn't matter if you get the right ones right or wrong. It's the capitalism distribution that matters. And you will enjoy the next Amazon, the next Microsoft, the next Google, if you have a broad enough portfolio. And if you're paying basis points to outsource that management, that decision-making, you're probably coming out ahead relative to trying to do it yourself.

- And I'm fine with people speculating as long as you right-size it. There's nothing wrong with wanting to pick stocks and pick, like I like paying attention to stuff. I have a fun portfolio at Robinhood that I pick stocks with. It's gotten destroyed this year. I have one boomer stock that pays dividends, that's doing okay.

Everything else has gotten mangled for the last 18 months. - Yeah, I got that all out of my system two recessions ago. - I right-size, it's like five or 10% of my portfolio. It's fun money. It's kind of over here. And then everything else is on autopilot and everything else is not being touched.

And that's the idea. And I think people just have learned it's time to right-size this stuff. And I think this is the time that you do that. - Yep, I agree. So best of luck, Sarah. Thank you very much for you and your husband's service. We appreciate your service to our great country.

And just send us a quick email if there's anything we can help you with. We appreciate it very much. - Yes, so thanks for hopping in here, Bill. - Yeah, it was great. Where's the music? We need the tunes back. John, I was about to start beat boxing. - Duncan will be back.

We have some holidays coming up. So we'll have some days we're not on and around Thanksgiving and Christmas maybe, but- - Two weeks. - Duncan will be back. Yeah, we're getting there. I'm already ready to tell people circle back in the new year. - Yeah. - Already, right? - I don't know.

We've got some runway. We've got some work to do, Ben, between now and 1231. - If you're listening to this in podcast form, leave us a review, watching on YouTube. You're not a subscriber, hit that subscriber button. Make Duncan feel better when he's sick. Leave us a comment or a question.

If you have a question, askthecompoundshow@gmail.com and we'll see you next week. - Feel better, Duncan. (silence) (silence) (silence) (silence) (silence)